How can you test the most effective ads for your business to get better results?

There are three main issues when thinking about your advertising on Facebook...

1. Ads get stale quickly and it can take a long time to produce something that’s great
2. You have to play by Facebook’s rules to succeed with your advertising
3. It seems like Facebook’s #1 rule is to make you spend as much money with them as possible

...but you can still have success.

Image or Video?

Both image and video can work well for your Facebook ad creative, but which one should you choose? Think about what makes most sense for your business in terms of time, budget, and return.

Here are some things to consider:

Images

• Low cost to create
• Easy to outsource
• Quick to produce
• Faster testing due to low production barriers

Video

• Higher cost to create, even with a lower production value
• Usually requires more skills and discretion
• Takes time to produce
• More difficult to cycle out quickly

Overall, videos cost more time and money to produce than images On top of that, most people will not watch your video.

Here are some stats we put together on videos:

• Average view length 0:04 seconds
• 5.61% of people watched the full video
• 56.63% watched 3 seconds or less
• Most videos were 60-90 seconds long

Recommendations for Images

We recommend starting with images to establish your baseline and then adding videos into the mix later.

There are some techniques that will stop people from scrolling past your image:

• Juxtaposition technique: Take standard images and add a twist e.g. take an image of an office worker and add a silly cartoon next to it. This kind of technique works because the viewers see something unusual and want to know what’s going on. Try to match up the angles in the ad copy with the image and make sure the level of silliness is appropriate to your brand and your message.
• Familiarity technique: This might involve using familiar images with a twist, or formats that you know your audience will be used to. This technique requires you to know your audience pretty well, and you will need to test...a lot!
• Intrigue Technique: The idea with this technique is to show users something they haven’t seen before and that interests them. People often like to see images of people or animals but interest is subjective so you will need to keep an open mind and test a lot as well.

Recommendations for Video

• Supercuts: This is like a highlights reel of your existing footage. This is useful because you don’t need to produce any new material and it’s also a technique which is super easy to outsource. Keep the video under 90 seconds in total (remember, most people won’t watch all of it).
• Guided Tours: This gives your audience an inside look at your product or service. Use a walkthrough to show off your best features without getting too far into the detail - keep things low-tech and simple. They are a great option for retargeting warm audiences as a means of getting them off the fence, but can work with cold ones too.

Tools

• For creating video, we recommended Pixlr and Canva
• Facebook guidelines only permit text to take up a maximum of 20% of your ad. Use Facebook’s tools to check this.
• Add subtitles to videos with Veed (subtitles are essential as 85% of people watch videos with no sound).

Summary

• Videos are great but don’t let that become a bottleneck - images perform well too!
• Video views may be lower than you would expect
• Juxtaposition, Familiarity and Intrigue techniques can help you create scroll-stopping images
• Supercuts and Guided Tours can help you incorporate video into your creative toolkit

Why do you need a campaign structure?

Here are some of the key reasons why you should have a campaign structure:

• Makes campaigns easier to manage.
• Produces results that are easier to understand.
• Allows you to leverage Facebook’s machine learning to greater effect.
• Generates more profit!

Setting Your Campaign Objectives

Campaigns need a mission so that they are effective and measurable. Facebook will run your campaign and measure your results according to the objectives you give it, and will be very single-minded in doing this. That’s why it’s important to make sure you choose the correct objective from the beginning.

The four objectives that we recommend are Traffic, Engagement, Lead Generation and Conversions.

Key to choosing the correct objective is knowing where your audience are at the awareness scale (more about this in the Audience lesson). Let’s take a look at these four objectives and when to use each one:

1. Traffic - this shows your ad to the people who are most likely to click the link, optimizing traffic to your site. Make sure you also set Landing Page Views at the Ad Set level when you are using this objective to optimize it fully (this ensures you exclude clicks that are within Facebook).

This is a useful objective when you are starting out with a new brand or a fresh pixel which doesn’t yet have any data to give Facebook.

2. Engagement - This includes reacting, commenting or sharing posts. Even viewing a post or clicking a link can count as engagement. These types of ads can help support your profit-driven campaigns by boosting engagement on your ads. Facebook likes showing ads with higher engagement so this can lead to lower ad costs.

3. Lead Generation - This collects data from users without them having to leave Facebook. For example, you run an ad with an inbuilt form where users can sign up. The form is within Facebook so you don’t need to set up your own landing page. The only downside to this kind of campaign is that it is so easy for users that the quality of the leads is lower.

4. Conversions - This allows you to optimize for a specific event; usually a sale. A conversion is the prime objective for your business, but it’s important that you only use it at the right moment. Facebook needs results to work with so make sure that you are already generating purchases, and that your pixel is installed and collecting data. You should also consider setting a conversion objective for viewing your website or adding to cart. Although these may not result in sales, they provide useful data to Facebook in the learning phase.

The Learning Phase

Whenever you start a new objective, FB enters the learning phase. It will tell you when it has enough data from the learning phase in order to complete your objective. If Facebook tells you it’s in the Learning Limited phase, it is telling you it doesn’t have enough data.

If you see this message, you should consider running some more campaigns on Facebook to gather data. However, if you have data coming in from other sources, you can ignore it and run your campaign anyway.

Setting Objectives: Summary

• Traffic can be good for new accounts but stick with landing page views
• Engagement can help support your profit-driven campaigns
• Lead generation is great for launching fast, but monitor the lead quality
• Conversions are where you want to be but you need some data to make it work
• ’Learning limited’ doesn’t mean you can’t be profitable

Campaign Budget Optimization

CBO allows you to manage your ads at the Campaign level rather than at the Ad Set level. You give control to Facebook to distribute your ad spend so that high-performing ads get more and low-performing ads get less - rather than spreading it out evenly amongst ad sets. Facebook can get great results with CBO by optimizing the huge amounts of data they have access to.

In the graphic below, you can see the difference in how ad spend is distributed without CBO and with CBO.

To activate CBO for your campaign, just set the toggle to ‘on’ on the Conversions page.

When using CBO we recommend using audiences which are similar in size (no more than a 20-30% variation). Otherwise, Facebook will direct a disproportionate amount of your budget to the larger audiences.

If you do have more varied audience sizes but still want to use CBO, you can set maximum and minimum limits manually in the Budget and Schedule area. Use the Ad Set Spend Limits.

Building Your Campaign

Within your Campaign, you will have a number of Ad Sets (we recommend 3-5 per campaign). Then, within each Ad Set, a number of Ads. The structure should look something like this.

It is important to note that these are not all different ads. Ads are created from scratch in Ad Set 1 and then the IDs are duplicated across to the other Ad Sets. By using the same ID, you keep the likes, comments and shares that are already on the ad (so you can leverage the existing engagement).

You can find the ID in the Page Posts section of the Ads Manager.

Organizing Your Campaign

To keep track of everything, a spreadsheet is a good place to start, depending on the complexity of the campaign.

Overview

In the overview section, you should identify which product or service you are advertising, how long you want to run the campaign for and the budget.

Audiences

Audiences is split into Cold, Warm, and Reference audiences.

Audience Definition - This will act as notes for you and your team.

Audience Name - This is the name as it appears in Facebook (very important if you have lots of different - and similar - audience names in Facebook).

Status - Indicate where you are at with this campaign. Choose from pre-existing options in the template e.g. Audience created, Ad Set Created, etc.

Exclusion Criteria - Look in the Reference Audiences section for any groups that you want to exclude.

Ads

Ad Type - Here you should say a little bit about what kind of ad it is. It’s up to you how you want to describe them.
Ad Name - As you have named it in Facebook (although, with the ID you will always be able to find it).
Status - The options on the dropdown will allow you to keep track of what stage you are at with your ad.
References - Add information about UTM parameters, the countries you are running your ads in, any landing page urls you are using, etc.

Setting Up Your Campaign

Once the spreadsheet is filled out, you need to get the campaign set up in your Facebook Ads account. The idea is to quickly and efficiently copy the Ads from Ad Set 1.

1. Click on Ad Set 1, go to the Page Posts section and copy the ID from the first Ad.

2. Then, in your ads account, in the Ad Setup area select Use Existing Post, then paste the copied ID into the Ad Creative area and click Publish. Repeat for as many Ads as you have in Ad Set 1.

3. Now, select Ad Set 2 and click Duplicate. 

4. Then, just edit the name of the duplicated Ad Set. It will have all the same Ad IDs from set 1. 

Pro Tip

There is a faster way to copy an Ad ID into an Ad Set.

First, in the Ads tab, select the Ad you want to copy, open the Duplicate menu and select Copy.

Next, switch to the Ad Sets tab, select the Ad Set you want to copy the ad into, open the Duplicate menu and select Paste.

When you are managing lots of Ads, this can save you a lot of valuable time.

Note: You can also upload your campaign using a spreadsheet from Facebook although we don’t recommend it.

Summary

• CBO is the cornerstone of a profitable campaign structure
• Make sure to keep audience sizes similar (within 20-30%)
• Use Ad IDs to keep engagement across ad sets
• Stay organized by planning your campaign in advance

How to build effective audiences

Audiences are the one of the most important parts of a successful Facebook Ads campaign. Facebook is great at tracking down the right audience for your campaign. However, for best results, you need to know where you are looking and what you are looking for.

You should aim for an audience of at least 1 million, with the budget no more than $10 per 10,000 people. If your audience is too small, Facebook is still going to spend all your budget, but your profits will be lower. If your audience is too big, then the focus will be too broad.

As well as the audience size, you also need to know where your customers are at on the awareness scale. If your audience is at the beginning of the scale and they don’t know much about your product, then we call them a cold audience. If your audience already knows about you and has been targeted before or has interacted with you at some point, we call them a warm audience. There are different techniques for cold audiences vs warm audiences.

Cold Audiences

Targeting cold audiences usually focuses on creating awareness of your brand and identifying ways that you can solve problems for your customers. You can use interest targeting or lookalikes as techniques to target cold audiences.

Creating a Customer Avatar

With a cold audience, it’s useful to have an idea of who you are looking for. Building a customer avatar is a great way to do this. You can use these 9 parameters as a guide to create your customer avatar:

1. Name - give your avatar a name to make it more ‘real’
2. Gender
3. Country
4. Marital status
5. Kids
6. Job - you can keep this general e.g. traditional job, business owner, etc.
7. Financial status e.g. low-income, middle, wealthy, etc.
8. Interests - choose 3-4
9. Motivation i.e. how does your product help this person?

Your customer avatar will come in very useful not only for interest targeting, but also for crafting your ad copy.

Interest Targeting

Interest targeting is a useful way to define audiences if you don’t have lookalike audiences to work with. It’s more work, but can be very effective.

When searching for interests, refer back to your customer avatar and make sure that every interest fits with the interests of your avatar.

You have a number of Facebook and third-party tools to research audience interests:

1. Facebook Ad Builder

In the Ad Builder, at the Ad Set level, go to the Detailed Targeting section and start searching for some interests. The first word will bring up a list of possible related areas of interest. Hover over any of them to see the audience size and just click to add to your audience (remember, you are aiming for an audience of around 1M).

You can also browse if you just want to look for inspiration.

2. Audience Insights

In the Interests tab at the side, add an interest that you might be looking for. The graphics in the main area will show demographic information e.g. Age and gender distribution, etc.

In addition, if you switch to the Page Likes tab, you can see pages that people in that audience also like. The top area shows categories that your audience would be interested in based on page likes and below that, In Page Likes, you can also see pages they tend to like. The Affinity column even shows how much more likely this audience is to like the page compared to the average Facebook user.

Insights has some drawbacks; the data here is quite broad and, even if you do find an area of interest, you may find it is not available if Facebook decides the audience size is not big enough.

3. Google Search

You don’t have to only use the tools within Facebook to find your interests. A simple Google search of an interest will bring up examples of that interest, and also show you how popular they are by ranking each one in terms of search results.

4. Spark Toro

A third-party tool that will help you find interests for your audience. Enter one of the interests that you have included on the customer avatar that you built earlier. Spark Toro will give you a number of related interests, including social accounts they follow, websites they regularly visit, content they share, etc.

Then, you can choose any of those sites and look at stats about its users to see if it matches your avatar. Try some of the sites that you find in the Ad Builder to check the size of the audience and consider targeting.

Lookalike Audiences

The second way to find audiences is by using lookalike audiences. This is the most effective way to do it because you are using data that Facebook already has. You will give Facebook a list of people who are relevant to your business in some way e.g. they have bought from you or shown interest in your products.

You then ask Facebook to look for people who look like them. You can choose between 1% and 10% of the total audience population - with 1% being those that most closely match your seed audience.

Make sure you have a minimum of 100 people to give Facebook, but 300-500 would work much better. Also, make sure that Facebook is able to find the people in your audience i.e. that they have left data on the Facebook pixel.

The consideration is the stage they are at on the awareness scale. Customers who are further along the awareness scale are much more useful because we know more about their behavior.

Basically, the bigger the size of the audience and the further along the scale they are, the better they should perform as a lookalike audience.

You can experiment with audiences by giving Facebook multiple audiences to work with and adding CBO. This way, you know that Facebook will automatically identify the best ones and target your ad spend there.

Warm Audiences

This is also known as retargeting, as you are using audiences that you have already worked with.

The downside to this kind of targeting is that retargeting audiences will be quite small, so you should reduce your budget accordingly. Small audiences mean Facebook will just keep showing the same people your campaign until your budget is spent, this risks annoying your customers and wasting your budget.

Don’t worry about segmenting warm audiences. Keep them as large as you can so you don’t get the increase in frequency.

Summary

• The Facebook algorithm is an expert at finding your audience
• Aim for an audience of 1M people and a budget of $10 per 10,000 people
• A simple customer avatar can help you understand your audience
• Remember to consider your audience’s awareness
• Only use interests that would interest your avatar
• Find a balance between proximity and size for your lookalike audiences

What words should you use in your Facebook Ads to generate the best response?

We did some research into what works and what doesn’t work for copy in Facebook Ads. We have used these findings to put together some best practices.

Facebook Copywriting Fundamentals

• Context: Blend in but stand out. Make sure your ad fits into the Facebook ecosystem, including short and simple sentences, line breaks, easily digestible information and lots of emojis.
• Tone: Speak to your audience as if you were in a one-to-one conversation
• Length:

Ad Angles

The angle is what holds together your copy and your creative. There are some standard angles that we use at Data Driven that tend to work: We call these Double dip, What if..?, and We might be a little crazy….

• Could be a certain style, a theme, or both
• Allow for free creative flow, without the “work” of writing
• Avoid creating yourself into a corner by starting with the lowest cost activity
• Mix and match for quick combinations

Here are some examples of some angles that have worked for us:

Fast Feature Benefit

This starts with a direct, short and to-the-point intro. This is great for simple offers with strong pricing. Make a feature-benefit list for what you are selling and use “so that” to make sure you are including real features and benefits. 3-5 benefits is enough for your ad.

