Howdy Haveaclues!

I hope you had a fun and/or relaxing great weekend! I had a wild, lovely, jam-packed Brooklyn Saturday.

Before we get into it, I’d love to hear from more of you! If you haven’t already or you’re new here, please quickly smash the reply button and tell me what you want to hear more of from me. I’ve gotten some really helpful and supportive feedback so far. Also replying to my emails helps with its deliverability!

Stick around until the deep end of this email, but don’t skip ahead, I have things to give away!

First, I wanted to clue you in to my current “process” for making this newsletter you’re reading right now:

1. I see a tweet I hate, someone asks me a difficult question on a consulting call, or I get frustrated by something a client or FB rep said.

2. I get angry 😡 or inspired

3. I tweet about it (or is it X post? 😅)

4. I procrastinate, get distracted, or focus on other stuff

5. I write this newsletter

Allllrighty, let’s dig in to what made me angry this week:

Some marketers don’t trust Facebook’s system and other marketers trust it entirely without questioning it.

I keep hearing fellow marketers talk about how they don’t trust Meta’s system. Here’s how the story goes: “I used to trust the system to optimize my ads/budgets, but then [the system did something wrong] and now I don’t trust it and I prefer to control everything manually.”

On the other hand, too many marketers trust the data and optimizations they see in Ads Manager and don’t question them or dig into them to learn more about them because they don’t understand how the system can be cheating.

Facebook ads requires a balance of trust and skepticism.

1. Trust in Optimization: Facebook's machine learning can optimize better and faster than humans, making predictions that align with your ad goals.

2. Understanding its Limitations: The system makes predictions and predictions aren't always right. Mistakes can happen, leading to suboptimal results. Also, the system can learn to cheat or be lazy without the proper guardrails.

Btw, if you want a safe place where you can talk with other professionals and experts about complex nuanced topics like this, it sounds like you need my sponsor: Foxwell Founders.

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There is tons of information/experience sharing, intimate cohorts, group calls, supportive feedback, useful resources, and community events.

I owe Andrew and the Foxwell Founders community a huge thank you for helping me make some amazing friendships and for helping me launch my account audit template.

If this sounds like it might valuable for you and you want to join me and the rest of the incredible members, click here to get started. You can always try it for a month or two to see how it feels. I’m sure you’ll get a ton of value out of it!

Back to today’s topic, trusting Meta’s ads optimizations and machine learning system.

I've advertised on all the major social ad platforms and every single one of them has reporting that makes their own platform performance look good.

They don't care if they take credit for action driven by other efforts.

Every platform is incentivized to count the most conversions possible so it looks like their platform is efficient and effective to advertisers so they can win (steal) more ad dollars from them (that’s you!).