Sub Club Podcast: Creative Misfires, False Positives, and Meta's Auction Flaws

Guest: Alper Taner, Head of Performance Marketing, Stealth-Mode App Studio
Hosts: David Barnard, Jacob Eiting
Release Date: December 24, 2025

Episode Overview

In this episode, David Barnard sits down with Alper Taner, a veteran in mobile growth and performance marketing, to dig into the contrarian side of app growth strategy. The episode challenges prevailing "rules of thumb," explores the pitfalls of competitor ad analysis, and unpacks the nuances of creative testing and platform optimization—particularly with Meta (Facebook) ads. Through lived experiences and sharp insights, Alper urges app marketers to question received wisdom, develop their own learnings, and test boldly (but systematically) to carve their path in the trillion-dollar app marketplace.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Challenging Best Practices & Rules of Thumb

• Personalization of Best Practices: Alper stresses that industry best practices are good guides, but should not be blindly followed in every situation.
  • Quote: "There are definitely best practices and rules of thumb that you should stick, I don't know 80% of the time, but that doesn't mean they are universal for every single case." (02:14, Alper Taner)
• Investment Split: Spend ~80% of resources on proven approaches, but dedicate 20% to experimentation—even those tactics that failed others might work for your niche or audience.
  • Quote: "The new rule of thumb: follow best practices 80% of the time and try crazy stuff 20% of the time." (04:51, David Barnard)

2. When a ‘Problem’ Is Just a Fact

• Diagnosing Before Solving: Alper points out that data and metrics—like a low trial conversion rate—aren't inherently problems until they've been systematically tested and proven problematic.
  • Quote: "Something becomes a problem after you systematically test it, iterate on the results, and try many different ways... then I think I can consider that as a potential problem. Instead, you should always see what you can do or understand the root cause." (06:21, Alper Taner)
• Holistic Funnel View: David relates over-focusing on conversion rates to the broader health of the acquisition funnel— sometimes poor conversion is a byproduct of cheap installs, which may be a net positive.

3. Beyond Simple Creative Testing

• Iterative & Hypothesis-Driven Creative Testing: Instead of mass-producing creative variants and hoping for hits, Alper recommends hypothesis-driven iterations and analyzing why creatives win or lose.
  • Quote: "It's never about, oh, the dog won. Now we need 200 variations of the dog. It's more about, okay, is it the dog? We want to validate that." (25:10, Alper Taner)
• Avoiding the 'Quantity Race': More creatives do not guarantee success. Focus on hypotheses, analysis, and meaningful iteration over bulk testing.
  • Quote: "Testing a very high amount of creatives with a little success... it matters more you test less amount of creatives, stronger hypotheses... with a higher success rate." (12:09, Alper Taner)

4. The Meta Auction Flaw & Spending Strategies

• How Meta (Facebook) May Sideline Good Creatives Early: Meta’s algorithm may favor one creative too quickly, labeling others as underperformers without giving them a fair chance.
  • Quote: "Just because algorithm decides to deliver one creative over others doesn't make the other creatives bad creative. I think that's such a misconception." (18:54, Alper Taner)
• Tactical Moves to Counter Bias: Democratize spend among creatives, pause dominant ads in tests to give others a chance, or split winning creatives into separate ad sets.
  • Quote: "Every creative should have an equal chance. So I democratize a bit within the ad set." (21:53, Alper Taner)

5. Smartly Analyzing Competitor Ads

• Treat Competitor Ads as Inspiration, Not Gospel: Seeing many variants of a competitor’s creative in Meta’s ad library doesn’t mean it’s working; it might just mean they're guessing, too.
  • Quote: "Anything you see online... should be only as inspiration and not treat it as this." (30:09, Alper Taner)
  • Quote: "...it comes down to how I can customize this to my own personas... It should all go in that processing machine that considers the personas, the past performance, the current performance, and all your learnings." (30:50, Alper Taner)

6. Process, Instrumentation, and Horror Stories

• Auditing & Validation Are Vital: Regular checks on data pipelines, testing processes, and instrumentation are non-negotiable to avoid costly errors.
  • Quote: "Maybe 80% of your growth team's efforts should be focused on testing and moving fast... but you want to leave like 10 or 20% to... be continually auditing your processes." (40:01, David Barnard)
• Horror Stories: Alper shares tales of switched MMPs with missing event data and $100k spend on creatives with $100+ CPIs due to missing guardrails.

