Episode 63: How Ezra Firestone Sold 84,583 Jars of Face Cream Using Video Ads

Ecommerce Facebook Video Ads

Ezra Firestone is back with the Perpetual Traffic experts, and he’s sharing the Facebook video funnel that sold over 84,000 units in three months (Find his funnel in the show notes resources!).

Ezra details numbers, video views, retargeting, and much more. Listen to discover how you can imitate his funnel that generated three million video views at 23¢ a view!

IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN:

  • The concept that has helped Ezra’s business make eight figures.
  • The extra steps Ezra adds to his retargeting strategy, which allows him to successfully scale a campaign.
  • The three advertising assets Ezra would employ on a budget of $50/day (<< This is an easy funnel for marketers just starting on Facebook to replicate).
  • A “sneaky” retargeting trick to give your product the best chance at converting.
  • Why a video is the perfect top of funnel conversion asset.

LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

Ezra’s Video Ad Funnel:Ezra's Video Ad Funnel

Launch Grid

Ecommerce Marketing Mastery Certification

Feedly

Episode 17: Ecommerce + Paid Traffic: Ezra Firestone on Physical Product Traffic Campaigns

Episode 56: How DollarBeardClub.com Generated 100 Million Video Views in 13 Months

Episode 63 Transcript (swipe the PDF version here):

Keith Krance: Welcome back to Episode 63 of Perpetual Traffic. We have a special returning guest today, Mr. Ezra Firestone, welcome to the show. He was with us on Episode 17, talking about using Facebook ads for ecommerce and using social media paid advertising. Today, we’re super excited! He’s going to talk about how he uses Facebook video ads and sold something like 84,583 bottles of face cream over the past 90 days or so using mostly video ads. He’s going to talk about numbers, video views, retargeting, lots of stuff. I’m super excited because this is what we’re really passionate about. Ezra, dude, thanks for coming on.

 

 

Ezra Firestone: Yeah, man. Thanks for having me. I’m super happy to be back. I actually have a story for you guys you don’t know. I was taking a flight from Hawaii back to New York, which is like ten hours. And I noticed I had your podcast on my phone, so I put it at one-and-a-half speed and I got through like 15 or 16 episodes. I was just hooked. Your podcast is so good. Molly, the whole podcast is amazing. I’m happy to be back. I think you guys have a fantastic show!

 

 

Molly Pittman: Thank you, Ezra.

 

 

Ezra Firestone: I appreciate it.

 

 

Molly Pittman: Special announcement. We just released an Ecommerce Marketing Mastery Certification with Ezra, which is really exciting. This is our first elective certification and it’s all about ecommerce. It’s eight hours. There are tons of handouts. I went through it. Ezra, you did a great job.

 

 

Ezra Firestone: I was super hyped. I recorded all of it in two days. It was super fun. What’s cool about that certification is it’s soup to nuts. It’s all the way from the ground level of structuring your platform.

 

 

Molly Pittman: You can literally build a business with it.

 

 

Ezra Firestone: It’s really, really cool. Obviously, DigitalMarketer is the prominent information publisher, and you guys share the best information about online marketing in the space. I’m just happy to be in business with you.

 

 

Molly Pittman: Well, thank you.

 

 

Ralph Burns: You’re the first guy that’s non-DM to get in there, so that’s awesome.

 

 

Ezra Firestone: Working that relationship for years.

 

 

Molly Pittman: Ezra is special. If you guys are interested in checking it out, it will be 50% off for a few weeks. You can take the class and get certified. If you’re interested in that, you can learn more at digitalmarketer.com/ecommerce.

 

 

Keith Krance: All right. Cool. Let’s get right into it. Ezra, you’re going to talk about some high-level strategies, but you’re also going to talk about some specifics about what you guys did to—holy smokes. Let’s talk about some numbers. Just give us a big overview here.

 

 

Ezra Firestone: We’re on pace to do $24 million this year with one brand. Now, we’ve got a couple other seven-figure brands, but this brand, in particular, we spend between $10,000 and $20,000 a day on advertising, specifically on Facebook. We do advertise on Pinterest, Google, and Instagram, as well but the bulk of our advertising spend is on Facebook. What’s interesting is we went from a couple million dollars a year business, which all my businesses were a couple million bucks, to boom! Scaling to eight figures when we understood one concept. Now, I’m going to break down my sales funnel. I’m going to tell you exactly how I did it. All the ad campaigns, but there’s a higher-level frame that we took that allowed us to set up the funnel in this way. What that frame is and the way that I look at advertising is that we now live in a world where a sales funnel or a prospect to customer journey spans multiple touchpoints.

