Introduction
Hey everybody. My name is Adam Arkfeld, president and founder of Paracore. I’m really excited to be talking about Facebook advertising today. So today, we’re going to be talking about “The 5 Critical Concepts Every Facebook Marketer Needs To Know.” I only have 30 minutes and a wide range of people participating on this call. So what I wanted to do was add a little bit of value in a lot of different areas. So I wanted to talk about some of the key tactics that we use at ParaCore when it comes to Facebook advertising and I’m going to provide something for everybody.
So I’m not going to spend an incredible amount of time on each topic, each one could be a two-hour conversation. If you want to learn more, grab my email, it will be at the end also, and we can talk more about it. But we’re going to talk about some of the key things that we think about and we look at when we’re running Facebook ads at my agency, ParaCore.
Cold Brew & Facebook Ads: A parallel
All right, so first of all, I want to set the stage here a little bit, tell you a little bit of a story. So I love cold brew coffee. Cold brew coffee is my jam. I drink coffee cold brew just all the time whether it’s hot or cold. I make it myself. I do the thing. When we moved into our office about 18 months ago, I thought I’m going to get a cold brew keg and I’m going to serve cold brew in the office. I was super excited about it. So I make my own cold brew, I had a 5-gallon jar there that you can see it’s going into the cold brew keg. I put it in the kegerator, I pull the tap cold brew comes out. It’s like nectar of the gods. I’m drinking it and it’s amazing, right.
Okay, so I have my cold brew in the office, I love cold brew, I’m doing my thing. And the next morning I come in, it’s a couple of days before the open house, and I pull the tap, cold brew comes out, super excited, you know, free-flowing cold brew. I drink it and it tastes terrible, just absolutely terrible. And I didn’t know what happened. And it had literally only been one day, cold brew lasts refrigerated for quite a long period of time, and I did not understand why it tasted terrible. So I got rid of that entire batch. I did another 5-gallon batch, and they take a long time. I did the exact same thing, pulled it, worked, and tasted great. Next day, it tasted terrible.
So what I learned over time was that I was using CO2, like you use when you have soda, for my gas, so compressing, pushing the cold brew down, comes out the tap, I was using CO2. CO2 doesn’t work for cold brew because it takes on the taste with CO2, which is fine with soda, but not with cold brew. I needed to use nitrogen.
So the reason that I tell you this story is because there are many, many parallels with Facebook ads to this destroying my entire batch of cold brew situation. With Facebook ads, you can do something easily like boost a post or run a simple ad and get some moderate results and be okay on a small scale. But when you start to scale and grow your campaign, you run into different challenges.
There are also a variety of nuances within the Facebook advertising platform like the difference between using CO2 or food-grade nitrogen that you should know about so that it doesn’t destroy your entire batch of advertising.
That’s what I’m going to go over today. I’m not going to give you a step-by-step guide on how to do Facebook ads. I’m not going to tell you what Facebook ads are, you already know what they are. We’re going to talk about how you can run a very successful Facebook marketing campaign with a few key concepts that you need to know to make sure that you’re successful. So we’re going to get right into it.
Today’s Agenda:
- Facebook Pixel: Don’t advertise blind
- Coca-Cola & Facebook Pixel
- Creating compelling ads
- Fly tips to share with your hipster marketing friends
So we’re going to talk about five strategies for Facebook dominance, okay. The first thing we’re going to talk about is what it’s like to drive in the dark without headlights. Not very fun. The second thing is what Coca-Cola and your Facebook pixel have in common. Third, being ads for the “I’m not creative folks.” We hear a lot about people talking about creating ads and how they don’t feel comfortable creating ads. We’re going to talk about when it’s not the Facebook ads that are the problem. And then the fifth one is looking fly with your hipster marketing friends. So this is like the type of stuff some of the tools and tactics that are sort of small that you can talk about, people are like, “Ooh, you’re cool, man.” And they’ll be really good tips and things that we find really valuable with ParaCore.
Facebook Ads + Facebook Pixel
All right, drive in the dark without headlights, so clearly nobody would do that, this is not an intro that I need to elaborate on. When you’re driving, and you have the headlights on, you can see where you’re going right. And so the parallel that I want to talk about is your Facebook pixel and the value and importance of the Facebook pixel in your Facebook advertising. And if you don’t have a pixel and you’re not using the pixel correctly, it’s as if you are driving without your headlights on and you have no idea where you’re going. You may or may not make it there, you may or may not crash into a building. And neither of those situations are very good you’re going to end up somewhere, you just don’t know where, or you’re going to end up hurt. In the Facebook world, that means you’re going to be spending a lot of money and not really making any money.
