Facebook/Instagram Ads
Let’s put things into perspectiveThe most recent data shows that Facebook has the highest percentage of internet users in Canada accessing the platform – 84 percent compared to 59 percent accessing YouTube. Twitter is also experiencing growth and is expected to grow its user base from over 3.3 million in 2012 to some 7.6 million users in 2020. Based on mobile share of visits, however, Twitter ranks third among Canadians, with Pinterest taking the second spot, and Facebook remaining the unquestionable leader of social networks visited via mobile.
Let’s put things into perspectiveCore Facebook Vitals as reported in Q1 2019 IR Statement
● How many employees does Facebook currently have: 37,773 as of March 31, 2019, an increase of 36% year-over-year.
● Worldwide, there are over 2.38 billion monthly active users (MAU) as of March 31, 2019. This is an 8 percent increase in Facebook MAUs year over year. This is compared to 2.32 billion MAUs for Q4 2018.
● 1.56 billion people on average log onto Facebook daily and are considered daily active users (Facebook DAU) for March 2019. This represents an 8 percent increase year over year
Things get interesting here...Core Facebook Vitals as reported in Q1 2019 IR Statement
Mobile advertising revenue is reported according to Facebook to represent approximately
93 percent of advertising revenue for Q1 2019
Canadians are addicted to FBData pertaining to the frequency of social network usage in
Canada reveals that 54 percent of Facebook users access the platform at least once daily, with 23 percent of
YouTube users saying the same.
Even more interesting is the activity occurring on social platforms. A total of 28.5 percent of Canadian Facebook
users admitted to being very active; posting, sharing, liking or commenting on various things, with 49.3 percent reading or
liking content despite not posting their own.
Canadians Companies are...Milking it!!
Social media ad revenue in Canada is expected to reach over 590 million U.S. dollars, with the
largest share of these revenues being generated through mobile ads
Our Usage….
HOW WISH BECAME A MULTI-BILLION DOLLAR BUSINESSWish is a mobile shopping app founded by engineers at Google who worked on the AdWords product.
They’re doing billions of dollars in sales, and I genuinely believe that they’re the only conceivable threat to Amazon today.
How’d they do it?
They spent nearly 100% of their money on Facebook and Instagram advertising.
The biggest companies and brands in the world are the ones who take advantage of underpriced attention the most.
For example… the biggest advertiser on Google AdWords when it was underpriced 8 years ago was Amazon. The biggest regret of my career as an entrepreneur is not spending more on wine terms when Google AdWords was underpriced.
But you cannot reach to everyone on Facebook
Facebook bought a new algorithm by the name: Edgerank.
Reverse Engineer Campaigns...Facebook Ads Library
Reverse Engineer Campaigns...Facebook Ads Library
HOW DO YOU FIND YOUR COMPETITORS?
You likely already have a good idea of who many of your closest competitors are, however, you can also use one of many web apps like Webstagram to find popular accounts by searching for relevant keywords and hashtags. Once you find a large account and follow them, Instagram will suggest additional accounts that are similar. Following these accounts will lead you to more accounts, and so on.
Let’s assume you were a new fashion sock brand. You could search Webstagram using the keyword “Socks” to find related accounts:
Structure Is Critical For TrackingAd campaign structure
Campaign → Ad set → Ad
● Campaign — Create one campaign per product or per product category you’re advertising.For example, you'd have
one campaign for your men's jacket line and one campaign for your women's jacket line. Or one campaign for your
enterprise SaaS product and one for your small-to-medium business product.
● Ad set — If, for example, you're selling men's socks, you may have two valuable audience segments: young men
and middle-aged men. For each, you may pitch distinct or overlapping value props, such as "quality", "beautiful," or
"unique."
You then create one ad set per combination of value prop and audience segment. This keeps your targeting and
messaging controlled so the set's ads can find the best wording and imagery for pitching the value prop to the
audience segment.
● Ad — Within an ad set, create one ad per combination of unique copy and imagery.
Setup...Ad campaign lifecycle
First, I want you to have a high-level view of how campaigns are executed.
