What is a "banger ad"? Well...if you have to ask, you probably haven't run one.

You'll see/feel a banger within a day of launching it in the account. It sucks up all the ad spend in the ad set/campaign where it lives and starts driving conversions almost immediately.

Banger ads change your business' trajectory and allow you to unlock incremental daily ad spend without sacrificing efficiency.

You've probably heard all of that before...but this week, I'm going to use some aggregated and anonymized data from real brands to give you the "play by play" of a banger ad, so you know what to look out for.

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Anatomy Of A Banger Ad

Here is a timeline of the KPIs/behavior you'll see if your ad is a banger:

Day 1: Let's get one thing out of the way: most banger ads are videos. This isn't always true–I've seen some banger statics before–but the more complex the sales argument is, the more likely your banger will be a video.

The first thing you're going to notice in a banger ad is that it eats up most of the budget in the ad set where it lives. If it takes three days for a top spender to emerge, you probably don't have a banger.

The second thing you're going to notice in a banger video, on day one, is a hook rate that beats the account average. This doesn't mean that you should optimize your entire video creative strategy around hook rate though. These ads work because the hook is effective at drawing in the right audience.

On day one, the ad is driving multiple conversions, often at a ROAS that exceeds the account average, but apart from hook rate, metrics aren't fully locked in yet.

Meta initially serves every new ad to a "warm" audience. Your first three to five conversions are going to come from that warm pool. This is the first test of an ad's efficacy, but it doesn't tell you anything about the ad's ability to convert a truly cold/unaware audience.

This is why you'll often see ads that look like winners on day one, but die by day three.

Day 3: This is the day when a true banger starts to emerge*, because by this point the ad escapes the localized/warm "trial" audience pool and gets in front of a relevant cold audience.

At this point, hook rate is typically the same or higher than day 1. CPM is often higher than the account average, sometimes by close to 2x. And conversion rate is higher than the account average, often by a factor of close to 1.5x.

Outbound click through rate and video hold rate are variable, because these metrics depend on the ad's overall strategy.

I often talk about statics that "sell the click" vs "make the sale". You would assume that videos always "make the sale", but that isn't always true, even if the video contains a fully baked sales argument. 90-120 second video -> 5 Reasons (or 7, or 11 Reasons) lander is a successful funnel I've seen frequently.

*If you're running a very consolidated campaign structure where new ads get exposed to your high-spending campaign on launch, the things described here might happen before Day 3.

Day 7: At this point, most brands (with competent media buyers) have started to scale budget for the ad. The most important pattern is that CPA is within ~10% of the account average, despite CPMs that are higher, and often much higher.

These CPAs are typically enabled by above-average conversion rates and click rates that match or exceed the account average.

Something to keep in mind though: the account average is often set by prior bangers. In most healthy accounts I audit, the top 10-20 ads by ad spend drive 60-70% of all ad spend in the account.

The biggest lesson here: killing an ad based on high CPMs alone is the wrong move, especially if it's hitting your CPA target.

Day 14: This is where the S-tier bangers get separated from the A- and B-tier bangers. By this point, daily spend against the ad has more than doubled, and (depending on the brand's business objectives) exceeds $1k/day.

Despite this scale-up, CPA remains relatively flat, so ROAS is locked in despite budget increases. This is the platonic ideal of scale: increasing budgets while maintaining (or improving) efficiency, enabling more new customer conversions.

At this point, conversion rate and click rate might start to decline slightly, but they're still at or above the account average.

Ad performance will sit here until it starts to fatigue. How long will it take for that to happen? It depends on the size of the relevant audience pool and how hard the brand scales up budgets.

The Most Important Learning: ROAS often starts high on day 1–the banger converts the "warm" pool more efficiently than the average ad. But not always–sometimes Day one ROAS is at or below the account average.

The signal of a banger is not high ROAS maintained consistently. It's CPA and acceptable/profitable ROAS maintained consistently, no matter how hard you crank the budget (to a point).

The strongest signals of a banger are ad spend–does the ad gobble it up?–and stable CPA/ROAS that sits around the account-level target, or enables the brand to maintain its account-level target.

This is where the concept of "natural CAC" comes into play. This isn't verified by Meta itself, but Jordan's hypothesis is that there is a CAC that Meta considers "right" for each product category, and that is where bangers tend to stabilize.

What's Actually Happening Here?

We want to understand the "why" behind these numbers so that we can put more meaningful shots on goal in the pursuit of creating banger ads.

This is just me spitballing/hypothesizing, but nearly 100% of the banger ads I've created or seen during client audits have involved a pretty stark departure from the ads that came before it:

• New creative format, like a TikTok shop-style yapper in an account that was all statics
• New use case/audience for the product
• New demographic portrayed in the ad
• New sales argument/mechanism
• New authority source (usually very creative)

That doesn't mean that pulling one of these levers guarantees a banger ad. As I mentioned above, bangers usually exhibit really strong fit between the target audience, the messaging, the visual format and the hook AND the ad itself is really unique.

This is why hook rate is the best early indication of a banger ad, but other soft metrics are not.

Side note–nothing will raise your bar for creating attention-grabbing and compelling ad concepts like posting organically on TikTok and IG. Even if you're doing a "personal brand" instead of posting about your product, trying to grow on organic will teach you how to write hooks and keep viewers engaged.

Earlier this year, I took Cut 30, and I'd rank it as the best investment I've made this year so far. It's a virtual bootcamp with live trainings that turns you into a better organic content creator in 30 days.

The next cohort starts this Tuesday, September 15th. You can use my code ALEX when you sign up for $200 off. Click here to join.

To wrap things up in a bow: if I had to write a high level brief for a banger ad, here's what I'd put in it:

• We want to speak to a demographic, mechanism or use case that hasn't gotten significant spend in the account over the past 6 months or, ideally, ever.
• We want to engineer this ad to feel like the viewer's "comfort food" content on Facebook or Instagram.
• If humans are represented in the ad, they should look like target audience.
• Leverage the opening line in the voiceover, the opening three seconds of the video, and the text overlay in the opener to trigger an emotion or evoke curiosity about the problem you're solving.
• Structure your ad script and lander to provide multiple off-ramps for audiences at different awareness stages, and try to start as close to unaware or problem-curious as you can while still converting effectively.