Retargeting your ads
So when it comes to the Facebook pixel, the pixel is a piece of code that you put on your website that tracks all Facebook activity. Pixels are associated with ad accounts, and the pixel contains incredible value. Now the very first thing that you want to do with the pixel is you want to have a developer install on your website. If you need help with that, shoot me an email, but you go to the events manager in your Facebook Ads Manager to make sure the pixel is installed.
Now, when the pixel is installed, all traffic that’s running to your website, the pixel tracks those users and tracks those visitors. And when all that traffic is coming, whether it’s from Facebook, or from any other source…I know that we’ve got an SEO conversation this morning and we’re going to have other methods of traffic coming to your website, the pixel is tracking all of those people. It’s just like the Google pixel. Now when that traffic comes to your website, by having a mature and populated pixel, you can then retarget those visitors on Facebook.
So that’s the follow effect that so many people talk about when they talk about Facebook and pay-per-click advertising marketing. You have to have the Facebook pixel on your website so that anyone that visits your website, you have the opportunity to market to them when they are on Facebook and browsing through their feed. So that’s the very first advantage of having a pixel is that you can do retargeting to your audience and stay in front of them for a long period of time. As we know, you need to be in front of people for many, many impressions. I don’t know what the number is right now, but a lot of impressions.
Set up conversions
The second thing with your pixel is that you want to have a developer, yourself or someone else, set up conversions. Now, if you’re running ads and you don’t have conversion tracking set up, you’re driving in the dark. You have no idea if your ads are working, you have no idea if they’re driving business. You could be spending $1,000, $5,000, $50,000 a month on advertising, but if you don’t have a pixel firing for a conversion, you don’t even know if they’re working. You don’t know which ads are working, which audiences are working, or which ad sets are working. So it’s hyper-important, super-crazy-critical to make sure that your pixel is installed and it’s firing conversions. So step one is getting the pixel on your website so that you can retarget with traffic. Step two is making sure that the pixel is firing for conversions, which is just very critical to know if it’s actually working.
Pulling in offline conversions
Then step three is pulling in offline conversions. And offline conversions are conversions that occur not online. That’s why they’re considered offline. So the reason I bring this up is a lot of people say phone calls are dead, nobody calls anymore. And while that’s true, in some respects, we know as a pay-per-click marketing agency, that that’s not entirely true. For a lot of our clients, home services, legal, you know, a lot of the professional services, we typically see maybe 20% to 30% of leads coming through with phone calls.
So if you think about the fact that you don’t know if your Facebook advertising or your Google advertising or anything else is driving a phone call then you’re really only attributing 70% of your conversions to your advertising. So that means that your cost per lead may look artificially higher than it actually is.
What I love about CallRail and one of the reasons I’m here because we work with them quite extensively is CallRail allows you to attribute phone calls from your advertising back into the ad network so you know exactly how many conversions are occurring in your Facebook ad platform. And that also requires the pixel but it also requires a third-party platform like CallRail.
So with Facebook on its own, you cannot attribute phone calls to your Facebook marketing without the third-party platform, it’s impossible. Google has a couple of options like click-to-call that sort of work, they don’t work great. But something like CallRail really allows you to pull that data back in. So the way that it works is someone clicks an ad, they go to your website, and maybe they leave the website. And then they go back to the website later through maybe another ad, and they make a phone call, and they talk to a representative.
That call is then sent from CallRail to an offline conversion set which is then fed into your conversions in Facebook and allows you to see exactly how many phone calls came from your Facebook advertising. Now that is incredibly important, especially if you’re running a high volume of advertising and your cost per lead is important to you. Because it may be artificially high, you may be thinking, this advertising is not working for me. And the only thing worse than thinking that the advertising isn’t working for you…or excuse me, not knowing if advertising is working for you is the advertising is working for you and you turn it off because you think it isn’t. It’s a terrible place to be where you think the advertising is not working, you then turn it off and it actually was working, and then you have a negative impact that’s bigger than you thought it was. So that’s why conversion tracking is so important.
