Code 021- Facebook Ads Starter Guide with Amanda Robinson

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Facebook Ads Strategy

Amanda Robinson tells here story of how she went from running a wake board school to teaching Facebook ads and growing a business there.  We find out why Facebook is changing so fast and how you can keep up with it all. 

Find out that it’s ok to use the boost button when starting out.  We also find out how to utilize video and Facebook live to reach the right people at a lower cost.  We dig into the 4 steps to get you started on the right track.

 

(Click here–>> Amanda Robinson Podcast Transcript  or scroll to the bottom to read the full PDF Transcript)

 

Show Notes with the Amanda Robinson

01:52 – Here’s a link to Amanda’s Facebook Ads Bootcamp. 

16:57 – I note Lance Egan and whether you can use that name for your Facebook Ads in our competitive fishing example.  Lance was on the Wet Fly Swing podcast here.

18:20 – We talk about the Federation of Fly Fishers and whether it should be used as a target in this example. 

21:40 – We discuss how to use your Facebook pixel.  Here’s an article on installing your pixel.

32:24 – We talk about the option to easily split test anything within facebook.

41:10 – We discuss a video through play and how to make improvements based on the analytics.

 

You can find guest TheDigitalGal.com

 

4 Steps to Succeed with Facebook Ads

1. Create the ads (Creative)
   1. Week 1 – How to use Facebook ads manager
   2. Use video and Facebook live
   3. Retargeting at a lower cost
2. Audience and Targeting – How to find target
   1. Cold – First Impression
   2. Warm – Retargeting segment
   3. Hot Audiences
3. Budget and strategy – How much to spend
4. Reporting and optimizing and improving

Facebook Ads Tips

• Keep all of the text out of your ad image
• Show the product in use in your art
• Write your ad copy to make it about your customer
• Make sure CTA elicits a response
• Warm vs Cold vs Hot audiences
• You have up to a year to retarget people
• Spend at least $100 to $500 per month to start
• Do not jam a logo into the first few seconds of your video

 

Resources Noted in the Show

How to Instal Facebook Ads Pixel

 

Read the Full Transcript with Valerie Morris:

Click here: Amanda Robinson Podcast Transcript to get the Full PDF Transcript

or continue reading below……..

Amanda 0:00
You get this little report card and it really really does feel like back in the day getting your little report card like Oh, I got below average I got an F in category. I got an F in creative amazing. So yeah you can analyze different areas

Dave S 0:14
you don’t have your parents looking at you it’s just yes you

Amanda 0:18
yes you all by your lonesome self going okay, well, I got an app, but no one’s telling me how to make it better.

Dave S 0:23
That was Amanda Robinson describing how to analyze your Facebook ads report. Time to clear the air on Facebook. Welcome to today’s session of the marketing podcast.

Unknown Speaker 0:33
This is outdoors online co the marketing podcast that helps you elevate your business through online marketing master sessions. Join Dave each week as he helps you grow your online influence via interviews with leading entrepreneurs from around the world.

Dave S 0:50
Amanda Robson, the digital gal and Facebook Guru is on to share her best tips on growing your brand through Facebook ads. We find out what four main steps are to win at Facebook. Talk about a cold versus a warm lead and describe how you can get started for just $5 a day. Tons of tons of content too much to slow us down. So we’re just gonna jump right into it. Turn up the earbuds enjoy today’s episode with Amanda Robertson from the digital gal.com. How’s it going, Amanda?

Amanda 1:23
Hi, Dave, thank you so much for having me.

Dave S 1:25
Yeah, thanks for thanks for making some time. We’re gonna dig into Facebook ads, something we haven’t dug deep into this podcast yet. So I want to get there. But quickly, could you just give us a quick little snippet of your you know, how you got into online marketing and how you brought that into the digital down what you have going now?

Amanda 1:42
Yeah, so overall, I run the digital gal, which is a business helping small businesses and entrepreneurs with their Facebook advertising. So I teach Facebook ads and I run a boot camp training program. I run my swift kick in the ads membership, and I speak I speak profusely on Facebook ads because I am super passionate about it. It wasn’t always that way. I started in traditional marketing and I have a background in direct mail marketing. And I was not in love with that at all I got out of that game altogether, literally quit my job and went and started a water ski and wakeboard school did that for a year before, before the ski wakeboard school needed marketing before I started doing some marketing for that, and then then then it kind of coincided with the timing of when Facebook launched their entire ads platform. So at the same time, I kind of grew with the platform and year over year over year, I just keep learning. I just keep soaking it all in and I’ve I’ve now a massive, massive mental library of useless Facebook ads knowledge, but it has turned into the ability to basically troubleshoot any type of Facebook technical issue and help small businesses make the best use of their very, very limited budget.

Dave S 2:52
Yeah, that is that seems like that’s the challenge. Is that the the change, right? Facebook’s always changing. I mean how, how quickly can you talk about that? You know, if you learn whatever we learned today, is it gonna be gone tomorrow?

