Scalability School

What should DTC brands A/B test to increase revenue per visitor?

Test the variables that change how the offer is perceived before you test reassurance. In Brad Ploch's recent split tests, cutting a $279 product's sale price from $229 to $199 lifted revenue per visitor 44%, adding six problem-focused questions to a quiz doubled it, and swapping the post-purchase offer took upsell revenue per visitor from about $2 to $10. Trust signals went the other way: a bolder warranty line cut conversion 7.5%, full reviews lost 10% of profit per session to an AI summary, and USP blocks at checkout changed nothing.

The ecommerce A/B tests that paid off this season all changed how the offer is framed: the price point, how long a quiz lets shoppers sit in their problem, how plainly a headline states the USP, and where Meta sends the traffic. The "trust signal" best practices most brands assume are safe (a louder warranty, more reviews, reassurance at checkout) lost or did nothing. Andrew Foxwell and Brad Ploch walk through more than a dozen real split tests from DTC brands, with the numbers behind the winners and the losers.

We discuss:

- Why dropping a $279 product from $229 to $199 lifted revenue per visitor 44% and more than covered the margin hit
- The six extra quiz questions that doubled revenue per visitor, and the switcher review that cost 8%
- Why these "trust" signals ultimately backfired
- How a plain USP headline beat ALL of the clever ones during a collection page headline test on $2M in revenue
- Why USP and review blocks at checkout changed nothing
- One ad, five landing pages, one CBO: how weekly spend doubled & efficiency improved
- The post-purchase offer swap that took upsell revenue per visitor from about $2 to $10
- Longer product pages for premium products, and preorder vs. sold out

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This episode of the Scalability School podcast is sponsored by NorthBeam and they just launched Northbeam Incrementality. Northbeam Incrementality gives you easy, automated, self-service incrementality tests, while protecting you from the major mistakes so many people make while running incrementality tests. Your MTA handles the daily tactics, your MMM guides the long-term planning, and Incrementality provides the causal truth. It’s a closed loop that allows you to scale what works and cut what doesn't. Right now when you head over to www.northbeam.io/incrementality, they’re offering Scalability School listeners 50% off unlimited tests for a year when you join. Just tell them we sent you!

To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email [email protected]
To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM at https://x.com/brad_ploch
To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM at https://x.com/zachmstuck

Scalability School is a weekly show from Andrew Foxwell, Brad Ploch, and Zach
Stuck about what is actually working right now in DTC growth. No theory, no
recycled LinkedIn takes, just the numbers and decisions behind real brands and
real ad accounts.

Chapters

00:00 Ecommerce A/B tests: what won, what lost, and why
02:06 Price testing: why $199 beat $229 by 44% revenue per visitor
07:08 How to build a quiz funnel in Claude, and the button that added 20%
12:04 "Sit in the problem longer": the quiz change that doubled revenue
22:30 Why more trust signals lowered conversion: warranty, reviews, AI summaries
33:53 Clear beats clever: a collection page headline test on $2M in revenue
38:18 Do USP and review blocks at checkout lift conversion?
41:55 One ad, five landing pages: how weekly spend doubled
47:41 How to audit your post-purchase upsell
50:54 Longer product pages for premium products, plus preorder vs. sold out

• (00:00) - Ecommerce A/B tests: what won, what lost, and why

How do you build a DTC offer that raises profit without hurting conversion rate? Simplify the offer so a shopper understands it in seconds, then raise MSRP so you can show a bigger discount at a higher final price. The offers scaling DTC brands run today are buy more save more, a discounted first subscription order, or tiered dollar-off bundles. Brian Ng of Digital Ride raised one brand's MSRP to $74.95 behind a 50% discount and saw conversion rate hold steady while the brand moved from a monthly loss to profit. In this episode, Andrew Foxwell, Brad Ploch and Zach Stuck talk DTC offer strategy with Brian Ng of Digital Ride, covering how to raise prices without losing conversions, the three offers scaling brands run right now, and how a $10M a month brand manages creative with outside agencies. You'll learn why raising MSRP behind a bigger discount can lift profit at the same conversion rate, how to test a new offer with a single URL parameter, and why more creative volume often makes performance worse.

