Facebook’s a-changin’… again. Stay on the cutting edge and use these six Facebook ad updates to make your targeting even better and improve return on ad spend. Then, listen as Keith shares a quick strategy you can use to increase engagement, repurpose content, and help lower your cost per conversion.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN:
- The new update that will help you overcome the overcrowding of Facebook advertising.
- A powerful feature (« that you may not know about) that will let you target the right audience and get the results you want from your Facebook ads.
- How to differentiate your Facebook page and increase your ROI from paid ads.
LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
Episode 39: 5 Cutting Edge Facebook Ad Updates
Episode 62: 5 Critical Changes to the Facebook Ads Platform
Episode 90: 5 Facebook Ad Updates You Need to Know About
Episode 107 Transcript (swipe the PDF version here):
| Keith Krance: | Hello and welcome to Episode Number 107 of Perpetual Traffic. On today’s episode, we’re going to be doing a little update episode. We do these every couple of months and there’s always random changes within Facebook. And so today we’re going to talking about some updates and really just some cool stuff to build a really leverage the algorithm. And leverage Facebook Lives and Instagram. |
| Molly’s got some really cool changes and Ralph’s got some good stuff. | |
| Ralph Burns: | Especially recently, it’s been a lot of changes. There’s something going on behind the scenes. They’re changing things. They’re adding different features. They’re also, probably, tweaking the algorithm. Cause as we know, the news feed is getting somewhat crowded because there’s what, five million advertisers on Facebook right now. |
| Keith Krance: | Something like that. |
| Ralph Burns: | Basically the best most relevant ads wins in the auction. And the auction happens when you are competing against other advertisers for the first, second, or third, or fourth, or fifth position inside the news feed. |
| What happens is that Facebook alters the algorithm to show the best, most relevant ads. So we see that inside Ads Manager, inside Power Editor, when things are kind of going south. When all of a sudden the circle of death, as a lot of people sort of talk about it, when Power Editor freezes up. So this is all just a part of advertising on Facebook, cause they’re constantly changing things to make sure that they maintain the user experience. | |
| Keith Krance: | Once in a while, where each of us do either a tip or an update and that’s what we’re doing this time. Molly’s doing her own over in Austin, TX and Ralph and I are together here. We’re kind of on a little road trip, here. We just finished War Room, DigitalMarketer’s Mastermind, which was in Newport Beach at Pelican Hill. And today, we’re actually down in Ranchos Santa Fe, we just finished an all-day intensive with a client. |
| This is Episode 107. | |
| Hey, let’s get right into it. Lots of changes happening lately. I have heard of some pretty interesting things, like Facebook’s going to start rolling out shorts like Netflix little shows. That wasn’t actually one of my tips. | |
| Ralph Burns: | It’s interesting though because that is a content creation. I think they’re trying to get in to sort of the Netflix/Amazon Prime game a little bit. Original content being broadcast on Facebook. |
| Keith Krance: | Anything they can do for people to basically to live on Facebook. |
| Ralph Burns: | So, Facebook is constantly reinventing itself. The reason is, is that they’ve got this enormous user base and they want to make sure that that user base stays, even as ad load and more advertisers like those of you that are listening today, as well as ourselves, continue to jockey for our place in the auction inside the newsfeed. So Facebook’s in a tough spot right now because they have so many advertisers, so many ads that want to grab your attention, but they all have to make sure that it’s not just an ad platform. It’s actually relevant content, useful content and original content, like Netflix and Amazon Prime. So think of Facebook as a media company and then interspersed inside that media is the ads. |
| Keith Krance: | Alright, so let’s get into it. What we’re going to do, is we’re going to have Molly kick it off with her tips. So enjoy those and we’ll be back in just a second. |
| Molly Pittman: | Hey guys, Molly Pittman here. I have some updates for you. They’re pretty simple, but very exciting. So the first is that Facebook is launching an Instagram placement for the destination ads for Messenger. So rolling out on cross at accounts now, you will have the ability to show an ad in someone’s Instagram feed that when they click on it will open inside of Facebook Messenger. So, it’s the same thing as the destination ads that you see in your Facebook newsfeed. This is just adding Instagram as another placement, which is exciting. We’ll be able to reach more users with those Click-to-Messenger ads. |
| The second update I have is also around Messenger and also around placements. So right now, Facebook is testing a new placement inside of Messenger. So they’re testing it in Australia and Thailand right now, but I have a feeling that they’ll be rolling this placement out to more advertisers, soon. But, basically the concept is that your ad is shown inside of the Messenger platform. So when you open Messenger, you see different people that you chatted with at the top, you see people that are active, and in between those two sections we will actually start seeing a sponsored content. | |