So CallRail is a third-party platform that does that, you’re all on their digital marketing boot camp. That’s one of the main advantages or one of the key reasons that we use the platform like that because it’s super helpful. So the pixel allows you to see the traffic that’s coming to your website and retarget those people. It allows you to track conversions so you know which campaigns are working. And then the pixel and CallRail in combination allow you to track phone calls, which are offline conversions.
Action Items:
- Install Pixel on every page
- Ensure Pixel fires on every conversion
- Measure CallRail conversions with offline event sets
So action items if you find yourself lacking in any of these areas. If you’re not doing any advertising on Facebook, just build an ad account, install the pixel, have someone do it, super important. Even if you’re not advertising yet, it’ll start building that pixel. So you can retarget them later if you want to. Ensure the pixel is fired on every single conversion, you want to make sure that’s triggering a conversion so that you can see which ads are actually generating leads versus what you’re just spending your budget. You don’t want to spend your budget on ad sets or audiences because then you’re just losing money. And then third, measure CallRail conversions with offline event sets. So measure phone conversions with offline event sets. You can only do that through a third-party platform like CallRail, which is why they’re so awesome.
What Coca-Cola & Facebook Pixel have in common
Coca Cola and your Facebook pixel. All right, so now we’ve talked about the pixel why it’s important because when someone visits your website, the pixel fires, it tracks that visitor, and then it knows who’s been visiting your website. Now, Coca-Cola has a secret recipe that they’ve held secret for like over 100 years. Based on my research, I don’t know if this changes on a regular basis or not, but only two people in the world know the full recipe. They’re not allowed to fly on the same plane because if that plane goes down, then the two people that know the full recipe go down with it. So it’s highly secret, it’s highly specialized, and it’s one of the keys to Coca-Cola’s success. Nobody can duplicate the recipe and nobody’s been able to figure it out, right. So I think a lot of people have heard about the fact that they have this super-secret recipe so it’s not a big surprise, but that’s Coca-Cola’s thing.
Facebook Pixel is your secret recipe
Now, the parallel is your Facebook pixel is your secret recipe to success for your business. Now, the people that are visiting your website are your best customers. And the Facebook pixel takes all of those visitors and it puts them in a bucket and it takes all their attributes and you know exactly who they are. It is your secret recipe for success for your business specifically. Every business has a unique profile of visitors and the Facebook pixel picks up that profile.
So your pixel is your proprietary secret recipe. When people are coming to the website – We already talked about website retargeting, which is number one on this list.
Creating lookalike audiences
Now, the second concept I want to talk about is what’s called lookalike audiences and lookalike traffic. So if you have, let’s say, 10,000 people visiting your website, and those 10,000 people have certain characteristics, they live in a certain area, they like certain things, let’s say you sell yoga mats or something, they have a certain lifestyle of health and activity and fitness. All of these attributes are going to be pulled into this Facebook pixel.
And then you can take that exact list of website traffic or conversions or a database list that you upload to Facebook. There are a lot of different ways to create your base audience but the pixel is one of the best. And then you say, all right, Facebook, you’re smart. I want you to create an audience of people on Facebook that look like or are similar to the people that are already visiting my website or already converting. And you say, create a lookalike audience and Facebook goes out and does its magic. And the audiences are in the range of 0% to 10%. So typically, people do a 0% to 1% audience and about it’s two million people in size. And those two million people have similar characteristics to your customers.
So it’s basically saying take your 100 customers and find an audience that’s very similar to those people because they’re likely to buy your product. When you create a lookalike audience, on this graphic here you can see your customers and kind of brings them all down to the Facebook world, which is, you know, the gray headshots and then the blue headshots. Then Facebook says, well, these are people that are the right match so we’re going to put these people in the audience, and then we’re going to spit out a lookalike audience. And so you can feed your lookalike audience with web traffic, with offline conversions, also through CallRail, you can do it through online conversions, you can do it through website purchases. You can take a database list and upload that list and say create a lookalike audience off of this.
So these lookalike audiences are incredibly powerful. So I would recommend taking your website traffic and telling Facebook to create that lookalike audience for you and running ads to it. Don’t add any layers on top, don’t add additional interest, just let Facebook do its thing, and it’s probably going to work out for you. We tend to see look-alike audiences performing the best out of all of our audiences except for maybe just standard retargeting. Lookalike audiences are incredibly powerful and I have some campaigns that are just lookalikes spending hundreds of thousands a month that just keep feeding into each other and getting better, extremely powerful.
