Top 1.4% of Ad Accounts Are Responsible for 36% of All Meta Ads

0:00Eric Siu:There's 150 ,000 e-commerce stores, Neil. If you're to use the Pareto principle here, if you're to look at maybe the top 1 % of ad accounts, how many ads do you think these top 1 % of ad accounts are responsible for? Like 10%, 20%, 30%, 40%, 50%, 60%, 70%, 80 %? Top 1 %? Yeah. I would go with somewhere around 50%, 60%. Okay, close. I would go, the 50, like it's actually 36%. So Meta actually reported on this. So this comes from Brian Bumgarner shared this. So the top 1.4 % of ad accounts are responsible for 36 % of all ad creative on Meta. So they use clay to scrape 150k e-commerce sites to answer one question.

0:41Eric Siu:How many businesses are running ads right now? 47 ,000 of the 150 ,000 stores have one active ad. And here's where it gets crazy, okay? So 9 ,000 accounts are running 100 plus active ads. So 19.3 % of advertisers. 1 ,600 ad accounts are running 500 plus ads, so 3.5%. And then 679 accounts are running 1 ,000 plus active ads, that's 1.4%. The median advertiser is running 23 different ads at any given time. The median North Beam customer, I think they're like an e-commerce company, platform for machine learning powered advertising attribution, okay, great, is running 150. Oh, so this is not a meta study, but meta said it.

1:18Eric Siu:Creative diversification is key, not just hooks, but completely new ad creative. so your marketing team should look like a content creation house so there's this graph over here done by north north beam and you can see what's happening here so what i want to call out before we react to this is it's the whole idea of 80 20 right um you have this kind of top 20 percent or so they are driving the 80 percent of the results ultimately because i think this is uh if you add the results ultimately here um yeah i i think 1.4 percent uh no actually no they don't they don't actually have that number here but my point is 1.4 % for 36 % is a lot so the the 1 % in many

1:57Neil Patel:industries account for a lot of taxes ads yeah yeah that's true that's true by the way did you watch the CNBC interview with Jeff Bezos no what happened oh yeah yeah yeah he's like I uh bottom 50 % shouldn't pay taxes right which I think is good remember I've been saying for years if you make under 100 grand you shouldn't pay taxes because a lot of the business owners those people would spend more on rent food etc and it would cause marketing to boom right people would spend more money it would actually just cause gdp and business to boom um that's at least my two cents

2:31Eric Siu:but well why don't you talk about some of your takeaways from that one because i didn't watch the whole thing i only watched that snippet that clip a lot of it was political so let's avoid most

2:39Neil Patel:of it all right that's fine but the big thing that he said that i think should be eye-opening for a lot of people i think he used the example of a radiologist um you know a lot of people are word being like, oh, AI is going to replace my job. He's like, I disagree. He's like, it's going to make you better. That radiologist is going to be so much better with this technology. So his whole take is people are still needed in organizations. It's just more so they're going to have like a companion or a buddy or AI, whatever you want to end up calling it.

3:10Eric Siu:That's just going to make them a lot better. I just, I don't know about you, Neil, but I just have more fun at work now because I can do more. That, that, that, that like, it just makes me happier. And I I think maybe naturally if you're like, you're an entrepreneur, you have an entrepreneurial mindset, you just want to create more. You want to do more. And I actually do think the majority of people do want to create something. They do want to be useful and this just enables it more. So, yeah. Yeah. But going back to the, the, the 80, 20 thing. Yeah. I think we've reacted that one, that one enough.

3:38Eric Siu:So I want to come over to, you have one over here. Wait, real quick.

3:43Neil Patel:One interesting thing that I saw Bezos doing, you know, this is what all marketers end up doing so everyone knows SpaceX is going to IPO soon right they've been talking about it numbers have been floated if they're going to raise 50 billion dollars and how much Goldman Sachs is going to end up making from it it's causing you know if if one thing's doing well in a category extremely well let's say SpaceX it can create a whole wave a whole trend and in marketing they call it hey when something's doing really well or catching on fire ride the trend so bezos talks about how for the first time he's thinking about taking external investors because if spacex goes out and it gets a 1.5 or 2 trillion dollar valuation or 1.7 whatever they're aiming for he's riding the trend he's like hey let me just go you know get money while i can based on this trend being hot i think that's

4:34Eric Siu:smart and also also he's very credible and also this space like the real player right now is SpaceX and so if he can be a credible second player I think there's more than enough room here and I think it's a um it's very smart there's like he needs a lot of money to make this happen

4:49Neil Patel:it's very capital intensive so it's very capital intensive and in pretty much every industry you need a number one and you need a number two even if the number two is not that big and he's primed

5:00Eric Siu:to be the number two yeah I think it's good to have competitors right people like to say like oh you shouldn't I think it's good to have healthy competition between like anthropic and open AI for example. I think it's good to have a Google versus Microsoft. I think these things are all good.