 

 

  It used to be that people would be stationary and they’d sit at the desktop computer. Then, we got laptops. So, people were carrying the digital medium around with them, but they still had to sit down to consume it. Then, mobile phones came around. Now, touch-based consumption of the Internet has eclipsed traditional desktop and laptop consumption of the digital medium. People are carrying these devices around with them all day long. They’re engaging with the digital medium via touch and at different times sporadically. They’re not just spending an hour or two hours sitting in front of the computer, and then they’re done. They’re on it on the toilet or they’re on it at the bank. People are on their devices much more throughout the day. What we started to understand was that a prospect to customer journey is going to have to span multiple touchpoints.

 

 

  Gone are the days where a single campaign is like they type something into Google and you show them your ad based on what they typed in and they either buy or they don’t and that’s it. Now, the way you have to set up a sales model is taking someone who does not know about you, engaging them in a conversation about your brand, and getting them to do what you want them to do, which ultimately is to do business with you. And that’s going to span multiple touchpoints. Initially, on my last presentation with you guys on this podcast, I talked about how we were amplifying content. We were running these link-based image ads that led to a blog post article. Traditional digital marketer 101 stuff. Pixeling people based on where they are in the funnel, et cetera, and that’s awesome.

 

 

  The cool thing and the reason why content amplification works so well is because it mirrors the way that people are consuming the Internet. They’re consuming more. They’re consuming across multiple touchpoints. When you don’t just say, “Buy from me,” you say, “Consume this content.” Then you follow-up with them based on what they did or didn’t consume. You’re able to do a better job. Now with video, what’s cool is they can start a relationship with your brand inside of the social network. They never have to leave to consume five or six minutes of content about your brand, and then you can follow-up with them later based on what they did. Basically, our new thesis and the way that we look at our business is we look at it across multiple touchpoints. We understand that our prospect to customer journey is going to take five days, a week, two weeks, three weeks. It doesn’t so much matter.

 

 

  What we do is we identify each point in our funnel. Based on that particular point in our funnel, video ad, blog article page, offer page, checkout page, we identify all these touchpoints that we need to get them through, and we have advertising that supplements taking them through that funnel.

 

 

Molly Pittman: I love that, Ezra. And I love that you’re talking about the Customer Journey. It’s something that we recently talked about at launchgrid.com and really thinking about this not even in a certain about of time. Someone might go through all of the steps of the Customer Journey in an hour. It might take someone two months. That’s the beauty of social platforms like Facebook is you can automate all of this.

 

 

Ezra Firestone: It’s amazing.

 

 

Molly Pittman: Depending on the last step, the last action that someone took, you can make sure to show the correct ad to them. It’s like building a relationship in person.

 

 

Ezra Firestone: It’s unbelievable. What’s interesting is that now all the data points on a user are feeding back into Facebook. Your email CRM can feedback data into Facebook based on what people have done on your website. Eventually, videos that are on your website, like YouTube videos or Wistia embedded videos that you have on your website, you’ll be able to feed that data back into Facebook because both of them have an open API. Now, we can get data based on if someone watched a video on Facebook and we can run an ad to them accordingly. But, eventually, we’ll be able to get data based on them watching XYZ amount of this video on our website and we can put together a group of people who did that.

 

 

Molly Pittman: The longer you run these ads and the more people that see your videos or click your links or convert. Facebook’s going to get smarter, so they can really put your ads in front of the ideal customer.

 

 

Keith Krance: What I love about the videos, I think you’re going to talk about this, too, is when you’re using this kind of video, there’s always going to be a small percentage of people, especially when you’re using big audiences, that you can build that relationship and get them to take action all in one video. It’s like taking somebody to a content, let them consume, and then retargeting them. With video, there’s going to be a small percentage of people who will actually take action because you did a good job of making the right type of video. Then there’s going to be another 90%-95% of people that won’t, but then you’ve got systems in place for that.

