You’re bidding for the wrong thing

Welcome to a space where every edition delivers insights, strategies, and inspiration to fuel your advertising brilliance. 🤯

💰 Cart-Add Rate as Your Hidden Bidding Advantage

Are you optimizing your ads around conversion rate… while ignoring the metric that actually determines how aggressively you can scale?

Brands obsess over ROAS, but ROAS is downstream. It reacts to what already happened.

Cart-add rate is upstream. It tells you whether buying intent is forming at all, and here’s the part most teams miss:

Cart-add rate directly impacts how much you can afford to bid.

If more visitors add to cart, even before checkout optimization improves, your effective allowable CPA rises. That means you can pay more per click and still maintain profitability.

That changes the competitive landscape.

Peek Inside the Mechanic:

Let’s say two brands sell a $100 product.

Brand A:

5% cart-add rate2% final conversion

Brand B:

7% cart-add rate2% final conversion

Even if checkout conversion is identical, Brand B has more purchase intent, forming earlier. With stronger cart-add velocity, Brand B can:

• Tolerate higher CPMs
• Scale budgets faster
• Outbid competitors for the same audiences

Cart-add strength becomes bid power.

Why This Matters:

When cart-add improves:

• Paid efficiency improves automatically
• Blended MER becomes more resilient
• Scaling becomes less fragile

Instead of chasing cheaper traffic, you strengthen intent formation. Most scaling ceilings aren’t traffic ceilings. They’re intent ceilings.

If growth feels capped, audit cart-add before increasing spend.

Test:

• Stronger above-the-fold clarity
• Reduced browsing distraction
• Clearer value framing
• Faster path to commitment

Even modest cart-add lifts can unlock higher bidding capacity and more profitable scaling over time.

Traffic doesn’t determine who wins. Intent formation does. 

Together with Thesys

Go From Idea to Live Agent in Minutes

You want to launch a product advisor, a campaign insights tool, or an interactive assistant… and someone says, “We’ll need engineering.”

Suddenly it’s scoped, ticketed, delayed, and deprioritized. Thesys Agent Builder removes that barrier.

You connect your data, define how the agent should respond, and deploy it instantly with a link or embed. No workflows. No dev cycles. No waiting.

Now you can:

• Turn campaign and revenue data into conversational agents that generate charts, tables, and board-ready reports in seconds
• Launch AI product advisors that compare SKUs and guide buyers toward purchase inside chat
• Add website assistants that respond with cards, forms, and interactive UI instead of static text

Teams are already shipping internal and customer-facing AI in minutes, not quarters.

Claim your $10 free credits and launch your first live agent today!

⚡Meta ads don’t fail. Structure does.

A lot of brands think Meta stopped working. In most cases, it didn’t. The account just wasn’t built with intention. Wrong objective, messy tracking, unclear KPIs, weak hooks, mismatched landing pages. When those pieces aren’t aligned, results fall apart fast.

Why it works:  When you slow down and align the funnel stage, objective, tracking, and creative before spending, performance becomes predictable. Clean data gives you real signals. Structured testing beats random boosting. Instead of guessing, you’re learning, adjusting, and scaling what actually works.

Where it needs balance: Structure isn’t magic. If the offer is weak or the creative is boring, no checklist will save it. And overbuilding complex campaign trees can stall learning. Keep it disciplined but simple. Strong fundamentals first, smart testing second, scale last.

Together with Motion

Why More Ads Aren’t Creating More Results

Creative strategy is having a real moment. Budgets are rising, AI is accelerating production, and the gap between volume and actual performance keeps widening. 

Motion’s free Creative Strategy Bootcamp is your invite to build the skill that separates you from everyone else.

Over eight live weeks, you'll move through three focused phases designed to turn theory into repeatable output and AI-proof your career.

• In Foundations, you learn how to write scroll-stopping hooks, turn product insight into scalable concepts, and use performance signals to guide creative decisions instead of guessing.
• In Sprints, you run full creative cycles end to end, producing ads, testing ideas, iterating quickly, and seeing how structure compounds results.
• In Masters, you go deeper into advanced frameworks and systems that top Creative Strategists use to operate at the top 1% across brands and platforms.

You learn live from working strategists, collaborate with serious peers, and build a portfolio that proves you can execute.

It’s 100% free, fully live, and registration closes March 17th.

If you want the skill that actually moves paid social in 2026, this is your moment.

🎥 Reel of the Day

What Works:

1. They used conflict to drive retention -  Instead of opening with aesthetic latte visuals, they opened with tension around the pumpkin spice latte. That’s hook optimization. Conflict increases early watch time, which improves completion rate and distribution velocity.

2. “Our new pumpkin spice latte” is subtle demand creation - Notice how it’s framed. Not “limited time,” not “buy now.” Just repeated mention of our new pumpkin spice latte inside dialogue. That’s narrative-led product seeding, which builds curiosity without triggering sales defense.

3.  Founder visibility compounds brand trust - When the CEO steps in and makes the pumpkin spice latte himself, that’s strategic founder-led positioning. It signals ownership and confidence. Founder presence increases perceived authenticity and long-term brand equity.

This isn’t just a funny reel. It’s performance-led storytelling. High retention mechanics feed the algorithm, subtle product repetition builds recall, and founder visibility drives trust. The pumpkin spice latte becomes culturally interesting before it becomes commercially promoted.

Thanks for reading this edition! Keep pushing boundaries, testing ideas, and staying inspired. See you in the next edition with more ways to ignite your marketing success. 🥰