Here are the steps to setting up a campaign:
1. Setup conversion pixelWorking with an ad channel always begins by setting up the channel’s conversion pixel (linked is Facebook’s). This is the JavaScript code snippet that reports conversions occurring on your site back to the channel.
This is how the channel knows which ads are ultimately performing best — since cost-per-click is just an
intermediary metric that isn't necessarily correlated with conversion.
Setup...
2. Determine budget
Set your budgets for each set high enough for your ads to individually reach 3,000-5,000 impressions. You need a
significant sample size like this for your cost-per-click (CPC) to stabilize. CPC is how you determine in the short
term which ads perform best.
Unless you've used a channel before and you know how much your audience costs to target, you can't predict this
budget upfront. So start with a few hundred dollars per campaign, watch your metrics daily, and scale the budget as
needed to reach 3,000-5,000 impressions for ads showing high clickthrough rates relative to your others.
As you see consistent CPC or CPA numbers that are financially viable (we'll talk more about this), incrementally
increase your budget as high as you're comfortable with.
Setup...
3. Create initial ad sets and their ads
For each audience segment (e.g. mothers, software engineers, men under 40 with any job title), create an ad set for
every value prop you want to individually pitch them.
For each ad set, create ads presenting the same value prop in distinct ways — through differing copy and imagery.
The more distinct ads you have, the less frequently users on profile-targeted channels see the same ads on repeat,
so the longer it takes for them to tire of your product!
Setup...
4. Monitor
Check the ad channel's dashboard once daily to see which ad set audiences, ad set value props, and ad
copy/imagery combinations perform best.
If you've reached a significant sample size of 3,000-5,000 impressions, turn off the ads with much lower
click-through-rates (CTR’s) and/or cost-per-customer-acquisitions (CPA’s) relative to the others in its ad set.
If some ads perform much worse than their siblings and they've only reached, say, 1,500 impressions, you can turn
those off too instead of wasting money on them.
Setup...5. OptimizeBegin tweaking your highest-performing ads with changes to their copy and creative. Similarly, tweak your ad sets'
targeting settings.
Duplicate your ad sets and ads (keep the old ones running) when you do this. You want to see how your tweaks
simultaneously compare to their originals.
Build the habit of archiving all your work so you can look back at your costly-to-acquire advertising data when
setting up new channels in the future!
When tweaking, you're ultimately looking to lower your CPA numbers and to increase total conversion volume.
Depending on your total audience size, as your ads continue running for weeks and beyond, audiences will tire of
seeing your ads and will increasingly turn a blind eye to them. Your CTR’s will steadily drop.
At this point, your realistic goal may not be to drastically improve CPA's through minor tweaks, but to prolong your
current CPA: keep your ads fresh by switching them up and running at least 4 or 5 per ad set.
Setup...6. Run ongoing experiments
As you're optimizing the campaigns that already work, you should also test brand new targeting, value prop, copy,
and imagery combinations.
Your work never ends.
If you don't continually experiment, I guarantee you're leaving better CPA's and conversion volume on the table.
And your audiences will sooner fatigue of your ads.
I recommend setting aside 10% of your budget for weekly or bi-weekly experiments.
Setup...7. Retarget
Segment people who visited your site but didn’t convert into a separate audience. (Using conversion pixels, every major channel allows you to easily do this. These are called "custom audiences.") When retargeting your custom audience, you can hit them with a unique set of ads that appeal to their newfound awareness of your product and its benefits.
Consider, which new angles can you pitch them to tip them over the edge?
I talk a lot more about retargeting on the upcoming Facebook Ads page. Hold tight!
Setup...
Targeting: Profiles
With your demographic and device targeting in place, your next step is determining your primary means of profile
targeting:
● Profile data — Either target the attributes of people's Facebook profiles via:
1. Their interests (e.g. food, fashion, photography).
2. Their behaviors (e.g. frequent flyers, high-end diners).
3. Their job titles (e.g. engineering, sales).
● Lookalikes — Or, target "lookalike audiences," which are tailored audiences Facebook algorithmically
generates for you based on your sample list of customers.
Setup...Profile data: Interests
Facebook determines user interests based on Pages Liked and links shared.