 

 

Ezra Firestone: Exactly. The last time we talked about amplifying a presell engagement page, and then people would either click through or not click through to whatever our offer sequence was. In our case, we actually go from a presell engagement page to an ecommerce category page where you then have to choose a product you want to look at, which would take you to a product offer and then to the shopping cart and then to the checkout, et cetera. Now, what we’re doing is instead of just having an image ad that links to our presell page, we run a video ad. Our video ads are between four and six minutes long. Now, if someone watches under 50% of that video ad, so if they’re in the 50% or under group and they never click off of Facebook, so they consume under 50% of our video, let’s say 25% or 50%. We don’t actually retarget people who consumed under 25% because they weren’t interested enough.

 

 

  If you consumed between 25% and 50% or 50% up to 75%, we are retargeting you with more content. We’re not sending you an offer. We’re either retargeting you with a link to the presell page or a different video ad. We’ve got another piece of content that you will see if you consumed 25% or 50%. Now if you consumed 75% to 95% of our video, which is like four-and-a-half-minutes long, then we’re going to retarget you with a direct link to our offer. We’re going to skip the presell engagement page. Now, anyone who watches the video on Facebook and clicks the link from that ad will go to the presell engagement page whether they watched 25%, 50%, 75%, whatever. When we initially show the video ad, it’s linking to a presell engagement article. Right?

 

 

Keith Krance: Okay. Got you.

 

 

Ezra Firestone: If you click through that video no matter how much of it you consume, if you’re actually taking action and clicking on the initial ad, you’re going to go to the presell page. However, if you consumed 75% or 95% of the video and do not click through, we retarget you later with a link to the offer page. We’re skipping the presell if you consumed over 75% of the video initially because we figure hey, you know enough about our brand.

 

 

Molly Pittman: You’re warmed up.

 

 

Ezra Firestone: You’re totally warm.

 

 

Keith Krance: Basically, if you’re running a video four to six minutes, which I love. If somebody watches but leaves at like three seconds, ten seconds, maybe 30 seconds, then basically they’re not getting retargeted with a separate video. They might get served the same one again. Right?

 

 

Ezra Firestone: Yeah. If they end up in another one of our top-level interest-based awareness ads.

 

 

Keith Krance: Right. Okay. Got you.

 

 

Ezra Firestone: There are a certain number of people who are not even going to see a retargeting ad. They didn’t even watch up to 25%. In order to see one of my retargeting ads, you have to actually see 25% of that video or more.

 

 

Keith Krance: Twenty-five percent to 50%, basically. If they don’t click through, they’re not going to get retargeted in an offer, but they’re going to get retargeted with another content video or maybe a link ad to a presell article.

 

 

Ezra Firestone: That’s right.

 

 

Keith Krance: Okay. Seventy-five percent or more, back to an actual offer.

 

 

Ezra Firestone: Seventy-five percent or more who don’t click through initially are going to see an actual offer. Now, let’s just keep going a little bit deeper. We can go back over it because I know it’s kind of hard to imagine this without actually seeing it on paper. I’m actually looking at our funnel on paper. I can give you the image. We can put it in the podcast show notes.

 

 

Ezra's Video Ad Funnel

 

Basically, if you do click through no matter what amount you watched. If you click through that video, now we actually have a link to the presell page above the video so that you don’t have to watch the whole video and wait for it to show that little, “Hey, learn more.” You can click the headline below the video or the link above the video to get to the presell page. If you land on that presell page and you don’t do anything further, you just made it to the presell page, again, we’re retargeting you with more content with either a video or a link back to a different presell page.

 

  You haven’t showed interest in our offer yet. You watched a certain amount of the video. You clicked over to an article, but you never actually showed interest in the offer. In that case, we are retargeting you with content again. Now, if you click through from that presell page to our store page and you’ve now made it to the actual ecommerce category page. Now, most people would probably link from their presell engagement page right to a long-form sales letter. Right to some kind of an offer page if they weren’t trying to display a catalog of products like we are. Right?

 

 

Keith Krance: Right. Right.

 

 

Ezra Firestone: If you made it from the presell to the offer page, and you actually made it to the offer page, but then you didn’t go any further, at that point, again, just like the 75% and 95% video viewers who never left Facebook, we are retargeting you with more aggressive advertising to get you back to the offer page. We’re sending you right back to the store because you showed interest in the products. Seventy-five percent to 95% viewers who never clicked on Facebook, we’re assuming are interested enough to see products because they watched six minutes of our video. People who made it to the offer page, we’re also assuming are interested enough because they made it all the way to the offer page. We’re amplifying content to the warm list. We’re amplifying offers to the hot list. And people who weren’t warm enough to even make it 25%, we’re not even retargeting.

