Catherine Langman:
Well, hello there. It’s Catherine Langman, back with another episode of the Productpreneur Success podcast. Today on the show, we are going to be diving into all the dos and don’ts when it comes to testing your social media advertising campaigns. And at the end of the day, I think we all know how effective a well-run Facebook and Instagram ad campaign can be in regards to driving business growth, traffic, and sales growth for your online store. But getting to the point of having a successful campaign can be a little stressful and frustrating at times. Nerve wrecking, as you may wonder if the money is being… The money you’re spending will actually pay off, particularly in the early days, but really at any point in scale. We can go through these waves of emotion in regards to our ad campaigns.
Catherine Langman:
So how do you create an ad campaign that works? And really, the answer is all about testing and optimizing. And so to help me unpack all of this for you today, I’m going to welcome our lead Facebook ad strategist, Rich Watson, back to the show. He’s been on a couple of times, but we are going to really dive into this in a lot of detail. You might want to grab a pen and paper and take notes with this episode. So without further ado, let’s welcome Rich onto the show.
Catherine Langman:
So welcome back to the show, Rich. It’s very cool to have you here again.
Rich Watson:
Hello. Hello. Great to be back.
Catherine Langman:
Super cool to have you on the show again. And some of our listeners might remember Rich is our Facebook strategist on our team here in our agency. But perhaps Rich, I mean it’s been a while since you and I did a session, just the two of us, for this podcast. Do you want to kind of reintroduce who you are, what you do, what your area of expertise is and all of that jazz?
Rich Watson:
Absolutely. Yeah. So, yeah. I’m Rich Watson. I guess I’ll go a little into my background. I’m English, but I’m living in Vietnam currently. I’m the Facebook ad strategist. Yeah, as Cat said, so my main responsibilities really are looking at the strategies and the goals for each client and then making sure that those two align and as a performance goes on sort of looking at how we need to change things to better suit the goal or whether the goals need to move forwards, really keeping track of all of that. As well as keeping up with the latest with Facebook, which was quite a big task last year. Facebook seems to be behaving themselves a bit more this year because things with Apple settling down, I guess, or maybe even the focus on the whole meta verse as well. So yeah, that’s basically the short of it.
Catherine Langman:
What kind of clients… Maybe talk a little bit about the clients, the sorts of businesses or brands that makes up your experience.
Rich Watson:
Yeah, sure. Yeah. So I’ve been working in eCommerce now for seven years, I’d say, with Facebook Ads. I did begin doing more lead generation for events and also sort of some government-
Catherine Langman:
That would be pretty dry and boring.
Rich Watson:
So basically it was like event management and that sort how I got into the whole thing. But really I started, I moved into sort of eCommerce when I was doing my own drop shipping products. So while I was sort of traveling, I came to Vietnam in… What is it now? I can’t remember. 2016? Yeah.
Catherine Langman:
Few years ago.
Rich Watson:
Yeah. And I basically, I sort of wanted to do the digital nomad thing. I wanted to work online and I wanted to maybe travel around, stay six months here, six months there. So what I actually ended up doing was starting my own drop shipping stores. I sort of slowly found out that I’m not that great at actually being able to run my own product because I didn’t have a lot of product knowledge, I didn’t really know what I was doing. And the margins the dropshipping are just absolutely terrible. What I was really good at was I was really good at, in the community I was in, because it was quite a new thing there, helping other people with their strategies, with their ads, with making their store profitable. And it slowly moved into the way that I basically helped other brands. So we sort of started in sort of fashion accessories. That’s sort of the start I had, and it moved more towards mother, children, family sort of centric brands, which is basically my main focus for the last sort of three years.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, yeah. Which is pretty much our bread and butter here. It’s all good. So we are going to have a nice chat about testing. So the dos and don’ts of testing your social media, media advertising campaigns, and there is a bit of an art and a science to this, really, isn’t there?
Rich Watson:
A hundred percent. Yeah.
Catherine Langman:
So I think that we all know how effective a well run Facebook ad campaign can be. And when I say Facebook ad, I’m really lumping Instagram in there as well. And we know that when you got these sorts of campaigns running really, really well, it’s really, really effective for helping to grow a business or a brand. But getting to that point of having a successful ad campaign can be a little stressful and frustrating at times. And a bit nerve wracking for some as looks like a little bit of a money pit for many and not really understanding when or if it’s paying off. So let’s kind of dig into it. How do we start to create a campaign that’s going to be successful and working?
Rich Watson:
The most important for the first step, really, it doesn’t really matter how established you are, is trying to understand your customer and trying to understand the pain point that your product solves or the experience you’re trying to give them. A lot of businesses do have assumptions on this, or maybe they’ve been running for a while and they’ve sort of kept in mind who their ideal customer is and things like that, but something that you should basically revisit maybe even every six months, especially over the last three years with COVID because people’s sort of buying habits have definitely changed so that would’ve altered your avatars or your personas, however you look at it, probably in quite a big way. And actually maybe even expanded your market.
Rich Watson:
So I will always start off having a look to see who’s in your space to begin with, and that’s completely not to copy them, not to steal their ads or steal their copy or anything like that, because I’m hundred percent against that. That’s basically what I did back in the day with the drophipping thing. So, don’t do that. I learned the hard way with that.
Catherine Langman:
It doesn’t work anyway, so.
Rich Watson:
And also Facebook are very savvy to that now. So you do get penalized. There’s definitely that. So yeah, that’s the most important thing, I think, just first of all try and come up with a process or even like a questionnaire that you… You can either try to sort of find the answers yourself, if you don’t have an established audience. Or if you do have an established audience, you can sort of send a few out. And the idea really you want to get as many sort of responses back as you can, and then you can start sort of bumping data together and you can sort of see trends, you can see general consensus within the community. But it’s very important how you pick your questions as well.
