Good morning DTC readers!
Launch campaign.
Refresh.
Refresh again.
Decide something is wrong.
A flawless process. (But it’s fine because we all do it, right?)
Here’s some updates to get your Tuesday morning started.
🔝 Different cost caps can control how Meta splits your CBO budget
@benradack uses cost caps to control how Meta splits a CBO budget across ad sets. He gives proven ads a higher cap, such as $120, so Meta can spend more freely. New tests get a lower cap, such as $100, which slows spending until they start hitting the target CPA. As a test proves itself, he raises the cap and lets it take more budget. He still adds spend limits as a backup.
⚖️ Amazon bans sellers from pledging their marketplace rights to lenders
Amazon changed its seller agreement today. Sellers can no longer transfer or pledge their rights under the agreement, including the right to future payouts. Seller policy experts say this could cause problems for loans backed by Amazon sales. If you borrow against Amazon payouts to buy inventory, send the new terms to your lender today.
🌎 Trump talks of 50% tariffs on Canadian vehicles, auto parts, and steel starting January 1
Trump has threatened a 50% tariff on Canadian vehicles, auto parts, and steel starting January 1. The U.S. already has 50% tariffs on about $20 billion of Canadian goods. Canada plans to hit U.S. steel, dairy, appliances, farm equipment, paper, and electronics with matching tariffs on September 8. If your products use Canadian steel or parts, ask suppliers what a 50% tariff would do to your costs now.
📦 Shopify Managed Markets automatically switched international orders from DDU to DDP
Shopify Managed Markets no longer supports delivered duty unpaid in markets where delivered duty paid is available. Customers in those markets now see and pay duties at checkout. That should mean fewer surprise bills at the door, refused packages, and angry support tickets. Test checkout in your biggest international markets and watch what the higher total does to conversion.
📊 Google changed Merchant Center’s organic and paid performance reports
Google changed how Merchant Center counts organic and paid traffic today. YouTube affiliate traffic now sits outside organic traffic, and Google has changed the numbers going back to July 1. Your organic traffic may drop overnight while paid traffic rises. Tell your team before someone sees the new numbers and assumes sales have fallen.
đź’ˇ Build the audience into the ad
The old Meta playbook was pretty straightforward.
Pick an audience like Gift Givers or New Moms. Then build creative for that audience.
Andromeda flipped a lot of that around.
Those audience selections still exist in Ads Manager, but Meta relies much more heavily on the creative itself to decide who should see an ad. The concept, copy, imagery, product, and context all become targeting signals.
Which makes this Mother’s Day ad a useful example (yes, we’re looking at a Mother’s Day ad in August; learnings still apply, so I call it fair game).
There’s no targeting menu involved here, but you can tell immediately who it’s for.
The whole concept is built around what mom actually wants from Mother’s Day.
50% family time.
30% mommy’s me-time.
10% quiet morning.
10% relaxing night.
Then it gets more specific. Grab her favorite drink → take the kids outside →  take some pictures of mom → handle bedtime.
Every part of the ad gives Meta more context about the person likely to respond to it.
If “Gift Givers” used to be something you selected in Ads Manager, now a lot of that targeting needs to show up in the creative itself.
And once you’ve got those creatives dialed, this is what comes next. 👇
🛬 Your Meta ad got specific, why didn’t your landing page?
Think about how much work goes into getting someone to click an ad now.
You’re testing hooks, creators, problems, use cases, offers, and the exact situation someone might be in when they see it.
Then they click and land on the same PDP as everyone else.
Daniel, VP of Performance and Creative at Pilothouse, calls the post-click experience the “middle child” of the marketing team. Media owns the traffic. Brand owns the site. The page connecting the two tends to belong to nobody and sits untouched in a Notion doc called something like Landing Page Priorities Q3.
There was a pretty good reason for that.
Personalizing five ads is easy enough. Personalizing five landing pages used to mean briefs, design, development, QA, deployment, and weeks or months of work. The economics rarely made sense, so brands got more and more specific with their creative while sending everyone to the same broad destination.
That bottleneck is starting to disappear.
Pilothouse has been testing AI-generated post-click experiences that can take the creative someone clicked and build a storefront around the same message, imagery, audience, and buying angle.
Daniel had a good analogy for why that matters.
Imagine walking into a store and saying you want a 65-inch OLED TV.
The salesperson says they have one, then hands you the entire catalogue.
You already told them what you wanted. Now they’re making you find it again.
That’s basically what happens when someone responds to a very specific ad and lands on a generic product page.
Pilothouse is already seeing some pretty significant movement from fixing that disconnect. In its recent pilots, personalized post-click experiences have produced roughly 20% to 21% lifts in conversion rate.
The part I found most useful is that this doesn’t necessarily mean another giant strategy exercise.
You’ve already figured out who the customer is. You’ve already found the angle that gets their attention. You’ve already built the creative around it.
As Daniel puts it, the creative is the brief.
The next step is making sure the experience after the click actually remembers what you just told the customer.
Listen to the full episode for Daniel’s breakdown of how Pilothouse is approaching post-click personalization, what they’re testing, and where they’re seeing the biggest opportunities.
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