Siddharth

Scaling D2C brands since 2020.

[Siddharth @Madras_Marketer]

⚠️First month for this D2C brand with us.

Scaled from 54L to 81L with the same ad spend as before.

Meta ads with multiple video creatives targeting pain points and urgency !

Client visited us today and gave us bucket briyani 🥳

[Siddharth @Madras_Marketer]

Dear
@Razorpay
One of our client is losing money because of your cache error.

The ticket number is 20157267.

Firstly, it is showing Welcome 10 as a coupon - which is not there both in shopify and also not in razorpay, so I am losing 10% on every order un-necessarily.

Secondly, it is not allowing me to create my coupons and apply them automatically on razorpay magic checkout.

All the below coupons should be applied automatically. Please create them on magic checkout side inside razorpay immediately.
1) Free Delivery on all orders from Rs,1199 and more.
2) 5% Discount on all orders from Rs. 499 to 1998.
3) 10% Discount on all orders from Rs. 1999 and more.

This ticket was raised on Friday and still no update from your team. Kindly help !

[Siddharth @Madras_Marketer]

Dear @Razorpay
One of our client is losing money because of your cache error. The ticket number is 20157267.

Firstly, it is showing Welcome 10 as a coupon - which is not there both in shopify and also not in razorpay, so I am losing 10% on every order un-necessarily.

Secondly, it is not allowing me to create my coupons and apply them automatically on razorpay magic checkout.

All the below coupons should be applied automatically. Please create them on magic checkout side inside razorpay immediately.

1) Free Delivery on all orders from Rs,1199 and more.
2) 5% Discount on all orders from Rs. 499 to 1998.
3) 10% Discount on all orders from Rs. 1999 and more.

This ticket was raised on Friday and still no update from your team.

[Siddharth @Madras_Marketer]

Here we go Again !

[Ash @ashvinmelwani]

I am seeing no spend in Meta for the last 3 hours....

Traffic 0
Spend 0

What's going on...

[Siddharth @Madras_Marketer]

@DaveDiederen @loggingscripts You were lucky enough to be able delete that ad, that thing when an ad gets declined doesn’t even let us delete most of the times 🤣

[Siddharth @Madras_Marketer]

An offer is a complete reason why someone should buy from you and not from your competitor.

Price is just one of the variable !

[Siddharth @Madras_Marketer]

Me: Your Meta ads are not failing, but your offer is.

Client: Are you saying, we should give discount ?

Me: 😭😭😭

[Siddharth @Madras_Marketer]

Me: Your Meta ads are not failing, but your offer is.

Client: Are you saying, we should give discount ?

Me: 😭😭😭

[Siddharth @Madras_Marketer]

Oh my days!!!!

Was onboarding a new client now, he has his business GST number by memory 🙊

[Siddharth @Madras_Marketer]

Real Value in this one !

[Barry Hott ☄️ @binghott]

You can spend millions per month with literally 1 CBO.

I know I'm gonna catch heat from the sweaty ABO fans and the ABO gurus everyone loves to glaze but...

I'm mostly a CBO maxi now 😱

(Btw, stick around for the reasons CBO doesn't work too)

Should you even listen to me?

Welp.

I've been doing this FB ad stuff for 18+ years (and still am in the weeds today so I don't lose touch). I've studied literally billions of dollars worth of ads. Annnnd I just love this stuff and love talking about it.

Also, I used to be a huge ABO maxi. I get it! But things have changed and I adapted!

Here's a real example from a brand I started working with in April:

In March they were spending 6 figures across 9 separate campaigns.

NINE!

The full sweaty routine, trying and failing to media-buy their way to a million-dollar spending month. And those 9 campaigns were quietly competing against each other in the same auctions and fragmenting all the data.

Last 30 days? Over $1.5M in spend through 1 CBO campaign, running on Incremental Attribution.

And their cost per conversion actually dropped 5% while scaling.

Fewer campaigns. More spend. Cheaper conversions.

