Catherine Langman:
Well, hello there. Welcome back to the Productpreneur Success Podcast. It’s Catherine Langman here, and today I am actually joined by our senior Facebook media buyer, Rich Watson. Welcome to our show.
Rich Watson:
Hello.
Catherine Langman:
First time on our show.
Rich Watson:
Hello from Vietnam.
Catherine Langman:
Yep, tuning in from Vietnam. And the reason that I’m keen to have Rich on the show today is because we are going to dive in deep and talk all about Apple’s new iOS 14 update. Everyone’s a bit worried about this Apple iOS update and what it means for the future of digital marketing. So for those of you who don’t know what this iOS update is, it’s the latest iPhone update that’s supposedly going to end Facebook advertising as we know it. But there’s a lot of a fear mongering I think, and probably a lot of misinformation, as well as just people not really understanding what it’s all about. So before you all hit the panic button, let’s kind of dive into it. And I guess I want to start by getting you to maybe explain to our listeners what on earth all of this update business entails. What’s actually happening right now, or about to happen, I suppose?
Rich Watson:
Yeah, sure. So yeah, Apple are rolling out this iOS update, it’s basically for the Facebook side, they’re going to comply wholeheartedly. So it’s going to be affecting both Android and iOS. Other platforms, I’m not quite sure. So I know general things about the platforms and the effect of it, but all the news is quite new. Apple have basically sprang this on everybody without the general consensus of the marketing world. So most people are sort of left to just scramble to sort of improve things. And obviously Facebook had to be the most effected. So they’re the ones with the most immediate action. And really what it is is, they’re basically introducing this new thing called ATT, which is App Tracking Transparency. And it basically allows users to opt-out of apps tracking them using third-party cookies.
Rich Watson:
So all that means is once you’re using an app on your phone and you click through an ad from say, Facebook, it goes to a website. That website is no longer allowed to match all the event data that’s sent back to Facebook. Facebook’s not allowed to match it, if you know what I mean. So for example, if someone clicks on an ad, they go to your site. They add to cart. They buy, basically some of that data, only a really small partial amount of it is going to be sent back and matched on Facebook. Whereas this sort of really, really granular customer journey that we’ve had availability to up until now is going to basically disappear. But not completely. And we’ll go into that later. There are work arounds, but that’s the ins and outs of it.
Catherine Langman:
So basically, we’re not going to have as much tracking information at our fingertips, through the ads manager to report on things like people who’ve viewed products on your website or added to cart or all of that kind of jazz. So it’s going to be a bit more limited in what we can track, yeah?
Rich Watson:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. And basically, so what’s happening is their Facebook, I talk about Facebook, the majority of this call, they’re going to introduce something called aggravated event management. And that’s going to come later on this month I believe, that’s the sort of latest update we’ve had. And basically what it’s going to do is it’s going to enable users to choose up to eight conversion events, the most important to their business. So up until now, we’ve had the ability to create as many custom conversions as you want, use as many events as you want, all this sort of thing. So that’s now really limited. But eight to eighth conversion, that’s actually still enough to do what you want to do. So that ranges from your landing page view to even post-purchase sort of events if you want to add those in. So you can still attract quite a few of them.
Rich Watson:
But what’s going to happen is only one event from that event set is going to be matched. So what I mean by this is if a user goes to your site, they add to cart, but they don’t purchase, the add to cart is going to be reported back to Facebook. If they purchase, but they go the whole way, only the purchase and none of the others are going to be reported. So what’s it going to do is they’re going to model sort of data based on the other events. So this is like, is it quite like techie at the moment? So I’m sort of still trying to learn about this, but it’s basically most of the reporting is going to be partial or aggregated data, apart from the true one command that comes back.
Catherine Langman:
So literally we’ll know for sure what their exit point was, but everything else is a bit slightly guesswork.
Rich Watson:
Yeah, exactly. That’s what I mean, it’s not totally throw everything out the windows it’s still pretty good. And this also pushes people more to as they say, owning their data, because up until now, most e-commerce businesses rely on Facebook’s data. You’re buying Facebook’s data, but what you can move towards now is having your CRM fill in the gaps. So obviously we have purchase data coming through with the person’s purchase, but not add to cart data. So then we can use the add to cart data from your CRM, and then you can upload that to Facebook as a custom audience. And then you can still use your customized lookalikes and stuff as usual, but all that stuff on Facebook is going to become a lot less powerful, lot less potent.