Facebook audience action Items:
- Start retargeting traffic
- Build website traffic lookalike audiences
- Use website traffic, conversions, engagement, calls, etc.
So Facebook action items with look alike audiences. With your pixel, you can start retargeting traffic that’s coming to your website, I would highly recommend doing that. That allows you to stay in front of people for those impressions. I talked about that a little bit in the first session.
Number two is building a website traffic lookalike audience. This one is easy to do. If you have your pixel on your website, and you’re starting Facebook advertising, just create an audience that’s lookalike traffic, and then you can run traffic to that lookalike audience. It tends to do quite well.
Number three, using website traffic, conversions, engagement, calls, these are more advanced integrations into the lookalike audience but also very powerful. So you can feed all of that information into a lookalike audience and get the user exactly like your other customers on your website or your actual customers and show ads to them. So Facebook lookalike audiences are super powerful.
And throughout my presentation, which I’m already into, I’m going to be talking about audiences, I’m going to be talking about ads, I’m going to be talking about conversions. So those are the three main areas that we look at in any Facebook campaign to see how the campaign is converting overall. I wanted to mention that because we just talk about audiences, and audiences are the people you’re showing your ads to.
Creating compelling ads
Next, I want to talk about ads. I talked to a lot of owners, a lot of marketers, a lot of just people in the community and people seem to have anxiety around creating ads. There’s something intimidating about it, it seems like a lot of work. If you’re having a video done, you might spend thousands of dollars on a video, might take a month to three months, then you launch, it doesn’t do well. And you’ve spent three to six months spending some money creating a video, didn’t have momentum, and it was overproduced and it just didn’t work because something was just wrong with the video.
So what I would encourage you to do, watching this video today, is if you take one thing away, and you’re running advertising, the one thing that I really want you to do is I want you to try creating a bunch of different types of ads with different formats. And I’m going to show you a couple here, a couple that we find interesting, are kind of low threshold, and are easy to create, but also unique. Because Facebook loves variety and consumers love variety. They don’t love the standard, you know, husband and wife standing in front of a home with a for sale sign. It’s been done a thousand, a million times, right. So we’re going to talk about some different ad formats for the folks that say, “I’m not creative.”
All right, so these are just a few ideas. So really, this is just me giving you some ideas and a few tools to make great ads to try out to see how they go.
Facebook videos
So the first one is Facebook videos. This is a screenshot right from the Facebook Ads Manager. If you have a stockpile of images, if you have, like an ISTOP account or a Getty account, or you’re just using Facebook’s stock photos, you can take those videos and say, “I want to create a Facebook video which is basically a slideshow that Facebook throws some text on.”
Now, it sounds kind of uneventful. If you’re an ads manager, you run a lot of ads, you might say, “that’s kind of lame.” That’s like Facebook’s interface, it’s going to be kind of like not that exciting. We’ve created some of these videos and while I often think they’re not that exciting, they do quite well because they’re engaging, they’re videos, you can retarget how long they’re watching the video, and they just tend to convert better than images. So use Facebook videos native slideshow production features when you’re creating ads because you can just throw in a couple of images, throw in a little bit of text, and it’s going to shoot out something interesting. Try it out. If it doesn’t work, throw it away. Do it again, throw it away.
Promo Videos
So here are the different ad formats that Facebook has for you, the different templates, and there’s a bunch of different options, they’re different lengths and with a variety of image needs. We started using promo.com for videos lately, they just have really interesting videos, easy interface for throwing text on top. Do you want to create a video? Sign up for promo.com, I have no affiliation with them. I just think the service is amazing. And you get cool videos like this like a pug with heart sunglasses saying, “Love has no face.” And obviously, you can change that text, but just cool stuff that grabs the consumers’ attention.
And the entire reason that I’m highlighting some of these different options is because you want to grab the consumers’ attention. The husband and wife in front of the house with the for sale sign is boring. Everyone’s seen that, they’re just going to scroll right past it. You see this pug with heart sunglasses, you’re going to stop because it’s just sort of interesting. So I would encourage you that anytime you’re creating that, do something that just makes people…and even if it has nothing to do with your business, do something that’s interesting and write the copy around the image. Don’t create the image and write the copy around it. Find an interesting image, then write copy, or an interesting video, then write copy.
