From the Meta account to the idea list, step by step.
Which ads are running, which ones are efficient, and which audience the account reaches today.
Verbatim customer language from reviews, forums, Reddit and ad libraries.
Personas built from the quotes, with eight evidenced layers and a purchase score.
One idea per persona and pain, each with evidence and a score. A strategist makes the selection.
The ads with the highest spend over the last 30 to 180 days.
The same ads, ranked by CPA and CPM.
Ad D gets little spend and has the best CPA. Ad C gets a lot of spend and delivers little. We look at the message and the hook behind each one.
Meta shows one person several ads in a row and credits the purchase to the last one. That is why we evaluate ad sets first, then individual ads.
We group the ads by product, creator, hook tactic and message, and see which group carries the account.
Few people watch, but those who do buy. The message works, the hook is weak. We write new hooks for this message.
High attention, many purchases. We keep angle, hook and format as winner elements.
Low attention, few purchases. We record angle and hook as loser elements.
Many clicks, few purchases. We check whether the landing page delivers on the promise of the ad.
How many are still watching after 3 seconds (hook rate), how many stay until second 15 (hold rate), how many click (CTR).
How many buy (conversion rate) and what a purchase costs (CPA), measured 7 days after the click.
Retargeting shows better numbers because people already know the brand. Only ads to cold audiences go into the matrix.
We write out every winning ad, spoken words and on-screen text.
We note which claims the ad makes. Meta reads these claims and decides who gets to see the ad.
Hook, scenes, proof, CTA, creator and setting go into a list. New ads are built from these parts.
Every ad gets its format: Recognition, Social Mirror, Reframe, Specificity or Earned Confidence. This shows which format runs twice and which one is missing.
We read every comment under the top 20 ads, the angry ones included. Objections in the customers' own words go into the quote library.
For every ad we record which angle, hook, message and format carries it. This becomes the list of winner elements and gaps.
We compare the people in the ads with the people in the reviews. Whoever buys but appears in no ad gets an idea of their own.
Meta groups similar ads together and throttles them. New reach comes from a new persona, a new situation or a new argument.
Own reviews, comments under own ads, post-purchase surveys, support tickets.
Competitors' 1-star reviews, ad library, landing pages, offers.
Reddit, YouTube comments, forums, Google page one, the study base.
Account, own reviews, customer data.
Google page one, press, social, founder story.
Ad library, landing pages, 1-star reviews.
Reddit, YouTube comments, forums.
For health, beauty and food. Study base per claim.
Before every search we write down which decision it is meant to enable.
Every finding is stored in its original wording, with link and date. These sentences later become hooks.
We collect until nothing new appears, usually beyond 100 quotes. If a source delivers fewer than 20, we flag it as thin data.
All reviews from Yotpo or Judge.me, every star rating. Each review gets a quality score from 1 to 5.
Post-purchase survey ("why now"), support tickets, quiz answers.
We google the brand plus "reviews", "test" and "scam" and note what stops a first-time buyer.
The 1-star reviews of competitor shops. That is where the others' broken promises are written down.
Meta Ad Library and TikTok Creative Center, Foreplay for the running time of ads.
The category's subreddits, in German and English. We look for first-person stories, the search for alternatives, and hate.
Comments under review, test and debunking videos about the category.
Depending on the category: onmeda, paradisi, motor-talk, gutefrage or Stack Exchange.
Each review gets a quality score from 1 to 5. We take quotes from score 4 upward.
Customers describe the result in their own words. This is the material for hooks.
Own reviews hold the fear before buying, competitor reviews hold the broken promises. Material for objection ads.
Customers write what they expected and what arrived. Material for ideas that explain the mechanism.
We cannot see other brands' numbers. The evidence is repetition: the same hook three or four times, the same creator more than once.
Direct competitors, brands with the same audience from other categories, one or two role models.
Audiences nobody addresses. Results nobody promises. Objections nobody answers.
We compare the people in a competitor's ads with the buyers in their reviews. Buyers without a matching ad become an idea.
Nobody has heard the promise.
The claim is known, the market still responds.
Big promises have been running everywhere for 60 days and longer.
Everyone explains a mechanism. German supplements sit here.
Claims and mechanisms no longer pull.
We read in the ad library which claim stage has been running at competitors for 60 days and longer. The stage above that is the one we need.