The Super Short

This should be between 20-30 words and is useful for offers which have a low barrier for entry e.g. a lead magnet. Questions that are difficult to answer and create intrigue work well for this angle. You can find more information about this in the resources section.

The “What if?”

Here, you paint a picture of the future then use the features and benefits of your product to solve an imaginary problem. This angle is great when you want to expand more on your product features. The tone should be conversation.

Optimizing Your Ads

Once you have ad copy that works, reuse it with different images and intros, then see how they perform against each other. This saves you writing new ad copy every time.

Summary

• Match the style of the platform
• Speak to the individual, not the group
• Find angles that work for your product or service, then mix and match
• Don’t get too attached to angles, some just won’t work
• Try to beat your best over time

[00:00:04] OK, everybody, thanks for joining us today. It's the first time we've done one in the afternoon in my time in the US. So for the time works for you all. But let me know that you're on, that you can hear me and your name and where you're coming from. I'd love to hear from you in the chat or... Yeah, just keep it coming because we have an awesome presentation today. I've gone through the materials with Veena and I'm really excited about it. And so that's what I wanted to do first. While we're waiting for you to come in and see who we have been doing a roll call, I just wanted to introduce you to Veena, who is doing this presentation coming at us from Australia, and she'll probably give us more details about exactly where she's from, coming from in Australia.

But what I want to say is this, is that last year I started working with Veena on some content for the Jeffalytics blog when it was called Jeffalytics. And now it's called Data Driven. And it was a fantastic article she wrote for us and we collaborated on. And so I've been really excited to have this relationship going. And now we're taking to the next level and doing a live presentation. And so it's really it's exciting to me because the topic is so important not just for now, but for the rest of the year, I would say. And then, you know, obviously next year and after that. And so when you think about Facebook ads, I mean, think about it from an e-commerce perspective. You want to know those people who give you ideas, you know, rough ideas, that something's important or that you know, they talk about things in theory and there's people who are out there practicing this every single day who are on the platform and know how it works and who really make this stuff happen.

[00:01:45] Right. The ones who know exactly what's going on. And Veena is one of those experts when it comes to Facebook ads. And so when she expressed interest in doing a presentation with us, I was just so excited. And so that's what we have today. And it all came together today. And so we're going to be talking about Facebook ads for e-commerce and doing much more than that, I'm sure, with Veena. So with that out of the way, thanks, everybody, for joining us live on this presentation. And I want to turn it over to Veena. Veena, thank you for joining me today and sharing your knowledge with the Data Driven community.

[00:02:18] Thank you so very much for having me. Jeff, very excited. Welcome. Welcome, everyone. And this is me saying hi all the way from Australia. So let's just jump into the presentation. All right. I hope everyone is able to see my screen.

[00:02:37] Yep, I can see it looks great.

[00:02:39] Cool. Thank you. So keeping in sync with Data Driven techniques of presentation. We want to teach proven methods which are constantly producing results because these have been tested by my agency and on client accounts. Time and again. And also, even if you take out take away one thing from our presentation today, it is something which is going to really, really add brand value, business value to your clients' business. And some of the strategies we are going to talk about in days are for sure going to help you produce results. And time and again, because we've tested it enough and more so before we delve deep into the presentation. Who am I? As you all know, my name by name and by now Veena, I'm based out of Melbourne, Australia. And by the way, we are the only city in the world that's still under lockdown. So, yeah. And I have an advertising experience, which is over 14 years. So I have worked with agencies like Leo Burnett, McCann, and that is where... so my experience is just not about digital media, but also traditional media and which really, really helps today when I'm working on most of my ads, etc., or campaigns. And we are a Facebook marketing agency. One of the premium partners and also I have dabbled in lot of businesses. Apart from running an agency and when I'm not doing advertising, I am reading up about wine, drinking wine. And Australia has some of the best wines globally. Just some of my clients: so I work with brands like Coca-Cola, Hewlett Packard, Elizabeth Arden. So there's a classpass. So there is a huge range of industries that I have worked around with. So now coming to the presentation, the biggest trouble might hear from advertisers. Time and again is my role was for extra last week and this week it has come down to one X. So how can you actually get consistent results for your clients using Facebook ads, especially when you're scaling your campaigns, especially when Facebook is making changes every single day? We had another rule come up yesterday that now you're doing away with a 20 percent text rule. The interface has changed overnight in September for everyone. And so many elaborative changes are happening day in, day out. Getting consistent results is such a huge struggle. And that's what we want to talk about in this presentation today, also because we are getting into the holiday season. So how can you be profitable, especially when you increase your ad spends as well? So what we covered today, The Power of 5, this is a document which has was released by Facebook last year and how by using The Power of 5, we can scale ad campaigns become more and more profitable. Insta stories ads best practices. This is the most neglected platform, most neglected placement by advertisers today. And why we should be using Insta stories. Some of the information I'm going to share today is directly from Facebook. Thirdly, maybe most of you are for this third thing here right now, how to profitable scale your campaigns, scaling strategies, tried and tested and also, depending on your ad spend, whether you, if you're spending less. Which strategy should you use? If you're spending more, which strategy will help you get better results? And most importantly, is troubleshooting your campaigns. A campaign was doing factum two weeks back and then suddenly you see it is giving you zero conversions. Zero sales. So let's just get into each one of our topics today. In 2019, Facebook had made a huge announcement of advancements with its machine learning capabilities. Facebook, we know, is making small changes, big changes almost every single day on the platform. However, in 2019 Facebook made some major changes where it wanted to support machine learning, where it wanted to size support both small advertisers and large advertisers. Basically, they wanted to get give those advertisers a little more control by making the algorithms smarter. And, of course, which has been you know, the goal has been to generate better results for advertisers, because if an advertiser is doing well on the platform, they would want to definitely spend more. And also, the entire thing is to make it simpler and more efficient for small businesses as well as large businesses.

[00:08:12] So they titled this Power5. And as the name suggests, it has five components to it.

[00:08:21] So it's, so Auto Advance Matching. It's a troubled button, which if you don't have it on, please switch it on. Last come simplification, Campaign Budget Optimization or CBO. So they were supposed to learn and make CBO a mandatory for everyone this year. But then they haven't made it mandatory. Automatic Placements and Dynamic Ads. So today, these are the five core campaign elements that advertisers should be, as an advertiser you should adopt this in your ad account. And when I say adoption, we need to adopt all five of these together and not just one or two, because they work together. They work, each component has to be seen in combination with the other one and just not on its own.

[00:09:17] So if anyone who has been advertising on Facebook for a couple of years now, pre-2019, we would just hack our way towards more success. You know, we would add a few elements here and there, if a campaign was not working. And we would make those tweaks and they say, all right, or if we were large advertisers, we would try and output big competition through certain ways. However, Facebook now want us to have a proper structure. The ecosystem has changed and they want us to make it more in synergy with the Power5 rather than just hacking our way to add success.

[00:10:09] So now.

[00:10:12] Advertisers can today leverage a specific set of automated ad tactics to unlock new phases for growth. The algorithm, as I said earlier, had become so much smarter. It has more data on, you know, any one of us thought. So I always tell everyone the algorithm knows me more than my spouse does. And this is true because so many times, you know, we would see people I get all this, you know, I was talking to my friend and suddenly I saw this ad. Fine, it's not mine really or anything, but it's also about our data points that Facebook has. And there was study which actually said Facebook has more than 5000 data points on each one of us.

[00:11:00] So imagine if machine learning helps us tap into those data points. And has that capability for us to reach the right target audience at the right time.

[00:11:14] So today we are going to focus on three big things from Power5. One is dynamic ads. The other one is account simplification. And when to use automatic placements. Campaign budget optimization deserves its own masterclass because we can't... I don't want to touch, just touch upon it because it is a very, very deep dive topic that needs to have... that needs time for sure.

[00:11:46] And if you haven't started using Campaign Budget Optimization, start it today. Start testing it like now, and you'll see the difference of results once you start using Campaign Budget Optimization correctly. OK, so the first one I really want to talk about now is account simplification and... What is account simplification? So there was a time when we would have multiple, multiple ad campaigns in our ad account. There were campaigns which were, you know, I'd see ad accounts which had 50 plus campaigns, 600 ad sets, and thousands of ads.

[00:12:35] So with account simplification, this refers to just not splitting out your audiences and campaigns in to lots of different sets, but instead trying to group everything into one as much as possible. The old way was, you know, mentally creating multiple campaigns at set, causing redundancy. Audience overlap simplification is at two levels: at the account level it means using of as few structural items that sets campaigns access as possible. And that's where a Campaign Budget Optimization also comes in. And there are many great tools to achieve this, including multi-language ads, dynamic, creative, multi text options, dynamic catalog, which now also has acquisition categories, dynamic formats. An account simplification is also at the settings level. It means relying on optimization algorithms to deliver the best results throughout placement, audiences, budgets, rather than setting up a restricted targeting fixed budget. You'd choose broader audiences, CBO and let machine learning do its thing, especially when it comes to targeting. There is mounting evidence that manual settings can no longer compete with machine learning, and these are recent studies on acquisition by phase of that have shown that detailed targeting produces results at a 50 percent greater cost than look like audiences, especially for small businesses. And it's twice more expensive than drawing audiences for large audiences.

[00:14:39] And this is something we've seen with a number of our own clients. One of our fashion retail brands is Own Kind, which is based out in Australia. And when we were using, when we were testing interest based audiences and lookalike board audiences, we saw a 47 percent decrease in cost approaches. When we adopted this approach, so interest based audiences were giving us a 47 percent.

[00:15:12] Looking like audiences were giving us 47 percent lower cost approaches. However, when you're doing this, when you're switching to lookalike audiences, make sure that your pixel has enough data.

[00:15:25] Facebook recommends that you should have hundred people who have either visited a website or taken this particular action, whether it's add to cart or purchase. How of what we've seen is bigger the number, the better it is. Like thousand is your sweet spot. So that's something which you need to take care of. Until then, you know, you keep running interest pace and then move to localize the moment, you keep having more and more data. The second one, which is the of key important, is automatic placements. Most importantly is when to use automatic placements.

[00:16:03] So currently there are 18 placements where you can show your ad. The most converted real estate is your Facebook news feed, your Instagram news feed. Of course, videos. And as we all know how Facebook is pushing video content so much or even your Instagram stories, et cetera. However, Facebook recommends automatic placements for every objective, and today, since we are focusing on e-commerce, our main goal is when we are running ads, especially top of funnel ads, we need to be very, very selective about this approach because we are targeting cold audiences in our top of funnel. We want to show them and to connect with them.

[00:16:59] Also, again, you know, when you're doing a funnel structures, you will know how important it is to drive quality traffic and do...

[00:17:10] ...do the news feed for both Facebook and Instagram is might cost you more. But it's going to give you the best quality traffic. Top of funnel. So when you're doing it over a funnel, make sure that you use your judgment in choosing the best placements and stay away, especially from low value options such as audience network. Or, right hand feed is a low value option, but you'll get unnoticed in the right hand column feed, especially when you're launching to a new audience.

[00:17:50] So I think we've seen a very targeting campaigns, all placement works really well. You'll see it also helps bring down your CPM, especially for re-targeting audiences.

[00:18:06] The next one is one of my current favorites, and that's Dynamic Ads. So what are Dynamic Ads? These are different right now from dynamic catalog ads. Dynamic Ads can... these refers to not only dynamic product ads, but also dynamic creative.

[00:18:27] In this instance, this enables Facebook to show products and ad variations that it believes the audience will respond to best.

[00:18:37] Like I said, all your Facebook has enough and more data about its users to show them, to let them know what they are really going to connect with. So Facebook scaling dialog is smart enough to figure out that maybe Audience X likes to see one product, an audience Y might like to see another product. 

[00:19:02] So, it's...

[00:19:04] So what are some of the advantages of using dynamic ads? And this is something that should really, really be tested, especially by e-commerce brands that have a huge inventory. So instead of having to spend time creating and targeting hundreds of different ads for hundreds of different items in your inventory, you only need to create a single ad. So the old way of split testing ads was to create hundreds of different variations. So we would have 10 different headlines, 5 different copies, you know, 20 different images, different call to actions, et cetera, et cetera. And then we would run huge budget way through to gain that statistical significance. However, with dynamic ads these days, advertisers can quickly spot winning combinations in a much cheaper and faster method. So also, the few things we need to keep in mind are, you should still allow enough time and budget to run before switching off your dynamic creative, before deciding that it's not working. Because sometimes and while auditing a lot of ad accounts, I've noticed people to switch it off after spending a few dollars, you know, 50, hundred, one hundred dollars.

[00:20:26] And they think it's not working for me. Give it enough time. That's crucial for anything we do with Facebook. Also, we cannot implement dynamic creative within an ad set already running with standard Facebook ads, dynamic, creative requires its own accent. So that's another important thing to remember. All right. So the next one is Insta stories. So what are some of the best practices for Insta stories and most creative best practices for Insta stories? And these are directly from Facebook.

[00:21:11] As of January 2020. And I'm pretty sure by, and we're in September, so I'm pretty sure by now, these numbers would have gone up massively.

[00:21:22] There are four million monthly active advertisers on stories. And in 2019 a study showed that there were 500 million users on stories. And pretty sure that number would have also exploded by now, especially with the current circumstances.

[00:21:44] So, all our Instagram stories...

[00:21:47] They are one of the quickest and the best possible ways to deliver information quickly and showcasing the brand or product advertise. So stories are easy to consume. You don't have to spend too much time. You just browsing your feed and you see stories, you'll see those videos, you engage with them, you like them, and they stay only for 24 hours so you don't get to see them again. That's for organic stories, of course.

[00:22:16] So what are some of the best practices here?

[00:22:20] Create for Stories-first. This is one of the biggest, biggest mistake we've noticed across arrogance. Everyone is running stories. If advertisers are running stories, they're using the same creative which they are using in the feed. Or, you know, or maybe they're running some campaign on YouTube and they've just taken that radio up and running with it. So the first thing we really need to do is to create for the platform, create for the placement. And this means whether it's your size of the stories, recommended dimensions, or it's also the way stories need to be created. This is quick content. You get it. You don't have time to create. You know, a lot of you don't have time to talk a lot about in stories. So use it judiciously, choose the right objective, especially if it's ready to read objective or conversion objective. Make sure that you adapted for the medium. Then the second is make the first few seconds count. What does that mean? You have very limited time with stories. There is study by rival, each Q you would say there is 20 percent of users switch off if they don't like the first frame of stories. So time is of a sense here. And the first few seconds really, really need to be important. If you can't engage, can't capture your target audience's attention in the first few seconds. You've lost them. Another thing which has really worked well is mix and match video and static. So you have the opportunity to create carousels where you can do videos plus your static imagery and you can communicate a lot more by using both the media. Lastly is hypotension with speed, and this is, I want to share an example from classpass, which is basically a directory for fitness studios worldwide. And this is also an example shared by Facebook in their insights with agencies, how classpass actually uses its videos, its content to capture attention. Since they have a lot of content from there, gym partners on the Fitness studios, they always... their videos are fast, the people that they dislike go boom, boom, boom. And that catches attention, of course, with the colors they use, the production values they use. Having said that, it's not necessary that you have to spend a bomb on EU production. You can still do it at a cheaper cost, but do it properly. Just follow a few guidelines. And another important question everyone asks me is in stories when to highlight my brand? Begin with your brand. Because you have just those few seconds. It's the old age way of showing product placement or brand placement. However, it should not look false fit. It should be good enough to be... It should flow into your storytelling, into your narrative, rather than just being there. Then the next one is designed with your objective in mind, especially for e-commerce, whether you want to show it, whether to brand stories or is it a product stories. Because if it's some brand story, your creative will be different from a product story. So be mindful of that. Keep that in mind. Enhance with sound - since stories is something where people can put up the volume, etc.. So use music or any good audio you want to use, which will flow with your product and with your brand. Lastly is stories... Instagram gives us lots of stickers. Doesn't mean that we have them, we have to use them. You limit the use of unnecessary stickers and limit prize inclusion as well.

