At Nord Media, we focus on profitable growth at scale, we help forecast revenue, and contribution margin goals, then build the marketing plans to execute those goals.
This means full clarity on testing, scaling and improving profitability at every aspect of your funnel.
If you want a growth partner aligned with your real business goals, let’s chat
Ask any media buyer to walk you through an ad account and you’ll hear the same tour.
This is our “prospecting” campaign. That one is “retargeting”. The CPA looks great.
But Meta doesn’t deliver ads based on what you named the campaign. Those labels only exist for you and your team.
Meta shows the “new customer” ad to past buyers because past buyers are the cheapest sales it can find, and the campaign name never stopped it.
So some of your best-looking numbers are fake wins, and some of your best ads are buried in the wrong campaign. Media buyers have been calling this out on X all week.
My working assumption is that your account is doing it too, and you can check in about 10 minutes without rebuilding anything.
The slowest stretch of an affiliate program comes before anyone's recruited.
You open a profile, watch the content, size up the audience, dig for an email, and only then write the pitch.
SATHI (the affiliate platform for Shopify brands) just launched Match to cut that down.
It's creator discovery is built into the platform:
- It starts with your Shopify store data and suggests creators aligned with your brand.
- From there, you narrow the list by niche, follower range, creator location and audience location.
- Each profile then shows recent content and audience signals before you commit.
- AI personalizes the invite. You edit it and send it without leaving SATHI.
The part I like is the order. You check the fit first and reach out second. AI surfaces the creators and you choose who gets invited.
Meta Optimizes Past Your Labels
Here’s how the drift happens.
When you run broad targeting or Advantage+, you’re letting Meta pick who sees each ad.
You give it a goal, usually purchases, and it hunts for the cheapest way to hit that goal.
Existing customers and recent site visitors convert faster and cost less, so Meta keeps pulling your ads toward them, including the ad you built to find strangers.
That creates two problems a normal report won’t show you.
Your prospecting budget quietly pays to reach customers you already have. Meanwhile, a retargeting ad that strangers love gets judged as retargeting and stays underfunded.
Meta now has a setting that tells a campaign to chase new customers only. It works, but it won’t help until you know which campaigns need it.
So the first move is to see who your ads are actually reaching.
One Report Shows the Real Split
Meta has a report called Audience Segments. It splits your results into new audience, engaged audience, and existing customers.
If you haven’t set it up, start in Advertising Settings in Ads Manager and define two segments:
Engaged audience: website visitors and email subscribers who haven’t bought
Existing customers: your customer list plus your purchase-event website audience
Meta counts anyone outside those two as new.
Then run the audit:
1. Sort ads by spend over the last 30 days and pull the top five.
2. Open Breakdown, then Demographics, then Audience Segments.
3. Next to each ad, write down its campaign label and what share of its results came from new people versus existing customers.
4. Flag any ad where those two don’t match.
Two quirks to know before you read the numbers:
People who only liked or commented on your posts get counted as new, so if you have a big following, your new share will run a little high. And someone who visited and bought only shows up once, as an existing customer.
Across the accounts I manage, two patterns show up constantly. These are composites, so treat them as things to look for in your own account.
The hidden winner: an ad sitting in your retargeting campaign where around 70% of buyers are brand new. Strangers love it, and it’s been stuck on a small retargeting budget the whole time.
The fake winner: an ad in your prospecting campaign where over half the buyers were already customers. Its CPA looked amazing because it was selling to people who would have bought anyway.
From now on, trust the breakdown over the campaign name. The name only tells you what someone hoped the ad would do.
Re-Budget Ads for Their Real Job
Once you know where each ad is really going, the fix depends on what you found.
> If you found a hidden winner, move it. Put it in a prospecting campaign with a prospecting budget.
Killing it because its retargeting numbers look weak would throw away your best new-customer ad.
> If your prospecting campaign is mostly reaching existing customers, turn on Customer Lifecycle. It’s a newer setting inside each ad set.
Choose “Acquire new customers” and Meta stops spending that budget on people who already bought. The campaign itself stays as it is.
> If two campaigns reach the same people, merge them. Keeping both just has them bidding against each other for the same buyer, and your team ends up arguing over which one deserves credit.
Black Friday is three weeks out. A week or two after, someone is going to open the results and decide where the Q1 budget goes.
A report built on campaign names will hand Black Friday credit to the wrong ads, right when those budget calls get made. Sorting it out now, before spend spikes, is a lot easier than untangling it in December.
Add One Column to Reporting
Here’s what I’d get done before next weekend:
1. Run the Audience Segments breakdown on your top five ads by spend.
2. Move and rename any ad whose delivery doesn’t match its label, then budget it for the job it’s actually doing.
3. Add a column to your weekly report showing the new vs. existing split for each ad you’re scaling.
That last one is what keeps the leak from creeping back in unnoticed.
Meta hasn’t delivered by your campaign names in a long time. Starting this week, your reporting shouldn’t run on them either.
If you want a growth partner aligned with your real business goals, let’s chat.
I appreciate you reading and as always if there's anything I can do to help you in anyway just respond to this email. I personally respond to every email I get.
- Kody ✌️
