Do This Before Running ANY Paid Social Media Marketing

coming up. If you want to hit six figures in MRR, then you're going to need paid ads. But if you're not doing this one thing before launching your campaigns, you could be wasting thousands of dollars and months of testing for an ad that never had a chance of working. Stay tuned. What is up app nation? It is Steve P. Young, founder of appmasters.com. And in this video, I'm going to share with you the critical step that you have to do that you have to spend most of your time doing when it comes to running paid ads, especially social media paid ads. That's running ads on Tik Tok, Meta, that's Instagram and Facebook, and even YouTube. Without further ado, let's get started. All right, here we go. Now, before we get started on that one thing with any social media paid marketing, here are the levers you're going to have to pull. Now, personally, that's why I always recommend starting with Apple ads

because you have way less levers to pull. But here's what you got to pull when you're running paid social media ads. You have the campaign set up. You have your audience. You want to leave that as broad most of the time. You have your placements, you know, that's feed versus stories or reels. You got your creative video versus static. You got your optimization install campaign or start trial, which is where you want to be, right? Measurement, attribution. So, you got to make sure that's connected and locked in. You got your scaling strategy. You got your testing strategy.

You got your onboarding and payw wall. You got to make sure that's locked in. That's this is an obvious lever before you do any type of paid marketing. You got your landing and store listing. Now, what we've also seen is that having your creative match your screenshots really work well. And so, this is more in the margins, like once you're at scale, these are things to test. And then obviously your budget and how much you're going to spend per day. Now, the one thing, the main thing that you got to really pay attention to is the creative. That will solve most of your problems, right? You can get everything else wrong because everything else you can let the AI and that social media platform like Meta and Tik Tok do its work, but you got to get creative right.

That's the most important thing. Now, look, this is a very popular video that we've done in the past with Ivy from Resto Me. I just took a screenshot. We're not very well optimized here, but here here's her methodology, right? And listen, she was spending $20,000 a day a day with positive rorowass, but it took her a couple of months to even see positive rorowass. So, you got to be patient and you got to be willing to spend and pretty much lose money. Again, that's why I start with Apple ads, but you're here for paid social media ads, right? Here's some numbers that you got to pay attention to. that hook rate. You can just chat GBT this, but hook rate 30 to 40%. That's what you're looking for.

Hold rate, right, which is there's different definitions of hold rate, but what I believe she was doing was how many people saw the first watch the first 15 seconds of the video over impressions. That's why these numbers are so low. You could also say of the people that watched the first 3 seconds, how many make it to the 15 seconds? And so it's a different denominator. And if that if you're looking at that, that's 30 to 40%. Regardless, just catch GBT.

And these are two parameters that you have to add on into your meta ads platform. Okay. Now, here's how she likes to do creative testing. Okay. 3-day period daily budget of 200 to 250. Now, that's because she's going to have multiple adsets. If you want to keep it as simple as possible, you can just do one ad set. She likes to have four creatives per ad set. And each ad set is differentiated between the different themes that you're testing. So it could be like, hey, one ads set is going to target this particular theme.

So maybe for Cal AI, it's going to be like, hey, all about calorie deficit, right? That's all I'm going to be paying attention to. Another theme could be like, "Hey, I'm going to target all females in this ad group or I'm gonna target all males in this ad group." So that's how you separate it. Again, if you want to start off simple, you can start off with just one ad group and about four creatives and just run a $50 per adset. Okay? So it's $50 per adset.

And that's why the total daily budget. Now, she just uses a three-day period. And if it doesn't perform in that 3-day period, let it go. That 3-day period should be the highest conversion days. All right. So, for one of our apps, we're actually paying attention to like we get high conversions on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday. So, I my 3-day period is going to be those three days. For games and different types of apps might be Thursday, Friday, Saturday. So, you're going to have to play around with your numbers and figure out where you're getting the highest trial activation rates. Health and fitness generally in the beginning of the week is when you get the highest conversion rates. All right, now that you got the campaign set up all out of the way, and I will do a deep dive later in another video. Now, be patient. Again, as a reminder, it took Ivy two, three months of things not working at all, looking bleak. All

right? So, you're going to have to be patient with this stuff, but the main thing you got to pay attention to is this creative. All right, I'm going to show you the best way to do that right now. All right, here's my favorite way to do creative research, and that is through social petta.com. socialpeta.com. I'm going to link up that website into this YouTube video and your favorite podcast app. But, I'm going to show you some of the cool features within this. and you want to stay till the end where I'm going to show you this really, really cool AI feature that you have to use. Okay, so here we go. Here's the top advertisers.