Examples of interests include:
● Activities and initiatives — Fishing, drawing, video games, veterans' support, etc.
● People and entertainment — Tom Cruise, Barack Obama, Rick and Morty, etc.
● Companies and organizations — Nike, Nintendo, Red Cross, etc.
Capitalism reality check: Most features Facebook releases are designed to learn more about you. Did you think
Facebook's introduction of News Stories was purely about getting you to spend more time on Facebook? Nope.
It was also about tracking which stories you click on so they can tailor your ad targeting.
Setup...
Profile data: Behaviors
You can also target Facebook users based on their "behaviors," which are categories Facebook lumps users into
based on their online and offline activity.
Examples include:
● Users who recently purchased a car
● Users who donate to charities
● Users who frequently purchase goods online
● Small business owners
Tracking Tool
Seed Size...
If your seed audience is smaller than 1,000 people, you won't be giving Facebook enough data to
significantly identify commonalities.
Conversely, if your list is much bigger than 5,000, you're probably not segmenting out your best users
(those with the highest LTV). Think about it: Wouldn't you much rather have a lookalike generated from
your best users than from the average of your users?
So keep your seed audience to your best 1,000+ users.
Audiences...Core Audiences are the basic method of Instagram ad
targeting. But beyond the standard targeting options of age,
gender, location, and interests, you can actually target your
Core Audiences even more precisely.
Behavioral targeting, for example, allows you to include or
exclude users from your audience based on their
behaviors, from where they’ve traveled lately to whether or
not they own a car.
Connection targeting, on the other hand, lets you refine
your audience based on their previous engagements with
your Facebook Pages, Events, or any apps you might
have.
Targeting Tips...
● Don't run Instagram and Facebook ads in the same campaigns. Treat them separately since their ads are
displayed differently and the user behavior across platforms differs.
● If you're targeting desktop devices on Facebook, only keep the Feed ads option checked. These are the
ads that show up in the Facebook Newsfeed. Ignore Right Column ads as they convert terribly. No one
clicks them, so they're only useful for brand marketing — and sometimes retargeting (which I cover
shortly).
● If you're targeting mobile devices, you'll see the Audience Network option. Test it out. These are
Facebook's third-party mobile app partners that display your ads within their apps. Sometimes these
perform very well.
Video Ads...Here's what you need to know about running video ads — on any ad channel:
● Optimize the placeholder image — Video ads allow you to use a static image as a placeholder before someone
hits the play button. Treat this placeholder with the same attention to detail as you would a standard
image-based ad: optimize it for conversion with all the same principles.
● Get to the point ASAP — Remember, unlike TV advertising, audiences aren't being forced to watch your video
ads. They're skeptically opting in, which means you better entertain them immediately to retain their attention:
Make the first 5 seconds extremely interesting and try to keep the video under 30s total.
● Prioritize demos over lifestyle marketing — When aiming for conversion, prioritize demoing the product over
broad lifestyle marketing: Show the product in action and skip the fluff. For SaaS software, this could mean a
screen recording of the product. For physical products, this could be a 360 of the product followed by close-up
shots of it in action.
● Use closed captioning — Never design ads that only work when audio is enabled. Assume users won't have
headphones and that they'll be relying on in-video text overlays and/or closed captioning to summarize any
non-self-evident value props. Facebook provides a closed captioning feature. It's really easy to use.
Video Ads...Videos
When assessing the performance of your Facebook video ads, there are unique metrics to monitor, including Video
Watches at 50% and Video Percentage Watched.
Video Watches at 50% is your key metric for determining how many engaged watches your video received. This is a
reflection of how enticing the thumbnail image and first 15 seconds of the video are.
Optimize for this metric to increase the volume of landing page clicks that'll then be taken by people watching your
video.
Video Percentage Watched is the metric that indicates the quality of your video: The more people who watch to the
end, the more consistently engaging the video is.
Clicks to conversions...For example, you could write incredibly enticing ad copy that generates an enormous amount of clicks — by
promising something your landing page doesn't deliver on.
Great CTR, bad CPA. But all that matters to your revenue is CPA, so what's the point?
Conversely, you may have ads with low CTR because you're targeting tiny niches, but the few who do click are
highly likely to convert — and at higher purchase prices.
