I have been following some fellow marketers run this strategy for a while and I had tested it out myself too a few weeks ago. I’ve seen decent results with it. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a lot of data to work with so I couldn’t test it at full scale but I believe in the concept for sure.
The strategy is called lookalike stacks and it’s dead simple to implement. You create 1% lookalikes of various options like 1% of view content, add to cart, initiate checkout and purchase and stack them together in 1 ad-set. You can do the same for 2%, 3% and so on.
At nearly $100 spent, purchase conversion value is $255 yielding ROAS of over 2.5
There are two reasons why I think this strategy works better than most other lookalike configurations.
Firstly, Facebook prefers broader audiences over narrow audience. When you let Facebook work with broader audiences, it has more room to play with, find buyers, and generate cheaper sales in turn. When you stack 1% of everything together, the audience size is much larger than 1% of individual lookalikes. It is often 2-3 times larger. Sure you could individually use 3% of purchase or 3 % of view content to achieve same audience size. However 3% is never going to be as good as 1%.
Secondly, best lookalikes are created when you not only use more qualified events but also have a large amount of data in them. For example, if you have 1000 ATCs and 100 purchases, your ATC lookalike is likely to be better than your purchase lookalike because Facebook had 1000 people to create lookalike from. Although purchase is a more qualified event than ATC, it will create a more qualified lookalike once there are large number of purchases in the data-set. When you create a stack, you’re able to leverage from the best of VC, ATC, IC, Purchase together in 1 ad-set. This kind of ad-set is the best of both worlds as it has both: lookalikes of most qualified events (IC, PUR etc), and lookalikes of events with most data in it (VC, ATC etc).
I hope I was able to explain myself just fine. If I didn’t, please feel free to ask me questions.
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.
I conducted an experiment a few years ago while I was trying to gain more insights on how Facebook’s algorithm worked and today I thought to share the results.
I can’t be more wrong with the timing of this blog though as Facebook has went after and sued a cloaking company that allowed the advertisers to cloak their real landing pages from Facebook’s review systems and instead served a “safe page”. So while I publish the results of this experiment, please know that I conducted it for research purposes, have not used the outcomes for monetary benefit, and publishing the findings here for educational purposes. I also encourage all of you to always use these platforms as defined by the terms of services. Now let’s dive in.
As I knew that Facebook is capping reach of certain domains and giving extra ordinary mileage to other domains, I went out on the search to understand deeply how the systems worked. We eventually found a way to leverage this while staying well within the TOS by using sub-domains. However, we didn’t just come up with sub-domains on the day 1. It took many other tests, one of which I’m going to publish here.
To conduct this test, I used a programmable link shortening service called Tr.im. I picked up an article from a domain that Facebook had given preferential treatment to and shortened the URL using tr.im. I then created a rule in the tr.im shortening system to continue forwarding all desktop traffic to the link I shortened but instead send mobile traffic to another dummy website hosting an exact replica of the same article.
I then picked up 2 Facebook pages with similar demographics, size and performance. I shared the dummy link directly on Page 1 and the tr.im shortened link on Page 2. In the next couple of minutes, we saw 987% more traffic coming on from the shortened link as it leveraged organic reach of the whitelisted domain but sent all mobile traffic our way.
This experiment set the foundation for us about how Facebook newsfeed is treating different domains and we eventually scaled and moved forward using the sub-domain method.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We have worked with many influencers for some of our content websites. The best part of running this operation between ’11 and ’16, in addition to generating revenue, was gaining extraordinary insights and knowledge.
It was a collaboration with over 200 marketers each running individual experiments in identifying the best of the best ways to leverage Facebook’s newsfeed. During the few years that we ran these websites, we collectively identified many ways to increase newsfeed visibility, but here’s my favorite one because this was the easiest to execute and had the highest reward.
We identified that Facebook distributes new domains on it’s platform with a much higher weight than domains with history. As the new domains receive some feedback in the next few days, their distribution is also limited. But there was no easy way to launch a new website everyday, with all sorts of advertising approved, and unique content in place. So as a quick fix, we resorted to using new domains but only as redirectors. This wasn’t a great solution to this problem, and obviously came with some caveats. So we looked further and eventually identified the perfect recipe to leverage this.
On running another experiment, we identified that sub-domains are also considered as fresh domains with no history as far as the Facebook’s algorithm is concerned. At the same time, subdomains do no require fresh approvals from the ad networks and exchanges. We also do not have to use redirectors, and Facebook referral headers stay intact.