Rich Watson:
So you basically want to try and discover based on the answers they give really what objections they’re going to potentially have in the buying journey. Also if they might have buyer’s remorse, if there’s someone else in the space who’s caused some bad experience with people. All sorts of things like that. You really want to try and find out, because really marketing and advertising really is a communication between people and brands. And that’s what you want to establish the most. And that’s going to drive you. So once you have that information, then you have the messaging that you need to sort of start to establish. And by that, I mean copy and also creative. So you start to see from people’s responses, even in the way they speak, their tone of voice, what communities they’re part of, who they are, what sort of age they are, what interests they have, all sort, things like that.
Rich Watson:
And you can start to weave all of these things into the copy, into the creative, and things like that. So that’s definitely the first step. And the process really for us to do that is with a survey. And we also have quite a rigorous research step, which actually has been made much easier this… Well, actually it was probably last year when Facebook actually gave you Ads Library. So you can basically now go into Ads Library, you can search for your competitor’s brands, or you can even search for keywords because it will actually look at the copy too.
Catherine Langman:
Does it now?
Rich Watson:
Yeah. It’s not always a hundred percent accurate. You’ll get a lot of really irrelevant ads sometimes. So what you can potentially do if that is the case for you, so if it’s something super broad, is actually search one of your competitor’s names, a really big one, but don’t click on the actual library of them. Just put that in there because it finds brands who are like them. So it’s an incredible tool you, can look at copy, you can look at creative, you can even look at how long they’ve been running ads for. So if you can see they’ve been running an ad since October or something, and it’s not black Friday related, you can see, “Wow, okay, this is really resonating with this audience. This is making this company money. That’s why they keep spending.”
Rich Watson:
So yeah, take all that learning back and try to really piece together maybe two to three different subsections of the audience. So, that’s what I mean by avatar, personas. So try and find… They don’t necessarily have to be a completely different demographic. For example, grandparents and mothers are sort of ones we tend to use, but it could even be different subsets of mothers. So luxury mothers like to spend money on expensive stuff. Others who are more eco savvy, more sustainability, things like that. So you can group it like that and then cater the messaging that way. And then start to do your testing based on those three personas. That’s the first thing you want to find out. So try not to have too much testing going on at the same time, for example, try not to test five different creatives to each of those three personas, unless you have a huge budget. Most people starting out, they don’t.
Rich Watson:
So, that’s really what you’re trying to establish first off. And then there’s basically different steps once you sort of establish which of those personas you’ve outlined is the most engaging or the most profitable for you. You can start to really focus in on how you can tweak the creative, how you can tweak the copy, landing pages even. But it’s also not to say you’re going to discount those other personas, because you can definitely revisit them. But really you’re just trying to focus on key groups to begin with, to get things profitable, to be able to reinvest back into ads. And then you can start pulling in different areas of testing where maybe you want to test grandparents, maybe you want to test dads, gifting, et cetera, et cetera. Just don’t try and expand it too much that once. Try and have as little variation going on as possible and test one really specific thing about audience, creative, messaging, something like that.
Catherine Langman:
Would you say that there is a little bit of an assumption by a lot of people about what to test and what testing really means when it comes to your ads? I mean, it’s a little while since I’ve been inside many people’s ads managers, now that you’re on here, but I know I’ve seen a lot where people will just run the same creative and they just might change out an audience or something like that. [crosstalk 00:10:48].
Rich Watson:
Yes. Whenever we get a new account to audit with a prospect or someone we’re just starting to work with, I see this a lot. I see this maybe 70% of the time. I see people, and I know why, people tend to, as you said, just focus on one or two creatives and then they test those to different audiences. And I’m not saying that’s wrong, but what you’re basically assuming at that point is that creative is the winning creative and you’re trying to find the audience that matches that.
Rich Watson:
Whereas you can do it that way, that’s a different way of doing it, but the established method that I sort of just outlined earlier is to know your audience first and then find a creative that matches them. And it’s a safer way of doing it because you have the data to back up those people being your audience. It’s not just [inaudible 00:11:39] out there, but with the audiences, you’re trying to find an audience for the creative, that’s a longer way of doing it because… And I say, I know why people do it that way. It’s because usually it’s a difficult thing for people to get enough creative and to invest in the right creative, to get the performance they want. So they tend to do it that way, but what it does [crosstalk 00:12:01]-
Catherine Langman:
They don’t want to do new photo shoots or get videos shot for them or that sort of thing. Yeah. But also I think there’s this assumption that I don’t want to waste money. I want to get this right out of the gate, maybe a little bit.
Rich Watson:
Yeah. It can happen for sure. And that’s what I’m saying. There’s no hard and fast rule on Facebook. You have to do my way. No way. I’m in a group with some of the top marketers in Facebook and everybody had a completely different method and they all respect each other’s method and they all ask questions. It’s not like you get gurus who tell you you have to do it this way, this way worked, and here’s the proof and things like that. And it’s like, “Well, that worked for you and that worked for the niche that you are in, or that worked for the people you’re [inaudible 00:12:45].” There’s really not that way of doing it. You have to back it. So that’s why we do it the way we do it.
Catherine Langman:
It is kind of a numbers game, or it should be a numbers game really at the end of the day. And the numbers for one brand might be quite different to the numbers for another one.
Rich Watson:
100%. Yeah.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. So testing and optimizing, there are two words that are kind of bandied around a little bit. I suspect maybe some of our listeners might not really understand the distinction a little bit. Do you want to maybe clarify that a little bit and let’s talk about the [crosstalk 00:13:20]-
Rich Watson:
Yeah, sure.
Catherine Langman:
… yeah, do next.
