🤝 The Official AppLovin Masterclass · by Smart Marketer
Master The New Scaling Channel Built For Brands That Need More Than 3 Seconds To Sell
Hey, I’m Ezra. For years, the brands I love most have been getting priced out of the channels they built on: the ones with novel products, founder-led stories, and offers that need more than a 2-second hook. AppLovin changes that. This is the official masterclass we built with their team to show you exactly how to scale on it.
- Learn how brands are using immersive ad environments to find real, net-new customers, not just retarget the ones they already have
- Reach an audience watching 35-second ads on average, so you finally have room to actually sell
- Get the full $1,497 masterclass free when you open a new AppLovin account, plus $5,000 in matching ad credits to launch with
Free when you open your AppLovin account. No catch.
Over 100,000 business owners, digital marketers & students worldwide trust Smart Marketer.
Reach buyers inside full-screen ad environments where they actually watch for 35 seconds on average, instead of scrolling past in 2.
Put your ad dollars toward people who’ve never met your brand. 70%+ of AppLovin customers are net-new, not retargeted regulars.
Get the exact setup, funnel, creative system, and attribution approach we run on AppLovin today. Built hand-in-hand with their team, not guessed at.
Most AppLovin resources are made for app developers. This is the only masterclass built specifically for DTC brands and the way you actually sell.
Course trailer embed goes here · 16:9
A 90-second look inside the masterclass, the platform, and the brands already scaling on it.
Some brands need more than two seconds to sell. Meta only gives them two.
Let me be straight with you: Meta isn’t the problem. We still run real spend there every day.
But the auction is more crowded than it’s ever been. The high-value impressions keep getting more expensive, when you can win them at all.
And here’s the part nobody likes to say out loud. The algorithm is built to reward interruption and familiarity. It’s tuned to stop the scroll in about two seconds.
Some of the best brands in ecommerce simply can’t do their best work in two seconds.
That’s a real disadvantage if you’re a brand built on something deeper than a quick hook:
- A novel product people need to actually understand before they’ll buy
- A founder-led story that’s the whole reason customers fall in love
- An educational offer that has to teach before it can sell
- A deeper transformation that doesn’t fit in a 6-second video
We kept hitting this wall with our own brands and our agency clients. The product was great. The offer was great. There just wasn’t room to say it.
So we went looking for a channel that gave our brands more time to sell. That’s when we found AppLovin.
Immersion beats interruption.
Same creative. Same offer. Completely different attention.
Here’s what took us a while to understand.
On social, you are an interruption. You are the thing standing between someone and the content they came for. That’s why the platform rewards whoever can stop the scroll fastest.
On AppLovin, the ad is part of the experience. Full screen. Sound on. Nobody is racing to swipe past it.
The result is the single biggest difference between this channel and everything else you’re running.
This is the entire argument in one chart:
AppLovin Ads Are Watched For Longer
Than Any Other Digital Platform
Source: AppLovin. Minimum enforced view time by platform.
Where your ads actually run
Full-screen placements across mobile games and apps, the environment people spend hours in every day. Not a feed they’re skimming on the way to something else.
Who's actually watching
An audience that’s relaxed, immersed, and paying attention, which is why a thirty-five second ad doesn’t feel like an imposition.
Why it matters for you
You get room to demo the product, tell the founder story, teach the thing that makes the offer click. All the stuff that never fit in a two-second hook.
We’ve been running this across our own brands and our agency clients all year. The number that keeps showing up:
70%+ of the customers coming through are people who have never heard of the brand before.
That’s not retargeting your existing audience at a better price. That’s actual growth.
Here’s what it’s looked like for real brands.
$113 leggings. $250 custom gifts. $46 subscriptions. All scaling.
Three brands we work with, across three completely different verticals and price points. Here’s exactly what happened.
Smart Marketer Agency Client
Resistance leggings · $113 AOV
Women 30+ balancing work and home
How they did it: repurposed existing UGC. No new creative to launch. Their best performers were 45-second user-perspective videos.
