How to Advertise on Facebook: Pro Tips from Dennis Yu

Dennis | 3:28
And, what I said this is in front of a lot of people. This is the entire GoDaddy audience. We did it live, we did it as webinars, and they said: “You know, even if it’s just you and you don’t have other people, you don’t have other businesses, you’re still going to need a Business Manager.” Because they’re going to want to collect more of your data, and that’s exactly what’s happening with iOS 14. And what you’re seeing happening with Google Privacy Sandbox and Chromium. And, you know, the Pixels going away. Right? You know, all the cookies are dying next year. Right? So you could see that I was basically, I didn’t predict this part, but I knew it was going to be important. 

Dennis | 4:10
So, I’m going to show you some things on the structure of Ad accounts on Facebook, that apply to TikTok, and Snapchat. And by the way, if you’ve not set up your TikTok and Snapchat Ad accounts, and the corresponding business managers, then I recommend that you do that. And also, do it by getting free money.

So full disclosure Snapchat and TikTok have reached out to us. And we are a partner, so they asked us to create training on Snapchat, on TikTok ads. Which is great, right? Because they said: “Oh, you guys have all the training on Facebook ads. Can you do the same for us?” We’re happy to.

So you’re going to see more stuff come out on TikTok. For Business Blog. And the same for Snapchat.

So if you sign up with us, you get free money, I think, $150 on Snapchat and $200 on TikTok, plus another $2,000 on TikTok when you spend the first, forgot the exact amount like a couple of hundred dollars. 

Dennis | 5:06
Alright, I’m going to go with an example here. You guys have probably seen the face socks that we have. And this is where you can put your dog or cat’s face or your face on socks. But also, masks, this is really popular. Then we call these limits. So all kinds of personalization. Printing here, right?

And you can see that there’s a lot of examples, there’s a lot of UGC.

And we’re primarily using Facebook Ads to drive sales here. Between this and the other places, where we’re doing the same thing.

So, if we go to blitzgifts.com.

So, you never see anybody in eCom shows this stuff off. But, I’m actually about to log in and show you this. These are all Shopify stores very easy to do.

Dennis | 5:58
You see the same thing, right. Here, you can come to get your face socks. And if you know me, you’ve probably gotten your face socks right here. It is and then it comes with a handwritten note.

And you know we are selling close to seven figures a month doing this, which is kind of neat. Okay.

So we’ve got all this UGC of people that are submitting pictures of their faces with socks on them.

So let’s go over here into the ad account. And this is for Pet Party. We’ve got a few of them, and they’re all the same thing it’s for sports, or for pets, or for business, but either way, it’s a customization of your face or your pets’ face. And I’m at the campaign level, and you can see that we’ve got 85 campaigns. So we’ve done a lot of testing 1.3 million here spent.

And let’s look at just the top level, to see what’s going on here. And then we’re going to drill into what the strategy is on bidding and targeting this kind of thing. 

Dennis | 6:59
So this has driven us 147 million Impressions for 28 million Reach, so that gives us a frequency of about four, right, maybe five, and I care about this because I want to know generally what does Facebook think about my ads, regardless of whether it’s converting this is a secondary metric, of course, it’s got to convert, of course you know I have to be profitable, but I just want to look at it always from Facebook’s standpoint. So, when I look at the breakdown by or by delivery. Now I’m able to see my costs and you can see here right I can, I can drill, I can group it by any of these other metrics or set of metrics.

My CPM is $8.96. Which I would have said, two, three years ago, that was high and that’s actually average now on Facebook, especially when you do the remarketing. The smaller the audience, the more they’re going to charge you. And this is something, I’ve seen especially true on Facebook, but not so much on the other networks. So, this is another argument, that you want to set your audiences larger. Not because you just want to hit people randomly, but because the system is going to be able to optimize for you. And they’re not gonna charge you as much on that traffic. So you get a double win here. 

Dennis | 8:18
Now you look over here, my Cost per 1000 People Reachedis $45. So why is that, $45 per 1000 people, that’s kind of high that’s four cents per person, right $45 is 4000 pennies. 4000 pennies on 1000 people’s four cents. That’s how I do the math. But if my CPM per 1000 Impressions is $8.96 and it’s $45 per 1000 reach, that means that my Frequency is about 5, right?

Actually, here it is 5.09. The average person is seeing my ad five times. But it could be five times across three or four different campaigns, it could be five times at the exact same ad, it could be across different ad sets. So, when I look at my frequency here, in this case, this is a lifetime. This account has been going for a couple of years. It’s not necessarily bad. A lot of people say we “shouldn’t have the frequency, go above two per ad set per week”. Well, yeah, generally true, but then Frequency and Audience Network versus Mobile news feed. And all that’s very different, so I could go over here and then break it down by where. Let’s see. I can.

What am I, here we go, right, I can go by all these other sorts of factors, but I don’t want to do that right now. Okay.

Dennis | 9:35
Now, let’s look at what actually counts. I want to see, are making money or not. So I’ve got all these different ways that I can look at the data by default, I look at the Performance:

And sometimes I set up another view, and I’ll call it “I love Paul, Rayzanov,” right. Just, just for fun. And we used to name these things and name our campaigns and name our ads, “we love Facebook reps,” right, that way we are less likely to be disapproved, or we even like this actually worked we would name campaigns, “please don’t disapprove I need this to pay rent”. Right. I’m just telling you, this kind of thing that works, okay.

Dennis | 10:15
So, you can see here, that we’re measuring how many Website Purchases we have. And we know that if we get a purchase for less than $30. You know if our CPA is less than $30. In other words, our ROAS is at least 1, we’re doing pretty well.

Why? Because there are repeat purchases because people who buy one pair of socks will often add another one. Because why not? It’s cheaper, right? You can get one pair for $25, two pairs for $40. If you use the coupon, you get 20% off, so it’s even cheaper. And these things work, so well that we, because we send them a coupon once they buy to get another one. And then their friends see this. So, and a lot of that’s going to be unattributed.