[00:26:47] So where there is, you know, just 20 dollars. 40 dollars.

[00:26:50] Don't put all this unnecessary information if not required. Stay away from the temptation of using it. Since you have all that, doesn't mean you have to use it. So less is more in some cases. And that is how it is for stories as well. All right.

[00:27:13] The next one is troubleshooting your campaigns, especially now when Facebook is making so many changes. We are hopping into the festival season. We are getting to Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Suddenly, we have, you know, overnight campaigns have started going off the cliff. And this is like my favorite analogy to use as well. What is basically, who have more tantrums - a toddler or Facebook? So if you're in a similar boat, this is going to be pretty useful for you. All right, so the biggest issue is, is my CPA, my cost for acquisition is too high. What do I do? And suddenly my client is freaking out at me and he say, oh, he's saying that, you know, we can't spend so much on... we can have this as our cost per acquisition.

[00:28:17] So what do you do? Because CPA, if you have a high CPA, it means your return on ad spend, ROAS is going down. So what do you do, if you are faced with a situation like this, dig into your secondary metrics behind that high cost per acquisition? Look, a common mistake what everyone's doing is before, without digging into the data, you would start testing your audiences. You know, you will say, all right, maybe I've got a high CPA. That means my audience, it's not working. Or maybe my ads are not working. Take a step back. And the first thing you really need to do is to dig into your secondary metrics behind that high CPA. So what's the one of the few things that you should look out for? The number one is check the conversion rate from clicks, which is your basically link clicks to your conversions. So in general.

[00:29:18] And this is... your ad account will have some benchmarks. Look into your account history. What are the benchmarks for the CBR and the CPC, your click through rate and cost per click. And in case you don't have any account history benchmarks. There are a few industry benchmarks generally for e-commerce. You know, it is a high CBR, over by one percent is considered good and the cost per click under one dollar is considered good.

[00:29:50] But this can change, especially in the current scenario where, you know, the US is having elections and you might see your CBRs going down and your CPC is going up or during the Black Friday, Cyber Monday. And that's why it's important to just not look at industry benchmarks, but also look at your account history and current scenario as to what is happening in terms of the environment. But that's the first thing you need to check is what? Where is the issue? And check the CTR, CBC, etc. Then the second thing you need to do is to slow down your clicks to your landing page views ratio. This should be around 8 percent. That's actually generous. If your site is loading too slowly, that ratio could be much lower. And this means that people are clicking on the ad, but they're not reading around for the landing page to load. And check this board on your desktop and mobile because you'll never know which one is slower. Do your tests, et cetera. And we have seen, people just... No one wants to wait if a landing page is not loading in time. The third one is, again, very important. And that is to check your add to cart to your purchase conversion rate.

[00:31:16] Generally we have an e-commerce 68 percent abandoned cart rate, but you really need to check why. If it's higher, and always go back to your account history, because I have seen some accounts have a 70 to 75 percent bank read as well, which is fine. But if it goes higher than that, that sets the alarm bells for us. And why are people abandoning your cart? Maybe you have to look into your price. Is the price too high compared to similar products in the market? Or is then sometimes another issue?

[00:31:57] I have seen with abandoned cart is... your trust factors. Maybe you don't have a secure check out. You don't have a money back guarantee or you are not accepting all media payment methods. Plus, one more thing we've seen is shipping. So sometimes people don't like to pay for shipping. So do you need to, if it makes business sense for you? Do you really need to add free shipping to it. So look into everything as to why you have a higher add to cart to purchase, abandoned cart purchase ratio? If all this fails, review the accent. This is again, a very, very ignored factor. People need to be right. So what this really means is the ad appears to be resonating with Facebook. You have a good CTR and a good CPC. However, when people click at the ad, something is not right. Check for the first thing is whether the visual ad sent from ad to landing page is the same. So what you're showing them in the ad is what you're showing them in landing page. And we have seen this as a common issue. We've seen, especially with fashion and beauty brands, what they would do is they'll show a particular outfit in the ad. But the moment you go into the landing page, it leads to the entire collection and you've lost the person there because, you know, I came for something else and you showed me something else. Another disconnect is headlines or other expectation mismatch. So maybe you are talking something else in your ad copy and you're saying something else in your landing page. So you have to make sure that there is accent and the next one is to check your targeting. Sometimes we've seen, you know, you might be sending unqualified traffic and need to revisit your targeting. So this can happen also when maybe you're using more than one source of traffic. So you might be advertising on other platforms and you are getting unqualified traffic from those platforms. So review that as well. Review your placements, extremely important is to check for targeting is to review your placements because what sometimes happens is that our placements as especially low value placements like audience, network, etc., are driving poor quality traffic. 

[00:34:32]  Again to check a quality traffic is to check your lookalike seat audiences. You need to update them. Generally, we update them. Our custom audiences and therefore lookalike audiences retry an update at every two to three months. So that's again, a very important thing to check because, you know, as the algorithm is getting more and more data so frequently, we just need to make sure we are checking, doing these hygiene checks at our end as well. Another thing is, if your client has made any changes onto the URL where you are driving traffic to because sometimes, you know, especially if it's a URL based audience and the client is updated those URLs then that can also drive unqualified traffic to your website.

[00:35:25] So what are some of the things to look out for? One is CPR is low and your cost per click is high. As a result, your CPR aims are all over the place and your return on ad spend is going down. So in general, a low CPR is anything less than one percent and a high cost per click is over one dollar. And so you really need to check if your offer is making sense here. It's something people want and your hook and your messaging is also resonating with them. Also check, as I said earlier, check your placements, your countries, your age group. Age group is again, people just do broad targeting 18 to 65.

[00:36:09] Always remember, especially for e-commerce brands, something that an 18 year old will like, a 55 year old might not like. And I think we really need to check is our funnel, if that is broken and this has happened time and again, especially when you're doing that check on mobile, you people are not able to add to cart or that are not able to initiate check out. So make sure you do a dummy purchase and see where the funnel is broken. Another hack. Now, does it hack where actually when your best audience was performing once upon a time. But suddenly it dropped. So we have tried and duplicating that audience and it stopped and it has started performing for us again.

[00:36:55] However, when all this fails, revisit your audience personas, revisit your hopes, your angles, and maybe it's time to launch a fresh campaign and look at things with a fresh pair of eyes. That is when all fails. All right.

[00:37:13] So we are now getting towards the end of the presentation. This is a very important piece as well. This is shared by Facebook. And this is add relevant diagnostics. So basically, Facebook had something called a relevant score to last year where they would give our ads a score out of ten and anything seven and below meant your ads are not great. However, they changed that because we had no idea what was relevant score basically, on what parameters. Facebook was deciding the relevant score for us. And now Facebook has split it into three parts. One is quality ranking, engagement rate ranking and conversion rate ranking. And what this means is, quality ranking is you need to improve the quality of your creative assets or target an audience more likely to perceive the ad as high quality. So engagement rate ranking is basically improve your ads, a relevance to your audience. And for example, by making it more engaging, interesting.

[00:38:23] So improve on your creative. That is what it's trying to tell us. Enclosure rate ranking is, of course, the landing page experience. The call to action experience. So. Sometimes if for all of these, you might see below average in all of these or you might see above average, depending on your creative, and how it's resonating with your audience and depending on your landing page, et cetera, and how well it's been built. However, you might still see you're getting a few below average, but your ad still performing well. Don't do anything.

[00:39:05] Don't fix until it's not broken. So don't tamper with it. If you're getting your results, ignore this. But if you are getting your results, then I'm sorry. If you're not getting a results, then deep dive into what Facebook is telling you next year and you'll see the ranking.

[00:39:26] OK, so this is, again, a very, very significant thing, especially when people are increasing ad their spend, especially when, you know, you see your Facebook ads are doing very well for you. You want to meet them more. But suddenly when it's a common issue or when people start, advertisers start increasing their ad spend, the ROI goes down. What do I do?

[00:39:54] So there are few strategies, about 6-7 of them that I'm going to share today with you. And some them are a little technical. Some of them, if you haven't started scaling or if you're looking into scaling. I'll recommend which ones to start with as well. So, of course, as I said earlier, a common problem marketers face today and how to scale and add account profitably without slitting your return on ad spend and without getting the client too upset.

[00:40:28] OK. So the number one strategy is small budget scaling, or vertical scaling. So if you're not spending too much... So what a small budget really means...

[00:40:37] So you're spending everything... about ten thousand dollars a month is a small budget. And you can really do well with vertical scaling, with something like this. How do you do it?

[00:40:49] So suppose my client told me you have to recall 3000 dollars a month from month A, but month B, I want to take that spend too. I want to double the spend. How would you do it. You are going to increase your budget 15-20 percent. Every one or two days. If you go too hard and too fast, Facebook doesn't like it. It doesn't go too well. So if you think you're spending a 100 dollars a day, don't try to make it. 200 dollars a day, immediately. Spend 15-20 percent. And if you just calculate it within the next two to three days, you will start doubling your ad spend. So it goes slowly and steadily. Some things to look out for: initially, you might see increase in cost per acquisition initially because the algorithm is taking time to adjust, and give it some time. Don't panic, don't think that 'Oh, but it's really increased my CPA'. Give it two to three days and you'll see it settling down back again. And also, it works best when you're not spending too high. The second one is horizontal scaling. So what do we really do in this one? We take our best performing assets and duplicate them. So don't use this method unless you already have an average cost per requisition. If you know what your cost for acquisition is and that asset is performing well. Most importantly, monitor this ad set daily. Every single day you need to monitor it to make sure that you do not exceed the acceptable customer acquisition. Keep your eyes that you've set for yourself.

[00:42:44] Also, it's wise to have some rules in place for something like this because you wouldn't want your CPA to go through the roof and then it actually loses itself if your CPA goes through the roof. Now for large budgets scaling - and this is for accounts that are spending 500+ 400+ a day: take your biggest winners and duplicate them.

[00:43:19] Set the budget to 3-5 times larger than your target cost per acquisition. So if your cost per acquisition is 20 dollars, set it higher 3-5 times more than that and monitor it very closely. In the first two to three days, expect wide variations in CPA, the low button settling down, give it some time. So make sure you give the new access at least 24 to 48 hours to fully optimize. Monitor the new ad set every single day and you just have to make sure you are not exceeding the your CPA and KPS excessively. So if your CPA is like 20 and you're paying 200 dollars, yes, that's excessive. Another strategy that is, especially if you're spending big, you can do is just scaling. So what do we mean by this? It works very well if you're selling in multiple countries. You can split your campaigns into US and worldwide or US and the top four, which is your UK, Australia, Canada and other European countries. And you can separate campaigns for each country. And this will again depend on your budget and if you are selling into those countries.

[00:44:44] Bid scaling - this is acting an advanced high risk approach. And if you are not comfortable with vertical scaling or horizontal scaling, a large budget scaling, don't even venture into it. This should never be your first method of scaling. This is like, once you're comfortable scaling with other methods, and this is when you can look into bid scaling. So it's a high risk approach to scaling that uses manual bidding and when pulled off properly it can help you to properly scale. If someone wants to actually scale from a 100 dollars a day to a 200 dollars a day, this can really work well. But...

[00:45:27] You should know what you're doing. Just don't start experimenting, you'll lose money in that case. So, first of all, you must ensure you're well aware of the average cost per acquisition you're optimizing for. And you must also always have a winning audience or two. I prefer to have more than one winning audience because it's scaling hard and scaling fast. You need to be sure that you have at least more than one winning audience. Use that winning audience and the size of that winning audience should also be over one million in size. Set, the first ad set to an average cost per acquisition and big gaps are set within the ad set level. And you can see that under the optimization section. Duplicate this ad set inside same campaign and now double the big gap. Repeat this exercise until you have 5 ad sets and the last ad set is 5X, the original big gap. So if you have started, suppose a big gap is 100 dollars for the first one. Double, double, double. Did you have 5X the original big gap. So these are some of the scaling strategies that we've been using across our agencies. And of course if you have different audience avatars and you need to test those as well, you can keep testing those.

[00:46:56] All right, so what are some of the metrics that you need to watch out for, especially when you are scaling?

[00:47:07] Click through rate. This is really, really important because this is one of the most important metrics you look for as on your click through rate depends.

[00:47:18] Your cost per click and your CPM as well. And of course, if your CPM is going through the roof, there are going to be instances during Black Friday, during holiday season with the US elections happening right now. Your CPM will be high, but this is a very, very important parameter to consider when you are scaling. And initially, we look for add to carts, initiated check out. But eventually it has to be your purchases because that's what you want by the end of the day. With your scaling, you need to make sure that you have enough, you are getting your desired number of purchases, which is what scaling is all about. And there are going to be instances when all this falls flat and you wouldn't know what to do. Scale down the spent, scale down the ad spend. This is going to help you. Once you start scaling it down it punishes the logarithm in that sense. And it starts getting your ROAS pretty stabilized.

[00:48:24] So that's about it. And we just do this quick recap.

[00:48:30] So what we've tried to do here today is Facebook Machine Learning is becoming smarter with time. It's all right for you to let the lawyer to do a few things. It's perfectly OK. And Facebook is currently loving broad audiences. So gone are the days when we would test, so suppose if it's for fashion brands, Gone are the days when I would test Hermes in one or leave it on in second ad set, now get name of the game is to combine all your similar interest audiences.

[00:49:05] And for that we have the audience overlap tool as well. Please do use it. And let machine learning do its job. Creative diversity is superbly important. Since Facebook is taking care of our targeting for us to a certain degree, we need to make sure that we are producing good creative vibe, well, with our target audience, which is on brand. And another thing is to use user generated content. UGC works like magic across brands, across industries. Fix broken funnels: that's a no brainer. Don't send traffic to a website or to your landing page that is broken. That is not, you know... So you'll be putting money down the drain. So that's something you should always check and keep checking. Even when you're running your ads. And if you are looking at scaling your account, stability is really important. You need to make sure you know your average cost per acquisition. You are getting an X amount of cost purchases every time you want to scale. So that's it from me.

