Forget Meta Ads! 7 Platforms Quietly Getting Sellers Way More Sales Transcript, AI Summary & Key Points

00:00 Every e-commerce brand I know has been quietly panicking about the same thing. Their Facebook ads used to work, but now they don't. Ad costs have jumped 20% this year alone. Cost per acquisition is up 38% and the algorithm changes Meta rolled out in March wrecked accounts that used to be printing money. Now, here's the thing. You don't have to keep pouring money into a platform that's charging you more every quarter for worse results.

00:23 There are platforms out there right now that are cheaper, that are converting better, and that most sellers have never even heard of. I run a seven-figure e-commerce store. I've been running paid ads for 19 years, and I moved a significant portion of my budget off of Meta this year to platforms that are outperforming it because they aren't saturated yet.

00:43 So, if you've been trying to fix your Facebook ads by tweaking creative and tuning audiences, you're fighting the wrong battle. Let me show you what actually works right now. Now, the first one is a platform that 12 months ago nobody in e-commerce had ever heard of. But today, the smartest founders I know are spending serious money on it. It's called AppLovin, and it serves ads inside of mobile games.

01:06 Gamers are a huge audience with cheap CPMs, and the demographics are broader than most sellers think. My buddy Ezra Firestone is running AppLovin on his brands right now, including Boom by Cindy Joseph's, Nabage, and Safe Sleeve, all eight-figure brands. And the public case study that should get every e-commerce seller's attention is with a company called Cuddle Clones.

01:28 They're a D2C brand that makes custom stuffed animal replicas of people's pets, and they scaled from zero to $80,000 a day in ad spend on AppLovin in a single week during Black Friday. In fact, AppLovin became their largest advertising channel by October of that year, higher than Meta. And the best part was that their customer overlap between AppLovin and Meta was less than 5%, which means that 95% of the customers AppLovin was bringing in were people Meta was never going to reach.

01:57 And the bigger news is that AppLovin just opened up self-serve access to all e-commerce advertisers in June of this year. Before that, it was invite-only. Now, here's what confuses most sellers about this platform. You're not paying to interrupt someone in the middle of playing their game. Mobile games show short video ads between rounds in exchange for in-game rewards, extra lives, hints, coins, whatever the game gives you.

02:22 The user opts in to watch the ad because they want that reward. They see your product for 15-30 seconds, and then they get back to their game. And then later, when they're done playing, they either search for the product on Google, look it up on Amazon, or click through directly if the creative hooked them. That is how AppLovin ads convert. Now, the audience is not who most sellers picture.

02:43 The average mobile gamer is in their mid-30s. More than half of mobile gamers are women. Casual game apps, like Candy Crush, solitaire, and match-three puzzles, skew heavily towards women in their 30s and 40s playing during downtime, waiting rooms, commutes, and before bedtime. That is a prime e-commerce buying demographic, and it's a demographic meta ads charges you a fortune to reach.

03:04 Data on the platform shows 38% of mobile gamers buy a product within 3 months of seeing it advertised in a game, and 71% of those buyers buy the exact same day. Now, AppLovin isn't for everyone. It works best if you have a real product catalog and enough monthly spend to give the algorithm room to learn. If you're a single product brand, or your customers skew order and do not play mobile games, this isn't going to work for you.

03:31 But, if you have the catalog, and you're tired of meta charging you more every quarter, AppLovin is the platform that I would test first. And that leads into the next platform, which doesn't run on any screen at all. So, the second alternative is the physical mailbox, and I know how that sounds. Direct mail feels like a throwback to the 1990s, which is exactly why it works.

03:52 I run snail mail ads on my own store bombobe linens. I sent 699 postcards to repeat customers who hadn't bought in 60 or more days. The campaign cost me $482 and revenue came back at $7,947. That is a 16.47 times return on ad spend in about 3 weeks. >> [snorts] >> Now the platform I used is called Post Pilot. It integrates directly with Shopify and can also be used to find new customers.

04:20 So basically Post Pilot uses your customer list to build look-alike audiences targeting households that match your best customers. It is the same look-alike targeting Meta had pioneered applied to the mailbox. Now I'm willing to bet that hardly anyone in your niche is doing this. So your postcard won't get lost in a feed of 100 other ads. It shows up on the kitchen counter next to a stack of bills and it gets picked up and it gets looked at.