And if you have a good product or service, you’re actually gonna have a lot of unattributed, and we call that there’s another piece of it, that we call delayed attribution. And delayed attribution is in the current window of 28 days, which is now seven days. You know, Facebook cut the window to seven days, because of this whole iOS 14 things. Your ROAS and sales, and all that is going to appear to be lower. But actually, they’re just as good as they were. They just changed the window that the reporting the data.

Dennis | 11:25
Okay, so let’s look at some of these. WCA 60 and WCA 7, this is Website Custom Audience 60 days, Website Custom Audience 7, that’s a site-wide audience, which is driven by the Pixel, which sits inside our Google Tag Manager.

And you can see in this particular ad set, we’ve had 13,000 Clicks, 1800 Purchases, so you can do the math. It’s about 15%. So, that means our Remarketing is working pretty well. So, people who didn’t buy, on the second time or third time. And, by the way, the frequency is going to be a lot higher.

So, to come over here and look at our Frequency, under the Delivery view.

See, our Frequency is an 8, just in this ad set.

And look, our Cost per 1000 people Reached is $93. Holy Moly! Right, our base CPM is $11, because the Frequency is 8, my Cost per Reach is $93. Yet, even with that, if I go back to performance, my ROAS is still excellent. Right?

Dennis | 12:26
And I can see here, ROAS here is 1.7. And your ROAS is going to differ. You just need to know what the math is on what you’re doing.

Some people need to have a ROAS of 5. So, for a lot of people in eCom, their overall blended ROAS needs to be at 4 or 5. Because they can’t afford more than a 20% marketing Cost of sale. Depends on what your margins are, lifetime value, all these kinds of things. Right? And we can see, that for these 13,000 clicks, we can see what the cost is – $20,000. That seems kind of high. But, our conversion rate is very good. So, you can see, because we have a 15% conversion rate, it’s, it’s okay for us to pay a few dollars per click. 

Dennis | 13:10
Now, I can shift to performance and clicks as another view. And see that that’s the case. So, with a CPC of $2 my Link Click-Through Rate is not that good at 0.55.

So, my low Click-Through Rate and my small Remarketing audience cause Facebook to penalize me and say “Hey, we’re going to nail these guys because their relevance score is relatively low.” Right?  So, that means low Engagement, low Click through rates, pretty high Conversion rate. See. So, the cost of the traffic is higher. But I’m here, I’m bidding to conversion. Because I set the objective at conversion. How do I know? Because, when I go back to performance, it looks at the objective that I’ve chosen. Right?

Dennis | 13:54
And I can go down to the ads level and start to see you know what’s going on here. Okay. And by the way, our friends who are on Clubhouse, this is listen-only, because we’re doing the live webinar with my buddy Paul Ryazanov of MageCloud. And we’re going through some live accounts, which you guys get to hear but you can’t see. So, Paul will publish this recording a little bit later. 

So let’s look at the ad level and see how our performance is doing. I like to go by the amount spent descending.

That’s my first metric anytime. There are a lot of ads in here. As you can see, there are 2958 ads. Right? That’s a lot of ads.

Dennis | 14:33
And, by the way, the new strategy to win – you don’t have to create as many ads. We’ve done a lot of testing. And so that’s why we have so many ads over time. And we have a huge team that’s collecting UGC. As you can see, people they’re submitting their faces. And people love their pets, people love promoting their friends. We have to see these ones. There are just so many examples of people that are submitting their dogs. They love their dogs. And we give this stuff out to influencers. And we say “Hey, you know if we give you some socks with your dog’s face or your face, would you be willing to share that on social media?” Of course, they say “Yes!” Because most influencers are not professional influencers, they’re just happy to receive acknowledgment of being treated special. 

Dennis | 15:15
Okay, so we can see these ads. And we can see where we’re keeping the ROAS above 1.

This website purchase ROAS of 1 really translates to a true ROAS of 3. Because, A – we have delayed attribution, which is sales that occurred later, they are untrackable. And then, we have the actual attribution that comes from, you know, first-click versus last-click. By the way, all the data you have here, by definition is last-click. A lot of people are like “Oh no,  I can set the attribution here because, you know, I can choose these windows.

And yeah, okay. Come down here and if I come here and Customize Columns, where I’m looking at different views.

And I can come down here in the bottom.

And you see, it says Attribution Window -> Comparing Windows. You see, here it says I’ve got six windows:

So I have 1 / 7 / 28 Days View, and I have 1 / 7 / 28 Day Click.  This is not attribution modeling.

Dennis | 16:16
Most people think this is attribution. This is not! This is the last click. This is all last click. Everything in Ads Manager, everything across all the data you see in Facebook is all, by default, last click. What’s occurring here is.

And, by the way, if you are performance-oriented in any sort of way, you need to understand this. And a lot of people “Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Dennis talks about attribution, this and that, who cares like it. Conversion is a conversion.” No, it’s not!

This, when you are looking here, here we’re saying what data do we want to be able to include.

So, when we talk about attribution models and we’re looking at data models. So, the data is what data we include. The model is how do we award credit.

Dennis | 16:58
So, here, the data is data do we include, you know. By default, I’ve got this box checked. Right?

Which is one day view, and now it’s a 7 Days Click. But I can say I only want to look at 1 Day Click data. Well, in that case, all of a sudden, your conversion is going to look not as good. Because it’s not going to count any of the views through conversions. Right? A View through can still be the last click. The only way to get to attribution data is inside the Business Manager. And I come down and I look at attribution.

[Scroll down] So, you see here Attribution. And this is where I can configure my event source groups.

Here, under Analytics, this is where I actually get access to Facebook Analytics.

Dennis | 17:43
You know, almost nobody uses Facebook Analytics. Like they think like “Oh yeah, I’ve got Analytics on my page, I see how much Reach, how many Clicks, how many video Views. I see my different posts. I can download that data. And all that that is NOT Facebook Analytics.

