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#84 Latest Facebook Ad Strategies

#84 Latest Facebook Ad Strategies

Over the last few months, I've managed over $500K in Facebook Ad spend navigating around the Apple update that most ad buyers feared. Now I'm not so scared. In this episode, I'll share some of my findings in audience building, prospecting campaigns, and attribution whether you're just getting started or a point of scale.

Over the last few months, I've managed over $500K in Facebook Ad spend navigating around the Apple update that most ad buyers feared. Now I'm not so scared. In this episode, I'll share some of my findings in audience building, prospecting campaigns, and attribution whether you're just getting started or a point of scale.

 

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TRANSCRIPT

What is up, everybody? Welcome to another edition of the Ultimate Marketer Podcast. I'm your host Orlando Rios. Welcome to the show. Well, things are going pretty great here at Dropkick Ads and my second company, Raised by Coyotes, the golf company that I launched. If you don't know about that, go a couple of episodes back and you'll learn about this second company that I started, just because, well, I have an interest in golf and number two, I wanted to see if it's possible to build a brand new company in the current state of e-commerce with Facebook ads changing and everything that's happening with losing our cookies and our tracking ability for our advertising.

So I've been doing that, but I've also been spending a lot of time, as you can imagine, within the Facebook ads platform, learning how to adapt to all the changes. And I'm thinking I've got a grip on this thing, and I'm going to share some of that with you, some of my findings and some of my thoughts here in a second. But first I want to remind you that if you need help with brand new creative for your campaigns, check out dropkickads.com and use promo code ultimate to save 10% on any service.

Some of the most popular things we're getting through right now are our pro setups. People are hiring us to go into their account, make sure everything is set up good, including the tracking, the domain verification, all the little nuances that Facebook is requiring you to do now because of Apple. And then we're setting up the prospecting campaigns, remarketing campaigns, we're making some images, we're writing some copy, and we're getting those in a position to help people get as successful as possible. I'm not going to lie, it's not as easy as it used to be, but we have some good data to follow and we're doing the best we can there. So if you're interested in that kind of thing, dropkickads.com, use promo code ultimate, save 10% there. Also, we have our copywriting pro membership where you pay one fee per month and you get an allotment of tasks to give us, to task us with. Whether you need copy, whether need some images and some targeting, that all comes with it in the copywriting pro.

You just log into our platform, you assign us a task, we have a form that you just fill out saying I need copy for Facebook or Google, I need a landing page copy, and here's all the info about it. You click submit. That comes to us. Our team works on that as soon as possible. And we get that to you and hopefully give you some great new creative to use in your campaigns or for your website. So again, check that out, dropkick ads.com. Now let's get to the meat of the show. Let's talk a little bit about Facebook ads and what I'm seeing right now. So, not only do I have Dropkick, the marketing agency, but I have Raised by Coyotes, my golf company, but I also manage a handful of full-time clients for Dropkick, where I'm handling all the Facebook ads and I'm handling all the Google ads in some aspects as well.

I don't take on a lot of clients, but I do have this small roster that I personally deal with. So I want to share some of the things that I'm learning so far in this new advertising world that we're dealing with. Number one, the first thing I want to say is that you can still have a lot of success. The whole thing isn't dead. Yes, it's more complicated. Yes, you're flying a little bit more blind if you're just relying on the dashboard data, but there is plenty of success left to be had.

So it's not something you should necessarily give up on. The only time that I've seen ads not work is because of the product. And this is just the truth, sometimes the product is not good enough or different enough to work for ads. So you have to keep that in perspective. Sometimes a lot of people are first to blame ads when they're not seeing success in their store. And they keep trying to fix the ads part of the process. When in fact, the problem is the product or the problem is the website. Those things should never be neglected.

And I'll always tell somebody if that's the truth, I'll always come out straight with it. Look, it's not the ads. Look, look at the click-through rates on these ads. Look at all this, something else is going on. And you got to be honest with yourself about that, is this product attractive enough? Does it really solve a problem? Is it different enough to survive in the marketplace? You have to think about those things. So, that aside, the way I build campaigns now is you have to not only expand your net, but you also have to rely on some data that is a little bit higher in the funnel. Now, if your business or you're an agency for a business, you have clients or you're running ads for your company, you're in charge of the digital marketing for the company you work for, the thing is you need to look at, and very often, is you need to look at your events manager and your pixel data.