Rich Watson:
And the other effect of this is also there’s the retargeting side of things is going to come a lot less granular, a lot less potent as well, because the custom audiences are going to shrink basically. Cause they have less data on those people. So adding to cart and [inaudible 00:00:06:00]. So there’s definitely a [inaudible 00:06:03] with CRM. So there’s more push towards having CRM and also conversion API. If people haven’t already installed that, for example, on Facebook, on Shopify, Facebook have rolled out their Conversions API service they’re tracking. Definitely want to get that in there. So that’ll plug a lot of holes, but it’s not a complete solution. They’ll still be limitations to the amount that they can track as well but it’s better than nothing. So yeah, there’s always workarounds.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, well, yes. And I suppose as we keep talking, we can dive into some strategies that people can move towards to adapt to this new world that we will have to exist in. And I guess I was just going to mention for listeners benefit that many of our clients are already using Klayvio to integrate with their Facebook Ads Manager and syncing custom audiences from their Klayvio lists and segmenting those lists. So I guess what you’re saying is you can really segment your list in getting quite specific so that you can use that list integration from Klaviyo to Ads Manager. Yeah and get that [crosstalk 00:07:16] .
Rich Watson:
Yeah. It’s going to become much larger part of the strategy of the rule I think. Just because of there’s sort of a Facebook hack side, the granular nature that we’ve been so used to using Facebook magic all of that side, all of the look likes, the using the algorithm. The learning that has, that’s all going to pretty much, it’s not going to disappear, but it’s going to look a lot less powerful. So people are going to have to go back to the old content marketing and enticing people in building communities. Of course, we’ll go through all these strategies later, but that’s really where the [inaudible 00:07:54], so basically essentially marketing is going to return to how it was like three or four years ago.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. Right. Well, that’s kind of good. I like that much better myself. I mean I guess with me when I started my first business, which was, I don’t know, 2007 or something like that. This I’ve been through a few iterations of similar scenarios, like major updates to the Google algorithm and people’s SEO traffic dropping off a cliff and then Facebook started and it was all amazing because it was free engagement for businesses. And then of course they changed that. So you have to pay and people’s businesses dropped off a cliff. I’ve seen it happen so many times and I feel like this is just another iteration of that. And for the businesses that have made it their business to own their own customer and build their own database, they’ll be the ones that do the best out of this, won’t they?
Rich Watson:
Yeah, exactly. And you need to evolve with the times, otherwise you’ll get left behind. I think the silver lining in this is it’s going to sort of alleviate a lot of lazy marketers who tend to use these hacks to try and put their suboptimal products and marketing and it annoyed people. So this is going to sort of level the playing field a little bit I think.
Catherine Langman:
Weed out the rubbish stuff and leave the creative, quality marketing in place and doing well.
Rich Watson:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so there is… Sorry, go on.
Catherine Langman:
No, you finish your thought.
Rich Watson:
I was just sort of saying I was going to allude it to community building and that’s sort of something I sort of want to highlight is that, the community aspect of the events that are on app aren’t going to be affected. So video views, page likers, page messages, paid posts savers, all of these things is not going to be affected because there’s all that. So for Facebook side of things, you can still use that data. And that will mean your sort of re-engaging campaigns, can become much more granular. And of course you can use whole content strategy to allow more of that to happen. So you can break it down by people who are viewing videos they’re interested, maybe they haven’t gone to the page yet so you can exclude that. People who’ve gone to the page and have messaged your page there’s like different small sections within those engaging audiences that we should really engage with your content and try and push them to your list basically. That’s going to be the move going forward.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. That’s really good. It’s interesting because I know that we’ve got a few clients who are getting really good at creating that sort of video content just for content generally, but also specifically for their ads and that, they’re doing very, very well. So I guess that’s all already coming into play, which is awesome. So what I was about to say before is I know that there are quite a few people out there who have recently been impacted with things like ad account shut downs and ads just being incorrectly flagged for things that Facebook says you’re doing wrong, but it’s just a false kind of error notice and things like that. And so a lot of people are feeling a little bit jaded. Is there still going to be any point in advertising on Facebook and all of that sort of stuff?