We discuss:

• What a bad DTC offer looks like, and why confusing offer pages lose the sale
• The three offer structures scaling DTC brands use: buy more save more, subscription-first, and tiered bundles
• How Brian raised MSRP to $74.95 behind a 50% discount and turned a monthly loss into profit
• How to test offers with Convert or Intelligems experiments versus sending ads to a new landing page
• How to forecast ecommerce revenue year over year and why you shouldn't scale before new customer ROAS is there
• Running a $10M a month brand's creative through three agencies with no in-house strategists
• Pricing psychology: why $39.99 beats $35.99, and a $30 price change that lifted profit per session 40%

Get the newsletter: https://www.scalabilityschool.com/scalability-newsletter Learn more: https://www.scalabilityschool.com This episode of the Scalability School podcast is sponsored by NorthBeam and they just launched Northbeam Incrementality. Northbeam Incrementality gives you easy, automated, self-service incrementality tests, while protecting you from the major mistakes so many people make while running incrementality tests. Your MTA handles the daily tactics, your MMM guides the long-term planning, and Incrementality provides the causal truth. It's a closed loop that allows you to scale what works and cut what doesn't. Right now when you head over to www.northbeam.io/incrementality, they're offering Scalability School listeners 50% off unlimited tests for a year when you join. Just tell them we sent you! To connect with Brian Ng: https://x.com/briannjho To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email [email protected] To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM at https://x.com/brad_ploch To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM at https://x.com/zachmstuck Learn more about the Foxwell Founders Community at https://foxwellfounders.com Learn more about the The Hive Haus Creators Community at http://HiveHausUGC.com

Scalability School is the podcast for media buyers, agency owners and DTC operators who want to grow without guessing, hosted by Andrew Foxwell, Brad Ploch and Zach Stuck.

Chapters

00:00 DTC offer strategy: why $39.99 beats $35.99 02:35 How Digital Ride grows DTC brands as a growth partner 05:27 How to forecast ecommerce revenue year over year 08:56 Can creative agencies replace an in-house creative team? 14:26 How much creative a $10M/month brand launches 22:29 The 3 offers scaling DTC brands run right now 23:55 How to test a new offer: Convert experiments vs new landing pages 25:29 How raising MSRP turned a monthly loss into profit 30:25 Pricing psychology: the $30 price change that lifted profit 40%

How do you scale a subscription app with Meta ads?

Start with an offer whose value is obviously outsized for the price, then test the packaging rather than the product. Format Finder moved from a single $97 plan to $29, $59, and $97 tiers, and the single change that moved AOV the most was toggling annual billing on by default. Free trials failed outright because the cost to acquire a trial on Meta never backed out. Target customers with a need rather than a want, since need-driven buyers churn less and complain less, and turn your best users into your ad creators by paying them a percentage of the spend their ads carry. Scaling a subscription app with Meta ads comes down to the offer, the pricing packaging, and where the creative comes from. Brad Ploch and Zach Stuck sit down with Naveed, who went from affiliate marketing to a 45-person performance agency to an ecommerce brand to Format Finder, the app he built in three weeks and now runs at $20,000 to $25,000 a day in Meta ad spend. You'll learn how he builds an offer, the pricing tests that worked and the one that failed, the campaign structure behind the spend, and the creator flywheel that turns his own users into his best-performing ads.

We discuss:

- How to tell whether an offer is worth running before you spend a dollar - Why problem-solution fit matters more than unit economics at the start - The move from a single $97 plan to $29, $59, and $97 tiers, and why the free trial never backed out on Meta - The pricing change that moved AOV the most, and it was not the price - Why customers with a need churn less than customers with a want, and how a realtor funnel tested that theory - Why he runs one CBO split by geo, no ABO testing, and no interest targeting - The creator flywheel: users who hit a million views make his ads and take 5% of the spend those ads carry - What a one-click AI video editor actually costs to run, and how SaaS margins survive per-user API fees - How he runs the ad account, customer service, and product development through AI agents in Telegram and Slack - Why the harness around the model matters more than the model

