Your Facebook Ads Strategy Is Wildly Wrong transcript

Back to Basics on this episode of the show a topic that I want to come back to that I talk about a lot which is meta media buying how to do it what is the right account setup what are the non-negotiables for your meta account and really why it matters so much and why I won't shut up about it media buying is the problem I'm going to repeat that comment media buying is the problem it is the problem with your ad account very possibly it's possible that all kinds of things are problem in your ad account but I have become increasingly convinced recently that it is a bad idea for me and for other people who talk about manual bidding in your media buying account thinking financially about your targets and using cost controls and uh leveraging machine learning everywhere you can I've been thinking a little bit you know there's there's a number of voices who sometimes will say things like we get it shut up about cost caps and and bidc caps and whatever else we get it that's not thing you you got to all other things in your ad account if you want to make your business work and that is of course strictly speaking true manual bids will not solve all of your ad account problems but I am convinced they will solve more of them than you think than many people think okay and it's because over I just keep seeing ad accounts that are being run in all kinds of other ways for all kinds of other reasons than running bid caps and T ass targets and and um consolidating where you can separating campaigns Maybe by product or by offer but running CBO no creative testing campaigns like all the stuff I talk about all the time these there's accounts that are doing all of these all of the sort of old way of doing this right it's like lookalike ads creative testing or look like audiences creative testing um Auto bids turning off individual ads that are and are not that you know that a media buyer thinks aren't working because they're under Target running View attribution all of this stuff that I talk about so much and and and auto bidding everything and I'm just amazed at how much impact there is to be had by simply switching your ad account to manual bids now now there's so much to say about this the first thing I want to say is here's one of the things that is basically right which is that a step back from there there's a lot of other stuff you have to do to make a good brand work this is what people are definitely WR about okay um like you your creative has to be good your product has to have unit economics that Mak sense so that like you know really if you're under 60 points of of margin landed to the customer you probably should try to solve that unless you have some other things going on in your business like extraordinary LTV or extraordinary demand or extraordinary Tam or some strategy that's really thoughtful and well considered around that like that really matters getting you know your your funnel dialed in is important your supply chain your uh inventory turnaround time all that Stu again creative strategy can matter a lot like just learning to sell the product but like all those things matter and really probably to get from Z Z of spend to a couple Grand a day in spend you need to do a lot of those things it's just going to be really hard to get there without having that stuff dialed in you just might not have enough demand your creative might not be good enough to get you to some baseline levels but once you are there the impact that you can make on media buying is way bigger than people think and over and over and over again when I look at accounts that are not performing that well what I see is under optimized media buying holding people back they actually have done lots of that hard work this is part of the thing that's so frustrating about it for me to watch part of the thing that makes me crazy about it is people do all the hard work of building incredible Brands they they they they uh have created products that they care about and they like and they've they've got good margins and all those things so so they see forward progress or whatever and they're just leaving so much money on the table and making their businesses so much more difficult on them than they need to be because there's so much wasted money in their ad account part of the reason you should stop listening When someone tells you media buying doesn't matter manual bids don't matter that much creative is the only thing that matters you should there should be a thing in your head that goes off that says why wouldn't that matter how I allocate my second or third biggest line item in my business matters it's like very likely the case that in your business your meta ad spend is the uh the number one uh uh the number two and maybe even the number one cost in your business depending on how much your cogs are okay because it's probably product is your number one cost most likely but it's right up there it's one of the top line items in your business so the idea that you shouldn't think carefully and critically about how to allocate those dollars is crazy it is crazy and uh and you should not listen to that advice you should not listen to it you should care about every part of how that spend is managed because it is the biggest spend or one of the biggest spends in your business and you should optimize it it's worth lots and lots and lots of money to you and so to come back to this this comment a second ago if you if you are at $10,000 in spend per month media buy switching to manual bids is very unlikely to take you to 100 it's it's just really unlikely okay um it's at that point it's probably the case that that you would have turned up your ad spend already on auto bids but here's one of the things that people really miss let's take that particular example I gave okay so yeah so in that case by the way just to back up what should you do yeah you should dial in your product you should dial in your offer you should dial in your creative dial in your margins all those kinds of things okay I mean at that point you still should be running like a really Consolidated approach I would still recommend running manual bids by the way still the best way to do it um you should probably have uh manual bids maybe one ASC no existing 0% existing customer cap spend like