Catherine Langman:
And of course like I say, yes, if your audience is there, because it’s such a, Facebook’s just everywhere now. And there’s so many people that are pretty active on the platform, so your captive audiences there. So we do need to find a way to work around these new changes and not just throw our hands up in the air and go, it’s all too hard. So what are we, what are the strategies that you are recommending that we move forwards with obviously building our database and our own email list is hugely important, right?
Rich Watson:
Yeah. And I think it’s quite an important thing to, you should never really just rely on one platform. I mean, Facebook’s one of the most powerful advertising platforms, and I believe it’s going to remain that way because they’re really working to sort of make everyone as equipped as possible with this update. So I definitely don’t think it’s worse to throw in a towel as far as Facebook is concerned, but it’s always good to have a multi-channel strategy. And then also like very important thing. The whole attribution things will become very important because you’re going to be, have to track things over a longer time period. And it’s going to be a bit sort of more granular in terms of where things are coming from, and maybe other platforms are sort of contributing to the customer journey and things like that.
Rich Watson:
So the actual long-term backend attribution side of things is going to become very important. But so as far as Facebook strategy, it’s really going to be a very strong, content, orientated strategy now. It should have always been, I think I’m definitely a victim of becoming a bit lazy because Facebook’s amazing, super power that it has. It’s really going to be down to really looking into the customer’s persona, your USP’s of your business, really trying to find where the pain points are, get your copy, your creatives really, really strong and really important, make sure you’re building a nice community within your Facebook, within all your social channels.
Rich Watson:
If you can, just make touch much as possible, get them to your email list, keep them warm with engaging content that’s very valuable to them. And then you can get, obviously get much more granular there. You can get more granular with an email lists. You can post purchases post-purchase is times two. Loyal people, people who’ve relapsed over a few months. So you can go from say, using one or two email just like abandoned cart segment and then a post-purchase segment or something like that to get super granular with your automation flows. So you’re able to break down those audiences within Facebook as well.
Rich Watson:
And then the whole, yeah, as I said earlier, as I alluded to earlier, the whole warm side of Facebook sort of retargeting is going to become pretty much relying on your CRM more than Facebook’s own then tracking.
Rich Watson:
So your hot retargeting will be very based on your customer lists uploaded from your CRM and your re-engagement campaigns will be a lot more from the social engagement side of things from your auction route page, from your… The actual engagement with the ads. That’s where you want to break those down. And for the cold prospecting, we’re obviously going to have to rely a lot less on lookalike audiences now. So interest based targeting is not really going to go anywhere because that’s all done on the app. So that’s not going to really be affected. So we can get very, very granular now and look for a lot of interests that a lot of people aren’t… Basically like we were doing three or four years ago, try and find those really, really gritty interests and groups where it’s really your target markets in there, but not many people know because they haven’t really done the research and then get those audiences grouped up together.
Rich Watson:
But the caveat of this is the broad targeting just go broad and everything’s fine. That’s not going to really work anymore. So you need to keep your audiences a lot more than you used to be if you were going for very broader which is nice.
Catherine Langman:
So this is interesting. It really is going back.
Rich Watson:
So a lot of research into personas.
Catherine Langman:
It is really going back to how it was a few years ago then isn’t it?
Rich Watson:
Yep, exactly. That’s good because that’s where we’ve got a lot of experience with that before we came a bit lazy with Facebook. So it’s just about [inaudible 00:15:54]
Catherine Langman:
It really does sound like if I don’t want to say old fashioned marketing, we’re not going to pull out the fax machine here, but it is very much about kind of building that really engaged audience. And I guess that takes a little bit more time, doesn’t it? You can’t just rely on one kind of conversion ad campaign and just kind of drive heaps of traffic and sales with one campaign or one funnel.