You're going to find it by going to advertisers and top advertisers. These are the people that are that are advertising the most. This short drama category is going nuts right now. If you can see like literally the top four, five advertisers, six, seven, eight, the top advertisers are these short drama categories. This is how I differentiate whether ASO is important or you need ads. Obviously, for short drama, you're going to need ads like nobody's searching for it. Okay? So, it's going to be brand driven and ad driven. All right? I've already sorted this for us.

You can see the Android and you can see iOS. So, you can get a sense. Now, one of the things that I would say is look at some apps that are direct competitors, but also look at other apps that are like targeting the same type of audience. So, for here, maybe it's short drama, it's going to be heavy female, maybe more millennial age, 30s and 40s. So, it's like if my target audience is the same, I'm going to take a look at this short drama category to see if I can find any interesting insights from this category that I can use in my health and fitness app. as an example.

So, here are the top advertisers. You can sort it. I've already just set it for the US, but I can take this out and you can see worldwide. You have non- gaming. Here's iOS. You can see which countries, you can see by channel as well. So, unlike all these ad channels have their own ad library, but with social petta, you can see all of it in one. And depending on the advertiser, you might start to see that maybe YouTube is more valuable for them versus Facebook and Instagram, right? So that's why I like it. If you want a full 360 view of some of your competitors, it's worth really using Social Petta versus going into each ad platform and looking at your competitors that way. All right, it's a lot of work. All right, here's the next feature I want to show off the weekly trending. So if you go to ad creatives and then weekly trending, you can see which ads, which advertisers are trending, right? And so the top 1% and

top 10% tag videos per week sorted by creative score to help you identify the best performing ideas of the week. So really, really cool here. Again, this is gaming. I'd go to non-gaming. Here's the non-gaming section. Now, again, I can filter this for just US. So here, country, US. Okay, here you go. This is by US. I don't even know what this app is, but all right, that's interesting. We got real short again. Negotiation off diet court picture. This super huge right here. And then if you are curious, right, most of the time meta is going to be good enough for you. But if you're curious and you're like, "Hey, what about Google ads and primarily YouTube?" You can filter off of that and Social Petta will give you the top ads for YouTube, especially those that are running on Google ads.

And this is we can sort this by iOS to see what iOS platforms. So, right here we have both. I'm going to put iOS because my internet's a little bit slow. Okay, here's what I got for iOS. Not much. This might be weird just because Google, not a lot happening on iOS for Google. So, let's take this off and let's just put all in here. And this is where we can see iOS, US, all categories, and then come up with the different ads that show up. All right.

Now, here's what you got to really pay attention to your competitors. All right. So, I'm going to show you a couple of ways that you can do this. I would just go to display ads, right? Go to tool. And here's where you can start putting in your competitors. So obviously this is everybody right now. Timu Shien is doing this. Again, you can filter, right? So, hey, I just want us right now. Whoops. US. Okay. Now that I have US, I can do different types of categories. So, for me, I'm heavy on the health and fitness side of things. Now, I can sort it that way and start to see which ads are performing well. Right now, there's a lot of Android apps because it's a lot cheaper to run those ads in there. Now, if you go into the advanced filter, you can just say, "Hey, show me those on iOS." So, now I have the top health and fitness ads in the US on iOS. And I can start to see, hey, what type of ads are working, right? Or

if you want, you can just put in one of your competitors. I'm going to pick on Cali right now. Put that in there. And I'm going to click on this. Now, I can see it's only app store. Right now, I see all their ads right here. Now, this is the last year. And these are the latest creatives. So you can do by impression share and that's what I'm gonna try to find. Right? So these are some old ones. So these are last seen in October.

That's pretty cool. So they're like, okay, maybe it worked for a little bit, maybe it didn't, right? But here, creative score duration. This is pretty good. So this is an ad that it's been running for a very long time. It's one of their highest ads. And this is what when I would be studying right here. The other thing I want to show you while we're still here is based off this ad. So you can click on it. You can hit download on the video. You can just do that. Download the cover if you want to see that. So really cool. I love that.

The the other thing I want to show you guys is this advertiser detail. And I want to get to this. So here detail. Yeah. If you click this, you'll have this. Now this is the most interesting part, right? And I I want to set this for the US instead. United States. Cute. Here's the advertiser detail. Now, you can get to this by just going to advertiser analysis. That might be the best way. And just searching for it. Or through that, you know, you go into the ad and then you go into the detail right here. All right. Let's get into the app itself. Again, here's what I want to show you guys right here. You want to come into this downloads of revenue. You can do that. But this channel analysis.