This is Facebook Analytics.

Facebook Analytics allows me to see. Here just click on it,  just to show you for you real quick. It’s the equivalent of Google Analytics, I can literally see how many people came to my website, what they’re doing.

So, here I’ve got a group of hotels:

Here, I’ve got our websites:

We have all these different analytics entities. Look at these Business Asset Groups:

They have all this weird terminology here. I don’t want to go into this right now.

Dennis | 18:23
But, there are so many things people don’t understand about Facebook. Facebook has their own website Analytics just like Google Analytics.  And you can do funnels and you can do conversion tracking. You can do all kinds of cool stuff. And it’s not just what happens on the Facebook page and what happens in the Facebook Ad account. They’ve created all kinds of ridiculous things in here. 

Dennis | 18:46
Okay. That another session should cover all of that. Let’s go back to this one here. And we said that we want to maintain at least a 1 ROAS because we know that from a direct attribution standpoint if it’s 1 it’s gonna be a 3. And I want to do whatever I can, in terms of getting more content to be able to feed the machine.  Okay.

So, here’s how we’re thinking about Facebook. There’s your plumbing, which is all the tracking. So, basically tracking the most important thing here, in this case, conversions.

So, when people check out, and Shopify or it could be whatever it is, that you consider a conversion: someone fills out a form, they book an appointment. And then I need goals content and targeting. So the goal, in this case – ROAS, I set that as a target or my cost per lead is $20 or whatever it is. You need to have a hard number goal for the Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU).

Dennis | 19:46
Content, which is the most important part. Targeting – we’re running off of retargeting. And then large audiences like a 1% lookalike against purchases, against low funnel. Seed audiences like I take my conversions.

No people have been to my website, I’m not going to create a lookalike on that, but a lookalike against people who’ve actually bought – the highest quality signal. As long as, I have a couple of hundred people technically you could do it of 20 plus or 50 plus.  But really, you need a couple of hundred people, otherwise, the algorithms are going to be confused.

Okay, you need 200 really good customers, upload that email, list of emails, or maybe you have it through custom audiences, and then you create lookalikes against it.

Dennis | 20:24
And then we need lots and lots and lots of content. So, you can see the majority of the content here:

And this is the way we’re labeling this. You can see, this is called ugcFlash1. Right? So, if I come and look at this. And, by the way, if you do eCom, this is something most people don’t do. Oh, look.

Now, they are saying another thing, I need to request a review. Oh, what’s going on here?

This one. “Your pet’s face on your face. PetParty.co/mask”

Okay. Look, see.

Dennis | 21:04
So, it’s working very well, right. And you can see we’ve tied in the Instagram account, so we’ve taken that Instagram account, making it a business account.  You’re gonna lose reach, by the way. People like “Oh no, don’t convert the business, you lose reach”. And we tied inside the Business Manager. That’s another reason to have a Business Manager.

And you see different variations of these.

And you can see the performance. As we go here, to the Reporting >

to see how we’re working on, how the performance is by, you know, Mobile Newsfeed, versus Audience Network versus you know, wherever. And you can see we’ve got lots and lots of these. And what we do – is that inside each of these ad sets we have a number of creatives that we will test. 

Dennis | 21:57
It used to be that, because Facebook’s algorithm was kind of dumb, you would just do the equivalent of Google single keyword ad groups.  So, you would just have one ad inside each ad group and have lots and lots of ad groups, because, or ad sets (whatever you gonna call them, the same thing). So the system would just keep allocating more and more test impressions. So, if you know the system is dumb, and it’s just going to give 2000 impressions to each new ad set, you create lots and lots of ad sets, the system’s got a lot smarter.

So, now you just have two or three creatives in each ad set, let it find a winner and scale it up. And if it doesn’t work, then just create another ad set. Or just add more creatives to that existing ad set, if it’s already working.

But you see this?  These are all combinations of UGC: 

Dennis | 22:48
And the bottom line here. If any of this stuff is technical it is somewhat confusing, here’s the key point to know for Facebook is: the quality of the video content and your ability to continue to collect video content with your VAs and your video editors, that process this kind of stuff is the key to driving sales.

Because, when you put your content in here and you set your objective to be, you know, I want a 1 ROAS or our conversion is less than $30, or whatever it is, the system is going to do the targeting for you.

So, if you look inside our targeting for Audiences,

you’ll see we don’t do a lot of fancy targeting. You would think that we would do targeting for all the people like a sports team, or all the people who have gold retrievers, or all the people who have, you know, whatever, – we don’t do that. We’re literally just running custom audiences and large lookalike audiences, right.

[Oh, “Accept terms”, but, what is this? I thought, I accepted terms on all of these. For every one of these things you have to click “Accept”. Do I have any that I didn’t accept? Let me go accept these ones.]

Dennis | 23:57
Okay. And you can see, you know, the size of the audience and whatnot, but we’re basically just using really large lookalike audiences. We even test off of, you know, look-alikes on page fans, or look-alike on people who’ve been to the website. That’s not as good as the look-alikes against Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU), which is where you want to be.

So, you can see here, look-alikes against people who’ve bought something in the last 180 days,

and these ones tend to perform a little bit better. Because there’s a lot of people, especially eCom, who will click on things, but never buy anything. And I think that’s a real shame. 

Dennis | 24:32
I remember I was at a meeting with Facebook, and I was with their manager of, what was his name. I don’t remember the exact title. But, basically, he was in charge of the Facebook ads auction. And he said that his sister was on Facebook, she didn’t have a credit card, but she just loved to click around on Facebook. You know, click on ads where there were things for sale, she didn’t have a credit card. But why would she click on it, I don’t know. Maybe, she just was window shopping or thought it was fun. to click on things.

You really do want to choose the right objective. And you don’t wanna choose website clicks, you don’t want to choose, you know, something like video views, unless it is someone who is already in a custom audience grouping, right. So, for remarketing, you can choose website views, when it is a small audience. But you wouldn’t want to do things like website views or whatnot when it’s top of a funnel.