04:43 And in terms of the cost, postcards cost about 67 cents each including printing and postage. Which sounds expensive until you realize you're not paying for impressions. You're paying for a physical piece of marketing that shows up in a person's hand. Now direct mail works best if you already have a customer file and you sell higher average order value products.

05:05 It's not the right play for cold traffic on a $20 impulse buy. >> [snorts] >> And the mistake most sellers make is using it only for retention. The real growth lever is the look-alike audiences where you're mailing to households that look exactly like your best customers. So the physical mailbox is one channel Meta does not reach. Now this next platform is where actual buyer intent lives.

05:27 By the way, if you're interested in starting your own profitable online store, make sure you sign up for my free 6-day e-commerce mini course below. It's 100% free and I guarantee you'll learn a ton. So the third alternative is Google Ads Performance Max. And here's the reason it belongs on this list. Nobody scrolling on Facebook is ready to buy a specific product right now, but everyone searching Google is.

05:50 Performance Max combines search, shopping, display, and YouTube into one AI-optimized campaign. You give Google your product feed, your budget, and your goal, and Google's AI decides where the ads run best based on where they'll convert the best. Now, here's the main difference between Google and Meta. Meta beats Google with discovery because Facebook is where people find products they didn't know they wanted.

06:12 Google beats Meta with conversion because Google is where people finish the purchase decision they already started. As a result, Google Ads typically cost 30 to 50% less than Meta for the same product categories. But, here's the bigger reason to be on Performance Max right now. Google is going all in on AI-driven shopping. Their AI mode product just hit 1 billion monthly active users as of May of this year, and Performance Max ads are already eligible to appear inside of Google's AI overviews and inside AI mode search

06:41 results. Which means when someone asks Gemini or Google AI, "What is the best gift for my mom for her birthday?" your Performance Max product listing can show up as a paid result inside of that AI answer. And this isn't a future thing. Google rolled it out in 2026, and it's already live. Every e-commerce brand that's on Performance Max is being positioned for AI shopping right now.

07:02 And Performance Max works best if you're an established brand with proven products people are already searching for. If your brand name and product terms are getting typed into Google, Performance Max will find those buyers. But, if you're launching a brand new product nobody knows exists yet, Performance Max is not going to work well. You need to build the demand first before you can capture it.

07:23 Now, this next platform creates demand better than Facebook at a quarter of the cost. And the fourth alternative is TikTok Ads. And I need to be really clear about this. I'm not talking about TikTok Shop. Those are two completely different things. TikTok Shop is selling products on TikTok's marketplace, and that's a whole 'nother topic. TikTok Ads is running paid ads that drive traffic to your Shopify store, and that's what we're talking about.

07:50 Right now, TikTok has the cheapest CPMs of any major app platform at only $3.50 per thousand impressions. By comparison, Meta costs over $14. >> [sighs] >> Now, TikTok's algorithm rewards native-feeling video that looks like organic content. So, if your creative looks like an ad, it's not going to convert. The TikTok Ads strategy that actually works right now is something called organic plus paid.

08:16 Post organic content on your brand's TikTok account. Watch what works, and then take the winners and put ad spend behind them. The organic performance tells you which creative the algorithm already likes, and then paid amplification scales it to more sales. Now, TikTok Ads work best if you can produce vertical video, or if you're willing to hire a UGC creator to make it for you, and it doesn't work if your customer base is mostly over 60, because TikTok's audience still skews younger than Meta.

08:45 Now, the biggest mistake sellers make is running polished commercials on the platform. TikTok's algorithm literally buries ads that look like ads. So, if you can't produce native-feeling video, don't waste your budget here. Now, short-form video works on TikTok, but it works even better on this platform every e-commerce guru forgets to mention. So, the fifth alternative is YouTube Ads, and the specific format that matters right now is YouTube Shorts.