5:14Neil Patel:Yeah, the other thing that he didn't mention in his interview was he will do more good from his for-profit companies than he will when he gives away the majority of his net worth. And he does give away a lot of his net worth, and he was talking about it like he provides a lot of shelters for homeless people. He has a lot of projects that he's funding, but his impact on world will be much greater from his for-profit uh entities than his non-profit and i can see a similar side like you and i have created content and education for so many years uh you and i have also both donated money we don't have anywhere near the money that some of these guys were talking about but we've donated money where we can and no matter how much money we've donated it, I believe will impact and help people do better financially for their families through the education we've created more than any of the money that we've given away.

6:09Eric Siu:Yep. I agree with that. And the thing is, it's unfortunate that business gets painted in a negative light. Like the more success you have, the worse it is now today. It shouldn't be like that because business ultimately is you trying to create a product or service that helps other people. And if people vote with their money and if you do well, it means that you've created something very valuable. I don't know how it gets misconstrued into something else, but I feel like that's always been history. That's always been human nature. It always has. Yeah. One thing I want to talk about, Neil. So I don't know if you saw.

6:38Eric Siu:So Opus 4.8 came out yesterday. And there's one part of it that changes business completely. So I want to share this with everyone because I want you to, you know, this weekend's coming up. And hopefully you have time to play with it. So you can see yesterday Anthropics, like, introducing Cloud Opus 4.8, which I was like, okay, is it going to be, like, you know, not that great? but I'm in all these AI chat, like CEO chat groups right now. And everyone's like, oh, my teams are using this. It's crazy. I'm like, crazy in a good way? And they're like, yeah, crazy in a good way, right? I'm like, okay, cool.

7:07Eric Siu:So you can see, obviously, when they market themselves on these benchmarks, this is one way of marketing your LLM, right? You just show that you're beating everyone else. So whenever something new comes out, obviously you're going to be number one, right? So you can see Opus 4A is in the red. But what I want to call out here is that they launched this new thing called dynamic workflow. Okay. So what this means, Neil, is if you want to do like a big migration on your website, you can just ask it to do it. Okay. Now I'm like, okay, well, Neil, you're not going to do a migration yourself. I'm not going to do it myself.

7:38Eric Siu:I'm like, how do I apply this to business, to making more money? Right. And so I worked with my Hermes on this. I'm going to share a couple of prompts with you, but there's even a video down here. Embrace long running tasks with Opus 4A and Cloud Code. Basically, it will create all these workflows for you, and you can have hundreds, if not thousands, of these sub-agents working. And the main benefit here is that oftentimes, when you have an agent work, they might not follow the process in terms of steps. They might go step four first, then step five, and then step 10, and then step one, which screws up everything.

8:09Eric Siu:But dynamic workflows allow you to spin up a bunch of sub-agents, and they follow the process. That's what it is. So any questions before I show you some of the flows, Neil? No. Okay. So check this out. I'm going to pull this up on my screen, on my Slack real quick. Give me a second here. So here we go. Let me share my screen. Share this over here. Do you see this? I do. I can't read it, but I can see it. That's okay. I will read it. Those of you watching right now. So I asked my Hermes, my Hermes over here. So you can see Hermes Paris. So highest leverage cloud code dynamic workflows. I'm like, tell me what the highest leverage things we can do.

8:46Eric Siu:Okay. Here's a cool one. I'm just going to read this one out. It's called Revenue Command Center. And you guys can screenshot what I have on my screen over here.

8:53Neil Patel:So can you zoom in for people so that way they can actually screenshot it? Or maybe it's just tiny on my end. And it's actually probably bigger on. There you go. Oh, that's helpful. Thank you. How about this? How about this?