Dennis | 25:30
Okay, I’m going to show you something on this, which is a little counterintuitive, but I think it’s critical. So we’re gonna go, let’s see what we gonna do. I’ve got too many things open here. Alright. Here we go. I’m going to create a new campaign.

Actually no, I’m not going to create a new campaign, because I got a problem on this one.

But, when I create a campaign, I get the choice of three stages in the funnel: Awareness, Consideration, Conversion. I’m gonna use my top of funnel content. So, the content is top of a funnel. And I’m going to use conversion as my objective. So, in this case, I’m looking at purchases. Okay.

Dennis | 26:15
So, this is going to sound weird, you see here it’s like Prospecting.

So, we’ve all the stuff that’s Top of the Funnel content, I’m using Bottom of the Funnel objectives. So what I’m not saying is to use Bottom of the Funnel content with Bottom of the Funnel objectives. So I’m still doing Top of the Funnel. But instead of using Reach of Video Views, I’m choosing purchases to send the right signal, to get the people who actually would purchase. Even though I’m only giving them Top a funnel content and maybe I’m not having a call to action. 

Dennis | 26:47
Conversely, when I have Bottom of the funnel content, I can use Top of the Funnel as the objective. So people who have been to the site or they’ve been in the shopping cart, I can do video views, I can do engagement, I can do it as a boosted post. And people say “Well, why wouldn’t you just use, you know Bottom of the Funnel conversion objectives for Bottom of the Funnel content?” It’s because I don’t get to 50 conversions per ad set per week. Then the system is gonna still be stuck in learning, it’s gonna jack up my price, my average CPMs. So, try flipping it and see how it works. Because if they’ve already consumed 15 seconds of my video as a through play conversion or they’ve been to my website, or they’ve added to the shopping cart. If I know the quality is good, then I don’t need a system to sub-optimize the conversion, and therefore I’m not gonna pay a lot higher price. So, hopefully, it makes sense there. 

Dennis | 27:43
Now, I want to switch over to Snapchat, and I have TikTok open here. Here we go. Yeah.

Now, with these guys, it’s the same thing. If you have a plumbing set up, meaning you have your Pixel, right. So, your TikTok, and your Snapchat Pixel, you install it the same way, stick it inside the container for your Google Tag Manager.

You’re gonna have all your accounts content inside your Business Manager. So just like with Facebook you saw it was: business.facebook.com. Here’s business.tiktok.com.

Dennis | 28:21
I’ve got all the same things. It’s not exactly the same, because they’re trying to, I’m probably not supposed to tell you, but they are intentionally copying Facebook’s thing in the way they set up ads. Why? They want to make it easy for anyone who is running ads on TikTok to just copy over their Facebook stuff. Is it exactly the right way and whatever? No, there are some bugs, but you can see they’re generally trying to do it right. Literally, you have these users, you have partners, audiences like it’s the same thing here, right. You can see it’s the same.

Oh, this one doesn’t have any of these shared audiences, because we’re inside a Business Manager.

So, now I can go inside, I think I have it already open. Yeah, I’m already inside this one:

And this is for Dr. Brandon Brown, who is a chiropractor, doesn’t matter, it’s gonna be the same thing, I’ll show you.

So when I’m in the creation stage, I can go for Website Conversions or Website Traffic. But you know, remember I’m using the same plumbing, the same conversion tracking, the same pixels, which is like the topics. 

Dennis | 29:30
So, I choose my TikTok Pixel, and by default, you want to choose automatic placements. I don’t believe you should ever tamper with the placements, with any of the networks. I think just always choose that, instead of $1-a-day, I have to choose at least $20. And, so I guess instead of the $1-a-day thing, that you guys know about, I would do $20-a-day and it’s $5 on Snapchat.

And I don’t believe in running continuously. Because that’s like leaving the water on and hoping that you’re gonna remember to turn it off later. I like to put it out just for a week or so. And then, whatever your conversion or lead is worth, you know, maybe it worth $30 or something like that.

Dennis | 30:12
And then, yeah, this is a suggested thing.

And, it’s not very intelligent. So, they have no idea what our conversions are, so they say you know dollar and twelve, whatever. I upload this one.

I forgot this part here, so I’ll set this up to 20. 

If you’re not getting the 50 conversions per week, they’re not gonna be able to optimize the conversion anyway. I don’t think their conversion optimization is very smart. [Dennis changed the Daily budget to $25 and clicked “Next”]

Dennis | 30:58
So, you can see here that I can upload my video:

And I can literally just upload the same vertical videos, that I’ve had from Facebook. Now, what I can’t do is boost a post. So, what I normally do on Facebook, on a page, is I would boost that post and run it against a custom audience or inside Ads Manager. I would run against a 1% lookalike, choosing conversion. I can’t do that here, because they have not connected the organic side with the paid side. Which is good for the rest of us. You know, I don’t wanna be singing and dancing on Tik Tok, but I do want to run ads, right.  I do want to drive conversions.

Dennis | 31:40
So, I would upload all these things from my library, and run the same thing. I’m looking for conversions, just like I am on Facebook. It doesn’t matter about the targeting piece, where a lot of people are “Okay, well TikTok and Snapchat that’s for teens, I’m trying to reach people who are 40+ or they are business executives”. 

You can do targeting there, but if you’re doing retargeting, which is where we recommend starting on Tik Tok and Snapchat, it doesn’t matter because it is retargeting, these are people who have already visited your site, people were already your email list. So, this is just guaranteed free money on TikTok and Snapchat.

Dennis | 32:20
Let me show you the same setup over here. Now, move over to Snapchat. So I’m inside this particular ad account in iHomes Colorado. And you see here the same kind of thing. So they have an equivalent of their business manager, right.

