Episode 77: 7 Biggest Traffic Takeaways from 2016

The Perpetual Traffic team shares their 7 biggest traffic takeaways from 2016. From the slew of new products and features that Facebook launched to our favorite episode of the year, this one is packed full of great reminders (and brand new takeaways) to round your year out just right. Thank you so much for joining us on this journey and we look forward to providing more value for you in 2017.

IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN:

  • How we can to terms with (and actually ended up loving) the “new” Facebook pixel in 2016.
  • What percentage of DigitalMarketer’s traffic is now coming from mobile (versus 2015) and what this means for your business.
  • Brand new updates on the Facebook messenger platform and how our strategy has evolved since Episode 72.
  • Updates on Facebook products like Facebook live, Instagram advertising, and video ads.

LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

Episode 72: How DigitalMarketer Generated 500% ROI Using Facebook Messenger
Episode 67: The Proven 3-Step Formula to Transform Your Business with Video Ads [Part 1]
Episode 68: 3 Elements of High-Converting Video Ads [Part 2]
Episode 73: 3 Ways to Use the Facebook Pixel to Create Higher Converting Campaigns
Episode 55: 5 New & Very Important Changes to the Facebook Platform
Episode 50: How Frank Kern Generates Sales & Goodwill with Facebook Live
Episode 77 Transcript (swipe the PDF version here):

Keith Krance: Hello, and welcome back to Episode Number 77. We’ve got Ralph and myself sitting right next to each other here, looking out the window in Denver, and Molly on the other side. How we doing?

 

 

Molly Pittman: Doing amazing.

 

 

Ralph Burns: I’m doing great.

 

 

Keith Krance: Today, we are going to be reminiscing. We’re going to be taking a look back at the year in review of 2016 and what we learned. We’re going to specifically go through seven lessons we all learned through our different traffic campaigns in the last year, 2016. Next week’s going to be a fun one. Next week, Episode 78, we’re going to be talking about some of our predictions for 2017 and what we think will be the best things for you to focus on to have the most success for 2017, but right now we just want to sit back and we want to really just appreciate you, the listener, for coming with us on this journey.

 

 

Molly Pittman: Especially thank you to all of you guys that we’ve met in person at different events, that have reached out on Facebook or email just to say how much you’ve gotten out of the podcast. I know it means a lot to each of us. We always share it with one another when we get one of those messages, so thank you for listening.

 

 

Keith Krance: Yeah, absolutely. A couple times a week we’re sending each other screenshots from you guys. If you do have a big win, we’d love to hear about it, even if it’s just a Facebook message.

 

 

Molly Pittman: It’s why we do this.

 

 

Ralph Burns: That’s totally why we do it. There’s nothing more motivating or makes us happier than to see those kinds of messages, you guys taking action based upon couple of the things that we had said here on the show. Really appreciate all you guys listening, and look forward to meeting many of you in lots of the events coming up in 2017, which will be really cool.

 

 

Keith Krance: Make sure if you haven’t got a ticket for Traffic & Conversion Summit, you go to trafficandconversionsummit.com for that. If you’re interested in coming to our live certification in February that Ralph and I are doing, you can go check that out as well at dominatewebmedia.com/2017.

 

Let’s talk some stuff, lots of good stuff happened. It’s been fun, it’s been an amazing year.

 

Molly Pittman: Putting this episode together was fun. I think we all realized how much has happened this year, especially on Facebook, how many changes, but really how much we’ve learned too.

 

 

Ralph Burns: Yeah, and this is only seven things that we learned. I think we probably could have made this list many times larger, but the big stuff we’re trying to highlight here. The cool thing about listening to the show here is that you can listen to how we test a lot of the new things that come on Facebook and see whether they’re worthwhile and they work for your business. We’re going to reiterate some of that here, as well as some additional testing that we’ve done recently that actually updates some of the advice we’ve given in past shows.

 

 

Keith Krance: Number one, number one’s kind of the big one, it’s really how smart the algorithm really is. Ralph, wasn’t this the year that new Facebook pixel came about, and we were all freaking out a few months ago?
Ralph Burns: Yeah, like a year ago we were freaking out because the old conversion pixel which we loved so much was going away, it was being sunsetted in 2016, and it freaked us out a little bit. I think Molly, you probably felt the same way, we certainly did.