9:04Eric Siu:Even better. Okay. This one's called Revenue Command Center. Okay. So use a workflow, build a Revenue Command Center for NP Digital. Inspect every available data source I provide. CRM exports, call transcripts, email threads, analytics, proposals, client reports, SEO data, ad data, internal docs. Create a unified map of where revenue is being created, delayed, leaked, or ignored. Then run specialist sub-agents in parallel for pipeline, retention, upsells, SEO, paid acquisition, outbound partnerships, operational bottlenecks. Return a list, a ranked list of the top 25 revenue opportunities with estimated upside, confidence, owner, next action, and required assets, and a seven-day execution plan.

9:43Eric Siu:All right, so you got to check out this podcast. is called Create Like the Greats, hosted by Ross Simmons. It's brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Each episode hosts an in-depth analysis of some of the greatest creations and creators of all time, along with deep dive conversations on the creative process that went into building companies, brands, stories, and more. He's got a recent episode where he is talking about the CMO playbook, so you gotta check it out. So check it out again. Listen to Create Like the Greats wherever you get your podcasts.

10:17Eric Siu:Then implement any safe automations, dashboard scripts, or draft assets needed to start capturing the top opportunities immediately. In fact, I want to hang up for this podcast right now and just run this on my cloud code and not talk to Neil. And then this one over here, stalled revenue recovery, use a workflow, analyze all deals. My point of saying all this is client expansion engine, churn prevention and safe plan. So I'm going to see how these turn out. I would encourage you all to try something like this. And I would encourage you to talk to whatever agent you're working with. to figure out how you can make use of these dynamic workflows to make you more money because it's not just a programming thing for engineers.

10:51Neil Patel:Yeah. Dude, the technology's here. The tools are here. People have access to them. They're just not using them.

10:58Eric Siu:Yep.

10:58Neil Patel:That's real reality. Is what you said earlier.

11:01Eric Siu:Yeah.

11:02Neil Patel:And I don't think that's going to change because if you look at traditional SaaS, it's been around for how long? I don't know. More than 20 years, right? Way more than 20 years. because SaaS was around even before the cloud. And when you look at SaaS, people still don't use all the features they pay for. And you and I are also guilty of it. There's no way that we use every single feature for all the products we pay for, right? We do a better job because we're really picky and we're price sensitive, you know, being entrepreneurs and startups. But I think the bigger organization, you know, the bigger organization gets, the worse they get about using what they're paying for.

11:43Eric Siu:Quick break. Look, I know what you're thinking. Another AI content tool. Great, more garbage content on the internet. And I thought the same thing. That's why we spent years building ClickFlow differently. Here's actual feedback from a user. It's sophisticated, grounded in real language, authoritative, but not academic. You've hit the sweet spot. That's not AI slop. That's content that you would actually publish. ClickFlow also helps with things such as internal linking, building FAQs, and reporting on the content performance. If you're skeptical, you can just go to clickflow.com and try it for free for 14 days.

12:14Eric Siu:And if it sucks, just cancel. But I don't think you will. Back to the show. Yeah. Maybe a place where, because we're really talking about inertia, human inertia. And I've given this example already, but my dad said when the internet came out, it took companies five years to adopt email. What I want to bring up is Neil and I have been fortunate enough to meet a lot of amazing people. Neil's been in business for 26 years or so. So I think for me, it's, I want to say, I don't know, 13 years or so, 14 years or so. But really, you know, I get this question a lot. I don't know about you, Neil, but it's, you know, Eric, how did you build your network?

12:49Eric Siu:You know, how do you find your peer group, right? And how do you find AI peers or how do you find marketing peers in general? And so we both have different ways of doing it. I think Neil was very early to the content process. So he was able to build a big audience. and naturally that carried a lot of people wanted to associate themselves with him. But I think there's a lot of different ways to do it. I think there's a few practical things we can share here on how to build your peer network because I do think events and human-to-human connection is going to become more valuable. And I know networking has done a lot for me and it's also done a lot for Neil.

13:22Eric Siu:So Neil, you want to go first? You want me to go first? Go for it. Okay. So again, I've been sharing this, I'm in a couple of these AI founder groups, right? And I have friends that will message me on Instagram saying, hey, can I get into this group? And I don't own any of these groups, right? And so I do think that let's say you don't have a network right now. I remember when I was 26 years old, I found a group of directors of marketing because that was kind of the niche I was in at the time. And I invited them over to my place. And we just had meetups where we talk about our marketing challenges and things like that.