 

 

Ralph Burns: I want to bring up something important because I think that we glossed over it. There’s a lot of people in our audience who have one core product. They sell physical products. They sell supplements, but they have one core offer and then they have maybe upsells after that. Some people who have more of a catalog style like you’re talking about specifically. Some of our clients we might run a video ad. A longer form video ad, and link directly to the sales page because it’s the main core. There’s a lot of story around it.

 

 

Ezra Firestone: Totally. Most video ads that I see, and I’ve started a catalog because on Facebook you can click “save this video” or “save this link.” I’ve got a team of 40 people. Basically, what I have my whole team doing, you guys might want to do this, is anytime they see an ad on Facebook they click save this link. They’re getting all the video ads that are shown to them, all the image ads that are shown to them, and they put it in a spreadsheet for me so I can look at all the different funnels that are being shown to people. Ninety-nine percent, literally almost every single funnel that I see that starts with a video ad links directly to a product offer page, long-form sales page, or product detail page. Most people out there are going video ad to offer page. They’re not doing all this craziness where they’re going video ad to presell engagement to ecommerce store or to product offer page. You’re right. That’s a much simpler way to do it.

 

 

Keith Krance: You’ve been able to scale up from $1,000 a day to $10,000 to $20,000 a day. Right?

 

 

Ezra Firestone: Yeah. I think that is because I have these extra steps. I know better where people are on that Customer Journey, so I can communicate with them where they actually are. Whereas, if I only have a video ad and an offer page, I only have two points of contact to reference.

 

 

Molly Pittman: You’re not asking for marriage on the first date. You can scrape the bottom of the barrel and make some sales initially in the first few weeks of people who are hyper-buyers and hyper-responders. If you really want to scale a campaign, adding in those extra steps will help move someone down that decision path.

 

 

Ezra Firestone: Absolutely. I’d like to point out a couple more things if you make it to our store page and click through to a product. At that point, you’re getting dynamic product ad retargeting, which is a whole different type of retargeting that I want to talk about in just a second. Before I do, I want to point out one other thing.

 

 

At every stage of this funnel, like on the presell engagement page, we have an exit-intent pop-up that attempts to get their email address. The people who enter their email address, we follow-up with via email to try to get them to continue on their Customer Journey. We have one exit-intent pop-up on the presell engagement page. If you make it to the store page, the product offer page, or the shopping cart page, we have an exit-intent that’s a little more aggressive. On the presell exit-intent where we’re trying to get email address, on the presell page is content. On the store page, or product offer page, or shopping cart, we’re incentivizing with a discount. We’re saying, “Wait. Don’t go. Get 10% off.” We have email sequences that are happening that are also supplementing and helping people along this Customer Journey. Not just the ad side, but we have conversion assets in place in the actual funnel that do the same thing.

   
Molly Pittman: I love that, Ezra. A lot of people asked, “Well, if I’m running a retargeting ad I can’t send an email that says the same thing.”

 

 

Ezra Firestone: Oh, yeah, you can.

 

 

Molly Pittman: You absolutely can because think about how your news feed is and how crowded your email inbox is. It’s not very likely that they’re going to see both messages.  Even if they do, it just adds more congruency and is a further reminder to take the next action.

 

 

Keith Krance: The online attention span is like two minutes. People are not thinking about you at all. You have to realize that. We get so many emails, so many Facebook ads. People don’t notice stuff because we’re so immersed in our own business. We are always worried about that, but it’s just so much different. Frank Kern talks about this a lot. People are too busy looking at porn. They don’t notice your emails.

 

 

Ezra Firestone: They don’t notice what you’re sending. Frankly, the way that a business has the opportunity to create communities of people to communicate with—because your business is essentially a group of people who you’re communicating with. Right now, there are really only two ways. There’s an email list and then there are people who you can advertise to who are on retargeting lists. You can put messages in front of them because they’re on customer list, i.e., they’re pixeled. Or you can put a message in front of them because you can email them.