Blue Ribbon Mastermind Member
Custom pet keepsakes · ~$250 AOV
Women 35–45, pet owners · In business since 2009
How they did it: long-form video, 40+ seconds, with simple animated end cards. Grew top-line revenue roughly 120% in their first full month.
Mentor Table Member
Bioidentical hormone cream · $46 AOV
Women 45+ · 4-month average subscription
How they did it: six repurposed 45-second videos, no static images, two carousel interactives. AppLovin now takes more of their budget than Amazon.
Notice what all three have in common.
- All three repurposed existing video. Nobody shot new creative to start.
- All three were skeptical about the gaming audience before they tested.
- All three found their actual customer already sitting there.
- Two of the three started at $300 a day. You don’t need a big budget.
You're already running two of these.
Google captures the demand that already exists. Meta scales what’s working. AppLovin reaches the people who’ve never heard of you.
We’re not saying pick one. We’re saying the brands that grow in 2026 will be using all three.
The average mobile gamer is a 36-year-old woman who does the household shopping.
Every brand you just read about had the same objection. All three were wrong.
Here’s the mistake almost everyone makes. We made it too.
You hear “mobile games” and picture a teenager playing a shooter on his phone.
That’s gaming. This is mobile gaming, and they are not remotely the same audience.
Mobile gaming is Candy Crush on a lunch break. Words With Friends before bed. Solitaire in a waiting room.
Don't take our word for it. Take theirs.
Assumed young men were the only ones playing mobile games.
Their actual buyer, women over 30, was already there. 90% of customers were net-new.
“My mind went to mainly young men gaming on their phone as an immediate bias.”
The customers they acquired fit their demo exactly, at a higher AOV than their other channels.
“Thinking mobile gaming is the same audience as the gaming audience. It’s a totally different demographic.”
Candy Crush and Words With Friends overlapped perfectly with women 45 and over.
Your customer is probably already there. You just haven’t been showing up.
Our first free course. Also the most expensive one we've ever made.
AppLovin approached us. We said yes on one condition.
We’d been recommending AppLovin to our agency clients and our mastermind members for months. Word got back to AppLovin, and they came to us about building the official education for the platform.
Here’s my honest first reaction: most sponsored training is soft. The brand approves the script, the hard parts get sanded down, and what you end up with is a very pleasant commercial.
So we told them we’d do it on one condition. We teach it exactly the way we run it.
Including the parts where our playbook doesn’t match AppLovin’s own recommendations.
They said yes.
Then we spent five months building it. Real campaign structures. Real spend. The case studies you just read, from brands who let us open their accounts.
What that actually got us:
- Deep strategy, not a platform overview
- The actual campaign structures we run in live accounts
- Our creative systems and offer-building process
- Attribution setup, including why the platform under-reports its own performance
- Our playbook, including where it diverges from standard advice
A first for us
Because this is an official partnership, we’re able to give it away.
This is the first free course in Smart Marketer's history.
Full curriculum below.
Five modules. 79 videos. Everything we know about the platform.
Every module ends with something built, not just something learned.
5 modules79 videos3 instructors
Module 1
Core Concepts of AppLovin Ads
What AppLovin actually is, why the inventory behaves differently, and the third-party proof it works. Includes three full brand case studies with real spend curves.
- The Goal
- By Far the Fastest Scaling Platform We Have
- What is AppLovin?
- Brands Already Winning: Pet Focused Brand
- Why AppLovin’s Inventory Is Different
- Brands Already Winning: SweetFlexx
- How AppLovin Works
- Brands Already Winning: Parlor Games
- Can You Trust AppLovin Numbers? Third-Parties Say Yes
- From Cookware to Cosmetics: D2C Brands Are Winning on AppLovin
- AppLovin In Action
Module 2
Getting Started on AppLovin
Walk out with a live account. Pixel installed, catalog connected, brand assets uploaded, billing set, and third-party tracking wired up correctly.