[Create Ads -> Advanced Create]

So when I come in, Create an ad, same thing here: I have three stages of the funnel: Awareness, Consideration, Conversion. They have the same objective names as you see on Facebook. TikTok and Snapchat are copying these guys to do the same thing.

And, I almost never choose Top of the Funnel objectives, because I think that’s just wasting money. But then a lot of brands love the idea of Reach, and Views, and all this.

Dennis | 33:14
But you see this here.

We have the same three stages.  The objectives are called almost the exact same thing on Facebook. So, here Awareness, Consideration, Conversion, right. Those are the categories, and then I can drive Engagement, Lead Gen, Website Conversions. Right. So, in this case, let’s say I want Website Conversions. And I’m going to keep all these other pieces the same, so I’m not gonna worry about split testing.

And I just love going for s Single Image or Video, because I’m just going to reuse the things that I had on Facebook.

Placements: I’m keeping on automatic placements.

Location targeting: if I’m a local business, then I’m going to go down to say like Denver or wherever it is, I want to go.

Dennis | 34:00
The thing with TikTok, which makes it more of a national advertiser, play is that I can’t target lower than the state level. So, if I’m a local business in LA and I’m a real estate agent, I don’t wanna target all the California, it’s too big.

But here I can target down much smaller, of course, like everywhere else.

I have demo targeting, provided that it’s legal. So, it is illegal in the United States to do demographic targeting when it comes to employment or housing, or things that have discriminatory policies. But, apparently, you can sort of get away with it. I wouldn’t do it though, because I don’t think it really matters. You can do this sort of targeting here [screen above].

Dennis | 34:00
A lot of people like to spend time messing around inside targeting. And you can inside Snapchat and TikTok. But I don’t recommend it. I don’t think that’s really the key. I think, the key is re-uploading your one-minute video, that I’ve been working on Facebook. But just for fun.

Do you remember, there were partner category targets on Facebook, where you could target all of the axioms, and data logics, and info USA. Here, look: Experian

People who are in farms, fishing or forestry, retired sales tech and science, presence of children 10 to 12. So, you have all of these different sorts of targets that are here. This is the stuff that Facebook got rid of, because of the whole Cambridge Analytica thing.

Look, Datalogix:

Spanish speakers, small business employees, small business decision-makers.

Dennis | 35:30
Look, HHI (Household income). $250k. I don’t know if it’s that accurate. But this is the stuff that Facebook got rid of. But we can use these things here. They said they [Facebook] did it because of Cambridge Analytica. But I think the reason why, the actual reason is that no one is using it, because they don’t know how to use it. So, for example, here. Moms, High Net Worth, whatever.

And the second thing is, anytime these targets were being used, Facebook had to pay a royalty to these data source providers. So, it was just a convenient way to cut out axiom and these other guys here, right.

Dennis | 36:02
I have other sorts of audiences. Look at this.

I’m not sure how smart these are, but certainly, depending on your category like your Fitness Enthusiast – > Cycling, Running, Yoga, right. 

I would think, that, at some point, these might go away. But, maybe not. I don’t know. Maybe Facebook is the one that’s getting in trouble, and everyone else can kind of draft behind this. The guy, who’s speeding in traffic, no one in the front, is the one who gets the ticket, and the other people can just kind of draft behind. Like none’s getting mad about Twitter. Twitter always had the same kind of targeting.  Just as good as Facebook has. But no one really cared about them.

Dennis | 36:41
See, look.  Pet & Animal Lovers,

so I could target this for a pet party. And then when I do, I can see my audience size is going down.

And then I can say Animal lovers, that are in Ukraine, or whatnot, and also were friends with Paul Ryazanov and like MageCloud.  No, they wouldn’t do that. You can see it here, right. I can start to do detailed targeting. Meaning, I can say, you know, there are this, and this, and this criteria are true.

So the number will continue to go down. Right, and look.  They try to trick me, “Based on your daily budget for $50…”. I’m not gonna spend $50. I’m gonna spend $5.

Dennis | 37:16
Right, look at this. They keep trying to trick me.

And by the way, don’t put in 5.00 is your budget, because most people will, I mean they might do it right, but I’ve seen people put it accidentally, making it $500. And then they come and complain, and, you know,  this kind of thing.

And it is reasonably smart. And, it’s not as smart as Facebook. But you can see here :

Right based on your $5 budget, your Reach is just gonna be 5k to 14K. And the same number of Impressions. And then Swipes. So, Snapchat is a cost per swipe up – CPSU.  So, you can kind of think of that, as like a click, right.

But look at this, this estimate here. So $5 to get me 5k to 14k Impressions. That works out to less than $1 per 1000 people, which I’m reaching. You know you saw what the cost was on Facebook, it was $9. And for most people, it’s like $20 or $50. You saw some of our custom audiences were up at like $15 – $20.

Dennis | 38:13
So, if I can get stuff for only a dollar, and I can run against my custom audiences, because I’ve configured my Pixel the right way, then I’m using Snapchat and Tiktok as an arbitrage channel for remarketing. Okay, I don’t think people really quite understand how powerful that is.

Dennis | 38:32
So, now I want to take a look at some of these stats.  [Menu -> Manage Ads]

Just so you can take a look at [which campaign I am in, I’ll go back, a little further, and here’s some]. So, I got a coupon code:

Oh, the coupon is the one you get for free. If you message [email protected], will give you a coupon. But, literally, you can see what we’re doing here. So, I look at this and they break down some basic insights and they tell us who these people are.

It’s not that informative. I really care about Impressions. Here what the interests are, even. 

If I’m not targeting by interest, it is just telling me of the people that I hit. Here’s, you know, who they’re you engaging with.

Dennis | 39:33
So, I go back to the Ads and look at Performance. [< Back to Manage Ads] They don’t give me a lot of columns here.

You can see. But these ones here. So there’s a lot of good stuff related to “App installs”, I don’t care about that. I can do “Leads”. They do “Video”, but the videos are already shorter, so I don’t really care that much about it. 25%,  50%,  75%. Most of these are geared towards mobile folks. [Dennis scrolls down].