 

 

Molly Pittman: Absolutely, the first step was definitely to panic.

 

 

Ralph Burns: Then once you started testing it and dipping the toe in the water, first the little pig toe, and then the big toe, and then the whole foot, then we started getting really good results, realizing that it was a massive upgrade, and the Facebookers were right yet again, to get rid of the old pixel and to get this new one in there, which has a cleaner code. I know nothing about coding, but apparently, it’s cleaner, it loads faster. There’s so much more flexibility with it, with different types of advanced conversion tracking. Really it’s like the one pixel to rule them all, and I think they really got it right. We’ve definitely seen that the algorithm in concert with the pixel has just gotten so much smarter.

 

 

Molly Pittman: That’s my biggest takeaway too. Facebook has gotten smarter. I’ve noticed that I can put more of our campaigns really on autopilot essentially. Not that I don’t need to scale or pay attention to it, but if I select the right objective, and if I have a good offer, and if I’m sending traffic to a high-converting landing page, that campaign will almost run itself. Facebook’s gotten so smart, like you said, all of the data that they have on users, they know who is most likely to take what action, who is most likely to be interested in X, Y, Z. Their ability to put ads in front of the right people is incredible. Not only that, but their ability to show ads to people who aren’t interested. I think that’s key too, Facebook’s ability really to just optimize our campaigns for us.

 

 

Ralph Burns: Yeah, I mean I remember a year ago, talking about lookalike audiences as being sort of a secret weapon within the Facebook ads platform, but never really using it on its own all that much. This is basically an audience that you can create, which is off maybe your customer list, or in our case, we’re using lists of customers we can pull out of a CRM, or a customer relations management software, that have spent over $5,000, or maybe over $1,000. We create an audience for them, and then create a lookalike audience off those people. We’re running traffic just to that lookalike audience, depending on, we test all kinds of different lookalike audiences.

 

A year or so ago, we were overlaying it, we were doing the lookalike overlay with another interest because it wasn’t quite as smart. Now the algorithm is so smart, we really do trust Facebook with a lot and leave the settings set on automatic oftentimes, and we’re getting even better results than we ever have, which has been great.

 

Molly Pittman: Just to echo that, I looked back over campaigns I created over the last two or three months, and most of the ad sets that are performing the best are simple lookalike audiences, and just the lookalike audience. Like Ralph said, we’re not pairing it with an interest any longer. Facebook is that smart, that you can create a custom audience of a thank you page and create a lookalike audience off of that, your email list, people who have purchased from you. Facebook has gotten so much smarter, and yeah, some of our highest converting ad sets are those lookalike audiences.

 

 

Keith Krance: Let’s move on to number two. Number two is video ads, specifically Facebook video ads, which we talked a lot about in Episodes 67 and 68, as well as way back to Episode Number 3. Video ads, for us, has been a core fundamental strategy from day one, for me, back in 2011. This year, oh my goodness, for a while we were predicting, I used to always say last year during webinars, “One of these days, Facebook, they’re going to give us more options for custom audience based on people’s video view length,” and guess what? They finally did it, and this has been a game changer, where now you can create a video. Let’s say you have a two minute video and now, automatically, as long as you tell Facebook to create these, they will create audiences, warm audiences based off of how long somebody’s watched your video.

 

You’ll have a three second audience, a 10 second, somebody who’s watched 25%, 50%, 75%, or 95% of your video, and the best part is, is you can also create these lookalike audiences based off of those engagement numbers. Facebook as well has added recently, people who spend the most time on your website, and some other engagement metrics that they’re bringing in. Video ads have crushed it. For us, it’s been a way to really help build that Perpetual Traffic formula, where we are continually building our warm audiences, building good will, but we’re also generating leads and generating conversions, but at the same time we’re kind of filling up that bucket, so our warm audiences don’t get too small.