Rich Watson:
So I mean, testing really, when you’re first establishing ads, say, if you’re doing ads for the first time, it’s all testing because you haven’t had anything consistent going yet. But what you basically want to reach, you want to reach this position where you have consistency going for 75% of your budget. And again, this doesn’t have to be a hard and fast rule, everyone finds their own way, but this is sort of outlining how we do it. You want to basically devote 75% of your budget for business as usual ads, promotional ads, re targeting, any other sort of lead generation, maybe you’re doing that for email lists, things like that. So those are the things that are consistent and you are getting them to a place where they’re producing a solid CPA of near your goal or lower than your goal, obviously, so you’re profitable.
Rich Watson:
And then you basically want to have 25% of your budget to test, as I said, these different personas you have in mind, or maybe the same audience, but because it’s such a big audience you want to test maybe slightly different creative that’s, I don’t know, in a different format. So one really specific example would be, okay, we really like new mothers, but what we want to do is we want to test the top of funnel carousel versus the conversion ads we have. And those are two different objectives but they can both work very well top of funnel. But they have to be in different campaigns because of how Facebook’s algorithm works and how it focuses on the objective you’ve given it. So that’s just one example.
Rich Watson:
But a better example would be we have a promotion going with new products. For example, we want to take the engaged audience out, we want to put them in a separate campaign and we want to test to see whether these new products work well. You don’t necessarily want to keep that with your middle of the funnel campaigns because it might interrupt that consistency you have, as I was sort of mentioning earlier. So you basically want to devote 25, around that sort of, to constantly testing new things, testing new products, testing new offers, testing new personas, because at any point you can’t rely on that consistency being there forever.
Rich Watson:
It might just be that it’s a seasonal consistency. So you might say, “Okay cool, in summer, this is working really well with this audience, but this creative, et cetera, et cetera.” So you have to constantly be on the lookout for new things. And that’s why I say have 20, 25%, because you obviously want to devote the majority of your budget to bringing in these consistent results. And then this 25% is the reconnaissance. Basically you’re pulling in juicy stuff and diamonds into your consistent campaign, basically
Catherine Langman:
Diamonds in the rough.
Rich Watson:
And I guess the best way to describe optimization is you’ve got consistency, but perhaps conversion rate is a bit lower than you want, or click through rate or something within the top of the funnel. Sorry, not top funnel. In the shallow metrics. So the through rates, the CPMs, things like that, is not quite bringing the consistency you want or it’s not bringing the result you want. So say you have quite a low conversion rate. And the low conversion rate is due to the ad not being that engaging. So people are flowing through the funnel in a very smooth way, there’s not a drop off [inaudible 00:16:30] or anything like that, but you can see that the picture rate lower than you’d want it to be. And maybe you want to jump it up.
Rich Watson:
So with optimization, you use the learnings you already have within that campaign. So, “Oh, cool. Okay. It’s this audience. This audience likes carousels. This audience likes carousels of a very clean nature. Not sort of UUC, not native looking ads. Let’s test different carousels with this sort of clean thing to this audience.” And you can have that in a different separate testing campaign, but ideally with optimization, you are trying to basically test them against each other in that state. And that’s why we call it optimization over testing because testing is something brand new where you’re definitely still using learnings, but with optimization, you are really focusing on just tweaking something really minute about something you’ve already got going.
Rich Watson:
So then that obviously leads to the CPA going down because you click through rate has gone up, you’ve got more engaging audience, and you’ve basically brought a good result about. But it also, optimization could encompass things like moving your event objective up. So maybe you had a conversion campaign going for at the cart, you can move it up to purchase, therefore you get a higher quality of people. Maybe the average order value goes up at that point. Things like that. That’s also sort of included in optimization. But they’re like more day to day, whereas testing is more phase… Okay, we want to test this for a week. We want to do this. We want to see if this audience works with this new carousel, blah, blah, blah.
Catherine Langman:
With the optimization stage, we’re also kind of looking at the website end as well. Right? It’s all well and good to drive traffic to a website, but if the website’s not converting for whatever reason, then we’re kind of stuck.
Rich Watson:
A hundred percent. Yeah. And that’s why UTMs are so important. Using just UTMs to show you, give you as close approximation of the amount of traffic coming from each source. So if you’re running multiple different marketing platforms, you know how much Facebook is sending, you can have a look at that and you can see the quality of the traffic compared to say Google or something like that. So you can see, “Okay, Facebook’s converting a little bit lower. Maybe we need to do something at that point.” Or maybe something in that funnel that’s showing us we’re sending really quality traffic to the site, but there’s people that are all leaving without adding to cart. So maybe-
Catherine Langman:
Or they adding to cart and then dropping off, we had that, I remember.
Rich Watson:
Yeah, exactly.
Catherine Langman:
One site and that identified a bug on the website. For those who don’t know what a UTM code is, do you want to just quickly explain what that is?
Rich Watson:
Yeah. Basically it’s Google, I think it’s Google’s product, it’s a identifier for different parameters of the traffic that you send through from Facebook, from Google, from any platform. And you can basically specify the source of the traffic, what campaign it is, what sort of content it is, whether it’s video, image, whatever. And also a little bit of custom information about maybe the copy or the offer you have going. And then you can see very clearly on Google Analytics, which campaigns are sending the highest converting people. What sort of creative is working the best, what sort of messaging is working the best, things like that. And that visibility is actually stronger when you combine what you’re seeing from Facebook with what you’re seeing from Google Analytics. Because if you just look at Facebook for that information, it’s not able to track everything it used to be able to, so it’s better to have both.
Catherine Langman:
That’s right.
Rich Watson:
So yeah. UTM is very, very important for us.
Catherine Langman:
And for listeners, you can go and check that, find out where that information is in Google Analytics, it’s in the acquisition menu somewhere.
