With the latest apple update, you may have noticed fewer data in your Facebook ads metrics. And while it's what we were all expecting, there may be a well-known hero coming to make things right again. In this episode, we'll discuss how Shopify will help our efforts to acquire new customers and why it's in their best interest to do so.
Transcript
Welcome back to the Ultimate Marketer Podcast. I'm feeling awesome. It's great to be back here on the show. It's been a busy couple of weeks. Actually, I did record a show last week, believe it or not, and then it all went to trash. The input device that I use for my microphone just completely failed on me. I recorded a whole 30-minute episode, and then when I went to edit it and get it ready to publish on the platform so that you guys can get it, I discovered that it recorded completely wrong, and it was doublespeak and had all this interference. So the input device that I usually use had completely gone to crap. So we're back though. I got a brand new input device for this show here, and so now we're doing everything nice, crisp and clear, and we're back to normal. I can make shows again. Awesome.
Before we get into the meat of today's show, I want to remind you that if you need help with your Facebook or Google copywriting, design, strategy, targeting, checkout dropkickads.com and use promo code 'ultimate' to save 10%. this is a great time to do this. If you get one of our pro setups, which we've been doing a lot of these lately, this is a great time to do it, because just post Apple's operating system updates, there's a lot of things you need to make sure that are set in place. And when you get the pro setup, we're going to make sure that those things are set in place. We're going to make sure your domain is verified. We're going to make sure that you have the correct events set up within your pixel so that you're getting the best tracking possible. It's not going to be perfect, Apple kind of ruined some things there for everybody, but we're going to get you in the best position possible. So check out our pro setups, check out our creative services. Again, dropkickads.com. Use promo code 'ultimate' and save 10% today.
On the note of tracking, if you've noticed, about two weeks ago, there was a major shift in the way things are being reported within Facebook ads manager. Now, the operating system updates have happened before, but whatever happened two weeks ago with the latest version, you really, really saw the difference. On some of the accounts that I've run, I saw very little difference, but on the majority of the accounts that I saw, there was a huge difference in reporting. To give you perspective, the previous episode, I talked about how I started this new golf clothing line. The only traffic is coming to that store is from Facebook ads. I don't necessarily have brand recognition yet. I don't have any SEO yet. I'm not doing anything else to drive traffic other than Facebook advertising. So I know that almost every single sale that I get on that particular store is because of my efforts in advertising on Facebook and Instagram.
So what am I getting at here? Well, a couple of weeks ago, after this update happened, I had a really good sales day where I had 15 orders, which for this new company is pretty dang good for a brand new company. I had 15 orders. But on Facebook, within the ads manager platform it only said I made three conversions. Well, there's a disconnect there, right? Isn't there? Because if this is a brand new store, brand new pixel, and the only traffic I'm getting is from Facebook and Instagram ads, that's where the conversions have to have come from. The difference between 3 and 15 is pretty gigantic, right?
That made me think for other people that are running Facebook and Instagram ads right now, if they're seeing that same difference there, that might be impacting the decisions they're making on their Facebook advertising campaigns, they may be turning off campaigns that appear to have a terrible return on ad spend, or not getting any conversions at all, when in fact, they actually are producing. But it's harder for them if they've had a store that's been working well for a long time, a store that already has a bunch of purchases and data to go off of. I have the benefit here with this new store where there's no history, there's no other way, there's no other traffic coming from any other source. I know for a fact that my conversions are coming from Facebook.
That tells me there that the operating system updates at Apple included is definitely making a difference, not necessarily in the effectiveness of a conversion, but in the reporting that is coming to the dashboard, which I guess in some form Facebook's dashboard will be limited to how it can use that data to further optimize. But the thing here that is worse is that the people running the particular ad account, if they're not sensitive to that data, and they're really watching those cost per acquisitions, they're really watching their return on ad spend, and they're on a very strict, small budget, they might turn off things that are actually working.
So, big note there, this just happen. That's why I'm still going to tell you and be a huge proponent of you need to take a look at the data from a fuller picture. You need to look at their daily revenue versus the ad spend. Find what you're comfortable with. I myself know that I'm comfortable with putting almost 25%, and sometimes more, of all my revenue back into advertising to acquire new customers. Then you got to do the math. How much are you spending per day on ads? How much revenue are you making per day? And figure out the percentage of differences. No matter what the platform says in Facebook, how are you doing?