- Within About 30 Minutes We Had Ads
- AppLovin’s Ad Policy
- Creating Your AppLovin Account
- Account Setup Walkthrough
- Let’s Tour AppLovin’s Platform
- Don’t Blind the Model: Why Your Pixel Matters
- Installing the AppLovin Pixel on Shopify
- Installing the AppLovin Pixel on GTM
- Payment & Billing on AppLovin
- Billing Setup Walkthrough
- Connecting Your Product Catalog
- Connecting AppLovin to Shopify Walkthrough
- Brand Assets Are Ads (These Show on EVERY Impression)
- Pre-Launch Checklist: Are You Ready?
- [ADVANCED] Third-Party Tracking Overview (Northbeam & Triple Whale)
- [ADVANCED] Third-Party Tracking Setup
- Don’t Neglect These Steps
Module 3
Building Your AppLovin Funnel
The biggest module in the course. Offers, home pages, product pages, advertorials, sales videos, and interactive pages built for this format specifically.
- You Wouldn’t Take Your Meta Ads and Run Them on TV
- Ads Won’t Save a Bad Funnel
- Crafting Offers That Convert
- Examples & Inspirations: Offers
- Your Home Page as a Sales Tool
- Examples & Inspirations: Home Pages
- Product Pages That Convert
- Examples & Inspirations: Product Pages
- When to Use a Long-Form Sales Page
- Examples & Inspirations: Long-Form Sales Pages
- Presell/Advertorials (Warming Cold Traffic)
- Examples & Inspirations: Presell/Advertorials
- The AppLovin Ad Format (How It’s Different)
- Creative Specs & Platform Rules
- 10 Sales Video Formulas
- Examples & Inspirations: Sales Videos
- Interactive Pages Are Half the Battle
- Examples & Inspirations: Interactive Pages
- Thumbstop Walkthrough
- Building Your Creative Portfolio
- What NOT to Do on AppLovin
- Dial In Your Offer
Module 4
Building Your Campaigns on AppLovin
Campaign types, optimization windows, budgets, creative sets, and launch timing. You’ll build and launch your first campaign start to finish.
- Your Creative Becomes Your Targeting
- Campaign Types: ROAS vs CPP vs CPL (Which One Is Right for You?)
- When to Use Prospecting v. Universal
- Match Your Customer’s Buying Cycle: Day 0 v. Day 7 Optimizations
- Setting Your Daily Budget
- Goal Setting on AppLovin
- The Testing Principle: Start Consolidated, Then Scale Winners
- Building Your First Campaign
- How to Structure Creative Sets
- Building Creative Sets Walkthrough
- Setting Up DPA & DOA (Your Third Screen Options)
- When to Launch and Scale (UTC Timing is Critical)
- Country Targeting
- Biggest Mistakes Brands Make on AppLovin
- Final Checklist Before Launching Your Campaign
- Don’t Cut on Day Two Because It Looks Rough
Module 5
Analytics, Attribution, Optimization, and Scaling
Read your numbers correctly in Northbeam and Triple Whale, diagnose what isn’t working, and scale spend without breaking performance.
- What Do You Do When It’s Not Working
- The New Visitor % Myth
- How AppLovin Attribution Works
- AppLovin Reporting Walkthrough
- Setting Up Triple Whale the Right Way
- Triple Whale Settings Walkthrough
- Setting Up Northbeam (Why Default Settings Penalize You)
- Northbeam Settings Walkthrough
- Reading Your Numbers (When Platforms Don’t Match)
- What to Do If It’s Not Working (Your Three Levers)
- Scaling Your AppLovin Campaigns (When and How to Go Big)
- Your Biggest Lever: Keeping Creative Fresh
- Not Quitting Before the Miracle
Let's make sure this is actually a fit.
This channel is a genuine unlock for some brands and a bad idea for others. We’d rather tell you which one you are now.