Rich Watson:
Yeah. Acquisition channels. And then you can see source medium. And it will assign it from Facebook, but when you haven’t given it a specific UTM parameter, it tends to just say everything’s organic. And then you say, “Oh wow, organic traffic’s amazing.” But it’s because when people go from an ad to the site, it’s basically lost the tracking straight away. And it knows it’s from Facebook, it doesn’t know it’s from an ad. So it just says, “Oh, organic.” Or it just says direct, which is the most useless thing ever. That means someone’s just popped through a URL into… When’s that ever going to happen?
Catherine Langman:
No, exactly.
Rich Watson:
[inaudible 00:21:04].
Catherine Langman:
It’s only when we are going on our own website. Right?
Rich Watson:
Yeah.
Catherine Langman:
We’re the only ones that remember. Oh dear. I remember, well, it was really only been recently, let’s just kind of use an example of some of our ads. I know that the ads that we’re running for this business lead generation rather than e-commerce, but we can kind of talk through a couple of the things that you’ve been working on to test and optimize. So we run some ads to promote… So I’ll just kind of set the scene for the listeners. We run ads to promote our podcast episodes so that you guys all know when a new one comes out, we run ads to showcase some of our client work, and we run ads to a free resource as well. So that’s kind of most of it in a nutshell, I think. Oh, and we do some educational video content as well. Have I kind of got it in a nutshell?
Rich Watson:
Absolutely. Yeah. That’s it.
Catherine Langman:
And so, I mean, talk through some of the things that we’ve tested recently and then some of the things that you’ve had to do to try and optimize the campaigns because the metrics were looking not as good as we would’ve liked.
Rich Watson:
Yeah. Well, what’s been really interesting over the last couple of years, because basically Facebook over goes some huge change every single year. And it usually takes a couple of months to realize what to do to sort of suit that because you have to just test so many different things.
Catherine Langman:
It’s so annoying.
Rich Watson:
Yeah. But it just means you just need to keep going. I mean, that’s why I say about keeping testing, that’s how you stay ahead of the vision basically. That’s mirrored within the lead generation stuff and it’s also mirrored within the e-commerce ads that we run as well. So definitely for both of them. And the thing I’ve seen that’s the most effective is actually simplification. And that basically is something that Facebook were telling us to do when they were warning us about OS basically in like March, April time before it rolled out and they were saying accounts and [inaudible 00:23:10].
Rich Watson:
And what we’ve done basically is we had multiple different campaigns running to maybe different offers or different content. We also have things lower down the funnel that tech people use, webinar, or they take them to a more of a paid resource with a bit more information or to book a call. And what we found is simplifying it enough to find out, okay, which one of these is the most effective? So each stage of the funnel, depending on the person’s awareness, what is actually the most effective way of building that relationship with them?
Rich Watson:
So we found top of funnel, for example, is actually split up in two at the moment, but just in the content side of things, because people are at different stages, and of course the people who are at the top of the funnel, the audience, that segment is basically much bigger. So there’s no wonder that needs to be split up a little bit. So we’re delivering content, but we’re also delivering a free resource. So if people are like, “Okay, I really want to find out more, but maybe there’s free resources for me at this point. So I’ll just absorb some of the content.” And some people are action takers so they want to take that free resource and they want to put it into practice basically and see the results.
Rich Watson:
And then from the middle of the funnel is more showing people the podcast, getting them a bit more engaged in us, our story, people we’re working with, case studies, stuff like that. And then lower down the funnel is a bit more practical application of everything where we teach and sort of talk about within our actual client results. So from there they learn really specific things about what we’ve done for our clients, what sort of results we’ve got, how we did it, they can even take that information away and apply to their business. Don’t necessarily have to jump on a call with us, but of course, like being the experts, it makes so much more sense for them to shortcut the path of success by jumping on with us.
Rich Watson:
So yeah, really that’s definitely mirrored within e-commerce as well, where we are really focusing in on keeping campaigns as sort of simplified as possible. And by that, I mean really just in terms of budget, we’re not trying to spread the budget out into lots of different things. We’re not trying to get these people on an email list. We’re not trying to get these people to come to the product page. We’re not trying to get these people to buy. We’re just trying focus in on the thing to the cold audience that has the most effective resonance with them and then try to look [inaudible 00:25:35] customer journey once they’re warmed up to us and how we can sort of shortcut it basically and give them all the information they need.
Rich Watson:
So yeah, that’s definitely something I’d say. And the reason for it really is from Facebook side is they need as much data as they can have through, depending on the budget optimization you’ve given them. So if you are using a campaign budget optimization, or a CBO for short, they need to basically get 50 conversions of the chosen objective within a week so that they can give you the best results.
Catherine Langman:
Which you’re not going to get if you split that budget up into lots and lots and lots of different-
Rich Watson:
Hundred percent.
Catherine Langman:
… Campaigns. Yeah.
Rich Watson:
Yeah. And then the other option is asset budget optimization, where you can choose to basically spend the budget. Basically you’re giving Facebook the range, where you’re saying, “Here’s the budget, here’s my campaign. You can spend it on whatever audience within that campaign you think is working best.” Whereas [inaudible 00:26:31] budget optimization, you’re saying, “Here’s the budget for this specific audience. Spend this. And then you can have the free reigns on whatever ads you think are going to work best.” So CBO just seems like the more sensible choice, because you’re giving Facebook more free reign over choosing your audience and also choosing ads. Whereas the asset budget, you’re choosing asset and then ads only. So it’s divvying out the budget, seeing where the performance is. But what happens with CBO, CBO is consistent. It’s more consistent, definitely, but it takes a much longer time. So when you are first starting off, I recommend, and this is just a side tip, I recommend doing ABO to start off with.
Catherine Langman:
So, asset budget.