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Amanda 3:05
Well, I won’t say it’s gonna be gone, it’s just going to be morphed and rolled into something new. And to put this in context, I mentioned, I do run my boot camp program. But I run that training program every other month. And the reason is that when when someone has taken that training program, within two months, so much has changed that the interface has changed, or they’ve moved to setting where they’ve launched a an entire new template or something along those lines. So what I do is I rerun it again, it’s the same content, but it has all the latest changes, and it just helps those light bulbs click and helps people go, aha, okay, I’m not crazy. It’s not, you know, it’s not me because especially when you’re learning a new skill, it’s really hard to not look at yourself and blame yourself and say, What am I doing wrong? And the reality is, you’re not doing anything wrong. It’s just changing so quickly. The way I look at it or explain it is that it’s more like a Frankenstein system. There are so many ugly branches in our to Facebook ads and they just keep bolting on new features and sometimes those features don’t talk really nicely to each other. So learning how learning how to make it all work for you and learning where you’re not going wrong it’s just Facebook and learning to learning to still grow and achieve results within that is something that it just basically takes a cheerleader in a coach by your side giving you the thumbs up saying good you got this and it’s okay and let me show you how easy it is. That’s cool.

Dave S 4:26
Yeah, this is good I you mentioned the the boot camp I think this is a good way to frame the conversation because we have you know, there’s fly fishing companies listening here outdoor companies people have you know, some have products, some have services, all sorts of different things but in your Facebook, in your boot camp, you kind of have the four sections that creating ads you know, audience and targeting budget and then and then reviewing right and then updating you know, the process, can you I mean would be a good way to frame this. If we had 30 minutes to talk about this. Would you want to dig into a little bit on each and maybe just start us off a little intro

Amanda 5:00
think it makes sense. I mean, the way that I’ve laid it out is the best way that I found to teach someone who is brand new at Facebook advertising to help you. It’s one thing to literally learn how to do ads. That’s great thumbs up. But it’s another thing to actually understand budgets and strategy, how much money should you be putting on it another thing to figure out how to do your targeting, and then it’s another thing to actually improve and make these ads work for you. So if that’s all right, let’s do sort of one at a time dig through and take a little

Dave S 5:27
look at it. So before we get there, can you just give a heads up of where everybody can go if they want to take a look at the bootcamp?

Amanda 5:33
Yeah, if you want to head on over to the digital gal.com, you’ll see all of the bootcamp information right there on the homepage. And if you have any questions at all, honestly, I’m the Facebook ads girl. Facebook is the best place to find me facebook.com slash digital gal and just send me a direct message through my page and I’ll get back to you or my chat, or my chat bot will show you show you all the information that you need is

Dave S 5:54
That’s right. That’s right. Okay, well, let’s start us off. So let’s just go from the beginning. Let’s just say somebody’s listening here. They Maybe they’ve done a little bit of Facebook ads, but they can’t really remember how to do it. How do we how do we start it out? Start out.

Amanda 6:06
So first, I want to preface by saying, if you have a business and you have a Facebook page, you’ve all seen that lovely boost Post button. And most most experts are going to sit here on a very high horse and say, don’t ever use that boost Post button, you’re wasting money. And I’m here to tell you, it’s okay if you use that boost button. But it has a place it’s what I call the training wheels of Facebook ads. And that’s where you get your feet wet. And that’s where you learn. So for example, if you’re learning if you’re learning how to fish, you need to learn what tackle to use, you need to learn what pond deficient you need to learn what lake is going to produce, you need to learn. You need to get comfortable at first before you dive right into the deep end and spend a ton of money. So if you’re boosting posts, that’s okay. It’s the it’s the training wheels of Facebook ads. But week one, what I teach you is how to move off of that boost Post button and actually dive into ads manager and ads manager is Facebook’s very robust platform on how you can run your ads both on Facebook and on Instagram. It’s also the huge reporting platform. And it has so many features built into it to help you it can be a little overwhelming at first. So week when I teach you how to go into ads manager, how to create ads from scratch, and how to make the make the best decisions for what you have to work with at the time and how to put the blinders on and ignore all of the insignificant things you don’t need to stress yourself out over or worry about. So teaching you ads manager, step one, and that includes learning how to learning how to create video ads, image ads, how to put in a headline and a call to action, and all those lovely things that go into actually creating the structure of an ad.

Dave S 7:35
What are the so video is, I think becoming a much bigger player on Facebook. Can you tell is that something where you know when somebody’s creating their their ad? I mean, how often should they be using videos is something that everybody should be thinking about doing?