That's scary. That's not the way that most people like to do things, I don't like to do that as well, because you kind of just have to give a lot of confidence into Facebook's algorithms that it's actually getting you conversions and it's making things happen for you. That's scary, especially if you don't see a positive return on ad spend or a cost per acquisition that you're generally comfortable with. But that's just the way we got to do it, that's the world we're in for now. When Apple came out with these operating system updates and all this chaos started to happen where Facebook was rolling out this thing, where they were against small business and all this stuff, they're not just going to lay down, they're not going to just lay down. It's like, "Well, this is it. This is the new way things are going, and we're not going to make any changes."
No, they're back there working their off, I'm sure, trying to figure out what things they should do to improve. If it's not going to be via cookie and it's not going to be via pixel, what can they do to get around it so that ads can be formulated and optimized correctly, using event data, so that they can continue to have the success, and it's so businesses that run ads and depend on ads can continue to have the success and the ability to really start a brand new business. Before Facebook advertising, starting a brand new online business was a lot harder. Facebook ads made everything a lot easier. So they're going to figure this out.
There's something that just happened earlier this week, or late last week rather, that I think is going to go and start pushing things in that direction. If you've ever heard me on this podcast in early episodes when I talked about platforms, I've done some Q&A's where people asked, "What platform should I build my e-commerce store on?" Without hesitation, my suggestion is always Shopify. WooCommerce is great too. There's a lot of people on WooCommerce. There's people that are doing really good on WooCommerce. But Shopify is almost number two to Amazon.
Think about that. That gives them a lot of leverage, and it gives them a lot of ability to provide certain aspects of the shopping experience that you may not be able to get on a WordPress-based platform. That's not to say you can't be successful there. With Shopify being number two to Amazon as a place of e-commerce, it's in their best interest that new, small business owners and that new entrepreneurs can easily make a new store and get customers for that store. They're affected by any type of limiting on tracking, so they're not for the things that Apple wants to do.
Quick side note, by the way, Apple also, about a week or so ago, is also going to try to mess with emails now. Luckily, not many people that I know anyway, use Apple Mail, most use Gmail. And as long as people use Gmail, I think that'll still be fine. But if they import their Gmail to their Apple Mail on their phones and stuff, then it might be affected. What is it they want to do? They want to possibly no longer have email clients be able to know if opened an email.
So think about your Claveo campaigns or your email campaigns, where you depend on knowing if somebody opened your email or not. They want to take that away. That's ridiculous. That's not a privacy issue in my opinion. It actually makes things better, it controls spamming of emails, because I know that in my Claveo campaigns, I like to put certain barriers to whether I send campaigns to people. If they haven't opened an email in like 15 emails or something like that, I don't want to keep sending them stuff, it hurts open rates, and you don't really want to spend sending campaigns to people that are not opening them.
You only want to send your message to people that actually want it, right? And if you're on a service like Claveo or MailChimp, the more people you email to, the more expensive it is. So if somebody is not opening my emails, I need to know that, not only so that I don't spam them, but also so that I can tailor in my message. So shame on Apple for even think of that. Shame on Apple for even thinking of that.
Anyway, back to Shopify, excuse that little rant there. It was just announced this last week, late last week, that Shopify is now doing a direct integration with Facebook's pixel. So you could always add Facebook as a channel so that it connect to commerce, your catalog, and your pixel. Way back, maybe a couple of years back, the only thing you could really do with your Facebook pixel and the Shopify is you can copy the Facebook pixel ID into the Facebook pixel ID field, and it'll add your pixel to your site and track events. Over the last year or so, they've had that sales channel with Facebook, which integrates with Instagram so that you can tag products on Instagram and have your catalog easily, have your pixel set up easily. And the benefit of this also is that it's not just browser tracking, which Apple's trying to cut off, and the people that use browsers like Firefox or whatever, to block any type of tracking, that's all done via browser cookies.
When you do this exact this direct integration with Shopify and Facebook, you're using the conversion API, which shares data directly from Shopify servers to Facebook. That means that it can't be blocked by ad blockers. Pretty sneaky, huh? Sneaky, but effective. Before this last week with the whole apple thing and the events and the domain verification and blah, blah, blah, you could only choose a couple of events to be populated within Facebook pixel to be reported to your dashboard. Obviously, if you're in e-commerce store, you would choose purchase as the top event, maybe add to cart below that, and maybe view content below that. But now, Shopify is sending all of the events through conversions API, through the servers, so it gets around the ad blockers on browsers and Apple can't do anything about it. That's awesome. Thanks, Shopify. That's awesome.