Remember, Facebook is the online version of the party or the coffee shop. Nobody likes that guy where you shake his hand and he’s trying to pitch you something 30 seconds after shaking your hand. However, if you show up at a part and you build a relationship with somebody, and you may be giving them a tip about something and you give them a little aha moment, you know he probably wants to learn more about what you do. In video ads, we’ve been able to do that, we’ve been able to take cold audiences from Facebook and take them directly to sales pages, offers in some cases, or directly into webinars or event pages, and it’s been a great thing.

 

Molly Pittman: I think even Facebook facilitating that more and more, like you’re starting to see the landing page pop up under the video. If you have your product catalog connected, you’re starting to see ecommerce products showing underneath videos. You can really see that this is a big effort by Facebook, this is a big initiative by Facebook because the whole world is paying attention to video. I mean, if you listen to Episode 56 with Dollar Beard Club, you’ll realize, and if you browse the Internet at all, you will realize how important video is, whether it’s on a landing page or in an ad. Really just seeing Facebook add different features, add different functionality, that’s been really cool. It’s a totally different dynamic, and I think video is a way to speak to a big group of people that might not resonate as well with text or written word. I think it’s really just opening another line of communication for us to speak to a group of people.

 

 

Keith Krance: Absolutely, we’ve seen a lot of cases, like in Dollar Beard Club. They went from a brand-new company to $1 million a month with one video. Yes, it was a viral video, but then they turned it into an ad, and all their other videos into ads, and their ads, their conversion costs are so low because they have great content. We’ve seen several cases where some of the clients where we’ve been able to scale and get those ad spend numbers up to $5,000 or $10,000 a day, and in most cases, they are video ads and they run longer, they last longer, they’re easier to manage. There are just a lot of different reasons why because you’re also building a better, longer term base for your brand as well.

 

 

Ralph Burns: It’s not just a side light either. I think video used to be just sort of one of those other things that you would do in addition to your link post or image ads, and really now it’s front and center. Looking at what our ad spend is on a daily basis, and we’re spending $65,000+ a day on ads, and the vast majority I would say, 70+% are video ads, maybe 65+%. It’s not a novelty, it’s a way for businesses to really grow, it’s a way for businesses to explain what it is that they do through explaining their product or showing people that they can help them by actually helping them in the video or informing them, and then pivoting to then next logical step, which in most cases, is something like a sale or maybe an opt-in or a webinar registration. It’s been transformative for the business, so if you’re not using video, definitely go back to 67 and 68, as well as Ezra’s episode at 63, which is really good.

 

 

Keith Krance: You want to always be thinking about, with all your ads, whether it’s a video ad or a non-video ad, but a lot of times video ads do this, what impact are you making on the viewer, the audience, on the ones that don’t click? Because maybe they’re in a situation where they don’t. Just because they didn’t click the first time, doesn’t mean they won’t again later. You always want to be thinking about how you can make a positive impact.

 

That leads us onto number three, Instagram. What’s going on with Instagram?

 

Ralph Burns: I think we’ve said this in a couple episodes before, that’s one of the reasons why we’re happier listening to this one because we start testing things and realize that maybe our initial test really didn’t work out for whatever reason because maybe we tested them wrong, or maybe we just didn’t test them in the right scenario. We met with our awesome Facebook partner manager and our former Facebook partner manager in Austin about a month or so ago, and they really convinced us to run Instagram alongside all our other placements. We started to test, and the account managers in the agency were somewhat reluctant to it, but not in every single case, but I would say in the majority of cases, we’re now running all our placements together, including Instagram, as well as instant articles, as well as right hand column in the mobile and the desktop newsfeed.

 

We’re seeing a synergistic effect, that’s my big 25 cent vocabulary word there for today. No really, they all seem to kind of work together as like ingredients in a cake.

 

Keith Krance: The placements, desktop, right column, Instagram mobile.

 

 

Ralph Burns: Absolutely, so they seem to work together because Facebook is smart enough, going back to number one, is that they’re smart enough to know where your potential converter or where your audience is. Maybe they’re on Instagram only for like 30 seconds, but they might see your ad and then that might be the zero moment of truth where they actually click on the ad and convert. We’re seeing that trend really positive, and that’s one of those things we’re really looking forward to continuing to test.

