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Good morning.
Here’s what we’ve got for you today:
Happy Halloween weekend and let’s get into it. 👻
🕵️ Your biggest competitor might be a copycat of your brand
Ever googled your own brand and found… you, but not you? Your product photos on fake listings. Lookalike sites running Google ads on your brand name. And those counterfeit sellers you finally got kicked off Amazon? Yeah, they’re on TikTok Shop now.
That’s lost sales, angry reviews on products you never even sold, and hours of your week gone to filing takedowns.
Podqi handles the cleanup for you. It connects repeat offenders across channels, so when one listing comes down, it’s harder for the same seller to just pop up somewhere else. And with its trusted-reporter status, fakes come down faster, with a 98% success rate across hundreds of platforms.
Jones Road, Starface, Vuori, Madhappy, Our Place and 150+ other brands use it to protect their brand on autopilot.
If your brand is worth copying, it’s worth protecting. Run a free two-minute scan to see who’s using your name. No account needed.
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đź“Š Is your Meta budget spread too thin?
Thinking about adding another ad set for BFCM? Check if your budget can actually handle it first.
In its peak-season guide, Meta says ad sets getting fewer than around 50 conversions a week cost about 28% more per purchase. That’s a pretty big tax for spreading things out.
Meta’s math for figuring out how many ad sets you can support is weekly budget ÷ (cost per result × 50).
So before you add more, see if the ones you’ve got are getting enough volume. And if you need to change things like what you’re optimizing for or how you’re bidding, try to make those edits all at once so the system has time to learn.
🪦 Do an autopsy on your Meta creative
Still making the 47th version of the same winning ad? @AdamTaylorl has a way to find angles you haven’t tried yet, using ads you’ve already paid for.
He connects Claude to a Meta Ads MCP integration, pulls the last 90 days of ads by spend, and has it tag each one by angle, persona, awareness level, and format. He also gives it his video scripts and strategy docs so it actually has context.
Then you look for the gaps. You might find 40 ads that only cover three angles, or whole customer groups you’ve barely talked to.
Those gaps become your next briefs. Just double-check how Claude tagged things, and look at conversions, not only spend, before deciding what’s worth testing again.
🤖 ChatGPT ads might be running through Amazon
ChatGPT is testing a bigger “Learn more” link on some text ads (here’s what it looks like). It’s not on every ad yet.
But that’s not the interesting part. Marketplace Pulse’s Juozas Kaziukėnas noticed a Delta ad whose click URL went through Amazon’s tracking server, which suggests it was bought through Amazon DSP.
Nobody really knows yet who can buy it or what targeting and creative controls look like. If you already buy through Amazon DSP, it’s worth asking your rep whether ChatGPT inventory is available to you.
📱 Google App campaigns can now plan for sale spikes by ad group
Quick one for anyone running Google App campaigns this holiday season. Google is testing seasonality adjustments at the ad group level, so you can tell Smart Bidding that one ad group is about to see a conversion spike without applying it to the whole campaign.
Say one ad group is pushing a three-day offer and the rest are business as usual. Now you can adjust just that one.
It’s still in beta and only for App campaigns. Google says it works best for big conversion-rate jumps over short events, ideally one to seven days.
⏰ Your Black Friday customers are about to disappear
You’re spending big to win Black Friday customers. Promos, ad spend, CAC... It adds up fast. And the second the sale’s over, the clock starts. If those first-time buyers don’t get a reason to come back, you basically paid a premium for someone who ghosts you after one order.
GetResponse helps you follow up before they forget you. You can set up email, SMS, and push journeys that turn first orders into second ones, recommend what they should buy next, and win back customers who’ve gone quiet. All automated, so nobody on your team has to chase anyone down.
You already paid to get them in the door. Might as well give them a reason to come back.
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🧛 Dissecting Liquid Death’s Halloween Ad
Liquid Death doing Halloween is about as on-brand as it gets. The drink brand is promoting its Sparkling Energy line with a limited-edition raspberry cream flavor called Blood Zero, starring a vampire and a pun on the line’s “easy-drinking” positioning.
Here’s how the hook, offer, format, CTA, and landing page hold up.
🪝 The hook does a lot of work
“Easy-drinking energy for people-drinking vampires” takes the product’s whole positioning and turns it into a Halloween joke. You get the seasonal angle and the product claim in one line, which is really hard to pull off.
The visuals back it up too. Red dress, blood-red can, a flavor literally called Blood Zero, all against a dark background. And the can is huge, so you know whose ad it is even on a fast scroll.
⏳ A little urgency could go a long way
Blood Zero is a limited-edition flavor, which is a great reason to buy now. Calling that out in the ad with something like “Limited edition. Grab it while it’s around” would add urgency without stepping on the joke.
⚡ Plenty of room to play with formats
The static image already works, and the copy carries Liquid Death’s voice really well. With a concept this strong, it’d be fun to see it as a short Reel that lands the punchline, or a carousel showing off the full flavor lineup.
🧛 Keep the vampire going after the click
Shop Now goes to Amazon. Bringing some of that Halloween creative onto the listing would keep the story going all the way to checkout, so shoppers land somewhere that feels just as fun as the ad.
📲 Carousels are giving Reels some serious competition
Reels have pretty much been the default on Instagram for years. But a recent Pilothouse test might make you rethink that a little.
For one beauty-service client, Pilothouse published 10 carousels and 10 Reels over a month, using similar topics and messaging for both. Here’s how the carousels did:
The Reels? 35 followers.
That’s more than 40x the followers from carousels in this test. It’s one account, so it doesn’t mean Reels are dead or anything. But it’s a pretty good reason to stop treating carousels like an afterthought.
So why might carousels be working?
With a Reel, the video sets the pace. With a carousel, people can stop, reread, swipe back, and save it for later.
It also breaks one idea into a bunch of little steps. The first slide gets their attention, the middle ones build on it, and the last one tells them what to do next.
Here’s a different brand using that exact structure.
The hook is “wtf is not buying a dog toy for the aesthetic.” It leads with an attitude their customers actually have, which hits a lot harder than a generic product benefit.
The video on the next slide shows a dog playing with the toy, so the aesthetic claim turns into a quick product demo.
The CTA on the last slide asks people to pick an emoji and follow the line to find what they need. It’s fun, it’s interactive, and it fits the brand’s playful vibe.
You can mix static images and video in the same carousel too, which gives you room to explain, show, and push people to act without cramming it all into one clip.
Want to test it yourself?
Make a Reel and a carousel around the same topic, hook, and CTA, and post them around the same time. Then compare the two on reach, profile visits, saves and shares, followers gained, and site visits or conversions.
For this Pilothouse client, carousels won big on discovery and follower growth. The next thing to find out is whether those new followers actually turn into customers.
đź’¸ Black Friday is the most expensive day to run Meta ads. Clustie is giving your Shopify brand 10 moves to protect ROAS beyond Cyber Monday and into January. Grab your free copy of the playbook here. *
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