| So, this isn’t just for Messenger ads. It could go off to a website or it could be an offer or whatever type of ad you’re running. But this is going to help us overcome the ad inventory problem that Facebook is facing right now. So as the ad platform becomes more crowded and more advertisers are buying ads, Facebook’s definitely going to be looking at other places where they can show users ads. So on the home screen in Messenger is a test that they’re running right now and I’m excited to see how it goes. | |
| Ralph Burns: | Hey this is Ralph, so with Number 2 this week on Facebook updates. I’ve got a couple things for you relating to audiences, as well as some ways in which we’re able to select multiple ad sets to increase ad budgets. To scale up campaigns, as well as a really cool tool inside reporting that will now allow you to actually see your return on ad spend. So, let’s get into the first one. |
| So first off, inside Audiences. If you go into your Ads Manager and you select Audiences, the first thing that you’ll see when you go into that particular part of Ads Manager is a big blue button which says “Create Audiences.” So inside Create Audiences, and in some of these accounts you’ll actually see an entirely new header on the top of the Ads Manager which is in limited release right now. Because I think there’s actually some problems with it because it actually appeared this morning, but then disappeared this afternoon. Where you can upload custom audiences or maybe audiences from your Infusionsoft, your Ameripost, or wherever it is that you actually gather customer data or purchase data, and then assign values to those individual potential customers. And then create audiences out of them based upon how much they’ve spent with you. | |
| So, for example, let’s say you sell a $37 product, but maybe you want to target people who have purchased multiple times. Well, this new feature inside Ads Manager, which seems like it’s in beta a little bit, will allow you to actually upload a customer conversion value through your CRM and then create a custom audience, which you can then target for other purchases, as website custom audience for retargeting or you can use that as a base audience for a lookalike audience. So, if you don’t have that feature quite yet, it actually was in the Ads Manager today and this is part of the presentation today and then it completely disappeared in the afternoon. Definitely check that out and if you’ve got those CSV files from your CRM, definitely upload them and see how you can use that. So that’s a really cool feature, brand new from Facebook. | |
| So, for those of you who, maybe, don’t have that, one I think the coolest features of creating custom audiences is going into the same part of Ads Manager, which is the asset library. So as you go over to the way left hand side of Business Manager, you can start to go down to a drop-down menu and click on “Audiences” and inside that you’ll actually see the same thing, “Create Audiences.” And when you drop-down inside Create Audiences, you’ll see a section for create audiences. And underneath the part that actually talks about your activity on your website, you’ll be able to go in and if you’re using certain conversion metrics, like let’s say you’re using the purchase conversion metric for a logging in purchases whether as like a Tripwire Offer, whether it’s a Core Offer, or whether it’s an Upsell, whether it’s your Slack Adjuster, or whatever it happens to be. Maybe you actually have a business where multiple purchases happen all at once, you can actually do a drop-down inside that Create Audiences for purchases for people who have purchased in the last 180 days, maybe 30 days, maybe 60 days. And then select those who have purchased more than once, maybe twice, maybe three times, maybe five times. | |
| So, we’ve done this on multiple cases inside our ad accounts. We’ve created these, sometimes small custom audiences and sometimes larger custom audiences that you can then use to retarget for your products through a website custom audiences and through retargeting. But more importantly, you can use these as seed audiences for lookalikes. So lookalikes, as you know, they take that seed audience, that data that’s from those individual customers. In this case, it’s actually seeding from Facebook data. And then they will find, once you actually say, “I want to create a lookalike audience off this seed audience,” Facebook will go out and find other people in the U.S., a 1% lookalike audience is about two million people, they’ll create other people that look like that audience that just purchased your product two times, or five times, or ten times, whatever it happens to be. So super powerful ways in which to target the right types of audiences to get the conversions, to get the results that you want from your Facebook ads. | |
| That’s not a brand new feature, but it is a feature I think a lot of people don’t understand and probably have not seen inside the Audience’s tab. | |
| Keith Krance: | I think it’s a really cool feature, but I also think it’s one of those features where you have to be leery, right? And understand the algorithm, right? So understand that if you’re going to be doing something like this you need to have the necessary volume of conversions, right? So for example, if you’re trying to create a lookalike audience based off of your customer list of a thousand people but you have a website visitor list of hundred thousand people, that hundred thousand people’s probably going to be better, right? Because there’s so much more data. |