Annnnd, most importantly, every minute less wasted on sweaty media-buying baloney can be spent on the things that actually move the needle, and those benefits compound.

The best thing a media buyer can do in 2026 and beyond is...

Spend less time on media buying

and

Spend more time on anything else that matters to your (potential) customers and your business: creative, products, offers, copywriting, CRO, landing pages, etc.

CBO helps you do that. Let me explain why.

With CBO, you let the system do what it wants to do, and then you can study it, empathize with it, criticize it, and use your human context to modify it if/as necessary.

Empathize with it because the system is trying to solve a problem you can't fully see. When you understand what it's actually optimizing toward, you stop fighting it and start steering it.

Meta has more data about your ads than it reports, meaning it has more and better data than you do.

Ever wonder why Meta spends more on stuff with a lower ROAS or higher CPA than others?

That's either the breakdown effect or it's optimizing for something you can't see. (Or a combination of both)

You can't see if or how any users have seen or interacted with any other ads before they click the link.

But Meta can.

In the age of advanced AI machine learning post-Andromeda Meta advertising, if you think the only thing that matters is the last ad a user clicked before they got to your site, or that only link clicks matter and no other on-Meta actions matter, then you're simply not living in reality.

This is also why I run Incremental Attribution on that CBO. It tells Meta to optimize toward the conversions it actually drove, not every last-touch conversion it can take credit for.

Better signal in, better optimization out.

CBO plus human inputs via cost caps and/or budget mins and maxes is the way to go.

Best of both worlds.

This works best the more data you feed Meta, so you need a lower CPA and/or high spend. The more data the system has, the more I generally trust it.

Consolidation = more data for Meta to optimize.

The worse/less data that you give Meta or the more you fragment your account, the less you should trust it to optimize on your behalf effectively.

Now, the honest part. CBO is not magic and it does have real weaknesses:

1. CBO optimizes to cost, not profit. Mix products with different margins in one campaign and it'll happily pour budget into cheap, low-value conversions. Feed it value signals or it'll work against you. (Or otherwise apply your own context via cost caps and budget controls)

2. Budget flows to whatever the system likes, so if you need guaranteed spend on a new product or geo, it'll fight you. (That's what the budget mins/maxes are for!)

3. Low-volume accounts don't give it enough to chew on. If you're not feeding it much, it can't optimize much.

4. It's scary and hard to move from a fragmented setup, especially if you've been using it for years. Consolidating resets learning. There's a real short-term cost while it re-figures things out. It's worth it, but don't panic on day 2.

Soooo when is ABO still right? Lower-spend or lower conversion volume accounts, or any time you simply can't get good data into Meta. Or if you're optimizing for something without deeper data being sent at all like reach, brand awareness, or link clicks.

ABO is also fine if you can mostly consolidate into as few campaigns and ad sets as possible, buuuut the reported data can still be misleading and cause a media buyer to optimize in the wrong direction.

And look, I'm not saying this is the exact RIGHT/BEST way to run EVERY account or business. It's not.

CBO is probably the easiest and smartest for most businesses, and it frees up a lot more time and resources to focus on the most important stuff.

It helps that this business has basically one main product, so consolidating into a single campaign is clean and easy. No mixed margins, no ten SKUs fighting for budget. If your catalog is more complicated, your setup probably needs to be too.

But if it can work for a business spending this kind of money, it might work for yours too. Just because you CAN over-optimize and manually control every little thing, doesn't mean you should.

This CBO plan will never work for YOU if you:

1. Have zero trust in Meta (I'm not saying you should 100% trust Meta all the time. Please don't! Buuut you need to be able to trust it at least a little bit)

2. Don't care or understand that overlapping campaigns and ad sets impact each other

3. Think you have more/better data than Meta's system (you don't! Seriously, you don't! Click data only tells one part of a complicated journey)

4. Think you're smarter than Meta's system (you're not!)

5. Give Meta bad/wrong signals/data to optimize from

6. Refuse to believe that there are other bigger things to focus on more than media buying

And here's the thing sooo many media buyers (and gurus!) don't want to hear or admit: they think their media buying is the reason it's all working.