Mind you, we're not getting as much as we used to, but there's still value to be had there because it helps you make the decisions. So if you're an e-commerce and you have a product to sell directly, you're going to look at things like purchases, add carts, view content. Those are the three key events that you want to look at. Now, a lot of people, even though purchases are happening on their site, we're not getting as much as that data. So if you're a brand new business or you're just getting started in Facebook ads, or you've been doing it and you haven't really been putting a lot of money into it, the thing that really sucks now is that you can't... Well, not necessarily you can't, but actually Facebook will not let you make a look like audience based on value, unless you're getting over 100 events for that particular event in a month's period, in a 30 day period of time.

Here's the thing though, I'm going to use my Coyote's brand as an example, last month, I had well over 300 orders. In Facebook it says the purchases with value that I had enough to be able to make a lookalike off of was only 60. 60 out of 300. In pre-Apple times that wouldn't happen. I would have had the 300 that I can use to make a purchase look alike off of. Well, we can't do that anymore. So it's going to be much harder for businesses that are just getting started or businesses that don't spend as much, or don't get as many purchases to reach that amount to be able to make that look like off of the purchases using the value.

You can still make a look alike just off a normal purchased audience, but we want the value because we want higher value so we can get higher returns on ads, higher return on ad spends. So, that sucks. So, you're faced with two options here when you reach that point. You can either, A, switch to interest based targeting. You can, B, do a lookalike on purchases just without the value, just making a 180 day purchase audience making a standard look like off that. Or three, you can try to go up the funnel. So if you want a value lookalike audience, purchases, you're not getting enough yet according to Facebook and what the data they have, you can instead use add to cart, and maybe you can reach it there. That can usually give you some more data to work with and you might have enough to be able to make that lookalike value audience.

If all those things don't work, that doesn't mean that you're stuck, because actually in a lot of cases in accounts that I run, I am seeing better results from interest based targeting. So here's the difference, in the past I used to always have each individual at interest as its own ad set or in some cases as its own campaign, because I wanted to know what the difference was. If you're doing a national base campaigns, that could possibly still work. If you're doing local based campaigns, good luck. That's not going to work. You're not going to have a big enough audience. So the only time now I'll really do that is at a first attempt to see where you're at. The single interest ad set audiences, once you have that data and understand which interests are the best interest for your campaigns that you're running right now in Facebook, you need to combine all those things.

That's where I'm seeing the best results right now, interest based targeting, but combined with almost every good interest or demographic that you can think of. So in a lot of cases in my client campaigns, when it comes to prospecting, a of times I'm only running one to three total prospecting campaigns because the audience sizes need to be bigger with the way things are going. So I have to combine all the interests together and then let Facebook figure out, out of that pool we need to give them a bigger pool, what is working the best out of that? Same thing with lookalikes, I used to love just having a campaign just by itself that was just a 1% lookalike because it always performed so well.

I don't think that's going to cut it anymore. Now I'm in the three percents, now I'm in the fours, and some cases, the five percents. So a big key takeaway there is audience size and getting as much possible together in there. Yes, you may not have as good results as you used to in the past, but again, we're working with what we got here and you can still have some really good success with it. Again, and as I say in everything that I do with Facebook ads is don't look at the results from the day before and make a decision based on that, because you're not seeing everything right away. In a lot of cases, if you look at results one day and then come back two weeks later, the results you see within Facebook's dash is going to be completely different. So you need to give allocation time. You need to give optimization time.

And a lot of times you just have to trust. There's a lot of faith involved in Facebook ads marketing. It's gambling folks. Just, that's what it is. Educated gambling is basically what we're doing here. We're taking the knowledge we have and placing our bets on our hand whenever we make our campaigns, that's what we're doing. So think about it in those terms whenever you do this. So again, bigger audiences seem to be doing well. So you can do a test, small test, small budget, with individual ad sets of individual interests. Let that run for five to seven days. Maybe don't choose purchase if you're not already getting a lot of purchases, choose something higher in the funnel like add to carts and see what gets you the best cost per add to cart.

Look at things like click-through rates, clicks and see what works and then combine all those interest audiences into one mega audience that works for you. And so you can do this by product category. So if you're a store and let's say you're a clothing store and you have athletic apparel and then maybe you have camping apparel. They're two different kind of markets here. Two different kinds of needs. Maybe you have one campaign that is all athletic apparel with a bunch of interest on that one ad set, and then you have another campaign that's all camping related stuff with camping related creative with all those related interests, that's how you have to maybe think about things now. Again, if you're e-commerce, you shouldn't really be using the purchase optimization unless you're getting multiple purchases per day already, ideally five or more purchases per day.