| Ralph Burns: | Typically, the more data they have, like we actually created a bunch of customers for this particular metric, this morning. People who have hit the add-to-cart page more than once in the last 180 days. For whatever reason, Facebook said it wasn’t a big enough audience. So you have to test this, you have to start a check it out. So we created probably about 20 or 30 different audiences this morning and about 10 out of the 30 actually populated. So you just don’t really know. Some of these things are actually sort of in beta and it’s not completely fleshed-out, but the point is, it’s other ways in which to target people. And then the big thing is not necessarily using that audience to send ads to, but using that seed audience to create a lookalike audience. |
| Keith Krance: | Well, that’s what I was talking about. |
| Ralph Burns: | That’s the big thing. Typically, the more data they have, the better the audience does. |
| Keith Krance: | But you want the most relevant audience, so obviously if you can get more from Facebook, like you can here. More active customer, like Frank Current always talks about, dynamic behavioral response. And that’s what you’re doing here. So, you can have different messages to different people, based on the actions they have taken or you can create more highly-relevant, cold audiences. Which is those lookalike audiences, based on your seed audience of people who have taken more action or bought more of your products or spent more money. But remember, if you don’t have a lot of data, you’ve got to just understand that. So try to pick something where you have enough data to give Facebook to create a good audience. That’s all. |
| Ralph Burns: | We did the same thing for people who hit the add-to-cart page in the last 180 days. Like that one populated and then we could create a lookalike audience off that. But for whatever reason, in 30 days, Facebook wouldn’t create a custom audience off that. So we couldn’t create a lookalike audience of it. So it is a little quirky, but the point is, is that Facebook is trying to track actions inside your store or inside your website as much as they possibly can. So that they give you as much data as they possibly can, so that you will end up creating these larger audiences to target more cold traffic to bring them into your sales funnel and ultimately make them customers. So it’s just one more example of Facebook just continually tweaking inside the Ads Manager to make our targeting even better. |
| Keith Krance: | Love it. |
| Ralph Burns: | So, the second thing I have, is sort of basic and, this is one that we haven’t talked about, actually, at all here on the podcast but it is a badass feature we have been waitin’ for, for a long … I just said “waitin’,” didn’t I? I feel like I’m talking from down south. |
| We’ve been waitin’, waitin’ for this for a long time. So one of the big features we’ve always wanted, ever since we started advertising on Facebook, is to say, “How much did we spend and how much did we make? And give me a proportion of those two numbers,” meaning return on ad spend. So I spent one thousand, I made a thousand. What is my return on ad spend? Keith Krance. | |
| Keith Krance: | One to one. |
| Ralph Burns: | One to one, exactly! |
| Keith Krance: | Yes! |
| Ralph Burns: | So alright. So if I spent a thousand, but I made fifteen hundred. What is that return on ad spend? |
| Keith Krance: | That’s like fifty-percent! |
| Ralph Burns: | One-point-five to one. Exactly. So kind of simple math, but stuff that we had to figure out on our own. Not that that math is overly complex- |
| Keith Krance: | Yeah, but if you have lots of ad sets, lots of ads, you can get down to the granular odds on that instantly. |
| Ralph Burns: | That’s the cool thing. This is a new metric, I would say, in the last month or two and you can actually select it. In some cases, when you’re doing a website conversion campaign, it auto-selects right off the bat. So, the default reporting inside Ads Manager, when you actually open up any of your website conversion campaigns is inside columns, which is over on the right-hand side of Ads Manager. It defaults to performance. Now performance will tell you your primary metric, whatever it happens to be. In most cases, we use website conversions as our conversion objective for our campaigns. So this would be the default for that. So let’s say you’ve got two or three campaigns. Maybe you’re promoting some content. Maybe you’re using a clicks-to-website campaign. Maybe, another one, you’re doing a like campaign. And then you’re doing you’re third campaign, which is website conversions to get leads and ultimately sales into your sales file. |
| So, if you click on that campaign, you’ll actually see inside that campaign, by default, the performance of that campaign. Which is the primary metric. In this case, it’s website conversions. So whatever you’re optimizing for, let’s say you’re trying to optimize to get more leads, it will show you how many leads you got and how much you spent, what your cost per lead is. So one of the things we’ve always wanted is we wanted to be able to assign a value to the purchase conversion value, as well as figure out how much we have spent and how much we’ve made. What’s the cost of our ads and what’s the conversion value of all those actions on our website. And in most cases, we want to make sure that it’s more than 100%. | |