I don’t think these “Custom Events” are gonna stick around, because of iOS 14.  Even though I think most people who use Snapchat are going to say “Yes to the prompt, Yes I’m going to give Snapchat the access to my data”.  I think for Facebook, it going to be kind of the other way around when this prompt comes out in the next few weeks.

Dennis | 40:14
But you can see, here are the different metrics, that I can look at. My “Cost per click” is basically my “Cost per swipe up”.

You can take your existing ads, and then what you can do is, say, you could add a little part, where you have your hands going from the bottom to the top and you say “Hey, swipe up to learn more about, you know, whatever might be.

Dennis | 40:36
Look, this one is $0.05 per swipe up – “eCPSU“, right. The effective Cost per swipe up. 222 Swipe ups.

So, whenever it is, you’re trying to get people to swipe up and if you are an agency or trying to get your clients to swipe up, it may be a little bit awkward. But what I just need you to do is look into you have a friend hold the camera, look into and say “Hey, swipe up to learn more about whatever, swipe up to schedule appointment, swipe up just get to see the deal we have for you on such and such”, right. You can have a lot more creative leniency too. You’re not going to get all these crazy ad disapprovals. Because the Snapchat and TikTok teams are eager to talk to you. Just like with Google, it’s easy to talk to a real human. It’s very hard to talk to a real human on Facebook, I know this. And you can optimize the stuff and if you’re stuck, then they’ll help you.

Dennis | 41:25
Now, I switch over to TikTok, just like I was on, you know, ads.snapchat.com, I’m on ads.tiktok.com, just like on my click on ads.facebook.com. And you see here, you know $0.15 Cost per click,  $0.07 Cost per click.  [Check image below]

And this ad group is called, our campaign is called “3_top_vids”.  [Check the image below] 3_  means conversion, so 1_ is awareness, 2_ is a consideration. So, top, middle, bottom, one underscore, two underscores, three underscores. I’ve put the top videos, that worked on Facebook and I put them over here for retargeting. And I can also put it against lookalike audiences or audiences that I think are going to be very similar.

The Click-Through Rate is pretty good here. Look, this one, 4.5% [check image above]. The Click-Through Rate gonna be higher on TikTok and Snapchat than on Facebook. Because there are not many advertisers there right now and the marketers haven’t come in and ruined it yet. You remember, when Instagram was awesome, maybe seven-eight years ago. And then, they said: “Oh, we’re going to start running ads on Instagram”. And the first ads were interesting because it was made by interesting brands and folks who had access like us. We got early. We are always one of the first to get access. And then all these other markets came in and now it’s a default placement. So, anyone who runs ads on Facebook, by default is running on Instagram, whether they know it or not, right. Now it sucks and the Click-Through Rate is not as good as it used to be.

Dennis | 42:46
I’m hoping you’re seeing that there’s a parallel structure between every one of these ad accounts: Facebook, Tik Tok, Snapchat, Twitter, sort of. Why? Because social networks are on your phone. And because they’re on your phone, they engage with people, people engage with you and users engage in the same way. 

Dennis | 43:11
Hey, look. You’re seeing my face. You see that the halo around me.

[Whatever Clubhouse people can hear me. I wonder if our Clubhouse people can hear me, but I hope, you guys are enjoying this and you’re getting some value. I’m trying to talk on strategy level so that you can also get value, even though you’re just hearing me.]

Dennis | 43:28
But I want you to see that your success in social advertising is your ability to get your goals – content and targeting – together. Mainly, 15-second and 60-second (one-minute) videos, that you’re clicking from your customers. Or where you’re talking about your business and how you got started. Or, you’re sharing your knowledge about how your product or service is being done, behind the scenes, kind of stuff. With your ability to collect those goals (content and targeting) and get them into the system, you load them up into the system. So,  the loading up into the system is not where the expertise or power is. As I just showed you by walking through Facebook, Tik Tok and Snapchat: the interfaces are similar enough that I even get confused. I’m not sure which one I’m in, because they’re so similar. You know, the mechanical administration of ad accounts is not a pro-level thing. This is an admin thing. The pro, the expertise, the value is the collection of the goals – content and targeting. Which is on you, as the business owner, entrepreneur,  marketer. You can not hire an agency to do that part. I mean,  you can hire a kid to come into your office or to collect stories. You see, we have 150 virtual assistants, that are collecting stories, you know, for these pet owners and people who have faces on their socks. But that’s done by VAs, that are making a few dollars an hour.

Dennis | 44:56

So, ultimately,  the value is in your strategy. So, if you really understand your goals – content and targeting. And put that into these buckets, you can then have your administrative sorts of people, VAs or whatnot, upload those into, whatever the ad platform is.  It could be, you know, Pinterest, or Quora, or LinkedIn, or YouTube, right. It’s all the same thing. I think people are missing this. They, for some reason, think like “Oh, I need to have a Facebook ads expert.” No, you don’t.

I’ve just logged in and I showed you how the ads are organized. I just showed you that, once something’s working, you just keep going. You put more money into it. And you take that winner from Facebook and copy it into Snapchat and Tiktok.

Do you need to know all mechanics of exactly how it’s being done? No! Have just someone who knows how to do that, all day long they do that. And that it’s not worth your time to mess around, right. Like it’s not worth your time to try to assemble Ikea furniture or try to do something, that is not difficult to do. It’s just tedious.

Dennis | 46:00
And, I want to say it’s a low-wage thing to do, but it kind of is. I don’t think any of us, as pros or entrepreneurs, where our time is valuable. I don’t think any of us should be messing around. Really, with the mechanics of uploading ads. And no offense to the people, who are video editors, and they’re really good at a Premiere or After Effects. Hey, there’s some skill there. But I don’t want to learn how to do that, how to edit video. I just want to produce the video and then know that a video editor can follow our template and load the thing up. And it’s the room for creativity, maybe, not really. I just need him to load stuff up, right.