You don't even really want to try the purchase optimization yet. If you want to, go ahead, I'm not going to tell you absolutely not, but in reality it's most likely not going to give you any type of results if you're not already getting some of those things. I know, it sucks. So don't be afraid to go up the funnel to optimize for add to carts. I have a number of clients that actually I've tried going to purchase conversions for them and got worse results on both interest targeting and lookalike targeting than when I had add to carts and I think this has to do, again, with what I was mentioning in the beginning of this podcast, is the pool, the pool of people in Facebook's audience pool. Now that we're getting less because the Apple update, there's going to be more add to cart events that come through than purchase events that come through. That's just logic.

More data that Facebook has to work with, the better it can attribute with. The better that it can provide optimization. So bigger add to cart pool. If you don't already have a lot of purchases to work with, to optimize off of, that just makes the most sense. And for some of my clients, that's just what's going to work best, period. So, that's what we do. We run optimization for add to cart. In some cases it hasn't worked, purchase ended up better, but that's what it is. Now, return on ad spend. Now that is the biggest gray area when it comes to Facebook.

If you ask me and you ask a lot of other qualified ad buyers, they'll probably tell you that if you're having a 1.5X or more in your Facebook ads dash, you're probably crushing it right now. There's not a lot of people that are seeing 3X and 4X in Facebook ads dash manager right now. I'm going to go ahead and brag and say that on my Coyotes business, yeah, I was seeing three to four X, but that's because what I have there is just so unique and I'm not spending a ton of money on advertising there, I'm super optimized, and it's a brand new business, brand new to the Facebook feeds and all that. Anytime you just start, a lot of times, some brands can get super lucky if you offer something very unique. Outside of that, if you're having 1.5X or more, you're likely doing a lot better.

Don't fret because you're not seeing the twos and the threes anymore. They're likely there, they're just not being attributed into the dash because Facebook can't track them. So you need to look at your business as a whole. And I've said this over and over again, and I'm going to keep emphasizing this. Look at your store revenue, look at your store traffic, compare it to the ad spends you're making. If you're seeing purchases show up on the Facebook dashboard and you raise the budgets and you see a bump in traffic at the same time you see a bump in revenue, and there's this difference, this percentage difference of ad spend versus revenue that stays the same as you increase your ad spend, that is a sign that things are working well for you.

So, those are the things that have been doing pretty well. Another thing that I really started to like lately is trying out using your catalog. If you're on Shopify, if you're integrated with Facebook ads, you already have that, using your catalog to make dynamic, creative, out of your catalog, where Facebook will automatically make some little video things. It's not going to be anything fancy. It's going to be a slideshow, but I've seen some success actually using that for myself and some of my clients because I like to try all types of things. I'm not going to be stubborn, and I need to use the exact images that my team designed. I need to use these exact videos. You have to try everything. So, that's one thing that I've been working well with too. So, in summary, don't be afraid to go up the funnel for optimizations like add to cards. You're going to need bigger interest based ad sets, where you put all your interests together.

You're going to need to be patient. Most importantly, you're going to need to be patient on deciding whether or not a campaign is working. And then, three, you need to look at your business as a whole to see where you're really at with Facebook ads and the results that you're getting. So, those are the things I'm seeing right now. I'm still seeing good results. And the businesses, most importantly, are healthy. They're healthy. They're profitable. And that's what we want. I think we got so spoiled before with the Facebook dashboard giving us these crazy return on ad spend numbers and all that stuff that, a lot of people are still too focused on that.

And you really need to not be. Yes, it's an important part of the equation, but it's not everything. It's not everything. So if you have a good product, you offer something unique. You're still likely going to do pretty good. We're okay. But try those things. If you're struggling right now, if you're struggling and if you had success in the past, try, number one, bigger audiences and going up the funnel. If you're just starting and you don't have any data to work with, first do tests with individual interests, get some data there which works the best and then combine those into one audience and see what you can do there. And then there, you got to play with creative there to see what works. So there you go. That's what I'm seeing in Facebook ads right now. That's what my tips are right now based on the things that I'm seeing in the accounts that I'm running.

Again, I have return on ad spends across the board for myself and my clients that go from a one to a 1.5, the business is still highly profitable. I have threes. One case I have a four and it's where we're at. Everything's going to be different. There's no cookie cutter, you got to play around with it. But that's all for today. I hope I was able to provide some insight for you and maybe spark some creative imagination in your heads on what to do with your ad campaigns. Again, if you need help with creative, you want to try some different stuff, some different copies, some different images, hit us up, Dropkick Ads, use promo code ultimate, save 10%. We'll help you out. We're there for you. All right, everybody, thanks again for listening. We will see next week.

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