Have you split-tested your grandma with Facebook ads? Notes from Facebook HQ

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So the background of this event is simple: Facebook has invited advertisers who are working with high budgets throughout certain European countries, both those who run agencies and those that work with big brands, like Nike and Adidas and run their Facebook ad campaigns.

We had sessions on different topics, including those that cover overall Facebook vision as a platform and more specific ones, like “what to do if your ad is dissaproved”.

I’ve met some great people and we had fun.

The overall mission of Facebook is the same as before: Facebook is focused on growing their community and protecting their data like never before. They introduce products that let people connect, find friends, be in touch and solve problems together.

In order to make this big community possible they need $$$. And that $$$ comes from us as advertisers. Advertisers can grow their businesses, get more customers and grow the economy.

Pretty simple right? They do the right thing while making good money. Win-Win for everyone:)

Here I will try to help you figure out the advertising game of Facebook 🙂

So here are the insights FB shared with us without any specific order but you can review them and apply them at your best convenience:

1. The major trends Facebook is seeing from its massive amounts of data:

– Segment of users of Facebook mobile is growing at a high rate. Which means people spend more and more time on mobile devices. So every piece of content YOU create has to be designed to display properly on mobile AND ONLY AFTER that for other placements.

Regular landscape ad format is getting gradually replaced by 1:1 square format (1080 * 1080) which was previously used for Instagram only.

For videos here’s what Facebook recommends:

Aspect ratios for mobile. Design for mobile first. Square (1:1) and vertical video (4:5, 2:3 and 9:16) can be most engaging as most people hold their phone upright.

This slide is about mobile-first creative development. Facebook has found that creative that’s done first for mobile devices and then optimized for other channels (TV, Print etc) works better as it’s designed for the mass groups of people that are using mostly mobile and tested fast, helps to dominate other platforms too.

The takeaway: Create your content for mobile devices following FB guidelines about dimensions AND considering short attention span of people on mobile. More on that below 🙂

Next big takeaway was that advertisers have to understand how Facebook treats every ad and makes a judgment of how well it will perform based on the signals it sends:

As Facebook’s main goal is a great user experience so users stay more on the platform, creating ads that drive those signals will be beneficial for them (so they will reward you with lower costs).

Those signals are:

1. Likes, shares, clicks, CTR, video view length. Make your ads engaging by spying on competition and learning what works and following best practices of advertising.

2. If your landing page is loading a long time, that will affect the value of your ad because FB is measuring that dropoff. So optimize your landing page for a fast load.

3. How converting your website is. FB is interested to make advertisers money so they can spend more on advertising. Advertisers with high-converting websites get rewarded with cheaper CPM’s and CPC.

4. Changing your creative that exhausted the audience could make a big difference in the performance of your ads. Once you have winner audiences, test new creatives to reach more people cost-effectively. You can do this in the duplicated adset.

When you create ads on Facebook, you have an option to choose the objective.

Based on the objective you choose: Conversion, website clicks etc. you ad will be shown to different people.

So even if you have the same audience (let’s say Lookalike of your buyers) but use different objectives for that audience, Facebook will show it to different people.

If you optimize for purchases, it will show people most likely to buy.
If you optimize for clicks, it will show to people likely to click.
If you optimize for engagement, it will show people likely to engage.

The question, how THE F* Facebook knows who’s likely to BUY?

Answer: Facebook has a LOT of data. So if someone has bought a lot of stuff in the last 7 days (Facebook knows this as they have triggered a lot of PURCHASE events for other advertisers) they know that person is likely to buy.

So if you win an auction, your ad will be shown to a person likely to buy.

You ask: How do I get people to buy and 10X the performance of my ads?

Answer: By creating ads that relate to one of the elements in their value pyramid:

Every product is satisfying some need for a customer. Your task as an advertiser is to find out what those needs are and to position your product as a mechanism to solve that need.

For example: If you know your customers are tired of shoes that stink and they’re feeling anxious in public because of that, you can create and sell “Non-stinky” shoes that make your customers more confident.

I call these needs-solutions bridges “Angles” and I think every product should have 3-5 angles to reach out to the marketplace.

So if you’re NOT getting the results you want with your Facebook ads, this is because you need to test more of the angles and find what works for your market according to the pyramid of needs.

This is a bit advanced stuff, but that’s where the success of advertising is. Grab yourself “Breakthrough Advertising” book if you want to learn more about this.

Once you have these angles, THE MOST crucial part is to figure out your creative. Creative is literally 80-90% of the success of the ad and you can test quite a few of them to find a winner.

Most people just aren’t testing enough.

See how many creatives/ angles McDonald’s was testing just to find 1 winner:

They literally tested 4 different grandmas for their ad with the mobile first format to find which one gets the highest CTR.

If you are doing this level of testing, you are guaranteed to build an empire.