The stage applies to the whole category. It tells us which kind of message still works there. Which single message is free or taken is shown afterwards by the Desire Map.
Offer, reason to buy now, guarantee. Keep it short.
Proof, comparison, answers to objections.
The path to the solution and why our mechanism is better.
Name the problem, why it occurs, what it costs.
A situation and a symptom from everyday life, without the product.
At the bottom, many people and a lot of explaining. At the top, few people and a short path to purchase. Every quote and every idea gets its stage.
"She wants to lose weight" is a fun fact. "She gets changed in the bedroom before the holiday" is an insight.
We count per category. What is said most often gets the highest priority.
We cluster the findings into narrative patterns: problem first, before and after, revelation. The hooks grow out of these.
Anti-aging, prevention
Taste, ritual
Worry gone, safety
Attractiveness, relationship
Relief, home
Performance, comparison
Family, children, pets
Avoiding shame, showing up
Eight innate core desires. Every ad attaches to one of them.
Nine learned wants, useful as a secondary motive.
A red light panel serves health, freedom from pain, attractiveness and comfort. Each desire is its own field for ads.
Every quote gets its dominant desire. When in doubt, the field stays empty.
A desire with many findings that no competitor plays. That is where the first ideas start.
The bars show how many findings a desire has in the quotes. Next to it, how many competitors play it. Schematic with sample values.
Orange marks desires with many findings and little supply.
Away from a feared state, towards a desired one. Every persona has both.
On the cards, the motives are called Tranquility, Recognition, Status, Family, Curiosity, Order, Saving or Independence.
Without coded findings, a motive counts as a hypothesis and gets no bar.
How they see themselves, where they belong, what they believe.
What she really wants underneath the wish for the product.
Why right now: a life event, a social comparison, a tipping point or a break in the daily routine.
What she has already tried. Which objections she brings along.
Place, time, emotion. In private or in front of others, acute or chronic.
How she grew up, how she handles money, whom she believes.
Who uses, who pays, who decides.
The image in the ad is at most two steps ahead of where she is today.
Every layer has a verbatim quote or the label "hypothesis".
"Woman 45+, mature skin", "Nurse, shift work".
"Working mom, tired" has no situation, no trigger, no objection.
How close the persona is to buying, read from the awareness stage of her quotes.
How much the problem hurts and how much is at stake, evidenced with quotes.
How strong this persona's most important desire is, intensity 1 to 5 times 20.
Sample calculation
Before scoring, we check every persona for urgency and stakes. Only personas with strong leverage move on.
The score decides which persona is addressed first. It says nothing about conversion.
Portrait in prose with verbatim quotes woven in. At the end, one line that sets her apart from the neighboring persona.5
We write down the story of the product and split it into moments. Every moment is an ad of its own.
Core sentence, in the customer's words
"Your dermatologist ruined your skin."
Hypothesis
Speaks to women whose skin is worse after cortisone than before. The evidence is 1-star reviews with the line "it has been worse since the cream".
Every idea connects a pain with a Buyer ID™. The core sentence sounds the way the customer would say it to a friend.
What she has already tried and why it did not help.
Why the product solves the problem differently from everything before.
Which awareness stage the idea is written for.
In a saturated market the idea needs a mechanism. A promise alone is not enough there.
Every health-related statement is checked for compliance before it goes into an ad.
Every idea has a verbatim quote as evidence or is marked as a bet. Without either, it gets cut.
How often the pain appears in the quotes.
How urgent it is for the persona.
How few competitors run the message.
Whether the statement is compliant, a borderline case or blocked.
Every idea gets the status winner, loser, open or new. Winners are iterated, losers are cut.
Unusual connections are welcome. They are marked as wildcards and get the same score.
Ideas that carry the product into an entirely different audience, with an estimate of how much spend they can support.
Ideas not selected wait, with their score, for the next cycle.
Who appears in the ad, which setting is shown and which words are spoken decide whom Meta shows the ad to.
Every persona sees her argument in her language. The reach adds up.
A touchpoint that leaves the person on the same stage has explained nothing.
More education in one step overwhelms. The rest belongs in the next touchpoint.
The funnel starts on the stage where the ad ends. It can carry more than the ad alone.
The score sorts. Which ideas go into the funnel is decided by a strategist.
Findings, quotes, personas, ideas: every stage is checked and refined by a strategist.
First the page, then the creatives. Every test writes winners and losers into the brand's memory.