So, where are they running most of their ads is very interesting. You can set it up the last 30 days. You can do last 90 days and so forth. But you can see the bulk of their ad spend is on meta. So 90% of their ad spend is on meta. So that includes Facebook and Instagram right here. So you can see that they have a little bit on Apple ads but not much. You can do by country. So, I can do the last 30 days and it looks like it's the US getting most of 60% of the spend, but you can also see where else are they advertising in here. Like, makes it really cool to just see what other countries they might be doing.

Here's the other part, the distribution network analysis. Again, we're not seeing much more, but it is heavy heavy on the Facebook side of things. Now, I'm going to get out of this section and go into the ad creatives. So you can do ad search for Calai and just see different, you know, creatives they're using. But here's what I love the creative analysis up here. You can do it from down on the side or up here and you can see if they're using video or images. Now we have seen that images work and but you can see the bulk of their impressions and the bulk of their distribution is all on the video side of things. So now you can focus more on the video side of your advertising versus the images, right? And then here from a copywriting perspective, like what phrases they're using the most. So it looks like about time, camera, smart, instant. So those are interesting things. Not that interesting, but time seems to be the

the main keyword. So limited time, free trial. That's what they're using a lot in their their ad creatives, their headline, and then here's the text that they're using as well. Okay, now I want to show you a really cool AI feature. So, you're going to go to AI tools and then you're going to do video analysis. Okay, now you saw me download that video really quickly. So, this was their best performing video. I hit here and I hit download video. I've got the video downloaded. Now, you can also save these creatives as well. So, here you collect it. I've already collected this. Okay, confirm. And it's going to go into your creatives and you can check out some of the inspirations you have here. And that's really good just to collect, keep saving them, so forth. Here's the video clip analysis. So, I'm going to go up here, AI tools, video analysis. I'm going to go into the tool section here, and we can upload this video. So, I'm

going to upload the video that I've already downloaded right here, and it's going to start the analysis. Right now, I've already done this for you. So, here's the video. Here's the video analysis that Social Petta does. So, I'm going to show the video again. >> If you want to go from looking like this to that, all I did was a calorie deficit. And the best way to make sure you're in that deficit is to track your calories. Something like Cali here helps you track everything accurately by just taking pictures of what you eat. This way, you don't got to worry about what you're eating and how much of it.

>> Super simple, super short. It's only 19 seconds. Here's the analysis that Social Peda did. Right. The video showcased a personal weight loss transformation 315 pounds to 219 to establish credibility and emotional resonance. Then transitions into a practical demonstration of the Cali app, which from all the interviews I've done, from everybody I've talked to, showing off the app for paid media works really well. Now, it might not help you go viral. So, if you're trying to go organic social media, showing off the app is not needed. It's not something I would do on the organic and trying to go viral side of things, but from the paid ad side of things, you definitely want to show off the app. And so, here's the opening hook. Result first hook using Stark before and after works really well for health and fitness, right? Shirtless man, 315 pounds. two seconds immediately followed by three seconds of the defined

abs and then with the text overlaid. This creates instant credibility and curiosity via visual impact and dramatic physical change. And then the main core of the video, the nine seconds, so the first six seconds is the opening hook and the remaining ne 9 seconds are just how to use the app itself and then you end it with the app store page. So, super simple and it really breaks down. Now you can start to use some of these hooks, potential hooks in your videos.

But I love this feature because now you have an understanding of why a video works versus just being like, "Oh, let me just copy this, right?" You want a transformation. You want that visual. You want that credibility. So, how do we add instant credibility? And then the main core of the video, the 9 seconds, 9 to 10 seconds should be about the app, core features, and showing off a bit about the app. That's what Ivy has said.

That's what all Desmond Hoe, another podcast guest of mine, has said in as well. Showing off the app within your ads really works well in terms of conversions because if you're optimizing for that star trial, which you should be, you're going to have to show off the app as well. All right, that is it. Thank you to Social Petta for your support and for giving us access to all these amazing features so that we can run ads efficiently and effectively. All right, guys. You got any questions related to running any paid social media campaigns? Leave a comment below. I'm happy to answer that in an upcoming video. And or do me a favor or check out social peda.com.

Let him know you heard it from app masters. All right, until next time. I'll see you on the next video.