[00:50:25] And jumping to the Q&A now.

[00:50:29] Awesome. That was fantastic. You could feel the knowledge coming through with everything you're doing and just the experience. I really loved it. And actually, I have some selfish questions that I'm going to ask you while we have other questions coming as well, because actually you've addressed some things that I've been struggling with lately with my own ads and some things that I have some questions on. Then also, philosophically, as somebody who comes from the Google world, primarily some of the Facebook stuff, it's so anti I how I approach Google on Google Granularity is as good as it gets, right. Like you want to be as as pinpoint controlled as you can be in everything that Google takes away some kind of opportunity. People just rebel and react and Google adds it back in or they or they hold firm and just sort of annoy people. But they're very fearful of change. Anybody who manages Google ads because they use the change means they're hurting advertisers. at least my experience for it. Whereas I know people who are, you know, anybody is primarily Facebook is basically like, hey, Facebook said, do this, so do it, right. So it's definitely a philosophical difference as well as a platform difference. So when I hear simplification, my skeptic hat, this comes arms like, hey, I'm skeptical of this. I just don't know how it would work if this is if Facebook is telling you to simplify, don't trust them. Yet, I'm, you know, the results speak otherwise, right. When Facebook tells you to do something and actually do it, otherwise, you're not going to get anything. They're going to bury you, right. So simplification is what they say. But you as an expert who's working in this all the time, does it produce the results you're looking for? Does it give you better results?

[00:52:31] Yes. So, Jeff, a couple of things here. Facebook, and as you said, there's a fundamental difference between the platform, between Facebook and Google. We have to realize that Facebook is all about user engagement. And that's the premise of the platform. That's why the platform wasn't built. And Facebook sees that you are... And that's why funnels and creative become extremely important in Facebook, because you're disrupting someone's news feed. Unlike Google, where it's a conscious search. So when we are doing something like this, and when Facebook sees account simplification, we have to understand they are telling us that don't try and within a small spend.

[00:53:16] Don't try and create 200 ads because then your ads are not going to reach out to relevant people because unlike Google, where it's a search based thing where I am looking for shoes for women, I'm going to go for shoes when I'm browsing Facebook. You're disrupting me, you know. Maybe when I see the ad and I want to buy those shoes. So when my account is simplified and I just have just two to three ads with a relevant budget.

[00:53:43] Facebook is going to show me those ads. And that's why I creative becomes extremely important, and a funnels become extremely important in Facebook. So account simplification is it shouldn't be looked at in totality. It should just not be looked at as running an ad. It should be seen in view of our funnel and how simple our funnel is. Again, coming back to e-commerce brands, then anything, and I've seen that Facebook time and again, anything which is less than a 150 dollars, people make an immediate purchase. It's a no brainer sort of a thing, you know, especially 50, 60 dollar product. Because when we look at that creative, we look at that ad, we feel I need it, I want it. And again, that's why I said, get your hooks and your angles right. And that's what Facebook is saying, that if you are sending the right message, we will find the right target audience for you. And that's where the account simplification bit comes in.

[00:54:44] Yeah, nomics and so. and I do sometimes forget that this is definitely for e-commerce, as you know as well, versus, yeah... I think that, you know, I'm guessing that their machine learning algorithms know enough about somebody that they would make an impulse buy. So by doing this, what they're doing is they're saying, hey, we're going to give you a better chance of being in front of somebody who's an impulse buyer. But you have to trust us that they're an impulse buyer, not so much that you're going to have the perfect targeting that you know they are because impulse buys are not usually... it's more interruptive or more, you know, mood or or time of day. And so we could never give you all the levers to pull to get to that person. You just need to find the right person on the right day. And who is better than Facebook? You know, somebody knows that on Thursday or Friday after somebody had a bad week, that they buy some going to cooking thing or they buy some kind of whiskey or they buy wine, you know, because of that.

[00:55:42] And then that makes sense. And I've actually been that way before, right. I I've purchased things off of Facebook because I had a bad day and I was like, OK, I'm going to sit there and I bought it impulsively.

[00:55:53] And I'm guessing that that pushed me into the algorithm to see other stuff, right. That they know what they're doing. And so I can see what you're saying. It's a combination of price point and then having a good product. It's funny, I was just looking at my Twitter feed today and somebody was like, I think I was at my friend Adam Singer, and he said, you know, marketing is not even about trickery anymore. It's about having a good product. And it's because the systems connect you so easily now that the product is actually the foremost thing, right. If you have a good product as you're saying, then Facebook is then to go find the right, the people who want it. Your product's not very good - you can't really resort to trickery and wordplay and so on. You have to have a good product first and foremost for this stuff to work.

[00:56:41] Absolutely, because, you know, marketing, if in the traditional world, we never used to say marketing strong is to sell, it was always to create awareness. And if you just go to Philip Cutlers for piece. So if your product, your price point, those are not all right, and you're reaching out to the right audience, it's bingo for you. But if anyone of those are not OK, you know, you can't get people to buy for you. So people might do an impulse buy once or twice, but not all the time. And so Facebook, I would also like to add here, it's just not about a low purchase point.

[00:57:22] We also have high end fashion brands that sell on Facebook. But their objective is different. So someone like Gucci, when you see their ads, or someone like Louboutin, there objective is to create awareness and that aspirational value for the brand using their content on Facebook. And that's why the more dialog with them is becoming smarter, the more content... The importance of content on Facebook is growing even for e-commerce brands. So we cannot... thank you.

[00:57:56] I think someone is leaving, thank you. And so that's really important for with Facebook.

[00:58:04] Yeah, that makes sense. I'll get to my next question is, and I know the answer to this, but I would like to hear your answer.

[00:58:11] Does the simplification and just following Facebook's rules eliminate the need for an agency as an intermediary to translate this? Couldn't a brand with a great product just start putting product photos into Facebook and matching up the dynamic creative and letting Facebook find the audience? Could they be profitable or what would be the barrier to them doing that?

[00:58:32] You wouldn't believe Jeff Klein asked me a similar question last week. And my answer to this is no. You will still need your agency. And now I'll tell you why. It's like even when Google started doing their smart campaigns, etc., there is just as much the smart campaign can do. Even when ad would express when you have there is just as much inopportune can do for you can be lower than read into your data and then tell you, make suggestions as to now is the time to pull back. Now or this is the time when you need to relook at your creative, you need an agency support or to read the idea, get you the right creative and to be seen in the right places at the right time. So the agency's role, I think moving forward will also be more as a brand partner in terms of content, which I think most agencies don't offer except for the large agencies and content recommendations. This is where agencies will really, really have an important role to play, because now Facebook is giving us the opportunity to basically customize content at every given state, at every placement, you know, and agency's role really come in big there.

[00:59:58] I think that makes sense. And I would agree that.

[01:00:02] You know, back in my my heavy agency days, if I could find a way that I could give my client twice the results they were getting before, even if it was more automation and doing less work, I would be all over that. And I would want the job and I would tell the customer that, hey, I'm able to do twice as much, you know, you're getting twice the results because I'm doing this method. And so that's the translation. That's important parts of it. It's the knowledge that you can do this, because otherwise it's not so much that you're competing with Facebook as a provider. You're competing with them, doing it incorrectly or them applying their knowledge poorly. And that's what the competition is against. And I think that an agency will always win because that specialized knowledge and the ability to pollinate your ideas across multiple clients. You just learn so much more when you're working on 10 accounts than you ever could on one account.

[01:00:56] Yes, absolutely, because - and that's important - what is working for one brand might not work for another, and the agency is able to test that. And that's what Facebook is all about. If the rate changes so rapidly, we need to keep testing, testing, testing. And, you know, and I think that's where an agency's roll also comes in.

[01:01:17] So I'm always wearing my skeptic hats, I'm putting it back on. How do you feel about not having control and just taking the recommendations? Is it because, I know you said that it's the cost less and you're getting more of the right people. So is it sort of like, usually not having control is like a tax. It usually costs you to not have control. But it seems like this is actually a benefit. So are you just comfortable with it because the results speak for themselves? Is that sort of how you approach it?

[01:01:47] It's actually not as simple as that. When I say you have to use dynamic creative, it is me or the advertiser who's basically feeding in the creative to the machine. So we need to understand one important thing is that Facebook is a machine. The data we give it is what it gives us and gets out. So if we put in gold, we get gold out. It's as simple as that. If we give them good creative, then we are doing dynamic creative. Facebook is not producing my creative for me. It's not writing my headlines for me. It's just made that mechanism much more smoother for me. So earlier days, I would be splitting the split testing campaigns where I would be testing with 200 headlines and 40 visuals and 5 ad copy etc. It's a 50 ad copy right now. I'm just taking one ad set, putting intense visuals, giving them 5 headlines or 10 headlines or 10 at copy. And Facebook is looking for the winning combination for me. I don't have to find that winning combination. I don't have to do all the hard work. So if I'm feeling good, creative, if I get Facebook the right content, it's going to give me the right results.

[01:02:54] Yeah, I like it. So I would say it's almost like manual farming versus having heavy equipment done, right. It's like, OK, you still need have the knowledge of what the growing season is, when you should plant something. You still need to do all that stuff, but you just have better equipment because Facebook is invested in that for you. And so that makes a lot of sense.

[01:03:14] That's a great idea, I'm going to start using that. OK.

[01:03:19] So who has more tantrums, toddlers or Facebook? I have a 11 month old and I think that it might be Facebook, not my toddler.

[01:03:28] I think it's Dennis Hooghly who confessed Facebook to a teenager. And I love that comparison because the way teenagers go through ups and downs, Facebook goes ups and downs, and even like a toddler...

[01:03:43] They are Facebook and just doing everything overnight. You know, suddenly you have one notification in the morning saying that you've made this change and you can do nothing about it.

[01:03:54] That's crazy. No, it's fascinating to see how this works because it makes, I'd become more comfortable with these things as I talk about them... But also, you know, the idea when you're talking about the creative, it's still at the four P the product.

[01:04:10] I'm not even sure the four Ps. I know its product price placement and promotion maybe also.

[01:04:16] Yes, promotion.

[01:04:17] I think it's something like, yeah. That's 3/4 at least. But the thing that's interesting to me is that...

[01:04:23] You still have to do, you still have to create a good product image. You still have to understand what people want. You still have to think about those things, right? You're just not guessing as much, right. You're not wasting time testing it because they have the testing mechanism because you're right, it used to be that you'd load in 200 creatives and test it and you'd let the users test it. Now you're letting the algorithm try to save you time. And so it's not that you're... Yes, we are doing less work, but we're actually not doing less work or we're just more effective with the work we do. And I don't know about you, but I always, you know, it's a hard men mindset the shift to go from amount of hours spent time doing something as you're being productive versus the amount of productivity that comes from your efforts. It just means that you're more efficient, which should be looked at as a good thing. Even though sometimes we train ourselves to say if we're not as busy, then we're not as effective.

[01:05:23] Yes. It's such a fundamental difference between busy and productive. So it's the same thing, especially with Facebook as well. When we let the machine learning do a few things for us, it's more efficient than us and it saves us time. But then, you know, we can perhaps tell our customers or our bosses that, you know, I didn't spend 200 hours getting this data. Facebook did it for me, and I just said it. But again, you know, there are certain parameters for creative or, like, disrupting the feed, etc. And at the same time being a part of the feed. So that's like for a separate discussion. And there are a lot of guidelines that Facebook has given on creative. What kind of creative work? Well, and the issue is, with so many marketing gurus and Facebook groups around, we've stopped reading what feeds the information Facebook has given us and using it to our advantage. So sometimes it works really well to go back to what Facebook has shared and test those things as well.

[01:06:30] And actually I think that's my final question that I had was, just again, that maybe you can help me wrap my head around this, but, you know, you said the creative diversity, that was one of your wrap up points. How does... I can understand dynamic creative in theory...

[01:06:45] ...but it sounds like...

[01:06:50] It almost sounds conflicting to a certain extent, like you want to have solid creative, you want to have a focus, you know, focus and get it loaded in there from that perspective, like you don't want to give them too many things to test. But you also want to have creative diversity. How do those things work together? If you don't want to have too many variations, but you also want to have diversity, of course.

[01:07:10] So when I say creative diversity, it has to be at every level of your funnel. So when you were talking to your call audiences and when you're talking to your warm and hot audiences, there has to be a different creative at each level of the funnel. We cannot show the same creative to someone who is on top of funnel, to someone who is almost ready to buy from me. And that is why creative diversity comes into play. And that's where you... So a lot of user generated content is used by most of us. You're middle of funnel or bottom of funnel for retargeting, et cetera. And on top of funnel, we generally try to introduce the brand or the product. So that is where, and when I say user generated content, especially for e-commerce and even, you know, even for digital products, testimonials work like magic. So that is another form of creative diversity where we can use middle of funnel, formal funnel and double funnel is when especially even in your own funnels, you know, even though it's a digital product, you would all start with a video where you are giving away some value on top of funnel to your audience. You don't start selling them directly. You just get what it's like, Ryan Dias's favorite example is that you don't ask someone to marry them on the first date.

[01:08:29] You always move them and you order. So it's a similar thing. And that's where the creative diversity that also comes in, is to use different creative at different stages of the funnel.

[01:08:40] Yeah. So actually, diversity can be a masterclass on its own as well.

[01:08:46] So I think there might be something we should talk about is whether we can do another one on that, because I'm fascinated by it and I really like that idea. And I think you said one more thing, and that was about the 20 percent tax rules changing. How did it go? It's gone. So what is there any other guidelines that you can just do...

[01:09:03] ...the whole thing? The tax politics thing, and I tested yesterday only, it's gone. It's like, wow. Because especially the euro. So what I said what I'll do is, John Lomar did a blog on this, yes, day before something. I look forward to that blog. It's gone. Yeah, it's amazing. It's the happiest thing for us.

[01:09:24] I mean, I was always annoyed by it because you can see, guys, we got automatically flagged all the time for those things and it didn't even... It was arbitrary how they enforced it.

[01:09:35] So, yes. So that's a recent change which has happened and a great change. We are happy for once with a change.

[01:09:44] This is fascinating. Thank you so much for your expertise and knowledge. I could probably go on forever with just questions, but I know we've already taken up a lot of time. So I think we should talk about whether we can do another one of these and see what topic we can cover, because I think this is really interesting and I think this would be really good value to the community.

[01:10:02] Thank you so much. Definitely. And thank you for the opportunity. I really enjoyed myself. And I hope, you know, people really get some valuable nuggets out of this today.

[01:10:15] I think so. I think they're gonna I love it. And so thank you very much. And we'll talk to you. Thank you, Jeff. Bye. Take care.