 

 

You can put an ad in front of them or you can email them. What’s coming next is being able to build groups of Facebook Messenger contacts the same way that your CRM works for you emailing people. You can mass broadcast to people within Facebook Messenger and that technology already exist. We’ve got probably 4,000 or 5,000 people on a Facebook Messenger list who we broadcast messages to, but that’s coming. That will be the third pocket of people that you can communicate with: your email list, people who are on your retargeting list that you’re putting ads in front of based on what particularly way you have them pixeled, and then your Facebook Messenger list.

 

Ralph Burns: That is awesome. If I count all the steps here, it’s like seven or eight steps. We can even include the DPAs at the end.

 

 

Ezra Firestone: Let’s talk about each step. We’ll talk about each step of the funnel. Then, let’s break down each ad that’s running for that step of the funnel. Then we’ll get into the dynamic product ads if we have enough time.

 

 

  My funnel’s a little complicated here. The way I break my advertising down is awareness, retargeting, and loyalty. Awareness is people who don’t know about me. Retargeting is people who know about me in some form or fashion; I’m communicating with them based on how they know about me, i.e., where they made it in my funnel. Then loyalty is how I’m advertising to past customers. Those three sort of phases of the Customer Journey get ad campaigns and ad sets. We’re starting with an awareness campaign, which is our top of the funnel, and that’s a video advertisement. That’s Step 1. Then, that’s running an awareness advertising campaign. Now, based on how much of that video that you consume, you’re going to see a retargeting ad if you don’t get any further than that first step on the funnel, which is just that video ad.

 

 

  If you stay on Facebook and you just consumed a video, then you are going to see a retargeting ad because I’m putting you on a list based on how much you consumed at that stage of the funnel which is the first stage. The second stage of the funnel is the presell engagement page. It goes from a video ad to a presell engagement page. Now, if someone makes it to that particular stage of the funnel and then they bail, they’re going to see retargeting for content. They’ll get content retargeting in the form video or in the form of a link ad. It can literally lead right back to that initial presell engagement page. Initially, for the first nine months, we just had one presell engagement page and anyone who made it there we reminded them of that article. It’s better if you have a different piece of content to advertise to them that also soft sells whatever your product is. You can start with just one asset of a presell page.

 

 

  Step 1, video ad. Based on how much you consume of that video ad, you’re either going to see content retargeting or product offer retargeting. Step 2, presell page. If you don’t make it any further, you’re going to see retargeting for more content. Step 3, you click over to our offer page, or in our case, our offer sequence, which is a store page and then a product offer page. If the consumer makes it to our store page, which is the third step in the funnel, and then bails, they’re going to see retargeting in the form of an image that leads them right back to the store page. We’re using link retargeting here. We’re not using a video in this case. We’re just putting a big picture of the products linking right back to the store. That works really, really well.

 

 

  The fourth step in our funnel (so we went video, presell engagement page, store page), is someone actually makes it to a product offer page. We do more traditional sort of long-form sales page style. Ecommerce product offer pages where we have a sales video, actually multiple videos. We have customer testimonials and stuff. Then we’ve got long-form left-right content. We usually have some cross-sells on the page where they can upgrade or choose a bigger size. We’ve got more of a traditional information marketing long-form sales page as our ecommerce product offer pages. Now, if you make it to a product offer page what’s going to happen is you’re not going to see a link ad, a video ad. You’re going to see what’s called a dynamic product ad.

 

 

  The way these things work is if you’re using Shopify, there’s an application called Feedly. What Feedly does is it creates a catalog. Sort of a spreadsheet or a feed the way that you would if you were uploading a feed to let’s say Google Shopping, it uploads that feed or product catalog to Facebook. You can then manage that catalog inside of Facebook and create something that’s called a product set, which is simply a group of products. In that product set, you can decide how people are going to see and when they’re going to see that ad. For example, the way that we have it set up is if you visit a product, or you add a product to the cart and you’ve done that in the last ten days, you’re going to see a dynamic ad. The ad unit is interesting. It’s like a carousel ad unit, but it dynamically inserts the products that they viewed into that carousel ad unit.