7. Advanced Tactics: Bid & Budget Strategies

• Manipulating Campaign Budgets for Scale: Set very high campaign budgets (with tight caps and bid controls) to bypass Meta’s daily pacing and unlock scalability—high risk without proper guardrails!
  • Quote: "We were able to, I think 5x the campaign budget within like two weeks with the same and even decreasing cost per purchase... budget at some point was spending the double of the daily budget." (40:34, Alper Taner)
• Guardrails & Controls: Always use campaign spend caps to prevent runaway spending if experimenting with inflated budgets.

8. Signal Engineering and Event Mapping

• Event Mapping Makes or Breaks Performance: Mapping app events (e.g., trial start, purchase, subscribe) to Meta’s optimization events should be logical and funnel-aligned. Sending noisy or illogical signals leads to subpar optimization.
  • Quote: "If you're happy with your current event mapping, don't try to just challenge it for the sake of challenging. If you are unhappy... I would suggest create another event... then run a split test purchase versus subscribe..." (53:03, Alper Taner)
• Simplicity Wins: Don’t over-instrument just because you can—keep things logical and legible for the algorithms.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "Take rules of thumb as suggestions. When it comes to execution and prioritization, you should do that based on your own data."
  (03:43, Alper Taner)

• "Sometimes you just need to take something as a fact and not consider it a problem until it becomes a problem."
  (05:22, David Barnard paraphrasing Alper)

• "More creatives do not equal more winners. It's about the quality of the hypothesis and iteration, not the volume."
  (12:09, Alper Taner)

• “People like to come to conclusions fast… they want to reach conclusions really fast and they want to move on to the next. …then they're missing out on testing things properly.”
  (07:22, Alper Taner)

• "Just because someone bought a skirt doesn't mean they're gonna try your app. There's also a bit of the relevancy there."
  (53:03, Alper Taner)

• On competitor analysis:
  "It should be just treated as inspiration, as another input... never about, oh, let's copy one to one whatever competitor is doing."
  (30:09, Alper Taner)

• On creative testing:
  "If I see a dominant one, I believe every creative should have an equal chance. So I democratize a bit within the ad set."
  (21:53, Alper Taner)

• On process pitfalls:
  “They switched MMPs, they didn’t implement any events on the new MMP and the old MMP was still connected to Meta… How did you not realize this for almost a month?”
  (37:53, Alper Taner)

Important Timestamps

• 03:43 – Challenging universal best practices
• 06:21 – When a metric is a fact, not (yet) a problem
• 12:09 – The real role and limits of creative quantity in testing
• 18:54 – How Meta can ‘prematurely’ pick and drop creatives
• 23:00 – Tactics for giving more creatives a fair shot
• 25:10 – Hypothesis-driven iteration vs. blindly copying trends
• 30:09 – Treating competitor ads as inspiration, not proven insight
• 37:53 – Data horror stories and the need for ongoing auditing
• 40:34 – Explosive spend tactics, campaign caps, and their dangers
• 53:03 – Detailed discussion on event mapping and signal logic

Final Takeaways

• Question Everything, Test Rationally: Use industry best practices as starting points, but let your own data and tests shape your growth strategy.
• Don't Blindly Copy: What works for a competitor or is “industry standard” may not work for you—treat external data as inspiration, not prescription.
• Creative & Process Hygiene Matter: Winning is about focused hypotheses, quality testing, and regular process/data checks—not about volume for its own sake.
• Guide, Don’t Surrender to Algorithms: Understand and nudge ad platforms’ algorithms rather than abdicating all decisions to them.
• Guardrail Your Ambition: Try bold strategies (with spend caps and audits), but stay vigilant to avoid costly mistakes.

Connect with Alper Taner

• LinkedIn: Alper Taner (Suggested best contact method)
• Happy to chat about MarTech, UA challenges, attribution, CRO, ASO, and more.

This episode is a masterclass in both strategic skepticism and practical creativity in mobile growth, especially for those working with large budgets and sophisticated app businesses. As Alper says: "Leverage others’ learnings, but don’t be afraid to challenge them. The alpha might be in what everyone else thinks is impossible."