11 Years of No BS Facebook Ads Advice in 31 Mins

I started advertising on Facebook 11 years ago in 2013 I spent more than $50 million on Facebook ads and generated more than $200 million in revenue for our clients during that time period and I've run ads in just about every industry you can think of now I say this right at the beginning to let you know that I know what I'm talking about and you can take the advice that I'm giving here now that you know it comes from a reliable source I'm going to compress those 11 years of Facebook ads experience into this one video let's get started Facebook ad results fluctuate that's just life now a lot of advertisers obsess over trying to get consistent day-to-day results they want the same number of leads the same number of purchases the same cost per lead the same cost for purchase basically every day that's silly it's more or less impossible to get day-to-day consistency and it's a waste of time to try and aim for it now the reason why so many advertisers go wrong with this is because they treat Facebook ads like it's a video game like they're up against non-player characters in terms of the people they're advertising to and it's just their inputs that are going to determine the outputs and they're forgetting that we're advertising to real people that are affected by real world events by external factors I'll give you an example let's say you're selling Sunglasses if it has been bright blue skies really sunny and the last 3 or 4 days and it is today you are going to get more purchases you are going to get a lower cost per purchase sometimes significantly so than if it's been chucking it down with rain and really overcast now that sounds quite obvious I say that to people and they're like well yeah of course but then they don't apply that to their own business and their own ads sunglasses and weather might be an extreme example but all our businesses are affected by external factors outside of just the ads that we we create so instead of aiming for day-to-day consistency much better to extend that time Horizon I like monthly how are ads performing this month in comparison to last month if you've got a 15% Improvement in your cost per purchase for example great if we're taking that long A Time Horizon it's likely that we've done things to help improve that should quickly mention around seasonality if your business is affected by seasonality highly you might be seeing worse or better results this month versus last month just because of the time of year in which case you need to compare say this October to October last year as a poster this October to June this year that's a that's a little aside extend the time rizons and just give up on that day-to-day um consistency of session that a lot of advertisers have some leads are good some leads are bad get over it I don't think I've ever heard a Facebook Advertiser be really happy with their lead quality everyone wants better lead quality and there are things you can do to improve lead quality but you cannot eliminate bad quality leads as some advertisers seem to be aiming for again that is a waste of time you are always going to get some leads that come through that aren't great quality I mean take my business for example we really pre-qualify people before they're able to book a call for up done for you services and most of the leads that come through are also really warm because they've watched my content or we've been advertising them for months sometimes even years so they should be really high quality leads and often are really high quality but we still get poor leads that come through it is impossible to eliminate it so it's much better to just accept that work on getting better work on improving the things you do have control over convert who you can and then improve those other elements don't fight seasonality now the longer and longer I advertise and the more I operate in this world the more I see that seasonality is such a strong force and as an Advertiser it's much better off not to try and fight the tide not to try and fight against it but to instead embrace it and try and take advantage of the good times so I'd much rather a business that sees much better results During certain times of the year spends a lot more money when they see better results and a lot less on their ads when they see worse results as opposed to trying to keep things even or actually see some businesses trying to do the opposite they want to create consistency month to months they spend a lot of their budget on the worst times of year and less of it on the better times of year thinking that that's when they get better results and and that's silly you're going to see much better results overall when you take a broader wider View and it helps I've been doing this for so long I can step back and see okay our annual results would be better if we take this approach and it's it's a longer term view than the vast majority of advertisers digital marketers um will take if we take advantage of the good times and scale back during the bad times like with my business for example as a meta ads agency the best time of our year is Q4 unsurprisingly why because lots of advertisers want help with Black Friday campaigns with Christmas campaigns it's a busy time of year for um a lot of businesses e-commerce otherwise and therefore we get more clients and more interest in our services so we ramp up our ads spend on our own ads we ramp up our content creation then and we scale it back during the summer months when we know things are much quieter I've also noticed that the larger scale at which you operate the more you you actually see seasonality so let's say for example your business is turning over $5,000 a month okay one person business most likely and you know 60 Grand a year and and relatively new if you see a a 20% drop at $5,000 a month and you go down to $4,000 a month that might just be natural fluctuation hard to see that seasonality if your business is doing $5 million a month and you see a 20% drop because of seasonality to $4 million a month you're going to really notice that and feel that and it's going