09:12 Everybody's talking about TikTok, but for some reason, YouTube Shorts rarely gets mentioned. The CPMs are cheap, the inventory is enormous, and most e-commerce sellers still are not running ads there. Shorts average about $4 per thousand impressions, which is roughly the same as TikTok, and YouTube Shorts is now getting 200 billion daily views. That is on par with TikTok, but most e-commerce sellers aren't advertising there because they're all chasing TikTok, which means less advertiser competition and cheaper

09:40 inventory. So overall, it's the same strategy as TikTok. You post organic shorts, identify which ones the algorithm likes, and then put ad spend behind the winners. TikTok and YouTube are wide net platforms, but this next one is the complete opposite. It's refining the exact person in the exact community who's already looking for what you sell. So the sixth alternative is Reddit ads.

10:04 And this is the one most e-commerce completely dismiss without ever testing. Reddit did a major algorithm overhaul in September of last year. E-commerce return ad spend went from about 2.3 times on the platform to 4.7 times on average. So even if you tested Reddit 2 years ago and it didn't work, it is a genuinely different platform right now. Here's a real example.

10:26 There's Natural Remedies, the witch hazel skin care brand, ran ads inside the skin care addiction subreddit. But they didn't run a hard sell ad. They led with a deep explainer on the ingredient science behind witch hazel and how to fix pores. Now the ad killed it, and Reddit ended up being one of the highest return ad spend channels in their entire paid mix.

10:45 Now Reddit rewards ads that do not feel like ads. If you approach it like a Facebook campaign and just push discount codes, you're going to waste your budget. But if you approach it like a member of the community sharing something useful, the returns are going to be really good. Reddit just plugged directly into Shopify this year. So if someone visits your store and does not buy, you can chase them with ads showing the exact products they looked at right in the middle of the Reddit feed.

11:12 So overall, Reddit ads work best for products aimed at specific hobbies or interest communities. Board games, home, coffee, mechanical keyboards, gardening, home fitness, anywhere passionate hobby communities live and talk about what they're buying. Reddit is where those conversations are happening. Now the mistake most sellers make is trying to reach everyone on Reddit.

11:31 Reddit isn't Facebook. You do not win by casting a wide net. You win by picking one specific subreddit where your product actually solves a real problem and then going really deep in there. Paying to be on Reddit is smart, but there's a bigger reason right now Reddit matters. And if you understand it, you're already going to be 12 months ahead of every e-commerce brand still buying meta ads.

11:51 So, the seventh alternative is not a paid ad platform at all. It is the fastest growing acquisition channel in e-commerce that almost nobody is optimizing for called AI SEO, also known as GEO for generative engine optimization. This is where you optimize your content so that ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude recommend your products when people ask AI to help them shop.

12:12 Here's what I've been doing for my own e-commerce store. I mapped out my different customer avatars. Wedding planners buying handkerchiefs for a bridal party, couples ordering embroidered gifts for their parents, event coordinators sourcing linens for a corporate event, and so on. And then, I went through and read out every question each of those avatars actually asked about my products.

12:35 How do I care for it? Will it match this specific outfit? How long does embroidery take to ship? What's the return policy on custom orders? I answered every one of those questions on my category pages and wrapped them in a fact schema so that AI models can parse them and cite them. That's it. When ChatGPT recommends embroidered handkerchiefs for a wedding, it needs a source.

12:56 If my page is the one answering the question that person asked in their own words, my brand is going to be the answer. Here's another number that should make every e-commerce seller pay attention. Reddit is a number two most cited domain in Google's AI overviews, right behind YouTube. It captures nearly 20% of all AI overview citations. So, when ChatGPT or Perplexity recommends a product, it is often citing a Reddit thread where somebody discussed that product.

13:19 So, AI SEO has two sides. On-site SEO means structured content on your own website that AI models can parse. So, we're talking schema markup, answer-first content, and real reviews. Off-site AI SEO means having an organic Reddit presence. Because AI is scraping Reddit constantly, and if your brand shows up in helpful, real discussions, AI models will start citing you.

13:44 And if you sell products online, AI SEO is going to be crucial for your business over the next two to three years, whether you like it or not. So, the lesson is this: Stop being 90% dependent on Meta ads. Spread your paid ad budget across three or four of these seven platforms, and your e-commerce store becomes bulletproof to any single platform's algorithm change. If you're interested in how I would start a profitable online store today from complete scratch, watch this video next.