Rich Watson:
Yeah. And when you create an ad… Sorry, when you create a new campaign now on Facebook it’s automatically going to choose CBO. So-
Catherine Langman:
Oh, is it?
Rich Watson:
Well, it depends on… Yeah. The newest, the brand new ones are basically they’re trying to do everything automatic for you now. So, that’s just one like little side tip because you basically want to be able to say, ” Facebook, Hey, I’ve done the research into these audiences. I want to test these audiences. I want to give them this budget.” The only time you would use CPO is if you feel like your audiences overlap a lot. So one example would be, if you are doing mothers, luxury mothers, compared to first time mothers, compared to something like that, you’re probably going to get overlap. Therefore, CBO because then you’re not competing with yourself in the auction as much. It would basically divvy out the budget depending on all three audiences combined. I hope this is making sense. I hope I’m not making it too complicated, but-
Catherine Langman:
It’s a big topic.
Rich Watson:
Yeah. You eventually want to take the reins away from Facebook a little bit in the beginning, but then to build the consistency, you are really better off giving Facebook the reins. As much as uncomfortable as it feels, they really do know what they’re doing. But you just need to have established a good amount of maturity for your pixel and in terms of giving them a lot of data before you start to do that. So that’s why I say [inaudible 00:28:37].
Catherine Langman:
That’s the scary bit for a lot of people getting started, I think, because when you get started, you sort of… Psychologically, it’s just human nature to want things to work straight away and have some sort of guarantee. “If I just do it like this, then I’m going to be fine. And things will work really well. And I won’t waste my money.” But unfortunately every product and every brand and every audience and all of that sort of stuff, they’re all going to perform a little bit different. We do need to be prepared to follow the data, as opposed to trying to ensure that data will do what we want.
Rich Watson:
Yeah. I understand. And you have to give it a sufficient amount of budget at the beginning, because if you don’t know what your cost per acquisition should be, Facebook definitely don’t know. So it can’t get to the point… So that’s where you should take Facebook’s advice with a pinch of salt at the beginning, and not give them the reins as I was saying, because you need to have sort of established how much… Even from profit margins or something, how much you should be spending if you have no idea what cost per acquisition should be.
Rich Watson:
And if you’re just starting out, you wouldn’t would you? But if you say, “Okay, my product’s worth… I get $70 average order value. So if I get a cost per sale of 30, then that leaves me $40.” And cost of goods or whatever’s 20, let’s say, so you get $20 of profit. And if that’s sustainable for you, that’s the CPA you want to aim for. So you have to sort of establish that to begin with. And then it’s just about going about how do we get the CPA to where we want it to be? What part of the metrics in the funnel are telling me that there’s some problem? Are people landing and leaving before adding to cart? Are people adding to cart but leaving before buying? Are people not even getting to the site because the click through rate is so low? You really want to see what part of the funnel and then react to that where the bottleneck is.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, I guess there’s so many other things that you can bring into these calculations as well. Like hopefully people aren’t going to just buy once. So can you take into account some repeat purchases or the lifetime value in that calculation? Or what percentage of your revenue and traffic comes from paid Facebook ads versus all the other channels? Obviously you want to be getting traffic and sales from email marketing and organic search and maybe some Google ads and a few other things as well. So I know it’s really hard and it feels like an overwhelming puzzle when you’re just getting started. But you want to try and think through some of those factors as well when you’re working out the budget that you should be spending. And I guess also just noting that a lot of people want to be spending the least possible amount on ads, just as a general rule, which of course you don’t want to be over rigging things. I’m not suggesting that at all, but at the same time, you’re going to be able to get better results if you are prepared to spend more than your competitors.
Rich Watson:
And if you have a low budget like that, keep your structure as simple as possible. So if your budget’s really minimal and you’re getting good traffic, just start with the bottom of the funnel. Just start by reengaging the people who’ve come on your site, who’ve gone to your socials, who are maybe on your email lists, things like that, who visited product pages. And just focus your budget there before you start prospecting. I mean, it’s not ideal to have just a bottom of the funnel and not a top of the funnel because you’ll basically exhaust your audience, but to get the ball moving and to actually get some good data to Facebook in the backend and pixel and conversion API is not actually a bad tactic just to focus completely on lower funnel just to start with, if your budget’s really low.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, that’s true. That’s a good point. And what about other ways that people can really help to teach the platform and feed that data through to the platform. Can some of the organic marketing that people do on social media or the live stuff that they might do, does that help?
Rich Watson:
A hundred percent. Yeah. The more engaging your audience are on the platforms, Facebook and Instagram, that should lower cost your ads will be, there’s a direct impact with the amount of engagement you get on your page and also like the reputation of the page as well, because now people can score you, has a direct impact on your cost per a thousand impressions. Your [inaudible 00:33:09] CPM. And not only that, but getting some organic engagement going and posting and really bringing people into your pages and to your communities basically, you’re almost like that’s your space that you can basically use those audiences within your targeting. And because you already warm them up, they basically end up being much more highly converting.
Rich Watson:
And there’s an added bonus with that of building social proof. So if you’ve posted a few things, maybe don’t even necessarily have to be sales related, and they’ve got a good amount of social proof, you can use those within your ads, maybe just to bring people to your store or to just start some sort of engagement going. And the social proof on that post that you are doing organically can then be used in paid ads to basically boost you up more. And you’ll see just a lot of engagement metrics, just being much higher to begin with. So that’s actually something that we recommend people do is having a part of the funnel where you basically, middle of the funnel usually, where you are reengaging audiences who are within your socials with a little bit of paid money into a paid post, just to get the engagement going. And Facebook, they actually recommend, our Facebook rep recommended we do that. So that’s why we’re doing it.
Catherine Langman:
Yes, it does work.