Facebook Polls
Next, on the right-hand side here we have Facebook polls. Polls are a new feature that can be used on videos. On the bottom of this one, it says “Are you on a PPC island with your job? This is me trying to hire people to work for ParaCore in Phoenix because a lot of people work solo in an agency. And it says, “Yes I am and…” I can’t even read it. It says, “Yes I am and I’m fine,” or, “No, and yes, I want more.” I can’t read it from here. But anyway, the idea is when you click that poll, that then opens the landing page so it acts as a click-through and then they see the poll results. So a poll shows up, you click the poll, then it shows the landing page, and it engages someone right into your landing page that really increases engagement click-through rates.
Sketches
Here on the left are our sketches. I just put this one in here because this has been hitting my Facebook feed and this guy claims that sketches are like the new rage. So I don’t know, it seemed interesting, it caught my attention. I literally only include this because it caught my attention. And I haven’t even done a sketch yet. So I want to try that but I haven’t done it but sketches look interesting. You don’t see those on Facebook.
Memes
Memes are cool. I have a brand, this is my brand Edison 21 for Shopify PPC marketing. So my employees like creating memes and, you know, this full-service marketing agency versus Shopify PPC specialist. It’s just interesting that one was timely based on the Super Bowl commercial.
Text Exchanges
The next one that we’ve been experimenting with are text exchanges. This is a video and literally, we will record our phones texting each other back and forth through like screen recording. And then it’ll say, “Hey, like, have you connected with Edison 21 yet?” It’s like, “Yeah, I have, they’re doing awesome.” And we’ll just create a little conversation on text, and we’ll save it as a video and then we’ll upload it on an app. And it is kind of like a social credibility thing, even though it’s not really social credibility. So the idea is, get creative, just try different things and just keep trying them. And anything that catches your attention on Facebook, look at that and just emulate it.
Ad action items:
- Use the slide show ad format
- Find a funny picture and create a “meme”
- Create 5 ads in each ad set with different formats
And I would encourage you to find interesting visuals and then write copy just to support the interesting visuals around your product or service because you can do that, you can create a story about anything. I created a story about cold brew and how it relates to Facebook. You can do that about anything. So use the slideshow ad format, find a funny picture, create a meme, go for meme, just anything that’s trending, like anything that’s trending on Facebook, snag it for a couple of weeks, throw it up there. See how it goes, people like it, they engage with it. And then create five ads in each ad set with different formats. So just throw a bunch of ads up there and see what works. And that’ll get you a lot more comfortable building interesting creatives.
Conversion point
All right, so the third piece that I was mentioning earlier is we have the audiences and then we have the ads. Now we’re going to be talking about the conversion point. So I’m not going to be talking about landing pages because you hear about landing pages a lot. Landing pages tend to convert better and you can do optimizations and testing. What I am going to talk about is the conversion point of if your Facebook ads aren’t working, it may not actually be your Facebook ads. So you may have a good click-through rate, a click-through rate of over 1%, we’re typically fairly happy with that. You may have an interesting ad, you may have good engagement, you may be running a lookalike audience that seems, you know, like it should be fairly well seasoned, but people just aren’t converting.
And so what we’re doing is we’re working with different types of conversion points and I just want to give you one example that convert people in a different, more engaging way.
Messenger chatbots
The first one is by using Messenger chatbots. There’s a platform called ManyChat, which integrates right into Facebook and you can create really interesting chatbots that allow someone to engage and answer questions to see if your services are a fit, or they want to reach out to you, they just want to understand more about what you’re selling. Or if you have some pre-qualification, they can actually pre-qualify themselves by going through a number of questions.
So ManyChat is a third-party platform, starts off about 10 bucks a month, you connect it to your Facebook Messenger ads. So when someone sees an ad, they click the ad, they then are sent into Facebook Messenger and the chatbot initiates and starts asking questions. So this just says, “Hey Max, how can we help you get a quote, schedule a meeting, learn more? Happy to help.” And then you can see that there are prompts that they can select, you can embed video, you can embed an image. But it’s just a far more engaging way to engage your consumer and we’ve run traffic to chatbots that generate leads that have a decent cost per lead. For one financial advisor, it was something like $40 a week.