Using this simple trick, we were able to boost our traffic by up-to 800% and were able to provide an environment that the influencers preferred due to extra-ordinary results and revenue-share.
Two days ago, I wrote about the reason why I got introduced to PHPMailer. I finished my blog saying that I ended up using PHPMailer for a completely different reason. This blog is a continuation of that.
The Rocketship
In 2011, my music blog Koolmuzone was seeing growth faster than it had seen before. It was burning all the rocket fuel, breaking all its previous records. The kind of growth that made certain people uncomfortable.
One late February night became one of the most miserable nights for me. Days became weeks, and weeks became months, but the misery didn’t end. Someone clearly didn’t like me and so he found a way to take Koolmuzone’s Facebook page down.
The Crash
My page was taken down by a fake DMCA report. It took me many weeks to understand what happened, and I’m going to explain that below as clearly as I possibly can.
Most of the times when you get a DMCA report, it is for copyright infringement. But this one was different. It wasn’t a copyright report. You can see the copy of the claim below
Hello,
We have removed or disabled access to the following content that you have posted on Facebook because we received a notice from a third party that the content infringes or otherwise violates their rights:
[Page: www.koolmuzone.com]
We strongly encourage you to review the content you have posted to Facebook to make sure that you have not posted any other infringing content, as it is our policy to terminate the accounts of repeat infringers when appropriate.
If you believe that we have made a mistake in removing this content, then please visit http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=1108 for more information.
The Facebook Team
The fine line here was that the person who sent this report to Facebook didn’t say I was violating anyone’s copyrights. That there wasn’t any particular piece of content on my page that infringed someone else’s right. The report rather claimed that the ‘page name’ itself is infringing someone’s rights; a trademark claim.
I read that email everyday for many weeks until I found out what happened when I read the following line
[Page: www.koolmuzone.com]
This line made me realize that the content that infringes someone’s rights is the page name itself.
After I realized this is a bogus TM claim, I started seeking for the legal ways to acquire trademark for my brand which wasn’t trademarked at that time, neither by me nor by someone else. The TM didn’t exist in any country or jurisdiction. It was a bogus TM claim that Facebook asked me to resolve directly with the other party by providing his (fake) email address that no one responded to.
First Attempt of Recovery
So I went ahead and locally registered my company, acquired the relevant tax number for my business and obtained the relevant trademark. However, in the end I was still asked by Facebook that it doesn’t resolve any DMCA claims, instead I should directly resolve the matter with the claiming party or in a court of law. A party with a pseudonym and a fake email. I was stuck, and I was still devastated.
Second Attempt
After spending a few more weeks, sometime in April, I thought of something. I thought if Facebook can be as stupid as this with a fake trademark claim, it could be even more stupid than that.
I realized that there could be a potential solution to this problem and the solution could be PHPMailer. The thing about PHPMailer, or any mailer for that matter, is that you can send email “from” anyone’s email address “to” anyone’s email address. This might be difficult for some people to understand but the way the email protocol works is that you can send an email from an email address that you don’t own or have no access to.
The only thing different about such emails are the “email headers” that are commonly used to verify the real origin of such an email. The email headers mention the real domain name / server IP from where the email originated from and can be helpful in detecting spoof emails.
Because Facebook took a page down on a fake TM claim, I wondered if it would restore the page if the fake email address took the fake TM claim back, without verifying the email headers. And so I sent out that email.
The next morning, my page was restored.
I was hurt, very very hurt. I buckled up and got back to work. I had wasted over 2 months because someone wasn’t happy with the progress we were making.
Looking Back
Over the years, I’ve tried to understand the psychology of people who do that. They think there are two ways to win the race. The first way is to run faster, so you can really get ahead. This, in my opinion, is the only way to actually win and make progress. The second way, however, is to hurt your competition, so you can get ahead of him.
The problem with the second approach is that although you get ahead of your competition, you don’t really move farther in the true sense. You’re still standing right there, only with weapons. And if you think about it; what good does it do to you? If you win a race by eliminating your competition, how does that benefit you?
Sure, you’ll get the winner’s medal but without actually moving forward. You’re not going to have any more visitors coming in or you won’t be generating any more revenue. Why would you do all of this for a fucking medal. If, the person who hurt me, is reading this; think about it.
Since then, in the past 7 years, I’ve never worked in the Pakistani industry. It was toxic and I wonder if anything has changed so far. Even if things have changed, I’ve never really mustered courage to ever work here again.
To all the people who have stood by me during this tough time, I owe everything to all of you. To everyone who were the reason for my pain, I forgive you, although I’ll be surprised if you were seeking forgiveness at all.