 

 

  Now, if they only viewed one product it’s going to look like a traditional link image ad. It’s only going to insert the one product in there. But if they viewed multiple products it’ll create a carousel ad for you. What’s cool about this is that we’re only doing a ten-day window here. The shorter that your retargeting window is, the more profitable your retargeting is. If you’re on a budget, I would recommend having all your retargeting windows be seven to ten days. If you’re doing more aggressive targeting like we’re doing, you probably are going to end up with a traditional standard 30 or 45-day retargeting window at every stage of retargeting, by the way. At the presell retargeting, the store page retargeting, and now, the dynamic product ad retargeting, if you want those to perform better and you’re on a budget, target people who saw your stuff more recently.

 

 

Keith Krance: Right now, what I want to do is I want to back up for a second. I have two questions. One, a lot of times what we find for people that have success with Facebook ads is a lot of it is about momentum and little victories. I want to ask you, first of all, would you mind going a little deeper on your presell page? What’s that about? Then, let’s say your cousin came to you and said, “I have this physical product and I’m getting ready to run Facebook ads. I can only spend $50 a day. And we only have the bandwidth to create three different ads over the next two or three weeks.” I want you to give me a basic funnel. What would you do if you could only make three ads? And then first, though, if you can go over a little bit more of the presell page because people may be wondering a little bit about that. Like what that content’s about.

 

 

Ezra Firestone: Let me tell you about a funnel that we’re using. That we’re actually running three different ads to. We’re spending $400 a day, but we started at $50. The way that I would do it. The three advertising assets that I would create would be: Number 1, a video ad that introduced the brand, told the story behind the product, demonstrated the product, and had a customer testimonial in it. Basically, when I say introduce the brand, I mean introduce the problem that people are having that your product solves. I just bought this product where it’s like a bib that suction cups to your mirror, so that you can shave and not get hair all over the sink and not piss off your wife.

 

 

Keith Krance: Nice.

 

 

Ezra Firestone: I always shave. I’ve got a beard and I shave. Then I spend 30 minutes cleaning up the sink because I know that Carrie really doesn’t like it when there’s hair on the sink. It’s much more pleasurable for her to use the sink when it’s not full of my hair, which I totally dig. It’s a problem that I was having and I saw this ad and this ad was perfect. What it did was like, “Do you have this problem?” and then it showed all the hair all over the sink. “Well, check out this product,” and then it showed the ownership benefit of the product. The product in use. Then it went into a customer testimonial, and then it led to a long-form sales page about that product. It was a genius funnel. I would create a top of the funnel video ad that did those things: introduce the problem, showed the solution, had a customer testimonial, call to action, all that.

 

 

  Then I would create a retargeting image ad. An image ad that led directly to the product offer page that would be to retarget people who watched 50% or more of the video, but didn’t click through. I have the video ad that would lead to long-form sales page. Then I would retarget people who watched 50% or more of the video with an image ad that also led back to the long-form sales page. Anyone who clicks on the video, I would also retarget right back to the long-form sales page.

 

 

Just to give you a practical example of this: Right now, I’m running an ad and I’m running a link ad. I’m not even using a video. I’m just running a direct link ad. It links directly to a long-form sales page for one of my brands. The brand is BeeFriendly Skincare. It’s a seven-figure organic skin care brand. Basically, anyone who clicks the ad gets retargeted with a discount. And anyone who spent 25%, the top 25% of people onsite—you can do this thing now where you can create an audience of people who spent the most time on your website. We’re retargeting people who spent the most time with a more aggressive discount. That’s it. We’re just leading them right back to the offer page. It goes image ad, offer page, and then we retarget them.

   
Keith Krance: Love it. Love it.

 

 

Ezra Firestone: I think that’s the easiest funnel to set up for someone who’s starting with advertising is some kind of video or some kind of image, but I would recommend a video that leads directly to an offer page.

 

 

Keith Krance: You’ve got to be able to tell a story. If you can lead in, build that relationship with a video. Add one simple form of retargeting like you said just to get people back because people are busy. You don’t want to do all this stuff at once, and you don’t have to. You’re going to start seeing your results double, triple as soon as you start to add one of these at a time.

 

 

Ezra Firestone: Here’s a sneaky trick. A sneaky trick is to run your initial ad set, your video ad or your image ad on a mobile phone. Only run it on iPhones. Don’t run your desktop. Don’t run right-side rail on desktop. Don’t run anything else. Then, for all your retargeting run it on iPad and desktop. What you’re doing, in that case, is you’re forcing the user path to be starting on mobile and then ending when they’re most likely to make a purchase on a desktop or an iPad. The reason that’s a good idea is because Facebook came out with a statistic recently that 33% of people who start on a mobile phone convert on a desktop. Of people who convert, opt-in, purchase, whatever, 33% of them are starting on mobile and finishing on desktop. People are moving to bigger devices to make purchases. And 67% of people, so 2/3 of people, are starting on one device and finishing on another.