Rich Watson:
Yeah. And it’s going to move more towards the getting customers to be part of the community and getting loyalty from them and having them with you for a long time. Which it pretty much should have always been. But as I said, we relied a bit more on Facebook to do the job for us. So that’s all going to be very, very pointed on the reporting side of things. I don’t know if I already briefly mentioned earlier, but the reporting side is going to change a lot as well, because obviously we’re doing day-to-day reporting at the moment, which is going to change because of the sort of delayed attribution that’s happening-
Catherine Langman:
So how are people going to know?
Rich Watson:
-the actual way we, the data is going to change too. [crosstalk 00:17:04]
Catherine Langman:
The return on investment is going to be harder to understand, I suppose.
Rich Watson:
Exactly. And that’s why we’re going to need to look more at customer lifetime value. That’s the most important thing because that’s looking at a longer time span. So you want to try and get your customers in and then as soon as they try and squeeze them for the cash now, you know what I mean? You want to try and get them-
Catherine Langman:
Get them fast as possible.
Rich Watson:
Get them free as low as possible. Get them for everything they’re worth. No, of course not. Can I get the value? You want to keep getting, keeping with you. And if you have multiple products showcase different products, then they might be interested in as the dynamic retargeting. That’s going to be affected. Cause all the events and the content ideas and things like that, only one of those can now be sent back. So if they’re looking at a product and it leaks, that’s going to be sent back. If they go to add to cart, that’s going to be sent back and the rest isn’t. So we can’t really rely too much on dynamic retargeting now as well. That’s another thing they just pulled out.
Catherine Langman:
They are, that’s true. Absolutely. Yeah. So many things, so many steps in the broad strategy, you’re going to have to be rethought by the sounds of things.
Rich Watson:
But the things that people should definitely focus, there’s the things that Facebook is saying. So I sort of talked a little bit about what Facebook are recommending you do. And one very, very important thing everyone should do now is verify their domain in Business Manager with Facebook. So that they’re official in Facebook size. This will mean that the co… If you don’t do this the events won’t be tracked basically. So the best way to explain this is say you have a pixel, but it’s owned by two different business managers. They both can’t take that data back again anymore. Only one can cause only the verified one will be able to, and only one can verify. So that’s a little of a… No one’s really talking about that, but that’s quite an important thing to do. And it’s quite just basically you can search for Facebook domain verification. There’s a very good article on how to do it. It’s very simple.
Catherine Langman:
I’ll double check, but I think I put a post up on our blogs. I’ll find that link and I’ll pop it in the show notes for this episode too.
Rich Watson:
Oh, nice. Yeah. The second thing implementing Facebook’s conversion API, obviously. Yeah, Shopify have it already. They already rolled out a few months ago. I’m not sure about the other platforms, but if, there’s another workaround as well. You can use Google tag manager to do a very similar thing, but don’t use Google tag manager and a conversion API the same time, because that confuses the hell out of the system and makes your tracking terrible. So don’t do that. So that’s very important. You can see that this is very easy to set up very, very… There’s also some really good setup step through, walk through by Adam Foxwell. So if you just put conversion API, Shopify, Foxwell or something like that, he’ll come up with his really, really, really [inaudible 00:20:20].
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. And we’ve, we’ve got something on ours too, I think just recently. So I’ll share that one in the show notes as well, but I was just going to mention, and this is not on my blog anywhere, but I did get an email the other day from, I think it was the Facebook for WooCommerce plugin. Pretty sure it was that one. So I think that it’s coming through there for WooCommerce users.
Rich Watson:
Yeah. I can imagine WooCommerce had it again as well, but put onto that Squarespace and things like that, they’re quite slow on the update. So I’d probably ask. Yeah, just make sure you ask. This is better to do sooner rather later. Make sure you ask your platform customer service, what they’re doing about it, because you also you’ll see, you’ll suddenly become very shocked when nothing’s working and nothing’s being tracked anymore when the switch happens. Yeah, I sort of briefly touched on earlier, but the attribution sort of comparison as we’re going to lose post seven days, you’re going to need to look to compare those to what percentage of your conversions are coming up to seven days, for example, and how you can change your strategies to sort of deal with this because we have to, there’s not really anywhere around it. Well, apart from using Google Analytics for the time being, but I wouldn’t recommend that because they’re not doing anything at the moment, so that’s all still working.