Rich Watson:
It feeds into lowering costs, it feeds into being social proof. And these are all things people sort of ignore when they’re doing paid campaigns, because the focus is on, okay, we want to get a sale. But these things will support that. You really want to be able to have more. And just posting regularly and organically does this anyway. But this is just a little bit of amplification basically.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, totally. I like to think of it as the digital news feed or the digital newspaper rather so obviously not spamming people with lots of, “Buy this thing now,” type content of course, but keeping people really nicely engaged, having that conversation. It’s good. So let’s just quickly move into what should people be looking out for? And I guess here, I want to really get you to talk about things like when is it time to change out the creative, for instance, or when do you need to look at maybe budget or audiences or those sorts of things? But the creative is a big one because I know it does take work. And so a lot of people like to put that at the bottom of the to do list because it’s hard.
Rich Watson:
Yeah. Well, there’s actually metrics that Facebook give you which you should only really pay attention to for the ad level. Well, actually that’s the only place [inaudible 00:36:05] be honest, but they used to have a thing called, I think it was just called Quality Ranking before, it was out of 10, and it was basically ranking your ad creative and it is relevance to the audience out of 10. And I actually preferred that to be honest because it was way simpler. What they’ve done now is they split it out into three different rankings. So there’s quality ranking, engagement ranking, and conversion rate ranking, and all three of these point to a slightly different element of the performance of the creative. But also it’s not all… I’m not saying creative is the entire result that it’s trying to display to you, but it’s a very big part of them. I’ll go through all three of them.
Rich Watson:
So basically you need to get 1000 impressions before this shows. So that obviously depends on whatever your cost per a thousand impressions is, but that’s really where I would start to make a judgment on a creative. Obviously if you spent $50 or something and your CPMs a hundred dollars and you think, “Well, that’s not really going to work.” At that point you can say, “This is way too much. Something is wrong here.” I’m not saying you have to a hundred percent wait for a thousand, but that’s a sort of one off case. So yeah, wait for a thousand impressions at the ad level and then go to your ad level and then add these into your column. So quality ranking, engagement rate ranking, and conversion rate ranking. I believe they’re in the default setting on columns. So actually it’ll be there anyway.
Rich Watson:
And basically yeah, what it is is the quality ranking is basically to do with your reputation, to do with… Actually what comes into this is your page score, also billing, and if there’s any billing issues and things like that, is basically your reputation with Facebook, and how they see you as an advertiser. Are you legit? Are your ads click bait-ey? Things like that. So they’ll give you a ranking. So it’ll either be below average, average, above average. So those are three. And of course you want to be above average. But yeah, disclaimer, all three of these, by the way, if they’re all below average, doesn’t mean the ads never going to work. It’s just an indication. It’s not going to say you have to change things. But as I said, it’ll just show you a different thing that you need to look at within a creative. So that’s quality ranking.
Rich Watson:
Engagement rate ranking is quite clear. It’s to do with the engagement rate. So how relevant is your add to that audience specifically? How are people engaging with it? Are people leaving comments? Are people sharing? Are they liking? All those things like that. So that’s quite clear. Is this audience matching this creative? That’s really what that’s trying to say. And then you’ve got conversion rate ranking, which is basically how willing are people to carrying out this action that you’ve given the ad. So if you’ve given the ad the purchase, and not many people are purchasing, it’s going to give you a lower score here. So this is probably the last thing I would look at because obviously it’s basically saying you haven’t given us enough conversions for the thing you’ve chosen. Therefore, change the objective or change something you’re doing with the ad or change the audience. So that’s why-
Catherine Langman:
Or check your website as well. Just really make sure there’s no bottleneck there.
Rich Watson:
Yeah. In fact, that is actually, I would look at that first. Whenever you go to look at your ads and you something glaring, definitely look at your website first, before you even start to try and diagnose it within Facebook. Because that’s a mistake I used to make when I first started was, “Oh, what is it within the ads I need to change?” And [inaudible 00:39:48] around something. And then, “Oh, actually wait, my site is down or something.” Or something really-
Catherine Langman:
I just see it so often where… And we’re all guilty of this to an extent where you build your website and then you tick it off your list. You’ve done that and you move on. And not that I think any of us consciously think that websites are static and we don’t ever expect to update them, but there is that knee jerk reaction that we feel like, “But I’ve done that. I don’t need to look at that again.” But we do. And we’ve seen it so many times within our agency business and also our academy as well, where we’re getting lots of great quality traffic to the website. It might be going from the homepage to the product pages and either it falls off there or it might add to cart and then it might fall off. And so it’s really trying to go through that motion as well and just see, is there any way that you can improve that experience on the website or is it actually the website or is it a disjointed experience between the ad and the website? And that’s another thing too. Right?
Rich Watson:
[inaudible 00:41:01]. There’s only really a few needles you can move to improve your performance, conversion rate, cost per acquisition, average order value. And website plays into all three of those as well as the ads do. So once you’ve identified where the bottleneck is happening, definitely look on your website first to see. Okay, I’m sending quality traffic through, the average order value is lower, maybe I can put free shipping a little bit higher than you basically than you want the average order value to be. And then see if that entices people to spend a little bit more. And by the way, most of the time it does. So certain tactics like that, you can do that.
Rich Watson:
And conversion rate, you can obviously see, okay, how relevant are my ads to the landing page they’re hitting? Is there something congruent happening or is there disconnection? So there’s something we can do there. There’s all these things you can sort of diagnose between the two, because if you have a good landing page with an awesome offer that’s super relevant to the audience, and you have a really engaging ad bringing them in, that’s like 90% of what you need to do. And you don’t need to, in the ad account, like, “Oh I need to do manual bidding and I need to do this.” All that’s not necessary because the foundations are there. That’s the most important part.