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Get the newsletter: https://www.scalabilityschool.com/scalability-newsletter Learn more: https://www.scalabilityschool.com Connect with Naveed https://x.com/navuud To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email [email protected] To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM at https://x.com/brad_ploch To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM at https://x.com/zachmstuck Learn more about the Foxwell Founders Community at https://foxwellfounders.com Learn more about the The Hive Haus Creators Community at http://HiveHausUGC.com

Scalability School is a weekly show from Andrew Foxwell, Brad Ploch, and Zach Stuck about what is actually working right now in DTC growth. No theory, no recycled LinkedIn takes, just the numbers and decisions behind real brands and real ad accounts.

Chapters

00:00 How to scale a subscription app with Meta ads 00:29 Meet Naveed: Switch Research to Format Finder 02:45 From affiliate marketing to a 45-person performance agency 04:06 Getting banned by Meta and what it exposed 05:45 Why the ecommerce inventory cycle burned him out 08:10 How One Peak turned viral videos into a course business 10:10 Building Format Finder in three weeks with AI 11:50 What the app does, from format quiz to finished cut 13:15 Why the offer is the biggest lever nobody talks about 16:18 How to price a subscription without killing conversion 19:15 The pricing change that moved AOV the most 19:55 Why customers with a need beat customers with a want 22:05 A word from Northbeam 23:20 Why your ad does the targeting, not your audience settings 24:45 Ad account structure: one CBO, no ABO testing 25:31 The creator flywheel: paying users 5% of ad spend 28:35 How the video editor cut churn and unlocked scale 29:35 SaaS margins when every user burns API tokens 32:50 Why the TAM for creator tools is enormous 37:50 Running ads, support, and dev through AI agents 42:00 Where to find Naveed

How much should you pay a DTC agency in 2026? For Meta ads management on its own, the market has settled between $2,500 and $5,000 a month, and paying above $5,000 only makes sense when the brand spends six figures a month or the scope adds creative, forecasting, and CRO. Creative is the one line item worth paying at the top of the market, because a single breakout ad can add $20,000 to $50,000 a month in profitable spend. Percentage-of-spend deals are fair when they carry a hard cap and a CPA or ROAS target attached, and they should never be charged against branded search. DTC agency pricing is all over the map, so Andrew Foxwell, Brad Ploch, and Zach Stuck break down what you should actually pay in 2026 using a Foxwell Founders survey of 200+ agencies. You'll learn the real retainer ranges for Meta ads management, when percentage of spend is fair and when it is a red flag, what a media buyer should be doing to earn the fee, and what creative, email, SMS, landing pages, and CRO cost right now. We discuss:

• What 200+ agencies reported charging, and why 4 out of 5 quote a flat retainer or a retainer plus a percentage of spend
• Why $2,500 to $5,000 a month has become the market rate for Meta ads management with no creative attached
• When to keep an agency, bring it in-house, or pay up for one exceptional freelancer
• Why percentage of spend only works with a hard cap and a CPA or ROAS target
• At what monthly spend incrementality testing starts to matter
• Why nobody should charge a percentage of spend on branded search
• Why creative is the one agency worth paying the most for
• What to pay content creators directly, with and without whitelisting
• Email and SMS pricing, and the attribution model that gets brands fleeced
• Landing page and CRO pricing per page and per month, plus five fixes that work on almost every store

Get the newsletter: https://www.scalabilityschool.com/scalability-newsletter Full Episode and transcript: https://www.scalabilityschool.com/scalability-school-podcast/what-you-should-pay-a-dtc-agency-in-2026Learn more: https://www.scalabilityschool.com

This episode of the Scalability School podcast is sponsored by NorthBeam and they just launched Northbeam Incrementality. Northbeam Incrementality gives you easy, automated, self-service incrementality tests, while protecting you from the major mistakes so many people make while running incrementality tests. Your MTA handles the daily tactics, your MMM guides the long-term planning, and Incrementality provides the causal truth. It's a closed loop that allows you to scale what works and cut what doesn't. Right now when you head over to www.northbeam.io/incrementality, they're offering Scalability School listeners 50% off unlimited tests for a year when you join. Just tell them we sent you!

