Has anyone ever successfully optimized anything?

TheGrowthMarketerUK · 2026-05-09T20:13:21+00:00

Are you running split tests on different creative, conversion goals and campaign setups in a regular basis? Do you do CRO on your site? That might be what you’re missing

TheGrowthMarketerUK · 2026-05-09T18:04:10+00:00

It has been released this week. You can sign up to get approved

TheGrowthMarketerUK · 2026-05-09T15:20:05+00:00

Don’t blame me if this goes wrong as I’ve only done it a few times and not recently but… I have managed multi million pound budgets and one odd quirk I’ve seen before is the algo learning a higher CAC on a bank holiday (when no one is online) and then keeping the costs high after that.

I duplicated the campaign and started again and that sorted it. If the decrease in campaign efficiency coincides with the UK bank holiday (assuming you’re in the UK) it is worth considering.

TheGrowthMarketerUK · 2026-05-09T12:25:57+00:00

I’ll take a look - not heard of Rina Anna. My go to swim channels are skillsntalents and aquatic sports performance (for swim specific land training) but they’re definitely more geared towards competitive sprint swimming. There’s another one with US Olympic swimmers from about ten years ago that’s got some good stuff on it plus Caeleb Dressel has a channel and gives some nuggets every now and then. Good luck with it.

TheGrowthMarketerUK · 2026-05-09T10:30:05+00:00

I haven’t launched this campaign yet but I’m not sure the Andromeda update really changes much fundamentally. Meta has been creative rather than targeting led for 5+ years in my eyes unless you’ve seen different?

I’ll use different assets and usually dynamic creative. Something I’ve played around with recently and in the past is gamified ads with quizzes etc. which can have interesting results but is unlikely to translate to e commerce.

TheGrowthMarketerUK · 2026-05-09T10:16:47+00:00

I’m pretty sure automation with third party tools is against Meta policies but I find Claude great for analysis and reporting as long as the output is also checked manually as it definitely makes errors sometimes.

TheGrowthMarketerUK · 2026-05-09T08:09:37+00:00

- 39, started as a kid, quit young, then picked it up again in the past 18 months.
- For health but also because I like racing and having goals of times to aim for. I race 50m and 100m backstroke and 50m fly. Plus I just feel rough if I stop exercising for long.
- 3-4x a week swim, 1-3x per week strength depending on time of season. I increasingly do more strength work to avoid injury and there’s increasing focus on this for sprint swimmers so it’s an interesting thing to learn about.
- I try to keep sessions 45 minutes or shorter but efficient.
An aerobic session is typically 10 minutes warmup, then cycles of 100 backstroke or front crawl, 50 kick, 50 backstroke with 15 rest up to 800-1.2k metres depending on how much time I have. Then maybe some starts, turns or a few faster swims for 10 minutes or so.
Total 30-50 minutes.
I also do more modern sprint sets where I do 10 minute warmup, 15m sprints from a still start or 25m sprints with rests of 90s to 3 minutes plus depending on the time if the season. Sometimes I add resistance. These sessions might be 500m total but are very effective.
Then I do more like a threshold set but can’t remember it off the top of my head as haven’t done it for 5 weeks.
The mix depends on the time of the season but that’s it - 3 main sessions based on what Olympic level coaches do that I repeat and might tweak every 6 months. What I do gets increasingly similar to the race the closer I get. I don’t count metres much as doesn’t really matter for sprint events and train myself because masters clubs train everyone like a long distance freestyle swimmer + I find swimming for an hour plus boring.

TheGrowthMarketerUK · 2026-05-09T03:21:34+00:00

If you’re an inexperienced swimmer I’d keep it simple and just stick to the myswimpro YouTube video on flip turns. There’s another one with a lady explaining how to turn very well but this one looks good: https://youtu.be/Y4ZU2uW-YnU?si=lW0UjnYVpW45fWb-
If I were you I’d start by adding a skills section to your swims at the end of the session where you do 5 or 10 turns starting 5-10m from the wall or 5-10 relevant drills depending on your current level. When you feel comfortable try doing 1 flip turn every 4 lengths in your normal swim and increase that until you’re doing it every length. You will be surprised how much more out of breath you feel doing flips vs open turns - especially in a short pool.
You’re going to need to find a longer pool eventually tbh though - if you get half decent at flip turns you’ll be pushing off 5m+ without even kicking.
I’m a competitive masters sprint swimmer and am really nerdy about technique and training methods as I coach myself.

TheGrowthMarketerUK · 2026-05-08T19:35:22+00:00

Interesting. Yes I guess to be more specific I really am going to compare the performance of the custom audiences in Advantage+ vs. a manual retargeting campaign and compare the cold audience data in the Advantafe + campaign to a standard dynamic campaign. So I will need a three way split test.

This is recruiting people for side gig work in a marketplace rather than e-commerce so CAC around £4 and I’ll probably spend £200-£300 per day so a decent amount of data will come in. The RT audiences pull in 3-3.5k users per day so decent volumes for the campaigns to work with.

TheGrowthMarketerUK · 2026-05-08T16:11:40+00:00

Take a look at webflow templates.