Dennis | 46:35
If I want to be architecting a mansion, I don’t need to learn how to nail the hammers in, or how to lay the roof, or how to put the drywall in or paint the walls. I don’t need to learn how to do that kind of stuff, because that’s not where the value is. As a business owner, I just need to make sure my strategy is right, meaning my goals – content and targeting – are those ingredients to put inside the machine. And I hire other people to build a machine. 

I’d love to hear what your thoughts are on this because I think it goes counter to what most people are saying. Put it in the chat, or I guess

Paul | 47:12
Yeah, we do have some questions.

Dennis | 47:15
Some of our friends are not able to add it into the chat, cause you guys are in the listen-only. I’d love to see what you guys think about this. Because I don’t believe in the YouTube strategist or whatever. I don’t believe in the channel level expert, so the Instagram ads person. In the next year, you’ll hear it, you’ll see these new people pop up like “Oh, I’m the Tik Tok ads expert.” No, you’re not. There’s no Facebook ads expert, there’s no Twitter ads expert. All there is – is strategy. And your strategy: once you collect these items, then you just have someone load them into the machine across all the platforms.

Dennis | 47:50
Okay, I see some questions here. Daniel says: “How do you get the winner?” Well, the winner is, whatever your lowest Cost per conversion is provided, it is statistically significant. So ideally, 50+ conversions for that particular ad. And the beauty is that the systems going to tell you what the winner is. Don’t make a decision, when there are only one, or two conversions. That’s noise, right. That’s not statistically significant.

Dennis | 48:15
Kayle says: “Would it be silly to run retargeted ads on Snapchat and Tiktok if you don’t actively maintain an account on those platforms?” That is a great question. No, it’s not silly. When was the last time I posted a Tik Tok or post something on Snapchat? Years ago. But, I’m a business person, I want to drive sales and conversions. I know that pure Tik-Tok folks going to say “Yes, it’s not just singing and dancing, and all that.” But I’m not a consumer of the platform. I’m here for sales. 

There’s a difference between being a passenger on the airplane, versus being a pilot. I’m a pilot. But a lot of people who think they’re passengers, think they are qualified to fly the plane. No, you’re not! Just cause you’re on Tik Tok all the time, it doesn’t mean you are qualified to run ads. Just because you’re on Facebook, and you’re hanging out with your friends, and seeing what your grandma’s doing, or whatever it is, doesn’t mean you’re qualified to run Facebook ads.

So, I’m here from a business standpoint. And Tik Tok and Snapchat, as you saw, are intentionally not linking those items together, as Facebook did. Which I think is what’s gotten partly Facebook in so much trouble. Because they’ve linked them together.

Dennis | 49:21
Literally, as you saw, we were running Snapchat and TikTok ads independent of whatever it is. Like we are not even associating it with, we can’t. Wait, actually, technically you can. There is something called an agency account, which is very hard to get a hold of. But you’re running ads on Tik Tok as an advertiser and it has nothing to do with your Snapchat or Tik Tok account. Isn’t that cool? I think that’s a smart move.

You know, working with TikTok and Snapchat, I can see why they did that. At some point later and maybe they will say “Hey, you can take your best Snaps and TikToks and boost them and put ads against it. But I think, that just creates more confusion right now. Facebook’s already out the gate on that. So, it’s too late on that one. You know, that cats out of the bag on that. 

Dennis | 50:05
And, the other part is. I’ll tell you one thing. So, I was with our buddy G, who has something like 13 million views on TikTok. He’s an actual TikToker. He’s an influencer. He does the singing and dancing and all that. And he said: “You know, what we should do to promote the TikTok ads course, we’re building for TikTok? We should do a whole bunch of TikToks, we should teach the course in TikTok, because, you know, what better way to teach TikTok than using TikTok.” And it sounds like a great idea, right. Especially, if we’re teaching TikTok ads. We can take these different moments. Her’s how to set up your audiences, here’s how you do retargeting, here’s how you do creepy creatives, how you bid,  here’s how you do these different things. This is a TikTok.

Dennis | 50:48
Sounds like a great idea, right. Guess what. Our advertisers, our business owners are not on Tik Tok or Snapchat. Are you guys hanging out on Tik Tok and Snapchat? I don’t think so. I’m not doing that, but I absolutely, if I can get an extra 20% or 30% on whatever is already working for me, I’m gonna do that. So, if the Facebook ads are working for you, you’re going to get a little bit more from TikTok and Snapchat. Just like if Google ads are working for you, you’re going to get a little bit more out of Bing and Yahoo, right. But if you’re not, if your search ads aren’t working, if your SEO isn’t working on Google, then stop trying to SEO or do ads on Bing and Yahoo. You see what I’m saying here. Get it working on Facebook, then copy the winners over into TikTok and Snapchat. 

Dennis | 51:39
And you know, the demographics might not align exactly the same, because your audiences are somehow different, or maybe it’s B2B. You have software or product, you think it’s not suited for Tik Tok or Snapchat. But I promise you, even though the match rate is lower. It’s just like saying “Oh, well, this thing works well on a Google search, but it’s going to work well on Bing search or on Yahoo search.” Yes, it will. The audiences are smaller, but they are still there.

Dennis | 52:04
Paul, you’ve got some questions. 

Paul | 52:06
I’ve got some questions. So, I will try to be as specific as possible for the eCommerce audience. So, I’ve noticed on your screen that your strategy is just to organize the ads account with engagement, and then remarketing and bidding for the conversions for the lookalike audience. Let’s imagine, we have like $1000 as a budget for the account, how would you plan it, in percentage? You know, typically, what type of percentage does go to engagement and to grab the audience, and how much percent into conversions?  That’s the number-one question.

