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Category: Advertising / Marketing

Here Are My Favorite Resources To Learn Facebook Advertising

I have profitably spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on Facebook ads. I have been doing this heavily since 2016. I could attribute most of my basic learning to Travis’s free resources that he put up on YouTube.

If you’re interested in Facebook advertising, I recommend that you complete these tutorials. You should also go through these.

Travis has been playing this game for over a decade so he’s pretty good at what he does. Much of his content may be dated although still very useful. This is still my favorite resource for getting the basics right.

For intermediate strategies, I’d recommend that you check out Verum. To understand what he’s saying, you need to be well aware of basics. If you’re well aware of the basics, you’d love his content and find it very easy to digest. Otherwise you probably wouldn’t understand much of what he’s saying.

The most advanced players, however, are the AdLeakers. I don’t think there’s any value for anyone here unless he’s already spending a lot of ad budget profitably and wants to further up his game by working on cost reduction strategies to achieve lower cost per acquisitions.

I don’t suggest that you invest in any course if you’re just starting. Investing in the actual ad budget might be a much better idea. But before you even do that, I strongly recommend that you consume Travis’s KingPinning tutorials.

Identifying The Optimal Manual Bid For Your Ads

I like to scale my Facebook ad campaigns with manual bids. One of the the tough decisions is to identify what is the optimal bid with regards to the best combination of number of sales and profit per sale. In short, getting the best return on ad spend (ROAS).

One manual way that I’ve used in the past is to start my ads by placing a bid that would result in 1.00 ROAS. For example, if the cost of goods sold is $10 and I’m selling the goods for $30, I’d start by placing a manual bid of $20. What this translates into is that I’m willing to break-even to initiate the learning phase for the ad-set.

Then I reduce this bid by 10% everyday until my ROAS keeps getting better and stop when the spend starts going down. This has helped me identify the right manual bid in the past. But there’s one drawback and that is the auctions change everyday and I only run the top down bid-identifying strategy once. So my manual bid may not be the most optimal manual bid everyday in the future.

However, since the launch of campaign budget optimization (CBO), there’s a simple solution to this problem. You can create multiple ad-sets with different manual bids and place them in a CBO. So if you’re selling that $10 product for $30, you can may be create 5 ad-sets in a CBO with a bid of $13, $14, $15, $16 and $17. The CBO will automatically choose the ad-set that’s likely to get the best results and each day a different ad-set with a different bidding may be getting the sales for you.

Why Using 2-Step Opt-In For Web Push Is a Must

For the past few years, many websites have been relying on adding an extra traffic source for desktop and android users by enabling web push notifications.

Browser sends notification to the users asking them to opt in into future web push notifications. The users can either allow or block the notifications. Once a certain number of users block your push notifications, browsers start to mark your notifications as spam or try to curb your push notification marketing efforts.

The solution is pretty simple; and all website owners should do it.

The solution is a 2-step opt-in for web push notification and you may have noticed that many websites do it already. Before the browser sends an opt-in notification, you send a native opt-in notification from your website. This looks something like this.

When a user selects “No thanks”, he simply doesn’t subscribe to your notifications without penalizing your website. When a user selects “Allow”, he is presented with the 2nd step browser opt in

Since the user has already accepted your invitation to opt in on the first step, it’s unlikely that the user will select block at the 2nd step. If many users click on block at this step, your website has a likelihood of getting penalized by the browser for future web push notifications. 

It is why it is highly recommended that you never present the browser opt-in as your first line of invitation. The web push opt-in should always be hidden behind the website’s native opt-in.

Receiving Ad Delivery Penalty Due to Coronavirus

It should be no surprise to anyone that coronavirus has affected some of the global trade and specifically slowed down the e-commerce industry.

Since we were facing increasing difficulty to source and fulfil our orders, we had stopped advertising some of our stores by end of January where product sourcing had become difficult.

But even though we had stopped the ads, there were still shipping delays for the orders that we had already received. By last week, after a three week break, we had made alternate arrangements for our product sourcing and resumed partial advertising operations for the affected stores. However, today we received an advertising delivery penalization. This has caused us to stop ad-ops one more time.