To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email [email protected] To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM at https://x.com/brad_ploch To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM at https://x.com/zachmstuck Learn more about the Foxwell Founders Community at https://foxwellfounders.com Learn more about the The Hive Haus Creators Community at http://HiveHausUGC.com Scalability School is a weekly show from Andrew Foxwell, Brad Ploch, and Zach Stuck about what is actually working right now in DTC growth. No theory, no recycled LinkedIn takes, just the numbers and decisions behind real brands and real ad accounts. Chapters 00:00 What you should pay a DTC agency in 2026 01:58 What 200+ agencies told us about how they price 02:45 Meta ads management pricing: the floor, the market rate, the ceiling 04:42 Should the fee be flat, or tied to performance? 05:13 Why $3K to $5K became the market rate for ad management 07:36 When to use an agency, go in-house, or hire a freelancer 10:20 Why percentage of spend works when you cap it 11:01 What a media buyer should actually do to earn the fee 16:52 The gap between pressing buttons and real media buying 19:17 At what monthly spend does incrementality actually matter? 22:42 Google Ads agency pricing and the branded search problem 28:45 Creative agency pricing and why it is worth paying the most for 31:45 What to pay content creators directly 35:58 Email and SMS agency pricing without getting fleeced 39:42 Onshore vs offshore teams and what actually changes 43:20 Landing page and CRO pricing, per page and per month 48:15 How fast a landing page should go from idea to live 50:03 Five CRO fixes that work on almost every store

How do you build a performance creative team for a DTC brand? Start with the most experienced hire you can afford, a director-level player-coach for nine-figure brands, a senior agency-trained strategist for smaller ones, and let them build the team top-down, using freelancers to fill gaps while full-time roles get approved. Match output goals to headcount, because ad volume is determined by team size, and vet every candidate with a paid assessment that tests both craft and how they use AI. Building a performance creative team starts with hiring the most experienced brain you can afford, a director-level player-coach, then filling in strategists, editors, designers, and a creator manager around them. In this episode, Andrew Foxwell and Brad Ploch sit down with Joanna Wallace, who founded the creative department at HexClad and served as VP of Creative Strategy at Birddogs, to map out exactly who to hire, in what order, what they cost, and how to test them before you commit millions in ad spend to their strategy.

We discuss:

• Why going cheap on your first creative hire is the most expensive mistake in DTC
• What a creative strategy director actually costs in 2026 (It's not what you think) and why
• Why your ad volume is determined by your team size, full stop
• Why agency experience beats brand-side experience for strategist hires
• How to run paid assessments that expose AI-generated word salad
• The coordinator role: the smartest entry point into creative strategy

Join The Scalability School Newsletter: https://www.scalabilityschool.com/scalability-newsletter

Connect with Joanna Wallace: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joannasloamewallace/ Joanna's creative strategist evaluation template: To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email [email protected] To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM at https://x.com/brad_ploch To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM at https://x.com/zachmstuck Learn more about the Foxwell Founders Community at https://foxwellfounders.com Learn more about the The Hive Haus Creators Community at http://HiveHausUGC.com. This episode of the Scalability School podcast is sponsored by NorthBeam and they just launched Northbeam Incrementality. Northbeam Incrementality gives you easy, automated, self-service incrementality tests, while protecting you from the major mistakes so many people make while running incrementality tests. Your MTA handles the daily tactics, your MMM guides the long-term planning, and Incrementality provides the causal truth. It's a closed loop that allows you to scale what works and cut what doesn't. Right now when you head over to www.northbeam.io/incrementality, they're offering Scalability School listeners 50% off unlimited tests for a year when you join. Just tell them we sent you!

Scalability School is the podcast for DTC media buyers and e-commerce operators who want to scale profitably — hosted by Andrew Foxwell, Brad Ploch, and Zach Stuck.