| But this new metric, which actually shows return on ad spend is a fantastic new metric, which sometimes it defaults to it sometimes it actually doesn’t but, you actually can go inside Columns and look at customized columns and find it by typing into the search bar “return on ad spend” or “ROAS.” And what it’ll do is actually say, well okay you spent this much and you made this much, your conversion value is this much. So, it will give you a percentage, in essence, a return on ad spend number. So, for the sake of argument, if you spend a $1,000 and you made $2,000, it would be 2. If you spend $1,000 and you made $1,100, it would be 1.1. | |
| So, what we use this for is we actually force rank all of our ad sets by this metric and then figure out which ones to scale and which ones to, perhaps, reduce budget or maybe even pause. So it’s been a game-changing metric for us especially when you doing this at scale, lots of different ad sets. And it’s a brand new feature from Facebook within the last month or so, which we really love. | |
| Keith Krance: | Alright, good stuff. Get inside the Facebook Ads Manager, Business Manager. Go check it out. |
| Alright, so, last tip. I’m just going to do sort of one and a half here. What I’m going to do here is, first of all, for my update it’s not really an update it’s more of just kind of a cool strategy. So I want to talk about leveraging Facebook Live, leveraging Instagram, YouTube and really these live platforms and really, just a quick strategy to be able to increase your ROI from your ad spend. And actually, this can help decrease your cost-per-conversion and increase your ROI because of the engagement situations. | |
| Ralph Burns: | Oh, totally. |
| Keith Krance: | Quick story, a couple years ago we had a client that got their Facebook page hacked. So for two days there, people were posting like, crude stuff, like stuff you’d see on like a porn site, right? So we get an email, “Keith, Ralph, oh my god, we got our page hacked. Can you help us?” |
| Well, they got their page back about a day and a half later after a bunch of crude postings and stuff like that. and it was pretty brutal, but they got it back and never got hacked again. So they weren’t actually an agency client, they were actually coaching client. So we weren’t actively managing their stuff they were doing their own. So, about a week later we get another email, “Keith, Ralph, my website conversion campaigns before we got hacked were getting $3 leads, $3 cost-per-leads.” | |
| I don’t know how long they’d been running, but for a while. And she goes, since we got our page hacked and got it back we are getting $9 to $10 leads. Our cost-per-lead tripled and we don’t know why. And I remember that email like it was yesterday, it was like two years ago. And I was like I knew it, I knew it, I knew that if you have a page that you are super-engaged with, or you get a lot of organic activity. You’re just really engage with your audience, you’re doing posts and all that kind of stuff, right? Maybe you built your brain up originally with a lot of hustle and when you run ads, Facebook rewards you for that engagement. But it was always hard to prove. | |
| And then recently we were on a call with a client, we were talking about a bunch of testing that they had done and other stuff that we’ve done ourselves. And, basically proved that when you are more engaged with your page your ads do better. So for example, if you’re doing Facebook Lives three times a week, once a week, whatever, every single day. More than normal, let’s say you’re doing Facebook Lives, you’re also commenting to all your commenters and just posting and just being very engaged. And the next week, you run ads and you’re running lead-gen ads to a Lead Magnet, whatever, and you’re spending $500 a day. And then, let’s say, you’re averaging $2 per lead that whole week. And then the next week, you go on vacation for a week and you’re not doing anything. Those same campaigns that are running ads, you have not change your budget, you’re spending $500 a day. There’s a good chance those $2 leads can go up to three or four and we’ve seen it happen over and over again. | |
| If you’re not engaged with your page, it can actually affect the ROI of your Facebook ads on campaigns that have nothing to do with that engagement. So that’s an interesting point. We still don’t have definite, definite proof. Facebook will not admit this, but that’s just what I’m going to tell you, we’ve seen a lot of cases and scenarios like this. | |
| Ralph Burns: | So, if you tend to your page- |
| Keith Krance: | It helps. |
| Ralph Burns: | It helps, not only your organic reach, no matter what. But it seems to also have an additive affect to your paid advertising. |
| Keith Krance: | Yeah, it should not have any effect on each other. There two completely different things. |
| Ralph Burns: | But remember, I mean, the Facebook newsfeed is crowded. |
| Keith Krance: | They want engaged pages. |
| Ralph Burns: | So Facebook is looking for any little thing to differentiate advertisers, so whatever you can do to potentially differentiate you from your competition. Whether it’s doing more Facebook lives, or posting regularly and answering comments on your page, it’s going to help your paid advertising. |
| Keith Krance: | Right. |
| Ralph Burns: | I mean, they are pretty stark. We don’t know exactly how much, but- |