[00:00:04] OK, everybody. We are live here with Alvaro and we are talking about Google ads and Facebook ads and deciding which one is better. And so if you've ever wanted a, let's say, definitive ruling as to which one is better or least a opinion based ruling as to which one will work in which situations, think you're really going to enjoy this and solve our housing to get into this presentation pretty quickly here. But I just wanted to introduce him a little bit and talk about our relationship and how this came to be.

And so Alvaro and I've been working together since I think 2017 and various programs and capacities and doing catch up calls. And it's been great to see him grow his business and grow his skills in these areas. And when we did our last catch up call, Alvaro mentioned to me how strong he's become in ad paid advertising, really, you know, doing a lot, managing quite a bit of ad spend. You can weigh in on that, too, as to how much of it is, but basically understanding the benefits and drawbacks of both of the major ad platforms, Google and Facebook. And so I said, well, that's really cool.

That's actually what I'd like you to talk to my audience about. Are you interested in doing a presentation? So I think that's where we left it. And sure enough, here we are doing this. Moving forward, but talking about comparing and contrasting these two major ad platforms. And so with that out of the way, I just wanted to welcome Alvaro to the audience and have him do his presentation.

[00:01:29] Thanks for having me, definitely excited to be here and to interact with your audience, so let me go ahead and start sharing a screen. So I just said we are going to be talking about Facebook versus Google ads and trying to determine which one is better. So the Google interpretation is to give you an idea of what it's like working in each platform. I went to Army with the knowledge to figure out where to start, if you haven't started neither one yet. And then also I'm actually gonna provide a little bit a sneak peek into YouTube ads. I'm going to save that for the very end. But I do think YouTube ads kind of deserve a mention here, because I think that is a very unique platform, not that many people are paying attention to.

So I'll give it just a little bit of attention towards the end here. So a little bit about myself. As Jeff mentioned, my name is Alvaro. I actually live in Santa Clarita, California, which is a northern suburb of Los Angeles. And I actually got my first marketing chops in the Google ads world. That's where I started when I was still working in the corporate world. And then I actually accidentally got into Facebook ads. I was doing Google ads for a company. And then they fired the Facebook ads guy and they were like, Alvaro, you're already doing Google stuff, why don't you go ahead and do the Facebook stuff, too. So that was my introduction to Facebook. It was a lot of failures at the beginning because I was applying Google principles to Facebook, which, as you'll find out, do not work. But, you know, through trial and error, I was able to make money through. And then I actually quit. So, as Jeff mentioned, I actually took his agency course back in 2017. And, you know, I have kept in touch ever since.

[00:03:07] And that was basically my jumpstart into leaving the corporate world and starting my own agency. So it's kind of what started the whole thing here. And now I'm a working mostly with businesses and entrepreneurs selling info products.

[00:03:23] So I do want to give you a quick spoiler, so I know we're going to try to determine which one is the better platform. But to be honest, there actually is no superior platform. They're both very powerful and very effective in different ways and some scenarios. Facebook is better in other scenarios, Google is better. So there is no overall better platform. And I kinda like to equate it to the beer versus wine argument that you hear sometimes. I've always thought that's kind of a silly argument to, you know, to try to determine which is better, beer or wine. I think today they are two very different beverages, and in my opinion, they also satisfy different urges.

You know, if I'm eating a burger, I'm most likely going to want a beer to go along with that. Whereas if I'm eating a ribeye, I'm also most likely going to want some wine to go along with that. So that's kind of how I equate it. You know, each one is better in its own situation depending on what's going on. And it's the same thing with Facebook and Google ads. So another caveat, though, is that I will be talking about a lot of things that I say, OK, well, generally this is better on Facebook and generally this is better on Google. But there's always exceptions to the rule, always 100%. There's no absolute truths in any of this. So if I say, you know, this certain type of product is better on Google, I'm sure you can find someone that's doing great with that same product on Facebook, but not many people, right.

So I'm just trying to give you kind of the best guidelines and general rules. But I do acknowledge the fact that there are exceptions to all the rules. And then lastly, as you know, right, when it comes to Google ads and Facebook ads, is there is actually a lot of placements, right. So for Google, the search display, Gmail and YouTube. And with Facebook, you know, there's a newsfeed. There's Marketplace, Messenger, stories, In-Stream, In-Article. And that's actually not even half of all the placements that are available inside of Facebook. But for purposes of simplicity and kind of keeping things focused, when I talked about Google, I'm only focusing on the search network and for Facebook, I'm only focusing on the news feed placements. This is just to simplify everything and and not try to get a little messy here.

But like I said, I won't be mentioning YouTube ads towards the end as well. So the first place to start in terms of determining what is the better platform for your business and your product and your situation is understanding the buying cycle and the levels of awareness. So, you know, here is your customer buying cycle. And so if you think back to the last time you made any type of purchase, it probably started with a problem that you wanted solved, right. So you started doing some research and that starts at the awareness stage, right, your knowledge you have a problem. And then you need to start doing research. So you move on over to interest. And research can be a lot of different things, right?

It can always be a Google search, which is probably the most common form of research these days. But it can also be reading Amazon reviews, going to the mall and checking out different stores with similar products that you want. You know, what have you can be it can be a lot of different things. And so then after you've done your research, at that point you're going to evaluate the different options that you have. So let's say maybe when you research you found 10 different options for a solution to solve your problem and you've narrowed it down to 3. So now you're going to compare contrast those 3 options right there. You choose the one you're most likely ultimately going to purchase it based upon emotion, right. You're going to choose the one that actually makes you feel better. So you're going to make the purchase. But after you've made the purchase, you're actually going to justify that with logic.

That's actually how the human brain kind of works there. And then after you make the purchase, assuming you enjoy the product, you're going to become a brand advocate, meaning that you're going to tell your friends about it. You're going to tell your coworkers about it, your family. And you're going to kind of spread the word on your experience with this specific product that you ended up buying or service. And so that is the customer buying cycle. It can happen, you know, over the span of days, weeks, sometimes even months, or it can literally happen in the span of just a matter of seconds, right. So think of the when you're at the grocery store and you're already at the checkout and you see the Tic Tacs right there. You're still actually going to go through the same process. But you're not going to go do a bunch of Google searches on, you know, which Tic Tac flavor is the best. It's going to happen within a matter of seconds of this whole process. So really understanding this part right here and how your product fits in is going to be the biggest determinant, in my opinion, of which platform is best for you. There's other things that may override that which will also get into. But I do feel that this is the most important aspect, which is why this is where we're actually starting with the presentation.

So how Google and Facebook fit into this is that the first point is that they are fundamentally different platforms. So a lot of the skills needed to be good at one are a hindrance at the other. I learned that the hard way when I went from Google to Facebook. I was applying Google principles to Facebook and it just simply did not work at all. And they're also both easier and harder in different ways. And we'll also be getting into that in a little bit. But where they differ most is where people are in the customer buying cycle. So with Google people are searching, they already know what problem they have, and so they're showing intent. They're actively looking for something out there to solve the problem. So when we think back to the customer buying cycle, they're already at least that's step number two, which is interest.

They might be even a little bit further along with that into the consideration phase. But at the bare minimum, we know they're out the interest phase, but someone advertising on AdWords offering a specific solution to a specific problem is a winning strategy. So if you're water pipers and you have an ad that says, you know, we fix your pipes and can be there in 30 minutes, you're probably going to click on that ad. Facebook is, they're very different, though, because the previous plumbing experience would be an absolute disaster on Facebook. And that's because Facebook is interruption marketing, right? So no one is actually going on Facebook looking for solutions. As a matter of fact, you're going to Facebook as an escape, right? They're looking to socialize and just have fun and relax. And also here you come along with your ad.

So it's a very big interruption. And so when you're showing ads to be on Facebook, you have no way of knowing what problems or concerns are top of mind at that very moment or if they're even actively looking for a solution. They might even not even know a solution exists. Or worse yet, they might not even be aware that they're experiencing a specific problem just yet. So what do we do? So how do we move someone through the customer buying cycle and choose the right platform to do so? It all comes down to understanding the levels of awareness and everything I'm able to pull from is from this book right here, Breakthrough Advertising, which I honestly feel is the best book ever written when it comes to understanding human behavior, psychology and marketing, all in one. It is a very expensive book because it's out of print.

But honestly, I think it's worth every single penny. So if you are super curious, you can go out there and you have to pay out a few hundred dollars to get this. But it's an amazing book. And that's exactly where I'm getting this information from. So when it comes to the levels of awareness you'll see here at the bottom here, there's a whole spectrum. There is unaware, problem aware, solution aware, product aware, and most aware or I also like to call most aware - deal aware. And so when it comes to unaware, this means that people they have no idea that a problem even exists. The example I always like to use is with drinking water here in the US is that most people assume, you know, living in a first world country and in a major metropolitan area. So I look myself in the Los Angeles area, you know, our drinking water is clean. That's what a lot of people assume. But the truth is that in a lot of areas, there's actually a lot of heavy metals in the drinking water.

And so therefore, people don't realize it's actually sometimes not the best. Problem aware it is that you would realize that the some of the drinking water in certain areas is not a good. Solution aware would be OK, cool, I know that drinking water is not the best in certain areas. And I know there's some filters that I can buy, but I'm just not sure which filter is the best for me. Then product aware is OK, I like filter A. Filter A, filter B are the two ones that I'm evaluating here, I'll eliminate all the other ones and then most aware or deal aware would be OK, cool, I've made my mind. I want filter A to help me, you know, improve all the drinking water in my home but it's a little bit too expensive and so I'm just gonna wait for them to have a sale. So that's why I like to call it deal aware as well. So that's the difference between the level of awareness right there.

And with Google, you can really go from problem aware to product aware. Obviously unaware is not going to happen on Google at all, right. Because if they're unaware of anything, they're not going be doing a search on it. And for the most aware or deal aware, like I said, that usually comes down to giving people some type of discount or offer. And so it's pretty rare that someone's going to be typing in, you know, is there a discount on this product right now? You know, it might happen sometimes, but for the most part, for Google, you can go from a problem aware to product aware, whereas with Facebook you can go the whole spectrum, right. You can take someone from unaware and make them realize that they actually have a problem, introduce them to your solution.

And then, you know, after a certain amount of days or maybe even months, and now you can finally give them an offer that they're enticed to take you up on. Then there's different buyer personas as well to go along with the levels of awareness. So there's people, the people at the top or the fast decision makers, "I want the best" or "I'm an impulse buyer". And then the people at the bottom are the slow decision makers. "I'm process driven" and "I listen to my heart", and then sometimes are based on logic and sometimes they're based upon emotion. So there's all these layers here. We're talking about levels of awareness and the speed of buying and using logic and using emotion, all kind of stuff. And so it can get kind of messy.

But with Facebook, you can create an end to end journey of taking people like I said from unaware and then based upon how fast or slow they make a decision they determine how quickly they make their way through this form, all right. So you start with branding and awareness up top. Then you might give him like a small conversion. And then at the very bottom, you know, they can take you up on your main offer right there. So if Facebook does allow you to have a little bit more freedom of flexibility in terms of getting people at different levels of awareness and different speeds of buying as well.

So I do want to give you a little bit of advice on how to use the different levels of awareness. This is I guess a little bit off topic in terms of talking on Google versus Facebook. But I want to arm you with some tools on how to use these different levels of awareness. So at the unaware stage, you want to show people that they have a problem and show what life can be like without the problem, at problem aware you do want to address the specific problem and educate them on why your solution solves that problem. At solution aware, you do want to argue your USP an argument for why your solution is the best solution out of all those solutions out there. At aware of your product...

...but not sold yet you want to, what you do is you want to give testimonials, guarantees, social proof and case studies just to kind of further drive from the point that your product is the best one out there. In a deal aware they already want the product. They just need price and terms. And so you can offer some sort of discounts, you know, like a Black Friday deal or some like that. So this is how you want to arm yourself in terms of different levels of awareness. And I would say certainly on for example, look, on Google, what I see a lot people do is that for a problem aware type of search term, they, right...

...deal aware ads where it's like, OK, I have, you know, back pain, for example. And, you know, I see an ad that says, oh, get, you know, 50 percent off our back pain solution. But I know nothing about the solution yet, you know, based on my search term. And so I do see a lot of people making that mistake. So always be very aware of the search term inside of Google, where it correlates and write a corresponding ad for it. Whereas with Facebook you have to do some testing to figure out where your audience is along the awareness spectrum. And yes, we are getting into marketing psychology here. And because both platforms are very competitive these days, you know, understanding or having at least the base understanding of market psychology is pretty much mandatory these days, right. You know, gone are the days where you can just threw up some ads and find some success.

There are very competitive platforms at this point. And so understanding more marketing psychology than your competitors will certainly give you an edge. Now, that being all said, you know, different levels of awareness and different speeds of buying, and stuff like that, here's where things can sometimes change. There's a standard problem and then there's an emergency problem. And what I'm getting to is that not all, not all problems are created equally. So there are problems that are always top of mind, such as back pain. And then there's problems that only come up because something unexpected has happened. Services and products for emergencies are amazing for Google. But they are terrible for Facebook. And then so for emergency problems, Google, you know, plumbing, great, great platform. Attorneys, roofing, carpet cleaning, car repair, HVAC, furniture. Furniture, it may or may not be an emergency, but it's also an infrequent purchase. And so infrequent purchases are typically better for Google as well. So these are some industries that are usually better for Google and worse for Facebook.

And then for Facebook, by definition, if someone is at unaware stage, they don't have a problem. They're obviously not going to do a Google search for that. So services and industries that solve problems people are unaware of are great for Facebook, but terrible for Google. So here are some examples that could be good for Facebook. So, again, unclean drinking water, my example from earlier in the US, new gig economy services. So when you think back to, for example, when Uber and Lyft first came out, ride sharing, right, ride sharing was not something that anyone was typing into Google at that time. Obviously now, because they are known services. But when they first came out, ride sharing just wasn't a term that people were using. Therefore, you know, Facebook obviously would be a better platform for that.

Online courses and memberships that solve problems that people may not be aware of just yet are, Facebook is really great platform for that. And then any type of new products. So when you think about when the squatty potty came out, that was something that, you know, we've never seen before, never even realized it was solving a problem. So so at the time when squatty potty was new, you know, Facebook was definitely a superior platform for that. And then industries that are great for both e-commerce can be great for both dentistry, education and chiropractors and software as a service companies. This is by no means a complete list, right. I just want to give you some quick examples of your platforms that can work well in both.

So when it comes to breaking down the whole customer journey and awareness level, so for Facebook, it's good for every stage of awareness. It is better, though, for new products and info products. And then for Google, it's good for problem aware, all the way to product aware, but it is better for emergency services or products or infrequent purchases. Again, they are equal, right? You can't say one's better than the other when it comes to evaluating the customer journey and levels of awareness and the whole beer versus wine. In certain situations Facebook is just going to be better. And in another Google is going to be better. All right, so now we're going to get into time sensitive products.