 

 

Molly Pittman: Just like with the algorithm in the past few months, we’ve continued to test Instagram ads, again all of the placements in one ad set, which I believed really allows Facebook to optimize for the best results. Instagram has been a big part of our ad spend, even for website conversion campaigns. People are clicking on Instagram ads and signing up for webinars or opting in for Lead Magnets. If you tested it in the beginning and brushed it off, definitely put it back into your rotation, especially if you believe that your audience is on Instagram, and especially if you’re just using it for retargeting because people are clicking.

 

I do think that when any new product rolls out, you’re either going to get a false positive or a false negative. People are either going to click and act on whatever the feature is because it’s new, it’s the new shiny thing and they’re like, “Ooh, what does this do? I want to play with it.” Or they’re going to ignore it because they think it’s weird or they don’t notice it, or because it’s new. I think Instagram ads, honestly it was the latter. I think that when they rolled out, they didn’t have a solid enough call to action buttons on the ads. I mean heck, when they first rolled out, you couldn’t even send traffic off to a website, you had to put in the link. It was essentially like a boosted post on Instagram.

I think Facebook was wise to roll it out when they did, about a year ago, and the updates that I’ve seen are really comparative to the Facebook platform. Again, don’t rule it out, and even if your market isn’t necessarily on Instagram, you can at least use it for re-targeting. I think it’s worth it.

 

Keith Krance: Absolutely, and the other thing is that if you want to build up an Instagram following and you want to be starting to reach more people organically on Instagram, or you want to start doing Instagram lives because they just rolled that out now, when you add Instagram into your targeting with your Facebook ads, guess what? You start to build up that organic following as well because that’s just a collateral benefit. When you run Facebook ads, you get more fans. If you’re running Instagram ads as a placement, you’re going to get more followers, which will give you a better foundation and another longer term, just more solid for the long run, and build your brand in a bigger way.

 

Let’s move onto number four, which is number four, this is a big one. The one episode that we had the one and only Ryan Deiss on, guess what he came to talk about?

 

Ralph Burns: Magical unicorns.

 

 

Keith Krance: Yes, how’d you know?

 

 

Ralph Burns: That was Molly’s joke, we just edited the tape for that.

 

 

Keith Krance: Ryan came on to talk about what we really consider the biggest leverage point when we go in to look at a campaign. How can we make the quickest improvement with the least amount of effort? That’s going right into the offer, the reason why they’re clicking on their ad, what they’re getting, the Lead Magnet, the webinar, the product, whatever it is. We’ve realized how important that is.
Ralph Burns: It’s like the one thing. I think more important than anything. And it’s probably the hardest thing to get right. I think that’s what makes Facebook a challenge to some people; they probably don’t have the right hook, and then the offer that encapsulates that hook. That’s the big challenge I would say with Facebook. Definitely go back and listen to Episode 43 because one of the things that I think trumps all in Facebook advertising is a great offer, is a great hook and offer.

 

 

Keith Krance: As well as Episode 45, where we talked about five offers that convert.

 

 

Ralph Burns: Yeah, which is killer, so go back and listen to that one as well. That talks about like how to take your hook and then create and craft an offer that people in your market really want, or something that they really want to avoid, and you can actually help them with solving that problem. Whatever that pain point is, whatever that desire is, that is what your hook is, and then you create an offer around it. What we’ve realized is that it’s the biggest factor if you don’t have that down right, or at least test it a lot to figure out what works best. All the other nuts and bolts and block and tackle stuff that we talk about on the podcast here really doesn’t matter quite as much. You have to actually create an offer that people want and that people are going to clamor for.

 

 

Molly Pittman: If I look back over the past year, whether it’s helping you guys with the different accounts that you’re doing, giving advice or insight of DigitalMarketer Engage, 90% of the people that are having trouble with their campaign are really having trouble with their offer. Most people think that traffic is what they need to grow their business. Yes, traffic is the water hose that you can turn on to really scale a business, but not unless you have predictable selling systems, not unless you have offers that people really want. It doesn’t matter how beautiful or awesome your marketing campaign is if you don’t put it in front of the right people, and especially if it’s not something that people actually want, it’s not going to work.