that run cost caps and see see how far you can get but um but once you've done that right like and you and you get your spend increased uh to some degree um one of the things I want you to realize that's going to happen there is that almost by definition you have made the problem of your account drastically more complex so think about it if you're managing $10,000 a day in spend or excuse me $10,000 a month in spend that's probably one or two campaigns with one or two ads doing most of the spending and your auto bid Approach at that point while still under optimized you know you can turn up or down your spend a little bit and probably be closer within the range of of uh you know spending the quote unquote correct amount of money you will see the impact in your actual Shopify account really really clearly Etc right but when you get to $100,000 a month in spend right this is before we're talking about a million a month in spend okay so just a hundred now you probably have a bunch of ads a number of campaigns multiple products different unit economic considerations and you've made the problem of the ad account and the allocation of your dollars more complex so before we say anything else about manual bids having external tools to run your ad account uh is is uh going to really excuse me having machine learning uh optimized tools to run your ad account is going to make a really big difference for you because the because now your human lizard brain is going to have a harder and harder time uh keeping all the details straight so not only are you worse at this at the Baseline than a than man than machine learning is which is much better at at probabilistically forecasting the future and allocating your spend accordingly which is what manual bids do okay you're already you're already bad at this game but when you make the game more complex you are way worse at it you're just way worse at it and so I look at ad accounts I looked at an ad account through the day that was spending in the hundreds of thousands of dollars per month like mid mid uh uh six figures what is that yeah mid six figures per month in spend like a good healthy spend right and I saw in that ad account like all of these different things happening including like very high spending ads just like turned off probably because the media buyer analyzed it thought it was performing poorly and now they have to analyze like how is that ad performing relative to the other ads advertising different products all with different unit economic considerations plus the customer might click on product a go to product B how do you factor that in um you're running lowest cost so how's the CAC relative to the different aovs like like there's just all of these different considerations what about um the spend today and how that affects the sale you're going to run in seven days and is that product going to be on sale or not and if that product is on sale how does that change the UN economic considerations all of those things make the whole problem more complex and what meta machine learning does for you is makes it drastically simpler and says here let us let let my machine stay on top of all those details for you and spend more and more and more and sometimes people will say things like I don't know you know larger spending accounts that are that are uh that are using you know cost Caps or bid Caps or t well first of all that's like just fundamentally wrong I just see like seen I run ad accounts myself that hit a million dollars and spend in a month and and it's 100% manual bids so the if that's not a big spending account like I know there's bigger ones but come on there's there's there's plenty of spend there and you you can deploy lots and lots of dollars doing this in fact I'd argue you can deploy more dollars running manual bids than other than uh than Auto bid campaigns for the reason I just said the complexity issue makes it only harder the more the spend goes through um so that that idea is just basically wrong but on top of on top of the fact that it's that it's just like straight up wrong that people are not spending on large accounts with manual bids they should be because the they have way more to gain by doing this the impact of allocating even if you even if the entire thing was a 10% increase in value like if that was the only value increase you were going to get by switching your ad account from Auto bids to manual bids by switching from view attribution to click attribution by um by thinking about unit economics down to the product level by layering trass campaigns in with uh with lowest cost campaigns like and I say lowest cost but what I mean by that is CAC optimized campaigns right so bid caps cost caps I'm not saying Auto bid campaigns sorry people are confused about that but uh bidc caps cost caps they are lowest cost campaigns they are optimizing for the lowest cost conversion so that's what I mean while you are running this setup in your ad account you should be doing it and tracking all of the purchases that come through via Billy b i l y. a billy is the third party uh meta ads tracking tool that I use with my clients it is 100% service side tracking and the benefit is really simple which is that you get uh more accurate data going from your store the purchase from your store back into your meta ads dashboard that means your dashboard not only reports data more accurately um which is nice in and of itself but it actually gets more data more accurate data sent back to it which could help it optimize more sometimes you'll see an even an increase in spend because meta is getting more information and the more information meta has the better it can optimize so uh go run your manual vids and run them with Billy that's what I do for my accounts Billy's Al the most affordable option on the market for Ser for server side tracking tools um and it's also the easiest to install that I'm aware of you can actually get started for $1 for the first month and so if you want to try Billy if you want to test it against your current tracking setup you can look at the event match quality scores you can see how the Ros goes head tohe head same ads against two different campaigns running two different pixels it's really easy to do to run that test that's what I've done with my clients has worked out well go to billy.