Chapters

• 00:00 How to build a performance creative team for a DTC brand
• 02:02 The #1 hiring mistake: going cheap on your first creative hire
• 03:04 What a creative strategy director costs in 2026
• 05:06 Player-coach: what the director does in the first six months
• 09:10 Why ad volume is determined by team size
• 13:13 The hiring order for seven-figure brands
• 18:18 Why agency experience beats brand-side experience
• 21:21 What nine-figure creative teams do differently
• 25:24 Sharing creative learnings across the whole company
• 31:27 Where to find great creative strategists
• 37:36 How to evaluate candidates with paid assessments
• 41:38 How to break into creative strategy (the coordinator route)
• 47:43 How to keep a creative team from burning out

In this episode, Andrew Foxwell and Brad Ploch sit down with Hannah Houg and Matthew Gattozzi to answer the question every team is quietly avoiding: how do you use AI for creative strategy without losing the judgment that makes ads work? The short answer is that you bring AI a hypothesis instead of asking it for one. You'll learn which four parts of the process to protect from AI entirely, why the briefing stage is where ad quality actually degrades, and how to give your strategists room to think without torching your output.

Hannah has built ads and campaigns for 300+ DTC brands. Matthew's studio has driven $100M+ in client revenue. Both use AI daily. Both have watched it quietly weaken the same muscle they get paid for.

We discuss:

• Why every creative brief in the space suddenly looks the same
• The difference between AI helping your research and AI writing your hypothesis
• Why AI is good at following rules and bad at breaking them, and why that matters for scale
• How Hannah lost the ability to write a script after a few months of AI-first drafting
• What a genuinely good AI input looks like (and why it's built before you open the tool)
• The one-sentence goal every brief needs before anyone writes a word
• Why building 7 personas on a $10k/month budget is a math problem, not a strategy
• What "deep context" actually means, and why most teams don't have it
• Why the efficiency-vs-quality fight is a leadership conversation, not a tools conversation

Join The Scalability School Newsletter: https://www.scalabilityschool.com/scalability-newsletter

This episode is sponsored by Proppel, the hiring agency that has placed more than 75 employees for Foxwell Founders members. Get 10% off your first hire when you mention the Scalability School Podcast: https://www.weareproppel.com/foxwell-founders-proppel

This episode of the Scalability School podcast is sponsored by NorthBeam and they just launched Northbeam Incrementality. Northbeam Incrementality gives you easy, automated, self-service incrementality tests, while protecting you from the major mistakes so many people make while running incrementality tests. Your MTA handles the daily tactics, your MMM guides the long-term planning, and Incrementality provides the causal truth. It's a closed loop that allows you to scale what works and cut what doesn't. Right now when you head over to www.northbeam.io/incrementality, they're offering Scalability School listeners 50% off unlimited tests for a year when you join. Just tell them we sent you!

To connect with Hannah Houg send a DM at: https://x.com/hannahhoug

To connect with Matthew Gattozzi send a DM at: https://x.com/MatthewGattozzi

To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email [email protected]

To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM at https://x.com/brad_ploch

To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM at https://x.com/zachmstuck

Learn more about the Foxwell Founders Community at https://foxwellfounders.com

Learn more about the The Hive Haus Creators Community at http://HiveHausUGC.com.

Chapters 00:00 Intro: why AI creative strategy is producing the same ads everywhere

04:08 Why every creative brief suddenly looks the same

07:18 What makes a great ad, and why AI can't break rules

10:22 Is research or briefing where AI actually hurts ad quality?

12:26 Why AI can't come up with the big idea

14:33 The danger of letting AI write your hypothesis

16:39 How AI quietly degrades your copywriting muscle

19:45 How to find an insight before you open AI

25:55 Why hyper-specific creative is winning on Meta right now

29:57 Why your team needs space to think, not more output

30:58 Has any LLM actually cracked ad copywriting?