 

If you’ve been struggling for months and you’ve tested this type of objective, or you’ve started bidding this way, or you’ve made tweaks to your landing page, and you still can’t get it to work, I highly recommend going back and listening to that episode with Ryan, maybe even taking his Customer Value Optimization Certification at digitalmarketer.com/products, and really figuring out, “Am I making the right offer to the right people?” I think that will only help your traffic campaign.

 

Keith Krance: Yeah, it’d probably be the best money you ever spent. It’s so game changing it’s unbelievable. If you get the offer right, and then you have a quality message, sometimes people aren’t quite aware of the challenge that exists or of the desire that your product solves. A lot of times we can use messaging, and we do that with video ads sometimes as well to help give people an aha moment, and make them more aware of the problem that they might not know they have, or the solution that they might not know exists. Then your offer is the next step. When you get that right, man, the audience targeting, the bidding, the budging, all that stuff, that’s just icing on the cake, and that’s how you go from $1,000 a day to $3,000 or $4,000 a day.

 

 

Molly Pittman: I always tell people that say, “How did you get so good at running traffic?”, and of course it came from a lot of hard work and I do think that I’m advanced at running traffic, but if I didn’t have great offers to run traffic to, it wouldn’t work. You have to make sure that you have an offer, you have a product, you have multiple products. My friends own a notebook company, and I was helping them the other day with some ads, and it’s not that their ads are bad, it’s just they don’t have a profit maximizer. They don’t have a way to make money on the backend to pay for the traffic. It’s not that their ads are bad, it’s not that their product’s bad, it’s just that their funnel, their Customer Journey, their selling system, whatever you want to call it, is not fleshed out enough for them to be able to spend more than their competitors to acquire customers. Again, highly recommend focusing on that in 2017 if you want to better your traffic campaigns.

 

 

Keith Krance: Let’s move on to number five. Number five is something we just recently talked about in Episode 72, Facebook Messenger ads, a lot of cool stuff happening here.

 

 

Molly Pittman: Honestly, this is my favorite thing that’s happened on Facebook in 2016. I think in 2017, and we’ll talk about this more next week, you’re going to see a lot of new channels come onto the market. I think that people, and you see this through live chat and Snapchat and different mobile apps and email, and all of the different ways we communicate now, it’s insane, people want different options. I think that Facebook Messenger opens up a whole new line of communication for us with prospects. If you refer back to Episode 72, I talk a lot about the first test we ran with Facebook Messenger ads. With that, we simply ran an ad to people on our email list and asked if they had questions about how we could double their business, or questions about our products, and when they clicked on the ad in their newsfeed, which looked just like a normal link ad, a normal newsfeed link ad, it opened up a Facebook message with our page.

 

Since then, we’ve run more tests, we have two people from the sales team that are dedicated to Facebook Messenger, they have a whole tagging system in there where they’re saying, “This message is a possible sales conversation, this is customer service related.” What’s cool is this has opened up an entire line of communication where we can have conversations with our customers. You might think, “Oh, well are they buying? Why are conversations important?” I think that as time continues to progress, people are going to expect more instantaneous conversations with brands. They don’t want to send an email to support and wait two to three days to hear back from you.

 

  If you look at any of the big brands, they have bots on their Facebook Messenger, they have live chat on their website, you can reach them within minutes. I think we all, even smaller companies, must adapt and we must realize that even if you have to allocate extra human resources towards this channel, it’s worth it. Facebook adding the ability to not only run ads in the newsfeed that open up in a message, but also the ability to run ads that show up in someone’s Messenger if they’ve messaged you before, is incredibly powerful. I think in 2017, we’ll see more integrations. Right now, Facebook Messenger is integrated with platforms like Shopify.

 

 

  I bought my cousin a sweatshirt for Christmas on a website on Sunday, and it asked me if I wanted to sign in via Facebook. Of course, I wanted to sign in via Facebook, so that it would go ahead and auto-fill my first name, last name, email address, you know, it’s easy. Then at the end, right at the end of the order form, it asked if I wanted to communicate via Facebook Messenger, and it was already checked. It said, “Get order updates, customer service and more, send to Messenger.” It was already checked. Of course, I left it checked so I could see what was going to happen. I hit “complete order,” and all of the communication moving forward with this brand, happened within Facebook Messenger. They sent me my confirmation number, they actually messaged me today on Facebook to tell me that it had been shipped, and it opened up a little map inside of my messages showing where the package was.