 

 

If you run your top level, your video ad that leads to your offer page or your image ad that leads to your offer page on mobile. And then you run your retargeting that’s leading people who engaged in some way—they watched 50% or more of the video or they made it to the offer page—but didn’t buy on desktop and iPad, you’re giving yourself the best chance of converting. You’re filtering out traffic that’s less likely to convert.

   
Keith Krance: Money. Love it.

 

 

Ralph Burns: Totally make sense. So, your windows for all these different retargetings is seven to ten days? Or do you ever do like one to two?

 

 

Keith Krance:

 

 

There’s might be a little longer because they’re a more complex funnel. For somebody starting out…

 

 

Ezra Firestone:

 

 

Somebody starting out, seven to ten days, dude. That’s going to be the easiest way to make that work.

 

 

What we’re doing. We’re in an interesting spot where basically every woman over 40, who’s on Facebook, has seen our ads. I literally have an ad set right now that I spend three grand a day on. This one ad set. Women over 40 in America. No targeting. It’s like ten or 15 million people, whatever it is. I’m doing it a little bit different. In the sense that we have this campaign that has gotten so big and so broad and everyone’s seen our ads that we’re being a little more aggressive in our retargeting. We’re being more aggressive in our top-line because we scaled it so crazy.

 

This other campaign that I’m talking about where we’re spending 400 bucks, in that case we’re doing ten-day retargeting windows. Because it’s a smaller campaign, we don’t have as much of a budget for that business. We want to make it work and gradually increase and work our way outward.

   
Molly Pittman: That’s great, Ezra.

 

 

Keith Krance: Love it.

 

 

Ezra Firestone: To answer your question about the presell page, the way that we do those is we make sure that the content on the presell page relates to the problem that our product solves. If I have makeup tips for women over 40, we happen to have a makeup line that is geared towards women over 40, then what happens is it eludes to a solution which is our product. It starts talking about the solution to that problem that they’re facing that the initial content introduced. Though it didn’t introduce the problem, they already had this problem. The way that it works is then it links over to the offer page. What happens is instead of us saying, “Hey, buy our stuff,” we’re saying, “Hey, consume this content.” Then they’re like, “Oh, this is an interesting thing,” and they click over to the offer. They’re chasing the offer rather than us chasing them with the offer. They’re consuming content and then clicking through.

 

 

  Another example would be like five tips to have better skin, or whatever and then it links over to a cool supplement that helps you with your digestive health. Check it out. Another way, “Hey, I’m Bob and I had diabetes. Man, I didn’t realize that I was eating high fructose corn syrup and all this bad stuff. Then I found that drinking more water and taking this stuff really helped me out,” and then it links over to a sort of case study type of presell.

 

 

Now, I sell software and I sell information, and you know how I sell that stuff? I sell it the same way: using a video and then a presell article. But when I’m selling software or I’m selling information, the presell article is just a case study about how the software or information helped the business. It’s like, “Hey, check this out. How I grew my Amazon business to $100,000 a month.” It lays out a strategy and then it says, “Hey, if you want more of this, check out this webinar,” and then it leads to a webinar that then makes an offer. The same principles apply. You can leverage content that is related to a problem that someone’s having that eludes to a solution that you have in any market.

   
Keith Krance: If you’re leading as a presell page with a video, is the hook with the video similar to the article?

 

 

Ezra Firestone: In our case, it’s not at all. In our case, it’s just like, “Hey, we have this cool brand. It’s a little different because we talk about this stuff. Here’s who we are. These are our products. This is how they work,” and then it links to an article that’s five makeup tips for women over 40. This video is introducing them to this radical brand of cosmetics and skin care that’s geared towards their demographic, and then we just link over to a piece of content, that’s also interesting, from the brand that then leads to the offer page. What was interesting was we thought that linking from the video directly to the offer page would outperform going to the presell article, but for some reason, the presell is just so good that it just outperforms.