It usually isn't.

It's the excellent creative, the strong offer, the dialed-in landing page, the actual product people want. The media buyer is often just along for the ride on top of a great machine, taking credit for the engine someone else built.

The best media buyers I know are the first to admit this.

Oh, and this post isn't a pitch. I'm not gating any of this behind a signup. I just want you to squeeze the best performance you possibly can out of your ads.

But if you take one thing from all of this, take this: the biggest swings in your ad performance usually aren't coming from media buying at all.

They're coming from your website and the world around it. A landing page change. A new product launch. A price update. A broken checkout. A competitor's promo. A holiday. A news cycle.

That stuff moves your numbers way more than which campaign structure you picked.

It's the entire reason I'm building https://t.co/5OLof3cdhh Because most people are staring at their ad account hunting for an answer that actually changed on their website three days ago, and they never even noticed.

TL;DR: Consolidate or die.

Feed it good signal (Incremental Attribution helps). Steer with cost caps and budget mins/maxes instead of babysitting. Then go spend your time on creative and offers, and alllll the stuff that actually moves the business.

If you run ABO and you're winning, or you think I've got any of this backwards, come at me. Reply, quote it, tear it apart. I'll take any and all of it.

One fair ask though: if you've never actually run a full consolidation, all the way down to 1 or 2 campaigns, I'll still read your take, but know that I'm going to weight it differently than someone who's actually tried it and watched what happened.

That's not me dodging the argument. It's the opposite. Go run it. Give Meta the data, give it a real shot, and then come tell me everything I got wrong. That's the feedback I want most, because that's the feedback that can actually change my mind.

Opinions from the sideline are welcome. Opinions from the field are gold.

And if any of you want to actually hash this out live, a space, a call, a recorded chat, whatever, I'm in. I'd love to sit across from someone who disagrees and see what I'm missing.

[Siddharth @Madras_Marketer]

@tech_nurgaliyev Audit

[Siddharth @Madras_Marketer]

@alecsandrull Page

[Siddharth @Madras_Marketer]

Fable5 !

We really are at a Pay2Win era 🤣

[Siddharth @Madras_Marketer]

Focus more on creatives and less on account structure.

[Siddharth @Madras_Marketer]

@AnshumatVakra True true

[Siddharth @Madras_Marketer]

When the Maestro says “Results”.

The result doesn’t have to be just direct sales.

It could also be an ad that pushes the buyer from top of funnel to bottom of funnel :)

[Ben Heath @BHeathMarketing]

How to measure a “good” ad…

It delivers results.

That’s it.

[Siddharth @Madras_Marketer]

Added a 2 line constant overlay text calling out the audience on top of a video creative that was not getting budget & it started printing

[Fraser Cottrell | Ad Creative For Meta & TikTok @sourfraser]

What’s the lowest effort yet best performing ad creative you’ve made?

[Siddharth @Madras_Marketer]

@UgcSam False and False 😂

[Siddharth @Madras_Marketer]

Yeah coz it has a lot of variables.

I’ll try to explain with a couple of examples !

A brand selling ₹999 phone cases doesn’t need the same campaign structure as a brand selling high-end jewellery. The buying journey, purchase value & customer behavior etc. are completely different.

Even within the same niche, things change.

Imagine two fashion brands:
Brand A launches 20 new creatives every week.
Brand B launches 10 creatives a month.

Why would I force both accounts into the exact same campaign structure?

Campaign structure should adapt to the business—not the other way around.

[Siddharth @Madras_Marketer]

The biggest lie about Meta Ads is _________

[Siddharth @Madras_Marketer]

@AnshumatVakra If you come across any reel that says “cbo is better”, check their profile - they would have another reel that says “abo is better”….people be just engagement farming about that for years 😂