33:00 Why creator talent match beats a perfect script

37:07 What a good AI input actually looks like

40:10 The one-sentence goal every creative brief needs

44:14 The persona trap that sinks small ad budgets

47:21 What "deep context" actually means

50:24 Why strategists want to slow down while owners push efficiency

53:27 Why this is a leadership problem, not a tools problem

56:32 Break your margins today for performance later

57:32 Bonus: the Michigan method

Brad and Zach go deep on the single biggest scaling lever most media buyers are ignoring: the landing page. The spine of the episode is a mindset shift, meaning you can scale spend without new creative, new offers, or more discounting. You scale with pages.

They open with creative-to-lander congruency: the ad makes a promise and the page has to keep it. Zach shares how MarsMen now runs 33 active landing pages organized by roughly 10 messaging pillars (aging, cortisol, energy, weight loss, GLP-1, TRT vs. natural), and the company has a hard rule that no ad launches without a congruent page behind it. The reason goes beyond conversion rate: Meta's Andromeda algorithm is reading the landing page itself. Page copy is a targeting signal, not just a destination.

Brad backs this with a case study: a client sending all traffic to a PDP ($41K in spend) duplicated the exact same creative to a "5 Reasons Why" page. Same spend level, substantially better ROAS, lower CPMR, and the age breakdown showed 45+ ripping harder than ever. Same ad, new audience, unlocked entirely by the page.

From there they cover the format progression (listicle → advertorial → dynamic hybrid page → quiz), the specific page elements that matter (comparison charts, clear single CTA, social proof, FAQ, shoppable PDP sections injected below listicles), how to structure tests inside the ad account, kill criteria (48 hours at MarsMen's spend level, plus a "graveyard campaign" with cost controls to separate creative problems from page problems), what "winning" actually means (net new spend volume added to the account, not just beating the PDP head-to-head), and reporting (spend velocity as the success metric, heat maps, and session recordings, including one recording session that led to a single button change worth +20% revenue per session).

The episode closes with the getting-started playbook: don't reinvent the template. Go pull the landers from the biggest spenders in Motion or any ad-tracking tool and copy the structure, because they all run nearly the same one. The real bottleneck is copywriting, which is much harder than people think (raw AI output without heavy pre-prompting gets you "shit copy with a bunch of em dashes"), and perfectionism: your landing pages can be uglier than your website, and your ads can be uglier than your landing pages. Use your brand font and colors, but if it's not perfect, get started.

• Did you know Meta's Andromeda algorithm is reading your landing page copy, not just your ad, and using it to decide who sees your ads?
• How one brand took the exact same ad, swaped the PDP for a "5 Reasons Why" page, and matched $41K in spend at a substantially better ROAS while unlocking an entirely new age demo.
• What if you could scale spend without a single new creative, new offer, or deeper discount, using only landing pages?
• Why "my lander beat the PDP" is the wrong definition of a winning landing page test.
• What watching just 20 session recordings revealed that a single button change fixed.
• Why MarsMen refuses to launch any ad that doesn't have a congruent landing page behind it, and how they actively enforce it with 33 live landing pages.
• Why nearly ALL nine-figure brands run the same landing page template, and why this one thing (and not design) is the real reason your pages take forever to ship.

This episode of the Scalability School podcast is sponsored by NorthBeam and they just launched Northbeam Incrementality. Northbeam Incrementality gives you easy, automated, self-service incrementality tests, while protecting you from the major mistakes so many people make while running incrementality tests. Your MTA handles the daily tactics, your MMM guides the long-term planning, and Incrementality provides the causal truth. It's a closed loop that allows you to scale what works and cut what doesn't. Right now when you head over to www.northbeam.io/incrementality, they're offering Scalability School listeners 50% off unlimited tests for a year when you join. Just tell them we sent you!

Chapters

• 00:00 – Intro
• 02:42 – Creative and lander congruency: the ad makes a promise, the page has to keep it
• 04:20 – Mars's 33 landing pages and the "no ad without a congruent page" rule
• 06:48 – Organizing pages by pillar and how wide to go
• 09:04 – Case study: same creative, $41K PDP vs. 5 Reasons Why page (and the 45+ audience unlock)
• 11:27 – "Andromeda is reading the page, not just the ad"
• 12:52 – What CPMR is and why it's debatable as a metric
• 13:54 – The landing page format progression: listicle → advertorial → dynamic page → quiz
• 16:51 – The elements that actually move the needle on a listicle

This episode is a tactical deep dive into two of the biggest measurement questions in DTC right now, capped off with Zach Stuck joining to break down how MarsMen sets ad budgets off forecasted recurring revenue.