Catherine Langman:
Exactly. Yeah. A hundred percent. So we’ve talked through lots of awesome things that we should be looking out for and we should be doing and approaching things in certain ways. What are maybe, to round us out today, what are maybe three to five things you shouldn’t do when testing? Let’s dive into that just-
Rich Watson:
[inaudible 00:42:35]. Well, number one, don’t do too much testing. As I said earlier, focus in on one specific thing. So practically what this may look like is, okay, my CPA is $50.
Catherine Langman:
That’s cost per acquisition, for listeners benefit.
Rich Watson:
Yeah, sorry. [inaudible 00:42:52]. Or cost of purchase, I mean, it really depends on the objective, but yeah. Purchase is usually what we hit. So say my cost purchase is $50. I’ve got a hundred dollar budget a day – do TWO ads so that you can get at least one conversion through a day. Don’t do 10 ads with five different campaigns because you’re splitting the budget so, so much that you have to wait a long time to be able to see any data. And what will happen is after three or four days, you’re like, “Oh, it’s not working. Facebook’s broken.” And it’s really because you’ve just not given it enough time. You can’t really give it enough to go forever. You haven’t given it enough juice, haven’t given it enough fuel to be able to start producing the results. So that’s why just test one thing. The grandparents audience. Let’s have two different creatives for it. That’s it. If you’re budgets like that just try and focus in on as simple as possible.
Catherine Langman:
And part of that’s to get enough conversion data, but also it’s like if you test lots and lots of things all at once, then you’re not necessarily going to really know what worked or didn’t. Right? You kind of cloud the picture.
Rich Watson:
Yeah, just in terms of processes, I mean, how can you take on that many things at once? I mean, you could basically create your own dashboard and some really expensive tools, super metrics and things like that that give you that information. But not only is it really time consuming, but it’s just not necessary. Because it’s just better to focus in on one specific thing you’re testing at a time. You don’t need to get it perfect straight away. And it’s a constant process. You may get something perfect at this certain time, and then Apple come in and they start throwing some problems your way [inaudible 00:44:35]. But there’s always something that needs to be done.
Catherine Langman:
It’s the most annoying. That’s great.
Rich Watson:
That’s a huge one.
Catherine Langman:
It is a huge one.
Rich Watson:
Number two, really, I mean this feeds into the budget again. So that’s why I want to highlight that one first. But giving it enough time to show you whether or not it’s working or not, you can make a judgment almost immediately within, say, 24 hours, maybe even half a day. You can make a judgment to see how you really think that ads going to go, but you don’t really want to act on that judgment because unless you’re just using your sort of shallow metrics, your clickthrough rates, your CPMs, things like that, Facebook’s not even going to show you until a full day has passed whether someone’s gone to your site because it can’t track that data. The last click attribution means it won’t even read that data back until the person’s done it, but they may have seen an ad and they may have clicked through like four hours down the line or something which happens very often.
Rich Watson:
So give it the seven days, as close to the seven days as possible. And then have a look at your data. That’s going to give you the most accurate signal basically of how that ad’s done. I know there’s a lot of… If you’re spending $50 a day and you’re not getting any purchases and it’s like, “Well, I have to give it seven days?” But use your judgment between the two things. They’re not hard and fast rules, but if you’re getting the results that sort of [inaudible 00:46:09] metrics, you’re getting a couple purchases through, [inaudible 00:46:12] carts, but it’s a little bit higher than you want it to be, you definitely want to give it seven days. So I guess number two would be not giving it enough time to show because the most accurate data you can get is during or after the seven day period. So [crosstalk 00:46:24]-
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. Got to sit on your hands.
Rich Watson:
I mean there’s so many, I’m just trying to think of one. One, I guess one really important thing in the creative side of things is to test out a variety of creatives. And I know this sort of almost goes back on what I was just saying, but when you are first releasing the ad, and this is why people need to spend a certain amount, is you want to be able to give your audience a variety of formats for them to absorb your content. And the reason for that is Facebook basically delivers people certain formats that they prefer.
Catherine Langman:
So [crosstalk 00:47:05]-
Rich Watson:
Yeah, exactly. So reading… reading.
Catherine Langman:
Text based.
Rich Watson:
Copy based, [inaudible 00:47:13]. My brains is going. Been talking too much. Video, carousel, collection, catalog, all of these different formats. And you want to have as many, a bigger variety in there as possible because say if you just do video, and of course video is the strongest one, you’re probably only going to hit against about 60% of that pool of audience you’ve chosen. Because you’ll get the people who like only looking at statics or you get the people who only [inaudible 00:47:43] carousels or something like that. So give it a variety of different formats. That’s a very important one. Even if you just test… I would almost say just testing one copy variation, and then focusing on the format testing first is a better way of doing it, just cause people’s attention goes to the creative first, basically.
Catherine Langman:
That’s the first thing that stops the scroll, isn’t it?
Rich Watson:
Exactly. So yeah. That’s a really big one. People just go, “Okay, static. We’ll just use static.” Or we’ll just use video. You’re still going-
Catherine Langman:
Videos the easiest [crosstalk 00:48:14]-
Rich Watson:
… to get as good a result. But you don’t know that maybe static actually converts way better. So you haven’t done just a-
Catherine Langman:
I know, right?
Rich Watson:
And that does happen. A hundred percent happens because that audience, people who are busy and they don’t have time to watch a six second video and they just prefer to just look at an image and get the information as fast as possible.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Rich Watson:
That’s a crucial one.
Catherine Langman:
And also maybe, you’ve just jogged a thought for me, so I don’t know this for a fact at all, but there might be some types of content that people like to consume in video, which might be more your entertaining or I’m just going to procrastinate and waste some time entertaining myself type content. But they’re not necessarily going to be triggered to go off and buy something. So yeah, using the different formats of content for different purposes might also work, but you won’t know unless you track the metric and see how you’re going with it.