to feel more significant cuz it might be cost Associated more difficult also works the other way by the way when you go to scale up from from the larger numbers so the something to be aware of that if you are seeing seasonal trends at lower budget levels as you spend more that's likely to be more impactful not less it means needs more planning need to be prepared to go harder when the times are good to really take advantage of them just something that I've noticed over time particularly as we've um increased our scale the best Facebook ad results come from solving the hardest problems it's much more difficult to replan rescript re-record re-edit a 45C video ad with the intention of increasing average watch time so that more people make it to the end so that more people hear the call to action so that more people convert that's much more difficult than just going into your ad account and messing around with a few targeting settings and the reason why doing the former recreating that video ad to try and improve average watch time can yield a much more significant Improvement in results is because your competitors are also lazy and and they don't want to do the hard work either so whilst they're twinker about with targeting settings you just go quickly in and change and you're doing this hard work this difficult work these hard problems to solve if you're able to do that that's what immediately separates you from the competition because people aren't willing to do that so when you really want to move forward and you really want to move the needle when it comes to your Facebook ads ask yourself the following questions right what have I been putting off what do I really not want to do what is a lot of effort to improve and the answers to those questions I think you don't want to do there a lot of effort that are really difficult you don't know how to do if you can improve those and solve those the percentage Improvement you get in results is going to be much much higher from anything that's just quick and easy go in and Tinker with this or change the color of a background on an image or anything like that give me a Relentless Facebook Advertiser over a skilled Facebook Advertiser now I've built a Facebook ads agency hired tons of people to offer the service of creating managing optimizing Facebook and Instagram ads and you realize that some people are definitely more naturally talented at this and others I'm sure that applies to just about anything right but the absolute best aren't necessarily the ones that take to it naturally the best Facebook advertisers are the ones that commit to volume because if you create a ton of ads and then you set those live and then you take the time this part is really important you take the time to analyze the performance of those ads and work out okay why has ad a performed a bit better than ad B but ad C's like ad a that hasn't quite performed as well what are the little nuances what are the details okay I think this is why this one's done well this is why this one great okay then create new ads based on that information based on the analysis you did and then rinse and repeat right you set those live you give them some time you analyze you do it again you do it again you do it again you do that enough times that Relentless approach to Facebook advertising and it is inevitable that a you're going to end up with some ads that perform incredibly well which is probably completely business changing and completely life-changing if you're a business owner but also beat you're going to become a really good Advertiser it's really hard not to become good at something if you make a thousand ads over the next few years for one single product it' be very very difficult to not be exceptional at that and producing exceptional results with that much repetition so relentless Facebook advertising is absolutely um an approach that you want to take if you're like I really want to be fantastic at this I think this could be a game changer for my business just think I want to be relentless and take that approach sometimes a 20% Improvement in return on ad spend is all you need now 20% might not sound very much but what it can often allow you to do is massively scale your ad campaigns whilst they're still profitable so let's say you need for example a 2. 5x return on ad spend in order to be break even that's your your break even number well if you can if you're roughly achieving that return on that spend and you can increase it by 20% that might allow you to spend for five times as much maybe even as much as 10 times as much before you then once again hit your break even amount because if you can improve your row ass at lower budget levels as you scale your return ad spend is likely to decrease slightly so you might end up in the same point in in terms of your cost per purchase but you might be spending let's say five times as much if you can get that initial Improvement in return on aspect what does that do for your business well if you're spending five times as much and you've got the same cost per purchase as you did before you made the Improvement at the lower budget levels you're now acquiring five times as many customers and compounded over time that does incredible things for your business you're building this massive customer base that you can Market to again and again and again if your products and services are good then people are having positive interactions there'll be Word of Mouth there'll be sharing they'll be coming back and you do that for a number of years and the business is able to get that 20% Improvement and then scale because of it is light years ahead of the one that doesn't so sometimes we can get a bit overwhelmed and feel daunted by the task of I really need to improve my ad results if you realize that sometimes all it takes is a 20% 25 30% Improvement in Ras that seems much more achievable shoot for that and what may come of it might be a lot more than you think come a sec take a look at this so this is in my menhip program right and the results and winds Channel and Tara said this in 2 weeks of joining my Ros went from 0. 7 to 8.