13:55Eric Siu:so as long as you're the curator you can serve and you're saying hey i'm gonna have i'm gonna get a good group of people together we're gonna have a great discussion here's what we're gonna talk about and maybe even sometimes if you have some money you can invite them to like a dinner for example or even it can be a happy hour or maybe you can have someone else sponsor it those are all ways to get the right people in the room and as you do that more and more people are going to see you as a connector and that's a way for you to start from scratch without having to quote unquote, know anybody. Yeah.

14:22Neil Patel:The main way I actually build my network is in-person events. So just meeting people, talking to them. I'm not talking about just ones I'm speaking at, just any in-person event. And the next one, and this is the bigger way, and you don't have to have a personal brand or be well-known for this, is I just hit up people that I like and reading their content. Like I was reading a piece of content from Search Engine Land by this guy named Adam Gnus. I'm probably mispronouncing his last name. sorry Adam I did message him he may not see it uh you know depending on if he logs onto the platform that I message him because you can do LinkedIn you can do email you can pick whatever you know platform LinkedIn I mean Instagram and direct message um and that's worked out really well and you know I just read a lot of content Eric reads a lot of content I know a lot of you guys consume a lot of information as well so it's I think it's really a good idea to just message people.

15:17Neil Patel:That's how Eric and I got to know each other back in the day. And people message me all the time. And I message a lot of random people who have no clue who I am. And it works out. And I built many long lasting friendships from this method.

15:31Eric Siu:Honestly, you might think it's too late to create content today, but it's not because we talk about like Gary V likes to talk about it's no longer social media, it's interest media. So if you post something that's really good, people are going to follow you and they're going to want to meet with you. So I'll give you an example here um neil remember how i just showed you those stocks the one that jumped like 8 000 in a year that's from a guy i just saw his post on x and he just started posting he does a lot of research on um all the ai bottleneck stuff and he literally has a website called ai bottlenecks dot app or something um and he just started posting and he has some of the best investors in the world following him now because he publishes interesting stuff to him it wasn't that interesting before but he lives his life all the time but when he started making it public he started you know people like to say increasing your surface area of luck and so even if you might not be doing really interesting research right now even if you're an intern right now or you're in college right now share your experience of learning whatever it is that you're working on build in public and then people are naturally going to want to associate themselves with you so for example my best friend mark andresen or my best friend gary tan for example from from yc or andresen like that's because i've created content neil the way i got acquainted with neil was because he used to have a blog called quick sprout and i really enjoyed his content around how he spent x amount of dollars on clothes or how he spent on like this and that and how it generated you know why roi um but more be more serious here like he wrote a lot of stuff around seo um and then one time i thought he was making something up so i emailed him and then that's how our relationship started and it started on skype right but and here's the other thing as you create more and more content you're you're you're producing things you're you're kind of uh you're you're you're building in public.

17:07Eric Siu:Maybe as an example, Neil, like let's say you're speaking at a conference in Mexico, I'm speaking at a conference in Germany. One time I spoke at a conference in Germany and one guy hit me up and he's like, Hey, I've been a fan of your work for a very long time. Let's meet up. We met up. We had, we had great German food. Right. And it was a, that was cool. Right. You never know what happens with these things. So, um, the content piece is great. I think, uh, putting events together is great too. Going to events, hanging out with people too. Um, I think eventually you make your own mastermind too.

17:33Eric Siu:You, you get a group of like-minded people. But we've had the same mastermind since 2018, Neil. I put this group together. And I can see this is a group that I'll probably grow old with. So all that to say is, you know, be helpful, be out there creating content, and then you'll increase your surface area of luck. That's how you build this peer group. And that's how you get into these AI chats, because people are aware of who you are and

17:55Neil Patel:what you stand for. Dude, totally. And speaking of Adam that I mentioned, who I messaged, and Adam, congrats to you. Love the article. he wrote an interesting article that breaks down the average time on site for traditional seo traffic versus llm traffic you want to hear some of the stats it's quite interesting yeah go for it so for tool and demo pages organic average traffic for those tool and demo pages from let's say traditional google traffic was 101 seconds llm traffic 146 seconds so roughly a 46 45 46 percent increase home page traffic from traditional search 36 seconds home page traffic from LLM 82 seconds so more than double service products 69 seconds for organic LLM traffic this is a decline of 63 seconds and article slash content organic traditional 56 seconds LLM traffic was 40 seconds so there was quite a bit of a drop there.

18:54Cool.