So again, here, what we're gonna get to, OK, cool, it doesn't matter if it's problem aware, solution aware, this that the other... Based upon whether it's Time-Sensitive or not, that can also often be the determining factor of which platform is better. So here I'm specifically talking about life events. So if you sell a product or service based on life events such as birthdays and weddings, then Facebook is definitely a better option for you because chances are someone isn't going to go to Google and type in, hey, today's my birthday, what nearby restaurant will give me a discount? Very few people, if any, are going to be typing that in. So life events are great marketing opportunities for companies on Facebook and companies such as they can offer discounts for someone's birthday, venues for certain events, wedding photographers, baby product manufacturers. Because you can bet your bottom dollar that the second you have a baby, Facebook is going to know about it and then you start getting a lot of ads about different baby products.

So when it comes to breaking down which platform is better when it comes to life events with Facebook, right, Facebook knows when it's your birthday. They know when you get engaged. They know when you get married. They know when you have a child, et cetera, et cetera. They're kind of all knowing platform, whereas Google, right, they only know what you type into the research. So if you happen to mention that it's your birthday, then sure they're going to know. But I don't think too many people actually type that into Google. So for a specific life based events on Facebook, it's definitely the superior platform in this sense. The next thing you want to evaluate is B2B or B2C, right, what type of business are you? So who is actually entering your B2B funnel. Job targeting on Facebook isn't that great.

In my opinion or in my experience, I should say actually,  simply because when people, first of all, not that many people actually put in their job title inside of Facebook, and even when they do, they don't update it, right. It's something that they put in there maybe when they first created their Facebook account and then they just forget about it. People don't treat Facebook like they do LinkedIn, so they're not going to keep their job information up to date. And so when you, it may be cool that you're targeting managers, but who knows if that person is still a manager at a certain business and stuff like that. You can also take any target by employers, but there's no way of knowing who you're getting in front of, right.

It could be the CEO of that company or it might be the new intern. Whereas B2B traffic in Google is of much higher quality because the person is showing intent. And plus the person that is doing the search at least has a say in the decision, right. They may not be the final decision maker, but because the fact they're doing the search, they're going to have an influence in the decision. Now, you also don't look at B2B funnel cost. So while B2B leads may be cheaper on Facebook, the quality is likely to be lower and then B2B leads on Google will be more expensive. But since the lifetime value of a B2B clients is usually very large, you know, thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars taking on extra costs in the Google platform, it is often worth it.

Now, when we compare that to B2C funnels, there's a lot of factors to determine which platform is best for B2C, some of which we've discussed and some of which we'll be talking more about in a little bit. But in general, Facebook, in my opinion, is the better B2C platform simply because of how granular their data is. And we're going to expand upon that in the next section. So breaking down, which platform is better for B2B when it comes to Facebook as subpar job title targeting, lower costs for sure, in terms of leads that you bring in, but lower quality typically. And then with Google, the searcher has a say in the decision. It's going be full of intent and yes, it's going to be higher cost. But because of the level of intent, it's going to be higher quality.

So when it comes to B2B, I would say Google is definitely the superior platform. And then when it comes to B2C with Facebook as ultra granular data, that makes it easy to get in front of a ton of ideal customers. And it's almost an unlimited amount of people that you can get in front of. Whereas with Google it has high intent with search. But the CPCs, which will get into, are on higher end so it can be less profitable. Plus, you're only limited to the people who are searching actively on Google. So like I said, with Facebook, it's unlimited, almost the amount people can get in front of. Whereas with Google, only the people who are actually searching. So B2C usually and in my opinion, Facebook is the spirit platform. Now, audience data. So this is the definitely a big one to consider.

So when it comes to warm audiences, both the FB pixel and Google tag allow you to retarget website visitors. Google also has customer mass for email. So if you have an e-mail list, you can upload that and then Google will find similar people. Facebook has custom audiences for email. So same thing. You upload your email list and you can either retarget them or actually find similar people as well. But when it comes to retargeting in general, Facebook is far superior because when it comes to Google search, right, while our RLSA is great, you only get in front of people if they're actively searching, right. Where that's not the case with Facebook.

You get to be front and center as well when they're logged onto their accounts, whether it be Google, Facebook or Instagram. Now, I know some of you might be saying, what about display? And I know I said it wasn't going to talk about display, but I feel like that might be an objection that some people might have out there, like, oh, but you can still retarget them with display and still get in front of them when they're not searching. Yes, it is true, here's an example of a display ad. But the issue with display retargeting is it's off to the side and banner blindness is a real thing, right? People, they see these banners all the time, all over the Internet.

They just ignore them. And it's not front and center. And while, yes, you can find some success with the display retargeting, ultimately it's not the best, in my opinion. It would be as if on Facebook, the only thing that was available was the right hand column. So here's an example of what I mean by the right hand column. But I mean, let's be honest, I probably clicked on, you know, right hand column ads like twice in my whole life, because when you're staring down at a blueberry stuff, sour dough, French toast, you're ignoring what's off to the writer, you know, so so, you know, it would be as if Facebook only had, right. And column retargeting banner blindness is going to prevent from getting the best results. Whereas with news feed retargeting, again, you get to be front and center and says 80 percent of the traffic is mobile. You can see an example here if you're using the right dimensions, which in this case is a 1:1 aspect ratio, it's going to take up the whole screen of the person on their phone. So it's maximum real estate, you're getting right in front of them.

[00:24:57] So it's just much better and much more powerful retargeting option when it comes to Facebook.

[00:25:03] Now, when it comes to the user data as well? Google gathers data based upon your search terms and what it sees you doing on the websites, your visits. Facebook also sees what you're doing on the sites you visit. Plus, they keep track of the photos that you click on, the posts and ads that you comment or share, of the search you type into Facebook and Instagram, the groups you're in that time that you mentioned, not one movie that you like, right. It's tracking absolutely everything. So that's why every single Facebook profile has at least 400000 data points tied to it, which is pretty crazy when you think about it, because I couldn't even tell you 400 things about myself. But Facebook knows at least 400000 things about myself, so. Kind of expanding on that, right...

...when it comes to Comparable Audiences is the term I had to come up with. So this is why Facebook's lookalikes are superior to Google's Similar Audiences because the additional data collected by the Pixel just makes it faster and easier for Facebook to scale your campaigns with people who are similar to your customers or your warm traffic. It just has so much more data per person. So, you know, expanding and scaling your campaigns, using lookalikes, you're gonna get faster results than you would with Google's Similar Audiences. So when it comes to audience data breakdown, Facebook has a max website audience length of 180 days. You need fewer people in an audience to activate it.

So once there's about 300 people in an audience, you can start doing retargeting, the Pixel gathers more granular data and creates superior lookalikes. And you get to show ads front and center and a person's newsfeed with retargeting. Whereas with Google, right, the max website audience is actually 540 days. So it doesn't have Facebook be there for sure. But you also do need more people in an audience to activate it or start retargeting. You need, at least about my experience, at least 600 people are twice the amount that you would need inside of a Facebook audience to start doing retargeting. Their tag, Google tag gathers less data. It creates inferior similar audiences and can only be targeted at people if they're searching or if you're off to the side using display.

So overall, it comes to audience data and warm traffic and getting in front of that warm traffic. Facebook is definitely the superior platform in this sense. All right, cost, this is a huge one for sure. So there are drastic differences in costs between the two platforms. And honestly, it can be the single determining factor out of everything. So this can honestly nullify a lot of the stuff that we've actually been talking about. And, you know, I actually have a client, the perfect example. They would love to advertise on Google. That would be the better platform for them. But based upon their industry, the cost per click for them was actually 80 dollars.

[00:27:44] And they just can't sustain. And that's per click, not per lead. And so we're going to break that down a little bit more right here.

[00:27:51] So Google CPCs, the average is to 2.69. But again, this is an average out of all industries. So it can vary wildly. So it doesn't paint the whole picture. As an example, my brother, he actually works at an agency that mostly services attorneys and they sometimes have certain search terms that they have to pay 200 dollars, even close to 300 dollars per click on each one. So for a specific search terms again here, an example like insurance, you might pay 200 dollars for a single click. Here's a breakdown. Again, these are just averages. So it's not going to show you the whole picture, but it does give you an idea of what you can sort of expect when advertising on Google. With Facebook the average CPC is a $1.72, so of almost a full dollar less than on Google. And then you can even see here, depending on your industry, it can be dirt, dirt cheap. So if you're in apparel or retail, you're gonna be paying, you know, oftentimes less than a dollar per click or travel and hospitality. Also super, super affordable. But it also again, this also doesn't paint the whole picture, if you are in finance, for example, it will be more expensive. You're not paying, you know, 80 dollars for a click.

[00:29:00] But, you know, it could be higher, such as, you know, 10 or 15 dollars.

[00:29:05] For Facebook the cost per click also varies drastically based upon the objective you're choosing. So here's an example between impressions, reach, lead generation conversion and conversions and link clicks. The most expensive one here is reach. That's still only a $1.21. A lot of the other ones, depending on the industry. Right.

[00:29:21] You're going to get likely some cheaper clicks than you would on Google.

[00:29:27] So you want to look at the full picture, though, right? So cheaper usually or sometimes means lower quality. So Facebook traffic tends to be more much less qualified than Google traffic because Google traffic, as you know, is full of intense. So in order to see what makes the most sense, you also want to look at your conversion rate. So I know I just painted a picture right now that says Google is super expensive and Facebook is super cheap, but you do want to look at the whole picture and analyze your conversion rate. So let's do two examples here. So with Facebook, let's say you get a 1000 clicks, your CPC is 80 cents. That means you paid 800 dollars. Your landing page conversion rate is 4 percent. That means you got 40 conversions in your cost per conversion. That's 20 dollars. Whereas on Google, you also get a thousand clicks. But this time you're CPC is 6 dollars. That means you paid 6000 dollars. Your conversion rate is higher. You have a conversion rate of 8 percent. But that means you got 80 conversions. But because of the CPCs, it means you paid 75 dollars per conversion. But it also works in reverse. Right.

So we're using the same example where the numbers are the same, the only difference this time for Facebook is that the conversion rate is 1 percent. And then over here, on Google again, same amount of clicks, same CPC, but the conversion rate is 10 percent. You'll see that the cost per conversion is 60 dollars on Google. Whereas with Facebook, it's 80 dollars, so don't base it just off of cost. Yes, you know, Google is likely going to be more expensive from a CPC standpoint. But look at the whole picture and make sure you're taking into account the conversion rates you can experience within each platform. But overall, when it comes to costs, you know, Facebook does have lower CPCs. You can run on low budgets, you know, 10 dollars a day, which is very difficult to do over on. Google has lower conversion rates. Google has higher CPCs. It's hard to run that on low budgets. If you're running on just 10 dollars a day, you're likely not to get any clicks off it, but it does have a higher conversion rates. But overall, when just looking purely at cost on Facebook is definitely the cheaper platform between two. All right. Next, we're talking about your marketing goal.

So obviously you want to ask yourself what exactly is it that you're trying to achieve with your campaigns? So some different marketing goals might include branding, awareness, consideration, lead generation purchase. And so this, again, is going to be a very big determining turning faster on which platform you want to start on. So you might think of this as your typical funnel, right, where you have your top of the funnel, middle of the funnel and bottom of the funnel. And so when it comes to those different areas of the funnel, right. When it comes to the top, Facebook is gonna be supreme, right. It's going to be really hard to do branding and awareness with with Google search, right. And then with middle of the funnel you can use both Facebook and Google.

And then bottom of the funnel, you can use both Facebook and Google. Also ask yourself, right, taking into account everything we've already discussed, which part of the funnel are you trying to optimize for? And then that will also kind of help you trying to steer you the right way in terms of which platform is better for you. Now, ease of use and implementation is also a very important one to consider right here. So level of difficulty, both Facebook and Google are easier and harder, but in different ways. So you want to think about phases of a campaign.

So typically, you know, this is what you go through with any campaign on any platform, really, right. So we have an implementation phase, which can also include the research you do beforehand. You've got your testing phase to figure out what works and what doesn't. Then once you figure out what does where, if you start scaling and then after that once you're done scaling, right, it's just ongoing maintenance of that part. So when it comes to, you know, the different phases, in my opinion, Google is definitely easier from the implementation phase all the way through scaling and I'll get into why. Whereas Facebook is definitely, in my opinion, the easier platform for ongoing maintenance of the campaign. So why is Google easier, in my opinion, for the first part? Well, let's think about a Google ads launch checklist. Now, this is, yes, a little bit oversimplified, but it still drives home kid of the ultimate point that I'm trying to make here is, right. So you do your keyword research. And because of that, you know what people are actually searching for and what they have on top of mind. You get all your Google tag.

You create very short text based ads, right. Well, know there's not a whole lot of room for creativity on those ads. And then you create a landing page, which can be simpler than one you use on Facebook, because you know what people are actually searching for? Which source is not the case with Facebook. Now, with the Facebook ads launch checklist it's a little bit more extensive, right. You ideally want to have a Facebook page that's consistently posting contents simply because your CPM, cost per thousand freshens, will be cheaper if you have an active Facebook page. Yes, you can still run ads if your Facebook page is not active, but it's been tested before and you'll definitely have lower CPMs. If you have an active Facebook page, you do your audience research. You need to install the Facebook Pixel. And it's ideal if you build up some data onto the Pixel prior to launching any campaigns. You have to set up your conversions and your different events. You have to create your custom audiences. You have to do your offer research because again, you have no idea where and what stage of awareness that your audience is in. You need to put a lot of effort into your ad copy and creative because as you know, with Facebook ads, you can have a ton of copy on there and needs to be very persuasive and you can choose all sorts of different types of creatives.

And yet to have your landing page, which ideally or usually it has to be longer than one you use on Google, because, again, people are not actively looking for solutions on Facebook. So you need to try to influence them a little bit more with additional content. So it's a much more extensive list to get your campaigns going on Facebook than it is on Google. And then when it comes to getting results because of the high intent with Google, right, you can start getting results pretty quickly. And while it is possible to get results quickly with Facebook ads, that's usually not the case, right. You have to do a lot of testing. You have to test different audiences, different messaging, different creatives, different offers, different optimizations, such as a seven day versus one day conversion, one now. There's a whole lot of things that you have to kind of tweak before you really find kind of the magic formula for your specific offer and your audience. And then what comes to scaling, with Google you can increase your budget fairly aggressively without any problems.

I mean, that's particularly true if you're using manual CPCs. It's a little different if you're using Google's more automated bidding strategies like Target CPA. But even with a automated ones, in my experience, you can you can still scale rather aggressively compared to Facebook. And as long as search volume is there, right, and you can sustain higher CPCs than scaling is very rapid. It's not so for Facebook. In most cases, you only want to scale or increase budgets by 20 to 40 percent increments every few days. And when it comes to that, I definitely encourage more of the 20 percent side as opposed to 40 percent side, because otherwise your results are going to spiral out of control. The algorithm just gets like super confused, essentially. And so you have to scale up more slowly. Now, what comes in the maintenance phase once you reach the maintenance phases? Not a ton...