03 and I've only implemented maybe 30% of the feedback was going to me so far which is that's just incredible that's awesome so Zoe up here she joined the MIP program with 35,000 raffle tickets was thinking she wasn't going to sell them and she ended up selling out completely with 2 days to spare and we've got loads of others in here we've got tons of people just sharing information around how they've done well great results they've got if you're interested you can click on the button beneath this video that'll go through to page and a website you could book in a free no obligation call with one of my team members to find out more information hopefully we get to work together hopefully you join and you'll be sharing fantastic results like Tara and Zoe of done just here targeting is far less important than you think now when it comes to Facebook ads targeting used to be make or break used to be one of the absolute most important things but it's not the case anymore meta has spent huge amounts of money and put so much effort into not making that the case they've introduced things like Advantage Plus shopping that takes care of the targeting for you they've introduced things like Advantage Plus audience that allows you to offer suggestions but till take advantage of Mets at machine learning processes to find the best possible audience and put your ads in front of many many Facebook advertisers are now using open targeting which is look just advertise to everyone and you go ahead and work it out basically when it comes to targeting now as long as you don't make a big mistake like overriding the systems and only targeting a really small audience you're fine your ads are reaching the right people a lot of iers if they aren't getting great results they think oh my ads just aren't reaching the right people they are it's other elements that you need to fix and this ties into a previous point where it's easy to change targeting it's much more difficult to recraft and offer or re-shoot uh high quality video ads but those are the things that you need to put your time and effort into cuz that's where you can get your compettive advantage it's not targeting anymore the single most important setting in your Facebook ad campaign is the performance goal now this used to be the campaign objective and it's still important that you choose the right campaign objective but all that really does is narrow the selection for your performance goal and you can still undo the good work you could you do from choosing the right campaign objective by choosing the wrong performance go so most of the time I'd recommend that Facebook advertisers choose either sales or leads as their campaign objective but it's very important that then when you get into the adset level and you take a look at the performance goal that you don't then go and mess it up by optimizing for link clicks or Impressions or daily unique reach or one other things you want to optimize for the thing that you really want which is most likely a purchase or a lead depending on your business and just to show what a big deal this is Met has released some data saying that if you want purchases the difference between even within a sales campaign optimizing for link clicks versus actually optimizing for conversions and then making sure that it's the purchase conversion event is 74% so by optimizing properly and optimizing for purchases if you want sales you get 74% more sales with the same budget than if you optimize for link clicks either using the traffic objective and then following that through or using one of the other campaign objectives and then overriding the default and going with um link clicks that's a really really big deal just from a little tweak there so absolutely make sure that your performance goal is aligned with what you really want from your ad campaign cost per conversion increases as you scale now a lot of advertisers feel like this shouldn't happen or actually they incorrectly assume the opposite that oh once I'm spending more I'll get a better um cost per conversion that's unlikely to be the case unless you've got issues with exiting the learning phase but that's a that's relatively rare at this point point the reason why as you continue to spend more typically your cost per conversion is going to get worse going to get more expensive is because meta is so good at finding what I call your hyper responsives so the people that are most likely to buy most likely to become a lead literally with in the Target area that you're advertising to they will find the best possible people so when you're spending a small amount of money you might be saying to meta look advertise to the best thousand people a day possible in my audience that are so interested in my thing that are actively Googling it that are part of Facebook groups about this product or this hobby or this service or whatever that are that are sending out all these signals to show they are absolutely ready to buy and then as you spend more and more and more you're then saying to meta okay yeah I want you to advertise to those thousand people but I also want you to advertise to another thousand people a day and met is like okay we can do that but obviously those people aren't going to be quite as good still going to be good but not quite as good as those core hyper responsive prospects and then that carries on you get to 5,000 people a day and the people you're now advertising to again you still got that core but there's only so many of them so the more and more you spend the less of those hypers sponsors there are as a percentage of the people you're reaching and then you get 10,000 people a day and 100,000 people a day and you're getting broader and broader and broader so this is something that you this is just this is not something you can change this is something that inevitably happens the solution if you're running to this as a problem is to make sure that your ad campaigns are successful enough at lower budget levels in other words you have enough margin so let's say you're aiming for a 3X row but you're that's what you're that's what you would accept but you're currently operating with a 5x return on ad spend okay fine we can scale and yes our 3x is going to go to a 3. 2 and a 3. 4 and a 3.