When we ran Facebook traffic to a landing page, we generated basically no leads. I mean, I think we literally generated zero leads, wasn’t a high amount of spend, but just the results just did not show up. But when we pull them into a chatbot, people can start asking questions, start answering questions to see if the service was a good fit for them. So chatbots are amazing.
In the web version of sort of a chatbot are landing page quizzes or quizzes on your website. So with Facebook, where there’s very low intent, these quizzes and chatbots and interactions are really important because people aren’t really looking for you. They’re not trying to find you, you’re putting yourself in front of them. So when you’re putting yourself in front of them, it’s nice to add some value. So when someone’s going through a chatbot, or they’re going through a landing page quiz, you can actually add value.
A tool like LeadsHook, which we started using, actually allows you to give the consumer a mortgage payment amount based on the information they give you. So they’ll amortize the mortgage in the background and then say, “Hey, your payment is going to be this amount,” which is really powerful, you’re actually giving value. So if you said, “Hey, what’s your current mortgage payment?” They said $900. And then you said, “Great, you know, what’s the mortgage amount, you know, blah, blah, blah? You know, 30-year term, we could actually save you $300 a month by, you know, this new mortgage plan, this interest rate.”
And that’s real value, instead of saying, “Hey, fill out this form to learn about refinancing and saving money.” That’s not real value, that’s serving you. And you’re not getting anything, you’re getting nothing in order to get a form submission. So these landing page quizzes or the Messenger chatbots, someone can come to you and say, “Hey, this is my situation, can you help me?” You can provide a little bit of value, and then they’re more likely to engage and convert because you’ve actually connected and shown you can help.
The landing page quiz on the right is for a personal injury campaign that we run where we’re actually asking, “How were you injured?” You know, “Are you represented by an attorney?” There’s just a sequence of questions to see if they qualify for compensation. And it’s a Facebook campaign, which is typically a little bit harder to get personal injury leads. So if your ads aren’t converting, the ads are interesting, the click-through rate is decent, your cost-per-click is between $1 and $2, and you’re just like, why am I not selling? It might be that you’re not converting.
And these are the three areas that we look at any campaign to ensure that a campaign is working correctly. You’re looking at the audiences, you’re looking at the ads, and then you’re looking at the landing page conversion. So consider using a quiz or conversational landing page. There’s platforms like Drift, which are similar but different. And I would use ManyChat to have conversations. I mean, ManyChat is amazing. I love it. I think it’s really cool.
Looking fly with your hipster marketing friends
All right, so the last thing is a couple of pro tips that we have found are really valuable that a lot of people don’t know about. So if you’re at a marketing event or business owner event, you want to drop a piece of knowledge to sound cool, use one of these things. Because the odds are they probably haven’t heard of it, but if they have, you know, don’t oversell it or anything.
Fly tip 1: Duplicate ads for engagement credibility
Okay, so the first thing is social credibility on Facebook is really important. If someone sees an ad, guy, gal standing in front of the house, for sale sign, they’re not that impressed, right? However, if you saw that ad, and you saw it had 809 comments, and 3,100 shares, you’d be like, “What? Why are there 800 comments on this ad?” Like it just triggers, like, “What is going on?” So the way that you can do that in your Facebook advertising is instead of creating new ads in every ad set, so going and clicking click new ad, you actually duplicate existing ads into different audiences, which keeps the same ad but runs it to different people. Same ad running to different people allows you to build up that social credibility and keep all of the engagement on one ad, which is super powerful.
So the way you do that is you look at an ad you hit the duplicate button, and then at the bottom there it says, show existing reactions, comments, and shares on new ads. You hit duplicate and then, it would use the same ad. Now if you change anything on the ad, if you change the image, if you can change the UTM tag, if you can change the headline, you can change the name of the ad, that’s the only thing I know you can change, if you change anything else on the ad, it will reset the ad, and you will lose the engagement. It won’t reset the original ad, it’ll just reset the new ad that you’re creating and it won’t give you the effect that you want.
So, I mean, we’ve ran an ad where we had a spelling error in it and we did not change it because we didn’t want to reset the engagement. That’s how important these seasoned social proof engagements are. You don’t change anything on the ad unless you absolutely need to or unless you’re trying something very different. But if an ad is performing duplicated across different audiences, you’re going to keep the same social engagement and it’s going to only continue to improve the performance. So fly tip number one, duplicate ads for engagement credibility.