B ly. A to use Billy today whether you're switching from the M the standard Shopify integration or another third party tool I have seen Billy beat every other tool and the standard integration for conversion tracking uh the best conversion tracking setup I know of um and I've seen it beat it over and over again including at the level of event match quality score so go check it out right now b. aai use Billy it's what I use if you make a 10% impact on a brand spending let's say $500,000 a month that is a $50,000 per month impact you're getting near the point of a million dollars a year uh at that point in in value right you're you're you're starting to approach that number that's a huge amount of money to get right and so now a 10% impact on a $10,000 a month spend isn't that big of a deal you shouldn't you shouldn't care that much about it right uh but what you should care about is as that ad account gets bigger and more complex it should be a non-negotiable i if you are listening to or watching this podcast right now and you are auto bidding an ad account that is spending more than $100,000 a month you ought to reach out to me podcast a jf.com I am taking no more business like this is not a sales call like and and just like let me see if I can help you figure out how to make the switch sooner than later okay and the reason why is the reason why is that there is potentially a very large impact on your business by making that switch over to bid caps cost caps uh and T RS bidding because again the problem has become more complex because you're spending more money and therefore there's more opportunities for your human lizard brain to get it wrong and manual bidding to get it right um and secondly uh uh not only is the problem more complex but you just have more to gain or lose even if you have a small percentage impact okay so it makes a really really big difference there's so much more I was going to say about this so um and I could go on and on and on here and and the reason I'm like sort of fired up about it today is because I've just I'm just watching the conversation continue to develop in different ways and I'm continuing to see different people come to me and ask for my input on their account and how do I go make this move and it is just um it is just remarkable to me how much impact there really can be by doing this well the other thing is I said a 10% impact but actually I am I'm running an account right now that had an impact just on media buying principles alone that saw like a two to 3x increase in spend just by doing this well now that is an outlier that's normally not what's happening okay but it can actually make a really big impact and crucially that impact is actually extremely low cost in terms of your time and effort to get right like if you want to generate more creative that's going to double or triple your spend right again that's that's an outlier scenario right I'm not I'm certainly not saying that you're going to double or triple your spend by stion of manual bids though I've seen it the the actual time cost of doing that is really low and the reason why is because once you have figured out your targets at the product level you uh only have to do some quick duplicating in the ad account and rebuilding in the ad account to switch the account setup to be a manual bid-based account setup and um and that actually can be really fast so the cost to impact ratio on Switching your account to manual bids is really really really strongly in favor of doing it generating new creative to do that like I said would take a huge amount of time it would like you have to go and come up with the ideas and think about the funnels and and potentially shoot the content and get a designer or a video editor involved or whatever right it's potentially quite a bit of time and and effort but actually simply going and and switching over your account to manual bids can be a pretty lowc cost thing in fact there are ways to do it where there's almost no risk to your auto bid spend if you really really want to you can make the switch over from uh Auto bids to manual bids and just keep your manual bids really really uh you know aggressive so that and keep your budgets lower and you can just make sure you keep getting your spend through if you're nervous about making the switch so you just keep your budgets where they were before keep your manual bids um pretty aggressive and then just tick your manual bids more towards their true targets over time and see if you keep getting spend through and what I what I'm guessing will happen if you do that is that you will see a better allocation of your of your money across your ad account and potentially even see um a bigger impact than that it's it's just amazing to me how well um it can work and how important it is I think to do it uh if you are not running manual bids I am comfortable saying that at least I don't know 95 to 98% of the time it is a massive under optimization in your business that you can fix really fast and so no I'm not going to shut up about it because it is too good of an opportunity for people who are out there trying to grow their businesses it just it just makes too big of a potential impact it won't solve all your problems I have accounts that are stalled out just like you do I have accounts where uh We've we've we're running that the right way we're getting as much spend through and now we have to figure out with creative and product offerings and all kinds of other things how we push it to the next