The first half is a real client case study on Meta's Incremental Attribution (IA). Brad walks us through an apparel brand, with an AOV just over $100, strong organic and influencer traffic, and $150-200K per month in spend. A conversion lift study at the start of the year showed their one-day click ROAS almost perfectly matched their true incremental number, so 1DC became the account's benchmark. When they tested IA head-to-head against one-day click (each with its own holdout), IA looked terrible in week one, then dramatically better in weeks two and three, and the lift study combined with Triple Whale MTA data validated the win. Then Meta changed its click attribution definition in March (only outbound clicks now count as clicks, with profile clicks and comments moved to "engaged"), and IA performance deviated hard from one-day click, Triple Whale, and product-level MER. IA also stopped responding to bid adjustments. The takeaway: they reverted to one-day click, with a plan to retest IA in three to six months as Meta feeds the model more conversion lift data.

The second segment covers creative cohort spend analysis: breaking down each month's spend by the month the ads were launched. If most of May's spend is running through ads launched last year, your new creative isn't earning spend and something is broken in the pipeline. If nearly all spend is from ads launched in the last 30 days, you are over-reliant on a few recent outliers. Splitting the view by evergreen versus promo ads shows whether new creative is compounding month over month, which is what actually earns the right to scale spend. Zach adds Homestead's layer on top: tracking "breakthrough" ads ($2K spend in 7 days at target) versus scaled ads every month.

The final segment is Zach on how MarsMen scales: if you can forecast next month's recurring revenue, you can spend into that full amount, as long as your blended MER covers OPEX and your new-customer ROAS holds at target. He walks through the cash-flow traps (90-day subscriptions deferring revenue, promos shifting cohort behavior), MarsMen's rebuilt forecast model that applies retention curves at the individual customer level, daily new-customer targets by channel, and a reactivation play: offering discounted one-time purchases to list subscribers who never converted because they didn't want a subscription, which he estimates is worth hundreds of thousands per month.

• Why Meta's Incremental Attribution passed a conversion lift test, only to then fall apart three weeks later.
• How you can REALLY spend 100% of next month's forecasted MRR on ads this month, and when that math breaks.
• The one thing that might be the real reason as to to why your account performance suddenly shifted after March 2026.
• The percentage of this month's ad spend that should come from ads you launched this month, and what it means if the answer is almost none.
• Is your "dead" email list quietly hiding hundreds of thousands in monthly revenue?
• Why one-day click beats seven-day click for brands with heavy organic traffic, and how to know which one your account should trust.
• What a "breakthrough ad" actually is and why your creative team should be measured on them every month.
• Caution: How adding a 90-day subscription offer can put your cash flow at risk 60 days later.
• Should subscription brands hold email, SMS, and organic to daily new-customer quotas the same way they do paid?
• Is the creative volume game dead, or are the people abandoning it just measuring hit rates wrong?

• 02:32 — Should you test Meta's Incremental Attribution in your account?
• 07:30 — How do you design a fair test of one-day click vs. Incremental Attribution?
• 11:32 — What did Meta's new click attribution definition change, and why did it break results?
• 14:02 — When should you turn Incremental Attribution off and go back to one-day click?
• 26:30 — How do you run a creative cohort analysis to see if your new ads are earning spend?
• 35:31 — How does a subscription brand use next month's MRR to set this month's ad budget?
• 46:02 — How do you turn a "dead" email list into six figures of monthly revenue?

In the words of Andrew Foxwell, "It's just the guys" and they framed this episode around one big shift: 2025 was the year of creative diversity and raw ad volume, and 2026 is the year that questions, "what is all this volume actually pointing at?" Call it a return to intentionality, and the part of the funnel many brands have been ignoring while chasing creative volume: the landing page.