| Keith Krance: | Try testing it, we’d love to hear from you if you’re listening to this right now, have you had this experience? You might be having an “Ah, ha!” moment right now. You’re like, “I had a feeling that was the case, but I never actually heard anybody say that in public.” |
| I got one tip for you and actually I got to give credit to Betty Rocker, Bree Argetsinger, a good friend of mine, and a client of ours at Dominate Web Media. She’s a client in our Navigator Coaching Group and she actually presented a little webinar, recently, for our members inside Facebook Ads University talking about this. Some other people are doing this, Todd Herman’s a friend of mine, he’s been doing this, and some of you guys that really, really up to speed on social media it might be doing this, as well. But this is a pretty cool ninja strategy. | |
| So, basically, the strategy here is to do a simultaneous Facebook Live. Maybe on your public Facebook page and also on your private Facebook group. Let’s say you have a member community like DigitalMarketer Engage or like our Facebook Ads University group. And so you got to have multiple phones. So you might have three phones. So, you got to get another phone, you don’t have to have the best one ever. | |
| But basically, you set both phones up or all three. So, I’m doing one from my Facebook business public page. I’m doing one going to the private Facebook group, maybe for my members. And then, maybe I have another one here that is going to YouTube. So, I can do three Lives or maybe I got another one that’s going to Instagram. | |
| Let’s keep it simple we’re just going to do our Facebook public page here, Facebook group here. Go live at the exact same time and then what we’ll do here is I will maybe do a 20 to 30-minute talk answering questions. And giving love to the private members, like let’s say if somebody ask a question, then I’ll call out, “Oh, hey Joe, oh you’re member of Facebook Ads University.” Answers the question, calls them out, makes them feel good. Answers questions and all that. And then, let’s say 30 minutes, I’m going to say, “Okay, what we’re going to do now is, I’m actually going to turn off the public feed. I’m going to turn off the Facebook page feed and I’m going to continue answering questions for another 15 to 20 minutes for my members over at Facebook Ads University or my members over at DigitalMarketer Engage.” And then people are like, “Well, what’s Facebook Ads University? What’s Digital Marketer Engage?” | |
| Ralph Burns: | Ad promo. |
| Keith Krance: | “Yeah, so that’s our great community where we do updates every month, we have to live webinars twice a month, we do hot seat blah blah blah. We’ve got recorded, we got trainings,” so you give a little one minute authentic sales pitch. “So you can go check it out there.” And maybe somebody from your team puts the link in the post or maybe you put the link in the post, if you’re doing this on your own. And what happens there is important, your members feel special, right? They feel like, “Cool, I’m VIP. You know, I get taken care of.” And this is while both of them are going on and then the people that aren’t members, want to be members. |
| So it’s a win-win situation. It’s a really cool strategy. Like I said, I got to give Betty Rocker credit. She’s just a little bit smart. | |
| Ralph Burns: | If you want to stay in business, you do have to draw the line somewhere between free and paid. So in this podcast, we give away everything basically, we don’t hold anything back. But I mean if we had a paid podcast and a free podcast, I suppose we would. But the point is, you could do basically the same things. I think this is a fair way to serve your members who might be paying you a monthly fee, as well as potentially recruit members into the that program. |
| Keith Krance: | It’s a great way to increase your engagement. It’s a great way to repurpose content, too. Say you want to do more content, do more Facebook Lives like this. Now you have a double-whammy, you’re giving engagement with your group … we’re going to start doing this. I just did one the 4th of July for our group. It was awesome, it was really cool. |
| Now you can use that recording, cause on the public page you can actually now run ads to that. You can boost it and you can go into the Business Manager and you can start running cold traffic to that and warm traffic to that. So watch people like Tai Lopez. Maybe you don’t resonate, I don’t resonate necessarily the way he talks. Like his messaging and his kind of thing. But I like to learn from his strategies, cause he’s doing this kind of stuff right. You want to stay on the cutting edge and guys like that … there’s a lot of other people that are doing stuff. And then put your own spin on it. Stay with your own authentic self and just look at other strategies, and that’s it. | |
| Ralph Burns: | Yeah. No matter who it is, you can always learn something from somebody. But you can learn a lot from people like that who are pushing the envelope as far as this kind of stuff, like this is really pretty cool. |
| Keith Krance: | Absolutely, and there’s a lot of people doing this, that are absolutely crushing it. |
| So, that’s it. We’re going to wrap it up. Once again, hit digitalmarketer.com/podcast. Episode Number 107 for any resources we mentioned and maybe the video recording of this last part of the recording of the podcast. Other than that, we will talk to you. See next week. | |
| Ralph Burns: | See ya. |
| Keith Krance: | Bye-bye. |
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