Fly Tip 2: Inspect your audiences for saturation and overlap
Now, we hear all the time “Oh, my audience is saturated. We’ve been in front of them too much. Their frequency is too high.” Like, oftentimes, it’s just speculation. Like, a campaign is running and we just see that it stops performing for some reason, then people say it’s saturated. Or just honestly, like people just don’t quite…we’re just trying to figure out why a campaign stops working. Now, Facebook has tools that allow you to see if an audience is actually saturated. And a lot of people don’t know about this, I’m surprised at how many people know about it, but it’s a really powerful tool.
So when you’re looking at an ad set here on the left, when you hover over it, you see Inspect, View charts, Edit, Duplicate, if you hit the Inspect button, this whole panel on the right pops up, and it shows you all these different metrics around first-time impression share, total percent of audience reached, and things of that nature. First-time impression share, for example, this tells you of all the people that saw your ad in a period of time. So let’s say I selected the month of February, how many people saw it for the first time? How many people were just being introduced to your ad in this time period? So that’s the first-time impression share.
If that first-time impression share gets very low, it means that people have seen your ad before and they’re starting to see it again multiple times and you may be getting to a point of a little bit of saturation.
First-time impression shares should start off as very high. And ideally, you would maintain around 50% to 60%. This screenshot here is showing 38%, which starts to get a little bit low. Now, keep in mind that when you change the time period on this, this will change because this is based on time periods. So explore the time period, if someone is seeing your ad…if the first-time impression share is 10% over a long period of time that might be different than 10% over a short period of time.
The second thing that this panel has is…well, it also shows you when you’ve made major changes, and it kicks back into the learning phase, which is where it says ad set budget is updated. That shows that yellow bar, which is when ad campaigns are running again. But the last thing that you can see in here is actually how much of your audience you’ve reached. And that’s another chart that I’m not showing, but it’ll show you how much of the audience you’ve reached in a period of time. So it’ll say, hey, you’ve reached 20% of your audience, clearly not saturated. But, you know, in the Facebook world, maybe that’s starting to get a little bit high.
Here’s the audience saturation example, it’ll show you, you know, reached lifetime 95,000, audience reached ratio .74%, and it shows you first-time impression and things like that. So the reach lifetime is really valuable and the first-time impression share.
Fly tip 3: Scale your ads like the pros
Okay, last one because I’m running out of time, scale your ads like the pros. So like I was talking about with the cold brew coffee, scaling my coffee production broke down pretty hardcore. I went from filling little jugs to filling a 5-gallon keg, and that didn’t work out so well. So when you’re scaling Facebook ads, similar effects occur. If you’re running an ad campaign for, let’s say, $200 a day and you’re getting great results and your client or you say, “Let’s go to $400 a day,” great. Don’t go to just $400 a day. What that does is it kicks Facebook into the learning phase again, and it kind of resets the algorithm and your performance will likely drop quite dramatically. Some of you watching this might have experienced performance decrease dramatically when you’ve increased your campaigns too fast.
So a rule of thumb that we use, you want to avoid going back into the learning phase every time you increase your budget, if you want to be conservative, and really make sure that like nothing is going to change, increase your campaign by 10% every 48 hours. So if you’re running a campaign for $200 a day, you can change it to $220 a day, run that for 2 days, and then you can change it to $244 a day, whatever it is, run that for two days, and then add 10% on top of that, but you increase it very gradually with small steps. You don’t double the budget in one day.
You can be a little bit more aggressive if you want, which is 15% every 24 hours. Honestly, I probably wouldn’t do that. I might do 15% every 48 hours. If you really want to maintain and you’re not in a hurry to scale, then do the 10% every 48 hours or 15% every 48 hours. Don’t get too aggressive on this because if you make a mistake, it’s done, there’s no latitude on it. So it’s sort of a better safe than sorry scenario, you just don’t want to make that mistake. So that’s the third tip, scaling ads like the pros.
So my time is up, it’s 11:02 here in Atlanta. My name is Adam, my email is adam@paracore.com if you want to connect. And I’ll be back later today talking about Google ads and five tips for that campaign as well. Thanks for watching.
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