There is one empty box sitting inside every single Meta ad set and almost nobody fills it in. It is not a setting most marketers think about, but every day you leave it blank, Meta keeps showing your ads to people who have already converted, your frequency goes up, your costs go up, and your cost per lead data gets skewed by duplicates you never noticed.

In this episode, I walk through exactly what that box is, why it matters more than most people realize, and the right way to set it up so it actually keeps working over time. I cover how Meta custom audiences work, how to use the exclude section correctly at the ad set level, the three wins you get from doing this right, and the one catch that causes most setups to go stale and break without you ever realizing it.

I also walk through how to automate your exclusion list using GoHighLevel workflows, Make.com, or Lead Distro AI so that every new lead gets added to your exclusion list automatically on autopilot. This keeps your campaigns reaching fresh audiences, reduces duplicate leads coming into your funnel, and gives you a more accurate cost per lead number to make decisions from.

If you are running Meta ads and you have never touched the exclude section of your ad sets, this episode is going to change how you set up every campaign going forward.

Check out our website here: https://www.greatmarketing.ai/

I made a PPL niche tier list earlier this year ranking over 40 lead gen verticals. Then I flew out to LeadsCon 2026 in Las Vegas, walked the entire convention floor, visited every booth, and had real conversations with buyers, suppliers, and operators who have been in this space for over a decade. What I saw in person did not match what I had originally ranked.

In this episode, I share what actually has demand right now based on firsthand experience at one of the biggest lead generation conferences in the world. I cover the six niches where I saw the most activity including legal, insurance, loans, home services, final expense, and debt consolidation. I also talk about why I had home services completely wrong in my original tier list, why one operator is doing 300,000 leads a month in that vertical alone, and why pay per call is growing faster than most people realize with buyers actively preferring calls over form fills in several of these niches.

I also touch on the blue ocean strategy, how to carve out your own demographic within a competitive niche, and the criteria checklist every vertical should pass before you commit your time and ad spend to it.

If you are still deciding on a niche or you are questioning the one you already picked, this episode will give you a much clearer picture of where the real demand is right now.

Managing lead returns manually is one of those things that sounds simple until you are dealing with multiple buyers, different agreements, and no clear system to enforce your own policies. Buyers forget what qualifies for a return, they submit requests outside your window, and you end up handling it all through email or Slack.

We just shipped new return policy settings inside Lead Distro AI that fix all of that. In this episode, I walk through the new portal settings that let you toggle returns on or off per buyer, set a custom return window that matches whatever you have in your agreement, add a policy note so buyers always see what qualifies before they submit, and automatically disable the return button once the window expires with a clear message shown on their end.

It is a small update but it removes a lot of the friction and confusion that comes with managing returns at scale.