Brad opens by reacting to a Twitter conversation where operators sounded burnt out on the volume game, then reframes the discussion around what you can improve outside of ad creative. The crew works through Cherene's "marketing tornado" idea: If the same person sees your brand 15+ different ways, and the job is consistency of message across all of them, then it's important to arm Meta with creative, landing pages, and offers so its AI (Andromeda) can deliver the right message to the right person at the right time.

The heart of the episode is landing page strategy. Zach speed-runs the page-type hierarchy, then both hosts hammer funnel congruency, the ad-to-lander-to-PDP message match they admit was a big driver of their Feb/March scaling. Brad shares a beauty-brand example where simply turning a winning founder video's transcript into a congruent listicle scaled spend 60% month-over-month (twice) with zero new ads. The short: stop hunting for the one winning page, run many congruent pages live at once, and let Meta allocate spend across them.

• Why ad-to-landing-page-to-PDP "funnel congruency" is the piece most operators are still leaving on the table in 2026.
• How one brand scaled spend 60% month-over-month (twice) with zero new ads.
• Why you need to stop hunting for the single "winning" landing page and instead run many congruent pages live at once.
• What it actually means to "sell one product 50 different ways," and why your angle TAM is more important than your category TAM.
• Why the volume game is finally dead, and what the 2026 shift from "make more" to "what is this volume pointing at" means for your testing budget.
• Why a "marketing tornado," is your best bet to keep message consistency when one buyer sees your brand 15+ different ways.
• When it actually pays to set different CPA/ROAS targets by funnel stage and product.
• Why a congruent landing page will lower your CPM, CPMR and earn you a "back tap" from the Meta auction.
• The order you should be building and testing your landing pages.

Harry Delmege, co-founder of Roly Poly Digital, joins Scalability School for a tactical conversation about what actually separates an ad spending $500 a day from one spending $10K a day. Harry's agency, named by Andrew's daughter Nora, has rapidly become one of the most respected creative shops in DTC by pushing back on a lot of what the industry is currently selling: high-volume AI-generated workflows, format obsession, and the relentless push to do more without slowing down to do it well.

The conversation digs into Harry's creative philosophy, which he distills into three things he checks every ad against: promise, proof, and (workshopped live on the episode) puzzling (big thanks to Brad). They cover his preference for long-form "yapper" ads, why he insists on manual research over AI-assisted research, how he hires creative strategists from non-media-buying backgrounds, and why he thinks the closest thing to a real "hack" in the current environment is just relentlessly studying organic content and ripping off what's already working.

Harry also shares his real take on the volume-versus-quality debate, including a pointed observation that brand-side complaints about agency performance have spiked at exactly the same time the industry adopted AI and started preaching volume. Key Takeaways

• What actually separates an ad that spends $500 a day from one that spends $10k a day
• How AI-assisted creative research is actually hurting your hit rate
• What is a "yapper ad" and why are most agencies/ brands not running them?
• Why Harry believes a U-turn on creative volume is on the horizon
• Where true creative innovation actually comes from and is it what you actually need for success.
• Why "open loops" is the most misunderstood term in creative strategy
• This 1 thing is the entire secret of high-performing creative.

This episode of the Scalability School podcast is sponsored by NorthBeam and they just launched Northbeam Incrementality. Northbeam Incrementality gives you easy, automated, self-service incrementality tests, while protecting you from the major mistakes so many people make while running incrementality tests. Your MTA handles the daily tactics, your MMM guides the long-term planning, and Incrementality provides the causal truth. It's a closed loop that allows you to scale what works and cut what doesn't. Right now when you head over to www.northbeam.io/incrementality, they're offering Scalability School listeners 50% off unlimited tests for a year when you join. Just tell them we sent you!

To connect with Harry Delmege, send him a DM at https://x.com/harrydelmege_

To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email [email protected]

To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM at https://x.com/brad_ploch

To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM at https://x.com/zachmstuck

Learn more about the Foxwell Founders Community at https://foxwellfounders.com

Learn more about the The Hive Haus Creators Community at http://HiveHausUGC.com