The takeaway here is don't aim for clicks for the sake of them. Attract audiences your product can satisfy.
Automated Rules...
Automated rules
Facebook handily offers a feature entitled Automates Rules that turns off ads, ad sets, and campaigns when they hit performance thresholds you deem unacceptable.
This helps you avoid the stress of checking your ads every few hours.
Instead, when things are going south, rest assured Automated Rules
will stop you from losing money.
Then, whenever you next have spare time, you can go back in to
optimize your ads.
Campaign Objectives...1. Brand awareness: reach people more likely to pay attention to your ads and increase
awareness for your brand
2. Reach: show your ad to the maximum number of people
3. Traffic: for clicks to your website or to the app store for your app
4. Engagement: get more people to see and engage with your post or Page. Engagement can
include comments, shares, likes, event responses and offer claims
5. App installs: send people to the store where they can download your business’ app
6. Video views: promote videos that show behind-the-scenes footage, product launches or
customer stories to raise awareness about your brand
Campaign Objectives...
7. Lead generation: create ads that collect info from people interested in your product, such as
sign-ups for newsletters
8. Messages: connect with people on Facebook, communicate with potential or existing
customers to encourage interest in your business
9. Conversions: get people to take valuable actions on your website or app, such as adding
payment info or making a purchase
10. Catalog sales: show products from your ecommerce store’s catalog to generate sales
11. Stores traffic: promote your brick-and-mortar business locations to people that are nearby
Budgets...Lifetime!
In most cases, we recommend setting a lifetime budget.
Source: Facebook Ads Manager
If you select a daily budget, Instagram will spend up to that
set amount each day and no more.
If, on the other hand, you select a lifetime budget for your
campaign, Instagram will distribute your budget at the
optimal times throughout your campaign period.
Delivery...
My Favorite Tests...
Here are some of my favorite audience tests:
● 7 day Instagram Engager (all types lumped)
● 20 day Instagram Engager (all types lumped)
● 90 day Instagram Engager (all types lumped)
● 30 Day Instagram Profile Visits, non customers
● 7 Day Instagram Story Video Views to 95%
Audience on Instagram...
Every time your Facebook campaign fails to take off, it might be due to one of these five reasons:
1. You’ve created too many ad groups of A/B test variations with low budgets
2. You ad images fail to catch people’s attention3. Low relevance of ads (might indicate a bad audience
targeting)4. Using the wrong bidding options5. Being impatient and making rapid changes (10,000
impressions minimum)
Understand your audience
Understand your audience
Target niche interests: Instead of targeting broad interests that describe hundreds of thousands of people, narrow down your target audiences. You can add several layers of interests so that the audience members must match at least one interest on each targeting level.
Facebook recommends niche audience targeting for advertisers aiming to reach a very specific audience, e.g. people in a certain location or with specialized interests.
Audience Breakdown
1. Ice cubes: people who have never heard of you and haven’t visited your site or landing page before. In the Facebook advertising land, ice cubes are usually the people you’re targeting with a Saved Audience.
2. Lukewarm audience: people who know who you are, but don’t know for sure what you do.
3. Volcano lava traffic: People who have bought something from you before or are way down the conversion funnel, on the path to becoming a customer.
Don’t Go Too Broad
Ad Creative is honestly...shit!!
Getting Context Wrong...
Careless or Shitty Copywriting
When creating a Facebook campaign, you can write custom copy for every part of your ads.
That’s a huge responsibility, as one wrong line of text could potentially extinguish the spark of interest in your readers.
Bad Choice of Ad PlacementIn a Facebook experiment, marketers at Scoro discovered that Desktop ads had a 534% higher cost-per-click than
ads placed on Mobile + Audience Network.
They also discovered, however, that Desktop ads performed a lot better in terms of conversions.
Bad Choice of Ad Placement...and best way to test it?
Facebook’s Ad Placements Include:
● News feeds (mobile and desktop)● Facebook right-hand column● Instagram● Audience Network● Instant Articles● In-stream Video
One of the main reasons why you might make a mistake when choosing your ad placements is the offer and placement mismatch.