Now here are some best practices for bidding for Facebook ads:

– Bidding is important. But people overestimate it. It ONLY will help you scale massively if your creative is good (or better very good), your relevance score is high (7-10) and your CTR is high too (3% minimum).

You can always start with automatic LOWEST COST bid to test your audiences and ads.

Once you have found your winners, you can expand with big daily budgets and BID CAP or optimize for target cost per purchase to spend more evenly.

Guess what I wrote on a Famous FB Wall? 🙂

BIG TIP for everyone: if you haven’t turned on the automated matching for your Facebook pixel, you should do this right NOW.

This will allow you to reach more people who are likely to be ideal customers as it will gather more user data you can utilize for targeting.

FB says it will get about 8% uplift in conversions, maybe even more for most advertisers.

The instructions to set it up are here:

https://developers.facebook.com/ads/blog/post/2018/07/20/advanced-matching-pixel/

Find what I wrote on the wall and I will give you $100.

List your comment in answers 🙂

Facebook has also introduced a Dynamic Creative Tool that will allow you to give more variety to your creative on different placements:

Now, if you’ve ever had your ad disapproved or maybe even your ad account banned, start with reading Facebook policies:

https://www.facebook.com/policies/ads/

And here are some specific things you don’t want to do with your ads:

You can’t advertise for the categories below (unless you are a partner with Facebook and you get personally approved):
– Alcohol
– Real money gambling
– Dating
– Online pharmacies
– Financial products and services
– And obviously crypto.

Ask your rep if you want to advertise in any of those categories.

Don’t make your video/ image elements look like buttons, as FB considers this misleading:

And here’s the landing page checklist:
– Focus on your product and clearly show what it is and how it works
Don’t promote prohibited products (refer to this: https://www.facebook.com/policies/ads/ )

Don’t focus on body parts/ especially if they are imperfect:

That brings bad user experience and FB doesn’t allow it.

For targeting, you can’t promote health and wellness products to people under 18 years of age.

You can’t promote alcohol for people younger than a legal age for alcohol drinking in that country.

You can’t use targeting options to discriminate people( for example exclude people of certain race etc).

You can’t overpromise specific results in specific timeframes in your ads. Need to be more generic and don’t give deadlines.

Don’t call out user attributes such as weight, financial situation etc. Only the ad on the left would be compliant with Facebook.

Once your ad got disapproved you can appeal in a few ways:

Through ads manager message that pops up.
Through chatbot appeal.
Through support contact page: https://www.facebook.com/business/support/contact-us

And here’s the process every ad goes through before publishing (and if it gets disapproved):

Facebook is using a combination of machine learning and human review to handle millions of ads that get published every day and make sure non-compliant ads don’t slip by.

They use a combination of face-recognition, word-recognition, and dozens more algorithm to find words and images that don’t comply with their rules.

Sometimes, bad ads get approved but with user feedback, they get detected and FB disapproves them. So it’s a constant loop of feedback that platform is going through.

Now here’s how to communicate your message: Whether simple or complex and find the best medium to reach your audience attention:

Facebook has introduced the codeless event setup for APP and pixel. Basically, that means once you have your pixel installed, all other events (purchase/ leads etc) will be installed automatically. This feature isn’t available to everyone though:

For some advertisers, the option to optimize ad spend for a minimum ROAS is available.
So you can set up to distribute your ads with a minimum ROAS of 1X or 2X and Facebook will be searching for users to get your conversions in that range.

Facebook story ads are mobile only and if your audience is younger than 30 or even 25, might bring you amazing results.

These are vertical only, so they are designed for immersive mobile experience:

Now the biggest insight for advertisers is this. In coming years, Facebook will try to automate bidding and targeting SO MUCH that users will only have to worry about the creative and ads themselves. No guessing about targeting or creating audiences.

It will be done with AI and automation.

That’s where the platform is leading to:

Facebook has introduced new types of events you can optimize for:

– Contact
– Customize product
– Donate
– Find location
– Schedule
– Start trial
– Submit application
– Subscribe

Facebook Analytics also become more robust and allow to measure and optimize ad spend better with more data points and user data to optimize the performance:

Guys, hope you found this valuable! Now if you are running an eCommerce business, I will be guiding selected entrepreneurs how to start and scale their highly-profitable eCommerce business. I’ll show how to start and scale profitable Facebook ad campaigns, how to maximize your profit margins and automate the majority of your business processes and work smarter.

You can register for an early-bird waiting list here:
http://ecommercescalingsecrets.com

If you have any comments or questions, please post them below this video.

Every month I choose a few entrepreneurs to personally help them scale their Facebook ads and businesses.

Watch the free training and apply here: https://www.ecommercescalingsecrets.com/home

Have you split-tested your grandma with Facebook ads? Notes from Facebook HQ

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