Dennis | 52:42
Yeah, the budgeting by stages is a good question. Over time, you’ll eventually settle at about 1/3  – 1/3 – 1/3. However, when you start, you’re going to start by driving conversions, for several reasons. One is that you need to make money. And when you make money, you’re going to spend more money and reinvest those profits. Number two is that you need to send a clear signal of conversion into the system. So I need to. I don’t want to just pollute the system with a bunch of people watching videos, clicking on things. I want the system to know who’s converting. So I’m seasoning that Pixel with conversions that are coming through, that are coming through my ads, but just coming through to the system which the Pixel can see.

Dennis |53:23
And, I’m driving conversion by running remarketing. So I’m starting with the bottom-funnel campaigns and then when that’s working, I expand into lookalike audiences for the mid-funnel. And then, all the way up to the top, where I’m running much larger video view audiences against, you know. Or not running video view audiences, I’m running top of the funnel content with conversions to the objective. I’m stacking my way up the funnel, but I’m starting with making money at the bottom of the funnel. And that’s gonna be true across every network, that we’re doing advertising. And it certainly makes sense, because we need to make money in the ads. And if you haven’t already, you’re gonna take the catalog you have. So for eCom, take your catalog, and that’s what you’re going to run on TikTok, Snapchat and Facebook. Your product catalogs, and so those create something called dynamic ads. Same thing for Google, right. 

Paul | 54:13
Yeah, so basically, this was another question on my list. It’s about the product feeds for your eCommerce clients. Are you actively maintaining those campaigns with the product feeds for dynamic ads. 

Dennis | 54:23
Dynamics answers are the system’s automatically choosing, based on what people are looking at. I mean, certainly, you can enhance your catalog with better images or better descriptions and more things. Because you can have multiple images for Facebook, for example, to choose from. So, I think a lot of the optimization is there, but if your plumbing is in place, which is all the tracking whatnot; if you already are driving sales and ongoing management is just updating the catalog.  As you have new products, as products go away, as you can add more images and descriptions for those products. And there are third-party tools as you guys know that help maintain those feeds for you. 

Paul | 55:02
Yeah, I mean, can you, I don’t know. From my experience with Facebook, a lot of business owners discontinue Facebook ads because they don’t really see much profit out of it. And do you have in mind the niche-specific, when you try to run ads and that was not really successful?  Cause the sample you showed us, about pets and pets’ photos is kind of engaging and social. So,  if that’s what is the instead of engaging social right.

Dennis | 55:32
For sure, that pets example, of course, it’s going to work on social media and drive sales. It’ll work for anybody as long as you can tell a compelling story and it resonates with the audience. Most people that do eCom, they are so product-level focused on features and images. They forget to tell the story, they can’t do video. So, you need a combination of videos and want to humanize it. Take your top influencer, take the top user you have, take the founder – tell some compelling stories. Do like what the Kickstarter version is, right. All the people that tell a Kickstarter and get people interested. So, you need that kind of content.  It’s not because “Oh, I tried Facebook ads, it didn’t work.” It’s that “I didn’t have the right content to put at the machine”, right. So, really understand your customers. What you could do is get your last 10 people who have purchased and get them out on Zoom and ask them about how they’re using the product, how they like it, why did they choose it. You know, “Why did you buy from me XYZ product?” And capture that, get with their permission, of course. And turn those into stories and say “Wow, that was helpful. Do you mind if we share that?” what you said on our social media.  And, of course, they say “Yes” and you can use it as ads.

Paul | 56:43
That’s smart.

Dennis | 56:47
You see. The issue is not the golf clubs are faulty, which causes you to hit the ball into the bushes. The issue is you don’t how to use the golf clubs. Right. You learn how to use it. It’s not the tool, I promise you, it’s not the tool. 

Paul | 56:58
Okay, gotcha. So, as a specific sample, right. I don’t know, let’s imagine I’m selling furniture, like a type of brand.  This is just an example. What type of content would you suggest to the business owner, who sells furniture? I just got it out of my mind. 

Dennis | 57:22
Well, we have a call. We have to both be on that. We’re already one minute late for it. But I’ll answer this question. You probably know we did this for the largest furniture manufacturer in the world and the largest furniture retailer, which is Ashley furniture. And what we did was we literally had stories of the sales representatives in the stores, and with the customers, talking about their favorite piece of furniture and how they liked this couch. And one guy would say “This is my go around, when we grew up we had to go around, I think it’s called a living room sectional, but we called it a go around and on Sunday afternoons we played, watched football in Alabama”. You know, whatever it is. It’s just telling stories and we found that that drove people into the stores. We were humanizing it. So not just showing product shots, but we have humans that are talking about how they like the product in a non-testimonial, kind of a fun, way. 

Dennis | 58:08
And we used the even like those Alabama stories, we usee in Seattle and we used in New York and other places where there’s clearly no people who talk like that. Aren’t there, you know, in Chicago, right. But it works. And we’re just humanizing it and it’s worked super well. And just lots and lots of little one-minute stories on the cell phone. 

If you’re an eCom person, you need to talk to your customers and collect their feedback. It’s that simple. Put up a whole bunch of these, like you saw (we had 1000s of them there) and you’ll find a bunch of them will win. Now, just because you put your first ad out there and it sucks, it doesn’t mean Facebook sucks.

You’re typically going to find one in ten of your ads, of your creatives, is going to work. So you might need 30 or 40 creatives, you get three or four winners. When you have those winners you just let them run and run and run and run and put several million dollars against them.

Dennis | 58:54
We’re late for another meeting, Mr. Paul, you and I.

Paul | 58:58
Let’s do it this way. Can you type over here, on the live chat, your email address? And who knows, if the audience has extra questions, they can probably reach out to you guys. All right.

Dennis | 59:11
One last thing. If you want a coupon code to get the $150 on Snapchat Tiktok, I think it’s $200 on Tik Tok, message at [email protected] and she will send you the coupon. You don’t have to start advertising, just claim your account now, and then we will give you our ads course and we’ll walk through together in more detail how to set up those courses. Okay?