This is for you if
You’re ready to scale, not just survive.
You’ve got something working and you’re looking for the next channel to grow it on.
You need net-new customers, not cheaper retargeting.
Your growth is coming from people who already know you, and that well is running dry.
You want healthy diversification.
One platform having a bad quarter shouldn’t be able to take your business with it.
Your product needs room to explain itself.
Demos, education, founder story, transformation. The things that never fit in a two-second hook.
This isn't for you if
This is your first ad platform.
If you’ve never run paid traffic, go learn the fundamentals somewhere the mistakes are cheaper.
You’re still testing whether your offer works.
This channel scales what’s already converting. It doesn’t tell you whether you’ve got something.
You don’t know your numbers.
The platform under-reports itself. If you can’t read blended performance and third-party attribution, you’ll misread what’s actually happening.
Sound like you? Then let’s talk about who’s teaching it.
Meet Your Instructor
Ezra Firestone
Founder of Smart Marketer
CEO of BOOM! by Cindy Joseph
Ezra has been in ecommerce since 2005, and in that time he’s bought, built, scaled and sold 12 brands. He’s generated over $185MM in revenue since 2015 with his largest business, BOOM! by Cindy Joseph.
He started testing AppLovin quietly, first across his own brands, then across the agency’s client accounts. Those results are what put Smart Marketer on AppLovin’s radar in the first place, and why they came to us about building the official training.
A refreshing voice in the entrepreneur community, Ezra consistently champions people over profit, and sustainable long-term growth over the hustle-and-grind mentality that so often leads to burnout.
Meet Your Coaches
Pep Hufen
CEO, Smart Marketer Agency
Pep Hufen
Pep is a direct response marketer, analyst, and AI first operator helping 7 and 8 figure ecommerce brands scale profitably. Equal parts growth operator and numbers guy, Pep is known for building performance engines that connect marketing execution to real business outcomes, with a sharp focus on measurement, profitability, and scalable systems. He directs tens of millions in paid media annually while helping brands turn data into confident decisions. He is currently building ThumbStop, an AI powered creative platform that helps brands generate high converting direct response ads faster.
John Grimshaw
CMO, Smart Marketer
John Grimshaw
John Grimshaw is an analyst, digital marketer, and educator empowering business owners around the world to embrace their left brain and make data-driven decisions. An avid believer in doing the work, John has profitably directed over $7 million in paid traffic spend, 462 million sent emails and hundreds of promotional campaigns. After coming on as CMO in March of 2020, he helped drive 2 record-breaking years of growth at Smart Marketer. He is a cohost of the Smart Marketer Podcast, the creator of the Analytics & Data Mastery course for DigitalMarketer, and a 5-year-running Traffic & Conversion Summit speaker.
- The Official AppLovin SystemEzra’s complete playbook for building, launching and scaling on the platform.
- 5 Modules With 79 VideosCombining deep strategy, real campaign builds and step-by-step walkthroughs.
- Creative Systems & Offer FrameworksThe formats, specs and sales video structures that convert on this inventory.
- Attribution & Scaling FrameworkRead your numbers correctly in Northbeam and Triple Whale, then scale without breaking performance.
Course Only
1 Payment Of
$1,497
Instant lifetime access to all 5 modules. No AppLovin account required.
Best Value
Free With AppLovin
$1,497
FREE
When you create your AppLovin account, or share your existing AppLovin Ad ID.
Same full course. Spend your first $5,000 on the platform and AppLovin matches it with $5,000 in ad credits.
You already know how this story goes.
Google, 2008Facebook, 2014TikTok, 2020
Every channel has a window. The inventory is underpriced, the competition hasn’t arrived yet, and the people who move early get a few years of advantage before everyone else shows up.
We think this is that window. We could be wrong about the timing. We’re not wrong that it closes.
The course is free. The only thing it costs you is the hour it takes to watch Module 1.
Prefer to skip the account? Buy the course for $1,497
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