Although our delivery rates received poor reviews and for obvious reasons, I’m still relieved that nearly 100% of the customers were happy with the product quality.

In the end, I’m not just an e-commerce seller, but many times also an e-commerce buyer. Since I expect to receive a certain quality of service as a buyer, I need to ensure the same as a seller too and when I fall short, with or without coronavirus, I’m not proud of it.

Overlapping Audiences, Competing With Your Own Ads And My Take On This

Yesterday, I wrote about my ad account that got disabled and I concluded by saying the following

And in the super optimist world, I’ll have two ad-accounts burning twice the fuel, delivering twice the sales, making twice the profit. I want to think that this will happen. Because without this kind of optimism, it’s hard to want to run a business

Today when I read my own blog post, I realized that overlapping brigade must hate me right now for saying something so foolish. But I don’t care about overlap as much as many other people.

I hear a lot of people say that this audience will overlap with that audience or that your ads are competing with your other ads and that you’re bidding higher against your own ads etc. I understand. I understand what you’re saying and I understand what you mean. But I am not concerned on the same level as you.

First things first, I mean no disrespect to other marketers. I will also never claim that I am good at what I do. I am always learning. I spend everyday in this industry with an open heart and an open mind with will to learn more than I knew yesterday. I understand that different marketers have different strategies and yet they are able to deliver results. In summary, I think any strategy that brings the results we seek, is the right strategy and that many strategies can co-exist together.

Now off to some of the reasons why I’m comfortable with overlapping and competing with my own ads.

In the past, I’ve had a successful product where we were spending thousands of dollars per day in ads, and were generating tens of thousands in sales. I did everything in my power to scale the ads profitably until I couldn’t anymore without hurting profitability. So I created a second ad account, created 100% duplicate campaigns as my first ad account, and started competing with my own ads.

The end result was that I was able to increase my sales by over 60% and my profits by over 40%. In summary, by competing with my own self, I slightly reduced my margins, and significantly increased the money I took home.

Now I don’t know about you, but I prefer focusing on the actual dollars I take home, and while the margin percentage remains the significant focus of my business, it isn’t what I’m actually focusing on at the end of the day.

There are many occasions when simply raising the budget will cost you much higher CPA than creating a duplicate copy of your campaign and duplicating budget like that. Of course, you’re overlapping and competing with your own ads, but if it works, then why not?

In addition, not many people know this but Facebook sets CPM penalization not just for ad-accounts, but even for business managers based on the reports it receives from the users about your ads. In this case, running identical campaigns from multiple ad accounts or even different business managers will generate significantly different results.

Furthermore, my attitude towards overlapping and self-competition is also lenient because we like to scale fast. If we won’t scale, someone else will. If we won’t compete with our own ads, someone else will compete with our ads. This is how we like our marketing at Socialoholic.

My Ad Account Got Disabled, But I Live On Optimism

Today, an ad-account for one of our e-commerce stores got disabled. There was no violation. It was the same ads that we had been running for 4 weeks. Usually when the ad account gets deactivated, there’s an appeal link. The account is usually sorted in couple of hours. But today, there was no notification or appeal link.

I’ve still appealed through a different support channel, but its not going to resolve in couple of hours but would take longer than that.

Meanwhile, I’ve exported all campaigns to a different ad account. Theres a way to export CSV of campaigns and import to a different ad account. Here’s a walk-through video of how to do it. The process can still be very messy because of custom audiences, and lookalikes. When Facebook deactivates one ad account, it locks everything inside that ad account including all custom audiences and lookalikes. So its not possible to move those if they are owned by a disabled ad account.

I had a shitty day trying to do these manual, hateful tasks. I really had two options. Option # 1 was to basically feel angry at Facebook and stop advertising. Option # 2 was to start-over.

The option # 2 can be interesting because I may be able to make the 2nd ad account deliver profitable campaigns too. In the best case scenario, I may get the first ad account back as well. And in the super optimist world, I’ll have two ad-accounts burning twice the fuel, delivering twice the sales, making twice the profit. I want to think that this will happen. Because without this kind of optimism, it’s hard to want to run a business.