Now you can get all these events, the view contents, the add to carts, the purchases. Everything is going to come in to the platform from Facebook, but you need to make sure that if you're on Shopify, you do these couple of settings to make sure you're taking advantage of that. Number one, you need to have Facebook as a sales channel. So if you go into your Shopify account, on the left-hand side there's an area that says sales channels, you have online store, you have the buy button, and then there there's a big plus sign. If you don't have Facebook as one, you should add that and you should connect your account today. If you have clients, you're going to want your client to do this, because it's going to be tied to their personal Facebook ad account. So if you have clients... You don't want to do this on a client's Shopify store with your Facebook account, because it's going to be tied to your personal Facebook account. So you're going to have to have them do it.
If you're running your own store, just use your own, that's fine. You're going to connect your account, you're going to connect your Facebook Business Manager. You're going to connect your pixel and ad account, everything, your page. And then it'll be directly connected from Shopify to your Facebook pixel and ad account and page. Now, once you have that all set up, you're going to open up that Facebook sales channel on the left hand side, where it says Facebook, and then you're going to have two options up top where it says overview and settings. You're going to click that settings.
Then under that, there's a section called data sharing settings. This is the most important part. There is an option here that's off by default called customer data sharing for Facebook uses, your customer data to target products, page posts, and ads to your customers. You're going to want to enable that customer data sharing. This is how the conversion's API is going to get to your Facebook pixel and help to improve your ads optimization and your audience building. Now under that it's going to give you the option to choose a level. You're going to have standard. You're going to have enhanced, and you're going to have maximum. You're going to want to choose... Take a wild guess, say it out loud in your car or wherever you are. Yes. You're going to want to choose the maximum, because that's going to take and combine all the data sharing options to reach the highest amount of customers, it's going to get the most data.
Now, take a note. This option does share personal customer details. You're going to want to make sure that your privacy policy reflects that in your website, because we're going to be getting past Apple's blocks here. We're going to get keep getting past any browser blocking here. But this is going to be good for advertising. It's going to be great. I think this is kind of the new way. This right here in itself is cookieless advertising. This is all server-based. And then it'll match orders with customers and all that kind of stuff. [inaudible 00:19:45] allow you to really build those audiences and really optimize.
Is this going to solve everything? Probably not right now, but this is a good first step. Shopify is making some big steps here, because they know that it's important for their survival and important for entrepreneurs, people that want to start their own businesses online, to be able to find customers for their store through advertising. That's the fastest way to do it. It takes a long time to build a brand. It takes a long time to get organic traffic. Ads allow you to speed up the process and do it quickly.
So, not only is Shopify doing that, but they're also working with Google now, too. There's going to be some direct... There already is a direct integration with Google in the sales channel, so you should also do that for Google as well, but they're going to do some more direct stuff when it comes to Google shopping here soon. Like, you might be able to use Shop Pay. Actually, I think you can, with this next coming up integration, you Shop Pay in Google Shopping. Shop Pay is going to really take off here. It really is going to be something. So, if you're not on Shopify and it would be an easy transition for your business, you might want to consider making that transition.
If you're about to start a brand new company and you're wondering, "Well, what platform should I go on?" It should not even be a question, you should definitely build on Shopify. I get no kickback from Shopify from this, by the way, this is just me and all the accounts that I've been in, and I've been in hundreds of ad accounts at this point in my career, and I've worked on hundreds of websites in my career. By far Shopify has this, the e-commerce thing figured out the most. And with this latest stuff they're doing to help salvage what has been the best traffic driver in our lifetime Facebook ads, it just makes sense.
So if you're on Shopify, you're running Facebook ads, make sure to do those updates. It's going to make a difference. You're going to start seeing. And if you go to your events manager after you make those updates, you're going to start seeing that all your events, your view contents, your initiate checkout, your add to carts, your purchases. They're all going to switch from browser to server. And that means you're tracking things that are not being tracked from other browsers or whatever crap Apple wants to do today to try to be the good guy, to try to be the privacy policy police when they don't need to be, we don't need them to be. So there's that. Awesome.
Just wanted to share that info. It's kind of a big week in terms of that, and look more into it. If you just do a quick Google search about it, you'll find out more about it. And make sure to make those updates, if you're on Shopify. Make sure to go to those data sharing settings and make those updates. That's it for today, y'all. I hope you enjoyed the comeback episode here for Ultimate Marketer Podcast. As you can tell, my voice is a little tired. I had like five calls today. So please bear with me on that. And I hope to be able to continue to bring you some new episodes as we go here forward. Maybe we'll do a question and answer episode next week. We haven't done one of those in a while. We'll see about doing that for you. Again, thanks so much for listening. Make sure to visit dropkickads.com. Use promo code 'ultimate'. Save 10% on any creative service, including pro setups. We'll help you get set up. And if you're on Shopify, you get a pro set up. We'll help you get that setup too, so that you're tracking to the best of your ability.
All right, everybody. Thanks so much for listening. We will see you next time.