Rich Watson:
Yeah. And the other full thing is those eight conversions, the tool becoming, aggravated event management tool will be coming late this month, you’ll suddenly have a little thing about it come up in Facebook Business Manager, and then we’ll choose in priority. You choose your most important event obviously is going to be purchased if your e-comm or lead, if your lead generation and then down just to initiate checkout at the and then yeah. Those are the most pertinent actions you need to take everything else. Facebook will keep on top of everything, but this, the strategy side of things really take in what we’ve been sort of talking about. And the other information is out there and it really sort of revert back to warming up your customers as much as possible and keeping them loyal. That’s really going to be the strategy going forward.
Catherine Langman:
Absolutely. Yeah. So content will be king once more. We’ll have to think more in terms of the broader marketing strategy and campaigns and product launches and stuff, and then funneling or communicating all of that information via all the different channels and not just like you say, using the Facebook hacks and being lazy marketers. Just incidentally on that note, just as well as a bit of a side note to that, for those of you listeners to our podcast here, you’ll possibly remember last week’s episode was all about the marketing planning. So pulling together a marketing plan for this year. So if you haven’t listened to that episode, go and check it out. I’ll pop it in the show notes as well, because with all of this stuff being rolled out, I think we are kind of left with no choice. We really have to get a little bit more sophisticated with that planning and yeah, not just be…
Rich Watson:
I’ve got a couple of little secret ninja hacks as well, little Easter eggs for people that have listened this far. One really good thing will be to do is get yourself a post-purchase survey. So there’s an app called what’s the name of this app? Sorry, let me just find the name, Prove It… It’s called,”Prove It Post Purchase.” So basically what it’ll do is just ask your customers a lot of the information that you’re going to be losing on the tracking post-purchase and it’s a very nice, easy, quick to do survey. And most people do it just because they’ve got their thing now. They’re happy, they spend their money. And at that point, usually people are quite happy to help you with this information. So that’ll be really good to include that because that’s going to fill in all the gaps. The other thing is something to look out for as well on Facebook and Instagram side is shops.
Rich Watson:
And I believe, and some of the people that in the industry who are experts in this sort of thing, shops are going to become a lot more prominent because that’s in app purchase. In app checkout basically going to be happening on Facebook and Instagram. So that basically means maybe the e-commerce side is going to move onto Facebook, Shopify, sorry, Facebook, Instagram, and then they can track everything because that’s the problem, isn’t it? It’s that they’re not able to track things off the app, but this is all going to be on the app. So I’m not saying that’s going to happen next week, but that’s going to be something to look out for just very, very easy to integrate. And then of course, you’re going to have all that data that you’ve now lost.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, absolutely. Gosh, that’s a bit of a brave new world we’re heading into.
Rich Watson:
Well, it’s okay for us constantly good marketers who focus on content and really giving value to our customers, but the people who do the hacky things, goodbye, goodbye farewell… I’m glad that you brought it up.
Catherine Langman:
Having a good quality product and good customer service and all of those things that have historically established long-term businesses that hang around. So yeah, we’ll just have to focus on all of that stuff and then we will all do well. So that would be good. Awesome.
Rich Watson:
[inaudible 00:26:13]
Catherine Langman:
Well, thank you so much for jumping on with me today and I can’t thank you enough for doing all of this research. I know it’s been a big effort on your behalf to get your head around all of this stuff, figure it out for us all and sharing all of that. For you listeners I’m going to put a couple of links in the show notes too, so that you know how to do things like verify your domain and get the conversion API in place. But also if you’re not already a member of our rockstar product preneur Facebook group, that’s definitely the place to be so that you can stay up to date with all of this sort of stuff.
Catherine Langman:
And of course, if you want Rich’s brain on your ad strategy, we are also available to help with ads for your e-com store. So I’m going to finish it off there and thanks for joining us today. And I look forward to next week’s episode as well, which is another interview, by the way, for listeners, it’s going to be all about fulfillment. Lots of questions. Come up to me to me all the time about fulfillment. So that’ll be a good one next week, too. All right, listeners, we’ll catch you all later.