Why I Use Accelerated Delivery For Facebook Ads

I haven’t met many people who use Facebook’s accelerated delivery for ads. The reason why people don’t use that option, beside the fact that many people don’t even know about it, is that accelerated delivery consumes your daily budget as quickly as it possibly can ignoring to spread it evenly through-out the day.

The problem with this kind of execution is that you’re basically asking Facebook to win all the bids possible in order to serve your ads which means you’re willing to pay as high as possible to get the results. Then why would I or someone else possibly use this option? There’s a very good reason for that and I’ll explain this just in a bit.

I scale a lot of my campaigns with manual bids. For example if a campaign is working well for me @ $100/day ad-spend but suddenly stops working for me at $200/day ad-spend, I can’t possibly scale this campaign using automatic bidding. I’d instead scale this campaign by placing a manual bid of say $20/purchase and setting the budget to $1000. If Facebook can find me $20/purchase, it will spend all $1000. If it can’t get me any purchase in that amount, no budget will be spent. If it can get me a few sales in that cost, the budget will be spent accordingly.

Even with manual bids, Facebook will also attempt to evenly spread my budget through the 24 hour period. However, that may be unnecessary with manual bids. When I’ve provided a cap per result, I would ideally like to spend all my budget even in a 1 minute period as long as the cost per purchase is met. And this is where the accelerated delivery does the job just right.

In summary, I like to run most manual bid campaigns with accelerated delivery in order to steal cheap bids as quickly as possible, even if that means spending day’s budget in an hour.

Shocking Facebook A/B Test Results Due to Page Name

I just concluded an A/B test that I ran simply out of curiosity. I first created a total of 10 campaigns targeting different things and having different creatives. I then created identical copies of these 10 campaigns.

In summary, I had 20 CBO campaigns divided into group A and group B. I created 2 brand new Facebook pages; one for group A and the second one for group B. The only difference between group A and group B was that the page names from which the ads ran were different. The adsets, targeting, creatives and everything else was 100% identical. On these 2 different pages I even uploaded identical display pictures and content.

The results came out to be very shocking for me. I use the word shocking because the price per result wasn’t slightly higher on one page than the other. It was more than 100% higher which means if CPA was $10 on 1 page, it was $25 on the other page.

The takeaway is that Facebook page name has a massive role in your over-all ad performance and cost per result.

Why I Like Facebook’s CBO (Campaign Budget Optimization)

Facebook launched campaign level budgets in the mid of 2019. Initially, I was skeptical but I’ve started to like CBOs a lot. By using campaign level budget, I can now test 5-10 adsets in the same budget that I needed before to test 1 adset.

Facebook simply spends higher budget on the adsets within a CBO that are more worthy of my budget and spends lesser budget on adsets that are more likely to burn cash.

There is always a risk of missing out on a potentially winning adset but the reward overshadows the risk. In addition, you could still define minimum spend per adset within a CBO to ensure that each adset gets a bare minimum spotlight. Although, I generally advise against that.

My only problem with CBOs thus far is the organizational structure. Prior to CBOs, I only had to create 1 campaign per product. My campaign could then have hundreds of adsets.

Now I’ve to create multiple campaigns per product with each campaign grouping similar adsets together. Because of this, I’ve to create 10s of campaigns per product. The downside is I can’t group together data for 1 product without using filters which is just an added inconvenience

If Facebook introduces something which is above the campaigns level only for sake the of categorization, I’d really like that.

Retargeting Campaigns – What I Do With Them

I had a really busy day today. We successfully launched phase 1 of scaling for our new store. I also started retargeting campaigns today. For those who don’t know, retargeting is simply reaching back to the potential customers who showed some sort of intent to purchase your products.

Generally, I like to run 5-6 types of retargeting ad-sets including retargeting those who visited the product page, added the product to cart, initiated check-out, watched at least 75% of our video ad, and top 25% of the users by time-spent.

Recovering abandoned carts, and potential customers with intent is incredibly important. You’ve often spent 90% of your budget already to capture their intent, you just need spend 10% more to capture the sale.

I prefer running retargeting ads with photo creatives. Although I run almost all other ads with video creatives. Since the retargeting user group have already seen video ads, they just need to be reminded again about a product with a photo. This has provably worked for me and I’ve had tons of data to support this argument.

Happy retargeting!