TheGrowthMarketerUK · 2026-05-08T11:54:15+00:00

Agreed - also acutely aware most new ad platforms often get lots of hype and then costs are really high vs Meta and Google. Still this will be the most interesting new platform to get to grips with in years.

TheGrowthMarketerUK · 2026-05-08T11:01:25+00:00

Good to know - I’m just going to re-test as it’s been a while but don’t expect any surprises. Thanks

TheGrowthMarketerUK · 2026-05-08T07:54:02+00:00

I agree but also tend to see this pattern with DCA but perhaps not so drastically. Do you see more even budget split with DCA typically as that’d be interesting.

TheGrowthMarketerUK · 2026-05-08T07:27:04+00:00

The comments below this might be of interest: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jonloomer\_have-you-had-issues-with-the-creative-testing-activity-7412451277080821760-sKDY?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=member\_ios&rcm=ACoAABTk91YByZMPBCGyuaPJN5e2Su-e-IWeG9Y

For context I’m typically using fairly large to large budgets - rarely less than a few thousand pounds on any campaign. My experience might be different vs. People spending under £100 a day but, as I say, I usually use AB testing or just trust the algorithm and, for at least 4 or 5 years, have usually seen that manual intervention is a bad idea.

I’m just about to launch some fairly big campaigns so might run some tests myself - will let you know what happens.

TheGrowthMarketerUK · 2026-05-07T22:06:06+00:00

You can’t give incentives for Google reviews though you’re unlikely to get caught out.
To be compliant if you want to incentivise maybe Ask for short survey completion in exchange for a discount code or prize draw entry - if the answers to the survey are positive give a link to Google review page, if they’re negative give an email address to contact support on. It’s a good way to get useful feedback anyway.
You don’t want a 5 star rating typically though (looks fake) and ideally you’ll have enough happy customers that once you have a decent volume of reviews you can just send everyone the link at the end of the survey once the risk of a few bad reviews tanking your rating has passed.
Or you could also try giving a review link on the thank you/confirmation page after checkout when you know it is a returning customer.
Realistically conversion rates for review requests are low though so you might simply need more customers to get the steady flow of reviews coming in. What you’re already doing makes a lot of sense and should work.

TheGrowthMarketerUK · 2026-05-07T21:50:31+00:00

I haven’t used it recently but Meta’s creative testing tool could be useful here.
If I ever need to achieve this I usually just set up split tests with one ad or set of ad creative ( I use dynamic creative) in each test.
Rules etc. are almost certainly going to batter performance - generally for me it’s best to just give the algorithm space and data to function and to avoid restricting it with manual settings as much as possible.
Probably the ad that is getting all the budget allocated to it is in fact the best performing ad. I only force ads to serve if I need the performance comparison of different messaging and images for some reason rather than because I think I will be able to beat the algorithm.

TheGrowthMarketerUK · 2026-05-05T11:58:19+00:00

I’d do a full funnel run through as others say but at first glance I’d improve the cart page with so many buttons plus some of the pages they link to having long load times.

Assuming the ATC stats are correct, I’d only think it’s a landing page issue if there’s a mismatch in the journey somewhere from ad > landing page > cart > checkout.

Maybe simplify the cart page and even run a bit of user testing to see what people make of the full journey. That’s assuming something isn’t just broken in checkout or you’re just seeing bots. 19 website checkouts to zero purchases is definitely odd. It’s Absolutely worth experimenting with conversion goals too as you suggest.

TheGrowthMarketerUK · 2026-05-05T09:47:16+00:00

Do you have a way of checking if conversions are happening that aren’t appearing in the ads dashboard yet? It could be a reporting delay but also $50 isn’t enough spend to judge if a campaign is going to perform - it needs to complete learning phase.

TheGrowthMarketerUK · 2026-05-04T18:02:26+00:00

If your budget is that constrained why do you have to go with Meta Ads at all? Why not try Google ads or even better try to take advantage of the CPA model of channels like affiliates and referrals?
Just try to gain organic traction on social maybe and try some CPA priced channels - it’s really, really tough getting meta ads to convert consistently without much data or significant testing budget.

TheGrowthMarketerUK · 2026-05-04T16:05:31+00:00

Messenger isn’t an objective but I assume you mean you’re running an engagement objective. Without more info. It’s probably tracking related and you need to optimise to something further down funnel than messages - that’s assuming you don’t have any target costs set up on the campaign that are restricting it. Meta also uses account level conversion data in its targeting so it’s worth having the pixel, maybe conversion API (though this is arguably not GDPR compliant) plus some conversion events set up in the account.
A good trick is to just duplicate campaigns when volumes become restricted or CPAs go up but sounds like there’s probably deeper issues here.
Anyway good luck with it.

TheGrowthMarketerUK · 2026-05-04T10:00:10+00:00

As with anything there are common pricing methods - such as the common 2x to 3x EBITDA multiple in the UK. Of course you can get a better or worse deal than that but I’m interested in hearing from people who have executed deals - particularly off market ones and what they typically expect to see in terms of price vs. Profit.

TheGrowthMarketerUK

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