For example, if you’d like people to create a free trial for your business software, Instagram ads might not be the best option. People aren’t usually in the mood to deal with business while browsing images posted by their friends.
The best way to find out which ad placements result in the highest return on investment is to test multiple ad placements and analyze the results.
Bidding...
Facebook operates on an auction-type bidding system, just like Google Ads.
Today, PPC bidding is almost scientific, and applying the right components could give your ad campaigns a real boost.
To customize and view your bidding options in Facebook’s Ads Manager, go to the “Budget and Schedule” section.
Bidding...
4 Different Bidding Options In Facebook Ads
1) Conversions: Facebook will do its best to deliver your ads to people who are most likely to convert. This bidding method is a good place to start as Facebook will optimize the ads for you.
2) Link Clicks: Facebook focuses on getting users to click on your ad to follow the link. If your goal is to get a lot of users to your landing page or to view an on-Facebook page, this could be a good option.
3) Impressions: Facebook optimizes your ads with the goal of being seen by as many people as possible. This is a good option for businesses looking to build brand awareness or sharing highly engaging content (e.g. blog articles).
4) Daily Unique Reach: Facebook optimizes for showing your ads to people up to once a day. This method is great for retargeting, ensuring that people will see your ads only once every day and (hopefully) preventing ad fatigue.
Bidding...Instagram is Over Priced!!
Testing….
Data from over $3 million in Facebook Ad spend experiments to create a list of A/B test elements that provided the
biggest gains:
1. Countries2. Precise interests3. Mobile OS4. Age ranges5. Genders6. Ad images7. Titles8. Relationship status9. Landing page
10. Interested in
As you can see, many of these elements are related to your target audience. Once again, it’s super important to refine your targeting to reach high-intent customers who are likely to convert.
A/B Test Your Facebook Ads
Automate it...
● Cost per Result● Cost per Add Payment Info (Facebook Pixel)● Daily Spend● Cost per Click (Link)● Cost per App Install● Frequency● Cost per Add to Cart (Facebook Pixel)● Cost per Initiate Checkout (Facebook Pixel)● Impressions● Cost per Purchase (Facebook Pixel)● Cost per Lead (Facebook Pixel)● Lifetime Spent● Cost per Complete Registration (Facebook Pixel)● CPM (Cost per 1,000 impressions)● Reach● Results
To create a new Facebook ad rule, select one or multiple campaigns, ad sets, or ads, and click on Create Rule.
What we track….
You keep track of these eight Facebook ad metrics to make sure your campaigns don’t go off the rails:
1. Ad frequency2. Relevance score3. Click-through-rate vs. conversion rate4. Number of leads5. Facebook Ads customer churn6. Ad performance by placement7. Clicks by interests8. Ad engagement rate
You can create custom retargeting audiences based around
Instagram post engagement, customer email lists, Instagram video
views and more.
Social Research Tool
Imagine Being Able to Find Any Adsfor Any Given Niche on Facebook !"Tmaster Pro The Ultimate FB ADS SPY Software"
Find Every Ad on Facebook In Seconds Even dark postsSpy on Top CPA OffersNow you Can Reverse Engineer theseProven Winners to Replicate their Success !
> Effectively Spy On Your Competition> Find Every Ad on Facebook In Seconds Even dark posts Cloaked / Redirects links> Analyzing Your competitor’s Campaign Exact Strategies> Discover the Most Profitable Niche / Idea Campaigns on FB
> Fully compliant with Facebook's TOS !
AD ANALYST
A tool to help you understand how you are targeted by advertisers on FacebookWhat kind of ads do I receive in Facebook? What kind of advertisers target me?What attributes do advertisers use to target me?What attributes has Facebook inferred about me?
Is my targeting unique?
Always Optimize for Conversions
Speaking of Facebook’s AI-powered algorithms, they’re really really good at delivering your ads to the people most likely to be interested.
That’s why, there’s really no need to be playing around with your Facebook campaign objective to try and lower your advertising costs.
Campaign objective is the first selection you’ll make when setting up your Facebook campaigns.
CUSTOM SCHEDULEChances are that your Facebook ads aren’t relevant to yo your audience 24/7.