 

 

  Now that we’ve had that interaction, that brand can send broadcasts out to me. If they have a sale going on, if they want to communicate something that’s going on with their company, they now have permission to send a message. I really think we’re just at the beginning of the journey with Facebook Messenger. If anything, I recommend obviously paying attention to it. You can use bots like ManyChat, again, we talked a lot about that in Episode 72. Go ahead, install a bot, something that will at least say “hello” to people that message your page, so they get that immediate response, and make sure that you’re watching it, or make sure that someone on your team is watching.
  Because these conversations can turn into sales. Most of the people that are messaging our page really just have questions about which product would be best for them, or will your products work for your business. I guarantee you every business has prospects that have questions about their products. “Will these shoes be good for hiking?” Ralph and Keith, “How much do you charge to run Facebook ads? Would we be a good fit?” Really any type of business can benefit from this conversational selling model, especially using Facebook Messenger.

 

 

Keith Krance: I would get on this right away because, like anything, after a while it’s going to start to fill up a little bit and there’s going to be a lot of noise, and it’s going to be harder to stand out from the crowd from their inbox, just like email has become. It’s going to take a while to get there, but the sooner you jump on this the better because this is awesome stuff because it’s so personal, and you get the push notifications, as long as they have that enabled.

 

 

  All right, let’s move onto number six. Number six is Facebook Live. We had Frank Kern on Episode 50, talking about his live streams that he was doing every single week. I’ve seen a lot of people absolutely crush it right now with Facebook Live and Instagram Live is now coming out, so you want to be paying attention to that. It’s the same thing as Molly was talking about with the Instagram ads, is where Facebook is continuing to improve. They’re now letting you pin your comment and you can edit that and stuff, so if you want to have a comment at the top of the thread that has the link that you want to send people to, or if you want to wait until a few minutes into the video to add the call to action, you can do that.

 

 

  The most powerful part about Facebook Live is you can continue to let these suckers live because you can run Facebook ads and you can pay for them to continue running, but they feel, when people see it say, three days later, it feels like it’s going on live right now, even though it’s a recording. There are a lot of different ways you can use Facebook Live, and it’s just an amazing way to get engagement, a lot more organic reach, and just get that much deeper connection with your audience.

 

There are a couple ways to run Facebook Live. Some people like to just do them spontaneously, and some people like to schedule them, maybe a weekly show like Frank’s doing, and like John Assaraf has been doing lately, and lots of people are doing, and that really depends on your specific situation, what you want to do. Once again, that’s Episode 50, and we’ll have all the links in the Show Notes.

That leads us to number seven.

 

Ralph Burns: Excellent segue.

 

 

Keith Krance: Thank you, Mr. Ralph Burns. Well, seven’s all about mobile, and mobile continuing to take more market share, and us seeing better results in mobile.

 

 

Ralph Burns: Yeah, mobile is still king. Say what you will about Instagram and Messenger as up and comers, but mobile is still the place to be on Facebook, and if you don’t have a mobile-enabled landing page, then you are missing out on a tremendous amount of traffic. Even non-mobile enabled landing pages, we’ve noticed, are working and converting just as well oftentimes because devices have gotten bigger. I mean, have you seen the new iPhone?

 

 

Keith Krance: Yeah, crazy. It’s like an iPad.

 

 

Ralph Burns: Well, it’s not really new. Yeah, it’s like an iPad mini. Mobile devices have gotten larger. We used to say, “Well, get your leads on mobile, and then convert them on a sale on desktop,” and that is absolutely not the case anymore. Mobile is great for everything, and the inventory really is on mobile right now and Facebook, so much so that they actually passed one billion mobile daily active users back in July. That’s just one billion people on mobile devices.

 

 

Molly Pittman: One billion.

 

 

Keith Krance: One billion daily active users.