...you have to do with Facebook ads, other than periodically update your app. So once you get there with Facebook ads, that's actually very nice. You can kind of just cruise along. But that's not the case with Google because with Google you have to monitor and adjust negative keywords, mobile bids, your geographic bids, your time of day bids, new keyword expansion, the dozen, hundreds or even thousands of keywords that you're managing inside the account based upon their bid and stuff like that. So there's a whole lot of moving parts with a Google campaign that makes the maintenance of that phase of the campaign phase much more challenging than it would on Facebook. So ease of use breakdown, I also mentioned some things here that I didn't touch upon. So with Facebook, the ads manager interface is very glitchy. There's also an interface update at least...

...once a year, which is annoying in my opinion. Ad approvals can be very challenging depending on your industry. You need to pay close attention to how the algorithm works and then account bands. Unfortunately, our huge problem inside of Facebook with Google, though, the interface is very reliable, very consistent. They rarely update it, which is nice. Ad approval is very easy. The algorithm understanding is less important. And if your Google ad account gets banned, it's probably because you deserve it. Which is definitely the case in Facebook. A lot of unjust bands, I would say, happened over there. So ease of use.

I actually think overall with the whole picture outside Google is the easier platform. Then there's social proof and word of mouth. So this is very important, right. So the social proof, you can create the greatest ad in the world with Google, but no one's going to know about it, right, because it's just as basic text ad and people click on it and they don't really think about it that much. But when you create a great ad on Facebook, people are going to like comment and share. So here's some examples. You can see the ad on the left. It's got over 4000 likes, 681 comments. The one on the right, it's got 141 likes, 43 comments. So people are signaling, hey, this is giving me a good experience on the platform. And that's important because word of mouth has shown that the selling through word of mouth is much more powerful. It can be 10 times more effective than traditional advertising. It's because it's more targeted, right.

Your friends know you and they have more trust with their friends. And it's also free, which is awesome, right. So when someone buys a product of yours off of Google, you know, are they going to tell some of their friends about it? Sure, they definitely know some will, but it won't spread as quickly as it would on Facebook. And here we're talking about, you know, things going viral on Facebook. So here going max, the same example, the one on the left you can see here, 949 shares. That's the virtual word of mouth on Facebook. That's a ton of shares. The one on the right has 23. So that's people that's giving you free impressions right there. They're sharing it with their friends. And it's going crazy, right. So on Google, right, you're...

...probably not going to get that amount of word of mouth referrals as you would on Facebook. Here's another example of some word of mouth marketing on Facebook, where this is a quiz and people are posting the results on the quiz up top. And then you actually see the examples of the very bottom. People are tagging their friends and saying, like, hey, this whole Facebook page looks fantastic. Or, hey, take this quiz right here. So, again, really, really strong word of mouth marketing on Facebook. So when it comes to the social benefits, you have a potential for tons of social proof, faster, bigger and broader word of mouth ability to get free impressions. And then additional Facebook followers and an additional Instagram followers as well.

Whereas on Google, right, there's no social proof on your ads, limited word of mouth, no free impressions except for YouTube, which we'll get into in a second. No additional Facebook followers usually. And then really usually no additional Instagram followers. Facebook is definitely the superior platform for social benefits and word of mouth. Type of product is also very important. So even if your product is searched for on Google, if it's very novel in some kind of way, then Facebook still might be the better platform for you. Again, even if people are searching for it inside of a Google search. So let me give you some examples here. So Facebook, right, with Ad Formats there's images, there's videos, and instant experience which is for mobile specifically. And then with Google ads, right, you have text ads, that's it, right. You can make them a little bit nicer with sitelinks and callouts and stuff like that.

But at the end it's just very simple, basic text ads. So when you do have something that's very novel, again, even if people are searching for it on Google, it might work better on Facebook. So here's an example of a company called Carbon Coco, and they sell two teeth whitening solutions. But as you can see here, because it has carbon in it, or charcoal, and I should say, you know, it's looks very different. And so when you see this pop-up in your news feed, it's really going to stand out, whereas you can't portray that in a Google search ad, right? You can say, hey, our unique teeth whitener makes your teeth black. But visually, it is not as powerful as it would be here on Facebook. Here's another example for toilet paper, right. You know, at the beginning of this whole pandemic, a lot of people were probably searching for toilet paper on Google. So, yeah, sure.

[00:41:41] This company who gives a crap could get results, but they probably actually get better results on Facebook because of how novel their product is, right. So it's a 100% recycled. They don't make a ton of money to charity based upon the proceeds. And as you can see here, all the rolls have like a unique design to them. And so just kind of quote unquote, more fun version of toilet paper. And so when it comes to a unique product break down, you are limited is a short, simplistic text ads inside of Google. It is hard to demonstrate the uniqueness of a product with those short ads, whereas on Facebook you have tons of freedom and flexibility to get creative with product demonstrations. And it's easy to demonstrate the uniqueness of a product. So Facebook, in this sense, if you have something very novel, very unique, even if people are searching for it on Google, you might find more success on Facebook. I'm going to fly by these next two sections very quickly because I do want to get to the YouTube part. But overall, ad customizations on Google, and you have these ones like countdown and device customizations. You do have customizations on Facebook as well based upon the placement.

[00:42:48] You can customize, OK, oh, I'm here, I want to square placements over here, I want a rectangle image and stuff like that, but don't use those. And this is why, because when you create an ad you get what's known as your Facebook ad ID. And that Facebook ad ID controls your social proof on your ads, your likes, comments and shares. So you typically want to have the same ad idea across multiple campaigns to build up that social proof. But when you use those ad customizers you actually lose the ad IDs, you can see here they tack on some additional information. And even if you try to use one of those numbers, as you know, the ad ID in a different campaign, it's not going to take it. It's not going to recognize it. And so while, you know, in theory ad customizers on Facebook are good, in practice, they're terrible. And so when it comes to ad customizes, I think Google's actually better. And then reporting -  Google's reporting is very visual, very solid. It gives you, you know, pretty decent recommendations.

Whereas with Facebook, it's just a, you know, a spreadsheet, basically. So if you hate spreadsheets, it's going to probably make your eyes bleed sometimes. And so when it comes to the native reporting, Facebook is very numbers based. It's hard to see trends. And they give few import suggestions, whereas with Google, it's very visual. It's easy to see trends and many solid suggestions. So it is the superior platform from a reporting standpoint. So YouTube, like I said I didn't want to touch upon this because I think it does deserve some attention. So one disclaimer here, you know, I do feel like I'm a beginner on YouTube. I've been doing them since the beginning of the year for our clients. So I strongly don't claim to be an expert. But I do know enough to share some insights on the differences and similarities and the strengths. And then also do want to clarify that here I'm talking about In-Stream ads within YouTube, which are the skippable ads that you see whenever you're watching a video. So when it comes to YouTube ads, they're a little bit of a hybrid between Google and Facebook because you can't put your ads in front of people who are doing a specific search inside of YouTube.

So, for example, if you're a chiropractor, you could advertise to people who are looking for videos you want to type in stretches to help lower back pain. But you can also target based on interest and behaviors just like Facebook, although the targeting options in this sense are fewer than what's on Facebook. So because of that, though, you can do keyword targeting, or you can do kind of behavioral targeting. So it's a little bit of a hybrid between the two. Or you can target specific channels or videos. One unique option is called custom intent, which you're actually targeting people based upon their Google searches, not their YouTube search. And then you can also target people based upon the websites they visit. And this is known as custom affinity. So, again, it's a little bit of a hybrid. It's also a hybrid in the sense that when it comes to whether it's interruption working or not on YouTube, as you know, people go there for two reasons.

They go there for education or for entertainment. So as long as you make your video educational and entertaining, then while you're still interrupting them, it's a little bit of a less of an interruption than it would be on Facebook, for example. So, again, a little bit more of a hybrid aspect right there. And then the cool thing about YouTube ads that for industry, you only pay when someone watches more than 30 seconds of your ad or if they click a button. So if they watch for less than 30 seconds and don't click a button, you don't pay anything. So you get free impressions that way, which is pretty cool. And there's also less competition on YouTube because there's a higher barriers to entry, right. Because you only can do video with these types of ads, which are a lot of people are intimidating. So there's fewer competitors on there, which means lower CPAs.

[00:46:20] All right, cool.

[00:46:20] So Ad Inventory, when it comes to Google and Facebook. So when you think of Ad Inventory, you want to think of everything as a "Main Street" when it comes to Google and Facebook, meaning, right, you have your Facebook newsfeed. And that's where ads show up. That's the inventory. And then when it comes to Google search, right, you have your search results on the first page. Yes, there's page 2, 3, 4, but let's be honest, no one no one goes there, right. So rolling, you're talking about page one. And so since both of those are a mainstream, there's only one main street, right. The amount of ad inventory is very limited, which means there's more competitors come, the higher the costs go up because there's only one main street. So it's no different for a restaurant that wants to be in the main street of aatlent. If you want to be there, you don't have to pay a lot more. With YouTube ads, though, when you think about the fact that YouTube has 300 hours of video uploaded every single minute.

That's basically that, you know, every single minute there is hundreds and thousands of main streets being built because, you know, just about every single video you can put an ad in front of, but always got a lot of those videos. And so each time these videos get uploaded, more and more ad inventory is being built, which keeps costs down, which is really a unique aspect of YouTube ads. And then best performing audiences for me, again, in my experience, I'm not saying I'm a YouTube ads expert, but this is just what I've experienced so far. Custom intent, which, like I said, is based upon what they search on Google. Channel targeting also has been very effective. You can think of that as like targeting influencers on Facebook. So you're targeting Tony Robbins, for example, on Facebook, right. You can target his YouTube channel on YouTube as well. And so you kind of think of it that way in terms of a comparison. In-Market audiences, so like in-market for education or in-market for a car or something like that, you can do that as well.

So those have been the most effective audiences in my experience so far with YouTube ads. I have done keyword targeting before based upon their YouTube keywords. I haven't had success with that. But like I said, since I'm a beginner, maybe I just didn't do it correctly. So I wouldn't rule that one out completely. But again, just based on my experience, these are what have been the most effective. All right. So bottom line, I know we cover a lot. There isn't a better platform, I guess, at the very beginning about being Team Facebook or Team Google or Team YouTube, right. It's about what makes sense and what makes you money, right. So you want to ask yourself, you know, which is a better fit for my budget. Which one is a better fit for the product landscape I'm in, and what stages of the buyer journey am I actually trying to target here? Ideally, you know, if you can be advertising on all the platforms, you know, that is a good scenario to be in. At the end of day, if you're just getting started...

...start small, right. Doing retargeting on either Facebook is an easy way to get started or on Google as well, and YouTube and work your way to where you can be advertising on all platforms at once. So you might be saying holy smokes, that was a lot of information that we just covered, I'm super overwhelmed. What do I do at this point? So, you know, shortcut, we know you probably should be doing a pretty deep analysis of what the best platform is. But if you're short on time, I would say that the shortcut is that you probably based up on your business, if you're new in business, then you probably want to be starting on Facebook simply because the competition on Google is a lot higher. It's a much more mature platform. And if you don't have any cash flow already going, then it'll be challenging at times to get Google going for you, whereas it is a little bit easier if you're a newer business to get going on Facebook. So those are the quick shortcut right there. And that's all I've got for you today. I do appreciate your time. I hope you're able to take something out of this and apply it to your own business so that you can figure out not only what platform is best for you, but then, you know, keep on getting from there and ultimately dive into all the platforms at some point in the future.

[00:50:13] That is fantastic. Thank you so much, Alvaro, Alvaro. Sorry. I was on the proper way to do it. So that's great. Everybody stayed on for quite some time and a few questions coming in. One person, Jiten, said 'Great information, thank you for sharing. Lately, I've been reluctant to attend webinars. Glad I did not miss this. And so that's great to hear.'

[00:50:38] Few people asking us for replays to get the information, which is good. Ruth asks us, are the launch checklist that you had midway through?

[00:50:48] Are they something that you have as a PDF? I'm talking about like what you need to do for Google. We need to do for Facebook. Have you ever put that out there as like a piece of content marketing at all?

[00:50:59] Actually, no, I have not. And it's funny that actually came up with a question, because as I was creating these slides that actually occurred to me, I was like, I probably should treat like a PDF like that. So it's something that's you will have at some point in the future, but unfortunately do not have it at this current moment.

[00:51:15] Cool. We'll talk offline and see if that's something we can we can co-do or do together as well, because that's something that we'd like to do is create checklists and I SOPs as much as possible.

[00:51:25] So awesome. Thanks, Ruth, for that question. Stephen asks -For B2B companies in, for example, industrial products and professional service do you recommend retargeting LinkedIn visitors with Facebook ads?

[00:51:43] So I'm going be clearly upfront and honest, I know very little about Linkedin ads. So I just know that, I'm speaking from a very limited knowledge. My understanding of Linkedin ads is that they're very expensive, especially when you compare them to Facebook. Now, again, that goes back to the fact that you're hopefully still getting in front of a more ideal customer only. But because of how expensive it is, then, yeah, I would maybe see that as a fair strategy where you first bring them in via Linkedin but then you retarget them on Facebook because you know, you're getting in front of the right person. But like I said, I have very limited knowledge when it comes to Linkedin ads.

[00:52:21] And I think he's more LinkedIn visitors, that maybe you generate a LinkedIn visitor through the organic methods or they're coming through and then you share as a company.

[00:52:31] Would you then? I think the question is more along the lines of can you use retargeting for B2B people on Facebook? Like, anybody who came to your site, would you retarget them through Facebook ads, even though Facebook is often regarded as a personal network?

[00:52:51] Yeah, I certainly would. So, for example, if I created some sort of post that was very specifically designed for, you know, managers, you know, inside a Fortune 500 companies, you know, then if I feel strongly that's the type of person that's going to be clicking on that from LinkedIn, then for sure, I would absolutely retarget them using Facebook still, because more likely than not, even though they're on LinkedIn, they're probably on Facebook more often. So you'll just have another opportunity to get in front of them.

[00:53:20] Yeah, I think that's often a misperception that I've heard for years and years and years, and that is that Facebook is only a personal network and there's no point in doing business on it. And I just, like, Facebook, wouldn't you say 200000 points of data are... 400000 points of data, yeah. Weren't a thousand points of data. Facebook knows who you are, whether you like it or not. Facebook stock on you and they're in your business, they're up in your business pretty hardcore and they have a lot of reasons to keep on doing that. You know, maybe it might feel less invasive, but does mean that it's going away. It's just more the outwardly facing part. They have to clean up the regulations, but they're in the business of data. They're in the business of buying, selling your data and collecting as much as they can. And so to completely overlook a second largest ad network in the world are digital ad network, because you have a personal preference, to say I don't use Facebook for business stuff so nobody else does, that's this confirmation bias that sort of basically just says, I'm not going to compete, I'm not going to try and show up in this crazy world that we live in.