For example, it’s rather unlikely that someone will create a free trial of your B2B product in the middle of the night. Rather, they might sign up for Netflix or order a pizza.
Take a look at your Facebook ad reports to learn which days and hours bring you the most conversions at the lowest cost.
TRACK...AND TRACK MORE!!In addition to tracking your website visitors, you can also track nine different Standard Events.
TARGET HIGH IMPACT
EXAMPLE….
Client: MuslimKids.TV
Industry Not Competitive...But Awareness Is Not There
Average Transaction: $9.97/month
EXAMPLE….INSTEAD OF SELLING Direct membership it’s free trial
DON’T SELL….
CREATE AWARENESS & BUILD TRUST
PEOPLE ARE ON FACEBOOK TO KILL TIME...MORE LIKE WATCHING CAT VIDEOS
AND BRAINLESS CONTENT
NOT TO BUY….THATS’S FOR GOOGLE/BING
AWARENESS STAGE ADS OUTPERFORM EVERYTHING ELSE
EXAMPLE….
Client: Maths Tutoring
Industry Very Competitive
Average Transaction: $100 per month for 4 years ($4000+ service)
EXAMPLE….INSTEAD OF SELLING $4000 FB SERVICE OVER FACEBOOK
EXAMPLE….Event CBC Covered It!!
256 PEOPLE CAME OUT OF 364
40 STUDENTS WERE ENROLLED IN THE PROGRAM
40 * $4800 = $192,000
CAMPAIGN COST: $2100 IN ADS COST AND $1200 IN CAMPAIGN SETUP
EXAMPLE….RESULT:
256 PEOPLE CAME OUT OF 364
40 STUDENTS WERE ENROLLED IN THE PROGRAM
40 * $4800 = $192,000
CAMPAIGN COST: $2100 IN ADS COST AND $1200 IN CAMPAIGN SETUP
OUR DENTAL CLIENT CAMPAIGNS
Master the art of FOMO and urgency
If you’ve ever missed a flight or been the next person in the queue right when the store runs out of the thing you
wanted, you know how bad this feels.
FOMO – the fear of missing out – haunts us every single day.
Create carousel ad campaignsA report by Kinetic Social revealed that carousel ads get 10 times more clicks compared to static sponsored posts on Facebook.
Spice up your ads with emojisSaaS brand Scoro ran a small A/B test to test whether emojis have any effect on the click-through and engagement rates. They did.
The ad with emoji in the headline had a 241% higher click-through rate than the ad with no emoji.
USING BRACKETS
This one is so painfully obvious that I wish I’d thought of it years ago. What do I mean by using brackets? I mean this:
[INFLUENCERS ONLY]
Yeah, that would’ve made me look too.
Facebook doesn’t allow you to bold, underline or italicise, so brackets are one way to differentiate your posts and make certain things stand out.
// THIS IS THE OTHER //
>> OR THIS <<
NOT INCLUDING A CTA
There has been so much written about which CTA button you to choose for Facebook Ads.
“Never use the Sign Up button,” say some. Others claim that “Learn More has the highest click-through rate”.
But, did you know that you can simply choose NO call to action button on your Facebook Ads? Yeah, you don’t have to have one!
Why does it work? Well, it makes your ad look like the native content it’s supposed to be.
Are you seeing a trend here? It seems that the key to successful Facebook ads is to make them look as little like an ad as possible. Groundbreaking.
FB MESSENGER AD CAMPAIGNS
Not really a Facebook Ads hack, but a huge opportunity nonetheless.
I’ve only seen two Facebook Messenger campaigns done well, so far. I don’t know if this is because I’m not in the target audience for those who are running them, or if there just aren’t any people running them yet. But, either way, this is a HUGE opportunity at the moment.
To put it in layman’s terms: You can use Facebook Messenger ads to get people to interact with your brand via Messenger. Then, once they’ve messaged your page, you can run ads to them that show up as messages in their FB Messenger. It’s a bit like building an email list, but within FB messenger. Shneaky.
Free Audit Reports...
Content Analyzer...
Run Contests….
Compare….
Graphics….Canva
Graphics….Picktochart