Rich Watson:
Yeah. And that’s why it’s important to have the UTMs because then you’ll see, “Oh, it was a video that these people liked. Oh, it was a carousel that people liked.” Otherwise it’s more difficult to know how strong that engagement is.
Catherine Langman:
Exactly.
Rich Watson:
But it’s true. For video, if we go specifically into a video, I guess this could be number four, is try and focus in on that first six seconds being the most engaging and most eyecatching as possible. And also [inaudible 00:49:40] the product. What you don’t want to have is some logo for like 10 seconds.
Catherine Langman:
No.
Rich Watson:
[inaudible 00:49:45] and the designer, it’s awesome. But they’re just not going to [inaudible 00:49:49]. And if they’re someone who’s really, really, really warm to you and knows you and knows your brand story, they’re just going to go and it’s just going to be a big waste of your production money basically. You need to have-
Catherine Langman:
We’ve definitely had to get clients to edit videos for that exact reason. That’s for sure. Oh dear. Yeah.
Rich Watson:
And then there’s a directly… We’ve seen this with a few clients as well where there’s a direct impact, Salubre was a good example, [inaudible 00:50:18] mind me mentioning. But they had a video where people would all drop off within the first six seconds. And basically within the video ad level, you can click on view insights, you hover over the actual ad name. So you can try this out when your business manager over next, and then scroll right down to the bottom, and it’ll show you the cadence of people’s attention on the video. And what tends to happen is there a complete downwards cadence for people just leaving and that’s completely normal.
Rich Watson:
But if you’re seeing a massive spike after three seconds or six seconds, usually it’s around six seconds because that tends to be people’s attention span. You need to be doing something within that first six seconds or at that six second marker to keep people’s attention. And it was a simple, I think for her, we put something almost like a UGC, like some images of skincare, of one of the people who used the product. And that actually completely changed the dynamic of that cadence. People would stay for longer. So people would then drop off after 10, 15 seconds. And just having that extra eight seconds or whatever, it basically meant you are keeping people engaged and indoctrinating them, for lack of a better word, with your brand.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. Getting more of your story. Absolutely.
Rich Watson:
So yeah. Make sure your video’s super engaging. And I see a lot of people using comedy in the ads with video now, especially within the sort of agency world, which is quite funny. So as you said, people just like to absorb video in a different way as well. So if it’s going to be something super serious and this is your business, you need do this. Maybe that’s like annoying people, switching people off.
Catherine Langman:
Comedy or cat videos.
Rich Watson:
Exactly. Like some kitten was playing with a ball of yarn and then have some [inaudible 00:52:12] behind.
Catherine Langman:
Exactly.
Rich Watson:
That would get my attention for sure.
Catherine Langman:
So good.
Rich Watson:
But yeah, no, I guess for the last one, I mean, there’s so many I’m trying to focus in on really the key.
Catherine Langman:
Let’s do one more. We’ve made so much gold today.
Rich Watson:
I would say looking at, okay, this is a cardinal sin I would say. When you are looking at your Facebook ads performance, don’t look at Facebook ads, the actual ads manager, because as I said earlier, the signal is lost. So we do tend to have this because it’s just completely rational. And of course the last sort of 10 years or whatever Facebook ads has been going for, it’s just always been that you look in the actual ads manager to see how the performance is going, but you can’t trust anything from when people have left Facebook to when they’re on your site and adding product to cart, even down to the actual conversion value. So it’s very, very important to use Facebook to indicate for the on page metrics. So on app, sorry, on app metrics, such as video views, content, click through rates, engagement, all of that, a hundred percent accurate. There’s no problems there.
Rich Watson:
But when the conversion data, so that’s the data after someone’s left Facebook and they’re on your site and they’re looking at product page or adding to cart or they’re check out, they’re at that stage, that’s the event data being fed back to Facebook. That is now way weaker in terms of signal than it was early 2021. So you basically have to be able to use multiple platforms to give you that information that’s lost. So a hundred percent look in the back end of your store, look at, okay, this may many people came from Facebook today and this many sales. Okay.
Rich Watson:
So we know Facebook is sending 65% of our traffic, and we’ve had 10 sales. Right? I shouldn’t have said 65. Why did I do that now? It’s going to be a really hard translation. Okay, [inaudible 00:54:21] 6.5 in there. So you can assume 6.5 of their sales is probably coming from Facebook, just general assumption. You go to Facebook ads manager and it says four. And you think, “Oh, it’s just not working. The A of E is too low and… But you can assume, because you’re not running any other channels or [inaudible 00:54:34] is super low, 65% of the sales have come from Facebook. So that’s what’s really [inaudible 00:54:41]. So don’t just look in Facebook for your results because Facebook just gives you a really grim sort of outlook.
Catherine Langman:
Incomplete picture, unfortunately. Yeah. So good. And thank you so much for sharing all of this stuff. It’s been an awesome conversation. Hopefully listeners have really enjoyed all of that and picking out hopefully one or two ideas and things that you can roll with. Just wanted to give one quick last mention, I’m going to put a link in the show notes for this episode for anyone who wishes to download. We have a growth pack bundle of free resources at the moment. And part of that growth pack is a kind of a pre-populated dashboard that you can use for tracking metrics.
Catherine Langman:
So that just might be something that some of you would find super helpful. So give me two seconds. I’m going to make sure you know which link to go for to get this. Just go to Catherinelangman.com/episode-106. You’ll get to the show notes for this podcast episode and you can go and grab that free resource if you wish. And we’ll draw to an end. It’s been a mammoth conversation, but I hope you’ve loved it, listeners. And Rich, thank you so much for joining me on the show. It’s been fantastic having you on again.
Rich Watson:
No worries. It was a pleasure.