 

 

Keith Krance: I can see why. If your video was leading with a content like that, then I think it would be easy to transition from the video to the offer.

 

 

Ezra Firestone: If you’re listening to this podcast and all of this has just seemed super crazy, in the show notes we’ll include an image that you can look at while you’re listening and it will make so much more sense.

 

 

Keith Krance: Digitalmarketer.com/podcast. Episode 63.

 

 

Ezra Firestone: Should we talk about the numbers really quick?

 

 

Ralph Burns: Let’s talk numbers.

 

 

Keith Krance: Yeah. Yeah. Let’s talk some numbers.

 

 

Ezra Firestone: Facebook is telling me that I had 30,345,296 video views. I spent 700 grand to get those. The problem is that Facebook counts a video view as three seconds. I don’t really consider that a video view. I would consider a video view as someone who completed maybe 25% of my video. They made it through a minute or two, right? I had three million of those. It cost me 700 grand for three million video views. If I do the math—

 

 

Ralph Burns: On average, seeing about a minute, minute-and-a-half, maybe two minutes, of a four to six-minute video. They’re clicking on that video and watching it. Maybe not turning the sound up. Very different than somebody who just passes it in the news feed and hovers over it.

 

 

Ezra Firestone: Dude, 23¢ to get two minutes of face time with a prospect about your brand. It’s incredible.

 

 

Keith Krance: Compare that to a link click to like a… There’s no comparison.

 

 

Ralph Burns: It’s going to be three times as much.

 

 

Ezra Firestone: It’s crazy. Basically, that’s why a video is the perfect top of the funnel conversion asset because you can get so much face time with people for really, really affordable prices.

 

 

Molly Pittman: Absolutely.

 

 

Keith Krance: We actually did a case study. We did a research for B2C and a B2B. We looked at the average cost per click to a blog post and compared it to a three-second video view, ten-second view, 25%, and all the way up to 95%. It’s crazy. In the B2C, it was 7¢ per click to an ungated blog post. It was 3¢ for a ten-second video view, 3¢ for a 25% video view, and 4¢ for 50%. But you’re talking about half the cost! In my opinion, it’s a much higher-quality lead because they’re watching your video. In the B2B, it was an even bigger difference. It was 88¢ per click to website and 15¢ per 25% video view.

 

 

Ezra Firestone: It’s incredible. If you take one thing away from this podcast as a beginner advertiser, if you’re just starting out, no matter what sales funnel you have in place, presell page, long-form sales page, whatever you’ve got going on. Create a video ad, that is done fairly well, that you then retarget people based on how much of it they consumed: 50%, 75%, 95%. That one strategy alone will be very helpful.

 

 

Keith Krance: Love it. Love it. We talked about that more. We’ve talked about video ads on several episodes on this podcast. Chris Stoikos on Episode 56 talked about how they generated over 127 million video views in the last 14 months. All this stuff works. It blows up your business.

 

 

Great stuff. Crazy numbers. You sold 84,583 jars of face cream and then several million video views. Through this entire process, you’re building your brand in such a big way.

 

Ezra Firestone: Building customers. People who like us. People who’ve seen content. People who may engage with us in a couple of months because when we run sale campaigns we also run to the retargeting list or people who ended up on our email list on one of those offers but didn’t buy who then buy when we have a sale. It just builds over time.

 

 

Keith Krance: Love it. Love it. Love it. All right. Get to the show notes. Look through those visuals while you’re listening to this. This is an episode that I recommend listening to multiple times. This is high-level stuff. This is game changing. This will literally change your life if you implement just the basic three ad campaign we talked about here. Don’t be afraid to listen to this stuff multiple times because we know it works. We’ve seen it work in tons and tons of different industries. Ezra, dude, thanks a lot for coming on. It’s been awesome. Molly, what’s the URL they can find out more about the certification?

 

 

Molly Pittman: Digitalmarketer.com/ecommerce.

 

 

Keith Krance: Sweet. Sweet. All right, Ezra.

 

 

Ezra Firestone: Ralph, Molly, Keith, thanks so much.

 

 

Molly Pittman: Thank you so much, Ezra. This was great.

 

 

Ralph Burns: Thanks for bringing that, man. Awesome stuff.

 

 

Keith Krance: Sweet. Sweet. All right. Talk to you next week. Bye-bye.

 

 

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