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Tag: Facebook Ads

Protecting Your Facebook Assets

I learnt this the hard way after all admin accounts for my business manager got disabled last year leaving me no access to my business manager, pages and ad accounts. If you’re wondering why that happened, then it can happen to anyone who uses Facebook for business. It’s AI after all. If the data points they have on you flag you in anyway, which by the way happens all the time, they are going to erase you.

Luckily, there are things that you can have in place in order to protect you from the catastrophic affects. I learnt it after losing access to everything. You don’t have to do the same.

All you need to do is generate a business manager admin invite to an email address that you own. Keep the invitation pending and do not sign up as admin on the business manager. In an event everything gets disabled, your pending invitation will not be disabled. You can then accept your invitation and gain access to your BM and all associated assets.

The fine print though is that invitations expire every 30 days, so you need to do this once a month. I do it and it’s worth it.

Diagnosing Your Sales Funnel

I received an email from a reader who needed some advice regarding the diagnosis of sales funnel. I’m going to keep this short as I’m busy with launching some more campaigns right now, but I hope that I leave some value here.

There’s no rocket science here. The first thing for you to do is to be aware of all the steps that your potential customer is going to take in order to purchase something. Starting off from seeing your ad on Facebook or other platforms, watching/engaging with it, clicking on it to reach your landing page, reading the product description, adding the product to cart, initiating checkout, adding shipping/payment info, and eventually committing a purchase. These are the steps that the customer goes through in most of my advertising. It can be different for everyone.

The second thing for you to do is to find where the breakage is. If you’re failing to see results, you need to identify the point where something is going wrong. If you’re doing video ads and have good watch time, your creative and your targeting should be okay. So you’ve diagnosed this step of the funnel and should move forward. If you have a good CTR (1%+ for Facebook), it means your ad copy was convincing and the customer is interested in knowing more about your product.

If your bounce rate is low and your time on site high, it means your landing page was engaging and informative. If over 10% of the people on your LP add the product to their cart, it means your ATC button placement, color etc is good. If over half of those who added the product to cart then initiate check-out, it means your cart page is not broken and created as it should. If over half of those who initiated check-out, purchase the product, congratulations you’ve made it.

Key metrics that I really like to focus on: average video views in seconds: 10 seconds or more. Average video views in percentage 25% or more. CTR minimum 1%, ideally 2%+. ATC rate, I like it over 10%. Initiate check out rate, I prefer having over 5% and conversion rate should ideally be 2.5% or more. Below are the today’s stats for one of my stores

I hope you find this useful.

Using Case Studies For Marketing

One of the things that people tell me is that when they run ads they get a lot of irrelevant traffic or leads although they are confident that their targeting is accurate. When you’re selecting a large interest with an audience size in millions, you’re obviously going to reach many irrelevant people just because of the sheer size of the audience.

One of the things that we do to improve this traffic quality as well as our conversion is to do case studies on the pain points and their solutions. For example, if you’re trying to sell a SaaS subscription, instead of trying to reach your potential customers directly with the ad of your product, you should do an ad of the case study.

If your product is an e-commerce product discovery tool, you should do a case study about “how a store owner made $37,000 with this product discovery strategy”. Once you run an ad for this case study, you’ll be able to collect very relevant clicks. You can then retarget this traffic with your product ad. You could also create a lookalike of this case study audience, and then run your product ad for them.

The more expensive your product is, the more number of case studies I recommend you to do.

Why Should You Always Duplicate Your Ads

If you’re familiar with Facebook advertising, you may have seen that some people always run multiple copies of the same ads in an ad-set. Those unfamiliar with this strategy always wonder, why would someone create 2 identical copies of the same ad and place them in an ad-set. Here’s the reason why.

When you target a large audience (for example 1 million to 100 million) which Facebook also encourages you to do so, not every person in your audience (interest/behavior) is going to be identical.

When you place two identical ads in an ad-set you’re hoping that your first copy will be seen by a small pocket of your large audience, and your second copy will be seen by a different small pocket. Based on the performance of the audience in those pockets, Facebook will continue to find similar audience using it’s machine learning capabilities.

It is obvious that one of the pockets of the audience would be superior to the other one and by having multiple copies you’re giving their machine learning a better chance of spending budget in your interest in a more optimal manner.

I found this difficult to convey over the text, but I hope that I’m able to do so. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask in comments.

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.

Customer Acquisition During Recession

I saw an interesting video by Garry Tan where he mentioned that startups spend as much as 40% of the funds they raise on Google & Facebook ads. That is a lot. In other words, 40% of all VC money is going to those 2 companies. This is obviously going to reduce in the coming months and so we could expect this to reflect in the earnings of these 2 companies.

During the upcoming recession caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the advice that seems to be coming from everywhere is to have cash runway that lasts 18 months.

In order for this to work, many startups are going to reduce their spending or risk survival. One option that all startups have is to allocate more time and resources to retain more customers instead of acquisition, as the former is often cheaper.

The startups that are going to continue to invest in customer acquisition need to know that the lifetime value of customers would most certainly be lower than what they were accustomed to. Because of this, an immediate recalibration would be required for ROI metrics. Acquiring customers on a better a ROI than before should be the norm for the next few months.

These are difficult times for everyone including us but looking into pandemics of the past suggests that all this should be over soon.

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.

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.