[00:54:36] And to me, that is not being a data driven marketer. That is being an opinion driven marketer, right. So you have to sometimes get over our preconceptions about how things work, and I'm projecting it, Steven, I don't think that you're suggesting that you and I go way back. But I'm just saying in general that I've heard that so many times. And it's like you can't admit defeat before you start.

[00:54:56] You won't even know unless you try. But Facebook has so much vested interest in bridging that gap between professional you and personal you that they will do whatever they can to make that happen. And retargeting is an easy way to do it.

[00:55:10] Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I know. And just to kind of build upon that point. I mean, once upon a time, it never even happened yet, but Facebook actually did try to buy LinkedIn and it had part be a part of their family networks. So that was many years ago, like I said, never fell through. But that just shows you their intention that, yeah, they do want to build the gap between professional you and personal you.

[00:55:33] Yes. And I think the lines are blurred more than ever, especially in the you know, in the work from home covid 19 world that we live in and the people working from home and a lot of tech companies indefinitely. You know, the very least two years from now, people are going to be working from home and to be more accepted than it is now. Whether it goes back to office or not, like your home computer and your work computer are going to be blurring the lines. And I know that because I haven't had an office the entire time I've had this business or I haven't had an official office space, right. You know, having been on the road like I was, I don't have a work computer and a personal one.

I actually finally do now that I have my own office, I have like this is the work computer. But those lines get blurred. And so if you accidentally, even if you're on your phone, you check your work, email and Facebook there, they're going to find a way. Or if you have Facebook on at work and you have like messenger and you have your microphone turned on, they're listening to you. I know it because I've mentioned my wife mentioned that to me, that I never talked about my life. And suddenly I got an ad for it, you know, so. They're not going to stop. They might get slapped in the wrist. They might get fined for something like that. But there's so much money that they're going to make. That's just who they are. And so, yeah, I mean, I just don't know if there's a line anymore.

[00:56:57] Yeah. I mean, that's a good point. Like, right now is probably the best time ever to do a B2B marketing on Facebook, because everything you just said and you know, for example, like a lot of people who are now in this working home situation, right, they're posting on either Instagram or Facebook 'Oh, look at me working for home now, you know, new lifestyle'. So the second they do that, right, that's another piece of data that you get. Facebook, so they know that you all are, you know, working from home. And they might even know what business you're actually working for and stuff like that. So, yeah, they probably have more B2B data right now than ever before.

[00:57:32] Awesome, OK. Next question, Annette, this one's for me. It says, how do I join your insiders group? Thanks for asking it. And basically, it's just datadrivenu.com/insiders, I believe, or slash program slash insiders.

[00:57:46] And that's something where we give access to as many of our flagship courses as well as these masterclasses we're doing. So we released something new every week, whether it's a dashboard or a process or a presentation like this. And I would love to have you inside. And that is the only way I know of right now to get this replay, is through the insiders group. And they're always going to be joining the insiders group as after this presentation. And he may be active in there to answer some of your questions, but he'll be in the group, you know, coming up soon.

[00:58:16] So it'd be great to have you in there as well. Matt asks that his name is Matt Matt.

[00:58:22] How and where do I get info on average CPC on Google and Facebook? So I believe that your stats were from WordStream.

[00:58:30] But but is there a way that somebody else could find that on their own?

[00:58:35] Yeah, sorry, just to clarify, he's asking specifically for Google, correct?

[00:58:38] He says, where did you get your 2.76 number on Google and the Facebook of $1.72.

[00:58:44] Oh gosh, OK. So for the Facebook, I got that data from WordStream. And then for the Facebook one, I actually got the data from AdEspresso, AdEspresso is basically the WordStream version of Facebook. So both of those two platforms, they have a ton and ton of data and each one. Also specifically for Google ads is, right, if you just use the keyword research tool that will show you based upon what you're trying to target, what kind of CPCs is you can expect for your industry.

[00:59:16] Yeah, it's, yeah...

[00:59:17] What I've noticed is that those numbers are usually gathered either through their... Like the WordStream's a major platform that allows you to manage all your PPC in some way capacity. And they they take the average from their their customers or they just use the Google API, which which the keyword tool or keyword planner has some really interesting numbers in there. But even then, like averages can be taken somewhat with a grain of salt.

[00:59:43] Usually I look at the level of Google is more expensive than Facebook. That's like the only thing that I'm certain of from experience. But everything else is sort of like you have to caveat it and then use your own data. So just anybody who's, you know, taking these numbers is like verbatim. This is exactly what it is. Usually it's you have an inference as to this that's going to be something like this. And then you put it out there into the wild and see that it's like twice as expensive or half as much. And there's either twice as much volume or half as much. It's more likely that you're going to have be off by a factor of 2 or 3. Then you're just going to put it in a number into Google and then just magically hit that.

[01:00:19] Yeah. You know, it's very true. And actually, one of my favorite sayings is that averages give you average data. So that's kind of like telling you to take it with a grain of salt. And I honestly was surprised when I saw that number from where is Jim, the 276? I was like, I haven't seen that note type of number for CPC in a long time, personally. And Google was like, hey, you know, they have all these industries, you know, tens of thousands, maybe, of accounts that they ought to have in their systems. Obviously, there's some industries out there that apparently have lower CPCs. But you're right. It's usually, in my experience, higher than what actually shows you inside the keyword planner.

[01:00:55] Yeah. And like you said, for a beginner, Google is just so expensive that it's hard to really get out of the water, you know, to get to hit the ground running unless you have a significant budget.

[01:01:06] So plan accordingly. This leads to Adam, Adam says 'What would you suggest for a daily budget ad spend, starting with Facebook for e-commerce'?

[01:01:18] Well, I mean, it's hard to give you a single number, because, one, it's going to depend on where in e-commerce you are. So what exactly are your partners? And also the price points of your product. So the best thing I can give you and this is, again, this is just a general guideline, so if you're just starting out, what I always like to assume when you're running ads straight to a purchase is that you want to assume that you're going to at least initially break even on the cost. Let's say you're selling a 10 dollar product. So it's going to cost you 10 dollar to get someone to buy it, so you're breaking even. So that being said, what you want to do is that you want to be spending at least 3-5 times your cost per acquisition. So in this case, your cost per acquisition for the product is 10 dollars. Then you want to be spending a minimum of 30-50 dollars per day on that product. And the reason for that is because the algorithm is all about, on Facebook, it's all about data. And the more data you feed it, the better it's going to perform. And you want to be getting as many purchases or conversions on a daily and weekly basis. Otherwise, it's simply never going to pick up any steam. And it's just not going to get any type of traction. So you want to be shooting for at least 50 conversions are purchases in this case on a weekly basis to give the algorithm enough data. That way you can start, you know, optimizing for you and finding the right people. So that's the best kind of guideline that I can have, is assume, you know, whatever your CPA is for your product, spend 3-5 times the amount.

[01:02:53] Yep. Yeah, for sure. And yep. And I put a link in the chat to the Facebook ads budget calculator we have where you just sort of walk through your key numbers and it will give you some kind of indicator as to what you might want to spend. But I agree with that. All these things are based on machine learning. In the best way I can describe machine learning is that like, you know, you can't really learn something if you have one experience.

[01:03:18] It's just like, you know, I tried to take a step and I fell down. That means that, you know, if you only have one experience, you think that stepping is equated to falling down. But if you take 100 steps, then you get to be more comfortable with, OK, that's actually not really what's happening. So you need to do things enough. Right. And Facebook is the same way. They need to show their ads. You know, people reach a critical mass to then say this is likely to happen. So it is somewhat based on statistics. Now people get scared off and say 'Well, I don't know statistics'. Platform will do that for you. But ultimately, you're not going to be statistically significant until you have hundreds to thousands of results that come in. And so ultimately, you need to give them leeway and some room to breathe so they can get these results, so then they can have an analysis. And so sometimes it means you're burning money or you're spending money you're not comfortable with. But the sooner you do that, the better off you're going to be, the closer you're gonna be to having those results you're looking for. Because it's a computer. It's like not somebody, it's not as smart as a human. Like, you have enough experience as a human. We can just say, OK, stepping does not equate to falling down. And I have a 10 month old who is like trying to walk right now. And he falls down. So to him, that is falling down. But I've seen enough. You know, I've been around lot. I know that walking is just a normal thing, right. And that computers aren't smart enough to do that yet because they don't have the experience. They're still figuring out the world around them. And that's Facebook, that's Google, that's everything tha's algorithm driven.

[01:04:41] Yeah. OK. Ruth says... Great question.

[01:04:47] I think this is in response to the question. I'm selling industrial plumbing. Have you been wondering about coming up with a solid retargeting strategy? I think we answered that pretty well, Ruth, around the retargeting piece. I'm going to go to Alexandra. Do you recommend Google display ads? At what point in the customer journey would you have GD or GDN?

[01:05:06] So Google display ads, I personally only use them at this point for retargeting. I guess even from a retardant retargeting standpoint, I guess so much more bang for my buck doing Facebook, retiring than than Google displaying retargeting. You can, you know, try to use it for cold traffic and bringing leads. But it's funny, actually I was literally talking to a Google rep last week, and this is straight from a Google rep. And he was like, yeah, Google display, it just brings in garbage leads. Those are his exact words. And in my experience, you know, that has also been the case, especially to cold traffic. So I personally only use Google display from retargeting standpoint. But even then, after I don't do that until I completely exhaust my retarding budget on Facebook and then our first actually also retarding budget into YouTube before I ever do put any type of the, you know, we're retargeting budget to display.

[01:06:10] Right, yeah.

[01:06:11] I don't disagree with you. Let's put it that way. You have to be very tight with your exclusions because there are a lot of click farms and a lot of bad stuff going on. Bad, bad activity, trying to game the system. Google doesn't place it nearly as much as their sacred search network. Igor says 'About analytics, what data do you analyze every day?' Now, this is a loaded question, so you don't need to go. I mean, I'll leave it for other time. So is there anything that you just definitely look at, though?

[01:06:43] Yeah. So, I mean, I guess I'll try to apply it for both platforms which will give me a child, because I do look at different metrics for each platform. But I mean, across the board, obviously your volume of results and then your cost per result. I mean, it doesn't matter, you know, what industry you're in. You know, those are connected to goals and metrics, right. So volume results, cost results. Make sure you're still profitable. Then beyond that, also you click through rates are super, super important because I mean, that's an indicator of your message match, right? If your message is on points, then you're going to have a good click through rates. And if you have a lower rate, that means whatever it is that you're saying is just simply not resonating with your target audience. And then at that point, I'm also looking at my cost per click and then button, like I said, I'm also looking at my conversion rates. It's not you know, if I have a higher cost per click, but a super high conversion rate, then I'm perfectly willing to take on that high cost per click as long as my conversion rate can sustain it, too. So across both of those platforms, I would say those are like the universal metrics that I'm looking at.

[01:07:52] Excellent. Thank you.

[01:07:55] Anthony says 'Where's the link to the Facebook ads cost calculator you just mentioned?' So I put it in a chat. Anthony.

[01:08:04] I'll put it in there again. I'll put the answer into here for you so you can see that. All right. And then, Ruth, this is the final question that we have in there right now.

[01:08:13] Ruth says 'What's a good clickthrough rate for Facebook and for Google?'

[01:08:17] Again, probably I'd love to hear you think, what they said, just seeing everybody like, it runs across the board with everything you do. So I don't mean to answer for you, but I have some campaigns on Facebook that have a really high click clickthrough rate and really expensive clicks.

[01:08:35] But, you know, 20 percent conversion rate. You know, so you can have a really high click or you can have a really low click rate, but really high conversion rate. And it sort of goes across the board.

[01:08:47] So, yeah.

[01:08:48] Yeah. I mean, and then typically, right, you're going to have a higher click the rate on Google then than you will on Facebook because, right, Google, again, you're the person who is actively looking for a solution, whereas they're not on Facebook, right. You're doing interruption marketing on Facebook. So whereas a one percent click through rates on Facebook could be phenomenal. That might be absolutely terrible based on your industry and mobile competition on Google. So there's one thing to account. And then the other thing we build upon what Jeff said, you know, regardless of your clickthrough rates at the end of day, right, the reason I mention your volume of results in your cost per result first is because, yes, sometimes, you know, you can have a terrible click rate, but if your cost per result is still really good, there's no reason for you to shut that campaign off, right. And, you know, if, for example, if your quality score is low on Google but you're still getting good results, then there's no reason to shut it off. If your engagement metrics on Facebook are poor, but you're still getting a good cost per result then there's no reason to shut it off. So while all these other metrics are important to look at you should be monitoring them. At the end day, what matters most is are you profitable or not? And if you are...

[01:09:57] ...just keep on running it. Perfect. That's exactly what I would say to it.

[01:10:04] All it matters is the results. You will find correlation between things, but there's often false correlations that can lead us in a weird direction.

[01:10:13] And so we'll give you all the guidelines we have. But sometimes you just need to make that judgment call yourself, based on what you're seeing.

[01:10:23] OK, so that's it for our questions. Thanks, Ruth, and everybody else for asking your questions. I think this is fantastic. It gave a really good overview. And you're right, it's a nuanced answer. There's maybe not one that's better, although I think that with the information you presented, I would go as far as to say that there are... with the information, you can actually make a decision right now whether you should go into Facebook or Google for a certain type of business. And it's definitely you know, there's been times in my life where everything was Google and the clients I was working for really thrived on Google. And now for the Data Driven business, Facebook is definitely the way to go, for what I do at Data Driven. And so you can have different products, different companies and one day you can say Google's the best thing that's ever happened to me. And then the next day you could say Facebook is. And it really depends on what you're trying to advertise, the awareness state, and understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each network. You're trying to do lead generation for a local service or a business. And somebody knows that if somebody's typing in what their problem is and you have the solution, Google's way to go. If you're trying to convince somebody to interrupt their day and to go in and do something that maybe they weren't thinking about doing and create new awareness - definitely Facebook, right. And then you sort of meet in the middle with everything else.

[01:11:39] Yep. And I said probably, hopefully at some point you can get to a point where you're everywhere, right? Or you're on Google or you're on Facebook, if it makes sense, you're on YouTube, and stuff like that. You know, I do think there is a big value to omni presence, you know, kind of being everywhere. But yeah, I know. Like I said, my shortcut, if you're a brand new business, you're just getting started, you don't really have any cash flow, you know, you're probably going to want to avoid Google because you need you need larger budgets for that. And so on Facebook based upon that scenario, could be the better option.

[01:12:15] Awesome. Well, thank you, everybody, for your time today. Thank you, Alvaro, for your time. This is fantastic. And we will talk to you soon. Hopefully we can do another one of these and get in-depth based on what people's questions are.

[01:12:29] Yeah, absolutely. I really enjoy this. And I would, for sure I'd love to come back and help your audience even more.

[01:12:34] Awesome. Thank you. All right, take care.