stage so it won't solve everything but it will make a very big impact on your business depending on how you're doing a lot of other things as well and so I do think uh if you are still listening to and watching my podcast if you've come to this and seen a lot of my episodes and and and I've had this conversation with Taylor Holliday as well who who is kind of in the same boat he was saying to me recently just like he's like over and over I see these accounts that come to us and media buying is the place it's the source of so much waste in these ad accounts and he's dealing with all eight and nine figure businesses and so yeah if you're in that boat you you absolutely owe it to yourself to consider it if you earlier in the process or if you want to get your head around this more yourself this is also the reason I talk about admissions so much from Common Thread Collective it's the most structured training material of which I am aware including the ability to get um experienced media buying coaches to look over your shoulder at your ad account account for a very reasonable cost to get your head around these principles with as much clarity as possible I'm amazed at how many people ignore my advice to go sign up for admission maybe because I have an affiliate fee affiliate commission with it and I understand people are Shilling right but like people ignore that advice and then I just watch over and over again as they waste I mean it's like I I forget what the cost of admission is it's something like $1,000 for three months uh there's 30-day moneyback guarantee like go through my link there's a link in the show notes there's a money back guarantee you get a free call with it they make the they make the barrier to entry pretty low and um and I see so many people waste way more than a thousand dollars in their ad spend they waste tens of thousands of dollars in their ad spend because they won't take the time to go learn the principles go learn the principles and and like I said the most structured way structured setting of which I am aware and go do this yourself to not waste the money if that's what is required go get an agency who is going to buy this way and make it an absolute non-negotiable of the spend it's not the only problem to solve it's not but it is a huge one that can make a really really big difference in your business it matters it matters a lot and don't listen to anybody who tells you it doesn't matter it really does matter um your here's your the basics of the account setup that I'd want to see that feel really good about you should be running no creative testing campaigns launch all your new ads in CBO campaigns whether it's ASC or not ASC is basically a giant CBO campaign you should be running it uh a mix of manual bids which either bidc Caps or cost caps I prefer bidc caps once again not the biggest deal which one you use okay um so but uh but I run bidc caps uh no view attribution in in your attribution settings that will only confuse you you should run that alongside Target Rass bidding um those targets should be informed by your unit economics and and the simplest way to do it I think is to separate out campaigns by product okay just one product per campaign you could also do one offer per campaign if you're running multiple offers in the same product okay that simple setup uh broad targeting broad targeting all of it broad targeting CBO manual bids no creative testing campaigns uh that that simple setup click only attribution will get you really really really far for building a great ad account and ultimately um having the structure you need to scale as you generate more creative more products do all the stuff that's the really fun parts of business right where you are actually um meeting customers where they're at with Incredible products that they're going to Love and Enjoy that's the stuff that you actually really care about set up your ad account to promote that stuff to them in a way that makes sense and be amazed when you see there is a meaningful Improvement in your ad account either you will waste less money you will spend more money the same Target or even better both the impact is serious it's significant go do it and get it right was that a podcast was that a video or was it just a rant I don't know but I just um it just was on my mind it was inspired by some work from today that I saw and I just thought like we just have to talk about this some more um just as a as a reminder to not get tired of things that make your business better so go do the things I said today email me podcast jf.com if you got any questions any followup about anything I said today I might not have been that clear I've got lots of other episodes on these topics too many to list um honestly if you want to go see this in person in person if you want to see it play out in terms of the way that I've set this up with Brands go to hf.com let's say beardbrand uh beard brand is a more Consolidated approach than I use for others but you can actually see the ad account there I've also um got some other uh videos I've been doing recently or I've been talking through how manual bids have gone wrong for for Brands when they've gone wrong they certainly can go wrong um and so there's another playlist in in my YouTube channel just subscribe to my YouTube channel and you'll get all that stuff as it comes through hf.com for everything I'm doing and andrewj Ferris on Twitter make sure to subscribe wherever you're watching or listening thanks so much I'll talk to you soon [Music]