 

 

Ralph Burns: Billion dollars. No, for us as an agency, I think the majority of our traffic, I have not run the numbers on this, but just looking at individual ad campaigns, when we leave all placements on, like we had talked about here in number three here today, that mobile still makes up the majority of our impressions. I would guess that probably 70 to 80% of our impressions are on mobile right now. I don’t know if you’ve done analysis on that, Moll?

 

 

Molly Pittman: We sat down the other day and we were looking at data from 2015 and 2016. In 2015, about half of our leads generated from Facebook came from mobile devices. In 2016, two-thirds of our leads generated came from mobile devices. Two-thirds of our leads generated from Facebook came from mobile devices, that is insane.

 

 

Keith Krance: Crazy, crazy, it is. If you think about some of the things we just talked about like Facebook Messenger and Facebook Live and all of these new things that we’re learning in video, if you’re tapping into mobile and Messenger with the push notifications, you’re able to really take advantage even more because of the mobile environment. That’s why you want to be paying attention to all of these updates and changes, Instagram, video, all these types of things.

 

 

  There are some things to think about when it comes to mobile. When you’re customizing a landing page or a sales page, make sure you send that link to your mobile device and look at it, look how everything looks on your mobile. A lot of times people will assume because their site is mobile responsive, that it’s still going to look good, but you need to check. Go check in a couple different devices, have your team look, and then maybe they have an iPhone 5, maybe somebody has an iPhone 6 or a Droid, or whatever it is, and just take a look at things and see how things are looking and how they stack. Maybe you have a countdown timer that looks weird on a mobile device, and so you need to shrink it down a little bit so the numbers aren’t like stacked on top of each other. There’s a lot of little things that you can really do if you start to pay attention to some of this stuff, and you’ll have much higher conversions.

 

 

Ralph Burns: Right before you set your ads live, you should always make sure that you preview it in mobile. If you have the Facebook app on your phone, all it does is it just sends you a notification so you can look at it. Literally, it takes three seconds, but if your call to action button is way down on the bottom of your page for whatever reason, your CSS is kind of screwed up for mobile devices, whatever. Make sure you check that because that can have a huge impact on your conversions. That’s a really good point, and I think that’s something that people just sort of look at the preview on the right-hand side and say, “Hey, the ad looks good, but what actually happens when I click on the ad and then go to my mobile landing page?” Really, really important to make sure that you’re maximizing every dollar that you spend.

 

 

Molly Pittman: Just to mirror what you said, Ralph, Justin Rondeau, our Director of Optimization, did a great job this year of making sure our landing pages and all of our pages were more mobile friendly. I do know that really helped with that percentage of lead number that I was talking about because we are converting more people on mobile. Moral of the story, mobile traffic is way up, and I know that’s been the story for the last five years and it will be the story for the next five years, but it’s true and it’s something you should pay attention to.

 

 

Keith Krance: That’s the seven, seven lessons learned. We’d love to hear from you guys in our Facebook groups, what lessons have you learned? What big aha moments have you had? We’d also love to hear from you again, once again if you love this podcast, feel free to write us, give us a review, helps us get this stuff out to more people. Once again, let’s go through the seven really quick, rapid fire.

 

Number one is the new Facebook pixel, and it wasn’t as bad as we all thought. Number two, video ads have been a game changer. Number three, Instagram. Instagram’s getting better and better as the users get used to it, as we get used to it, and as Facebook improves it. Number four is the offer. Get the offer right, and everything else comes easy. Number five is Facebook Messenger ads, one of the greatest new features. Get into that, start testing that, and you’ll get awesome results. Number six, Facebook Live, and number seven, mobile. Mobile is king, make sure you’re in mobile, you’re optimizing your pages and you’re leveraging it, and that’s it.

That’s it for today. Next week, Episode 78 is all about 2017, so be there, get on next week. It’s going to be a fun one, we’re going to talk about some of our predictions and how we think that you can set yourself up for the most success next year.

 

Molly Pittman: Thank you guys so much for listening. Happy holidays.

 

 

Ralph Burns:  Happy New Year!

 

 

Thanks so much for joining us this week. Want to subscribe to Perpetual Traffic? Have some feedback you’d like to share? Connect with us on iTunes!

iTunes not your thing? Find us on Stitcher or at DigitalMarketer.com/podcast.