Amanda 7:50
Let’s put it in perspective. If we look at how content performs on Facebook from an organic level before we even dive into ads, I see a lot of common trends with most businesses with most Small businesses where if most businesses will post images or photos or product images, and those perform, okay, not very well. Once you start posting video clips, they perform much better once you start involve video clips with a person or a human in it, they perform significantly better. And if you’ve got the guts for it, if you go for doing a Facebook Live video, it’s going to crush all of the rest and outperform everything. So in that in that order in that sense when you’re doing your Facebook ads video is a huge huge component of being able to reach reach the right people in a lower cost format and be able to start building your audiences of warm people that you can start retargeting which we can get into a little bit retargeting with your ads which I guess that leads us into my my week to structure which is teaching audiences and targeting.

Dave S 8:50
That’s good. So I and before we get there, I’m just going back I mean, there’s a there’s a ton of stuff obviously we’re not going to get into and that’s why having a you know, resource like you haven’t Some other stuff that’s out there is great. So Instagram is probably something that we’re not going to dig into, but just quickly is Instagram. How does that work? And is it? Are you doing everything through the same back end on your ads manager?

Amanda 9:12
Yeah, that’s correct. So Facebook owns Instagram, they’re one in the same company. They’re just two different branches of it. And when you, when you create ads, using ads manager, you’re creating one ad, you’re using the same imagery, the same video content or whatever, whatever you’re doing to create your ad and you have different choices of placements. So you can place that ad on Facebook, you can also place that exact same ad over on Instagram, you can place it in Instagram or Facebook stories on the audience network, Instant Articles messenger marketplace there are there’s a huge, huge list and that’s another thing that we cover when we learned about creating the ads is learning what selection you can get, you can get lost in the weeds and caught in overwhelm. So to be able to streamline that a little bit for you and help you make the right choices and understand what those choices are where to place your ads where to place your That’s so to speak, and to be able to get the best results.

Dave S 10:03
That’s it. That’s it. And when you’re creating your ad, can you talk a little bit about that? As far as I mean, maybe it’d be good if we take an example of a company. I was just talking to somebody out there who has he basically he’s a he’s a competitive angler. He’s a young, he’s actually pretty young. He’s only 17 years old, but he’s fired up, he sent me an email out and said, how much he loves the show and all this stuff. And he was excited. And you know, maybe we could kind of focus in on him and he sells his own products, Canvas merchandise, right? What if, you know, we had that he has fly fishing, it’s mostly clothing. You know, that ad? What would be just for an example? Potentially, what would the creative look like? Well, what could you do if you weren’t doing a video if you just wanted to put something together?

Amanda 10:45
So heads up trying to keep text out of your imagery also, okay, Facebook has, Facebook has this lovely 20% rule. So if you have more than 20% text in your ad in your image, Facebook may not run the ad whatsoever, or they’re going to charge you more to run it and they let you know that they give you a little warning saying hey, this has a lot of text could cost you more Do you still want to proceed? Even if you say yes it can still get rejected. So you’re in they just don’t perform as well. So you’re literally better off to keep all the text out of the image, keep the image something along along the lines of something people can can see themselves in so rather than just a product sitting on a shelf, see see that product in use in in a way that people can envision themselves literally sitting at you know, Riverfront and using the product. And when it comes to the text in the headline that you’re putting in there. The real key This is like the magic secret sauce I’m about to drop for you right now. It’s about them. It’s not about you. So when you’re writing your ad copy, make sure you’re writing it talking about what it does for them not for you so it’s not I am proud to be launching my latest line, my latest product, it’s not about that it’s about them. You are going to be so excited you are going to have the latest and greatest you are first up to get to try this new product. Purpose is very, very different psychological trigger. And when it comes to the call to action, make sure you have a call to action that does elicit a response out of people or motivate them use language that, that you know that your core audience can relate with. And that’s why it is important. If you are going to have somebody help you with Facebook ads, it is really important to find someone who understands your niche and really understands the language behind it. For example, I’m working with a romance novelist right now. And I don’t, I don’t read romance and learning the learning language and the psychological triggers and what I can and can’t say on Facebook, in the ads, what the hooks are and how steamy I can go versus how tame I have to be. It’s just and depending on what country I’m advertising it to. It also changes how I positioned the ads. So it’s a little bit of a learning curve. But that’s it’s part of the finesse. And what I will say is get out there, do the ads, try them and then continue to make improvements on top of them. So if you don’t nail it on your first go, it’s okay it’s not wasted ad dollars, the dollars that you spend On those ads, or they are attracting attention, and the attention that you’re attracting, builds an audience of people for you that you can then retarget with future ads at usually lower costs.

Dave S 13:11
Nice. Nice and before we move to the next section just quickly, so you have the ad you have the copy, you’ve got the within the creative, you’ve got the photo and then you’ve got your you know, it’s a call to action is that that’s all going to be completed in the first and kind of your first week.

Amanda 13:26
Exactly in the first that’s, that’s week one is building the ad. And that’s, that’s where when people think of doing Facebook ads and learning how to do Facebook ads, that’s usually what they think of is is that step of actually creating the ads. So I spend, you know, week one, our first training is on that I do all my trainings are an hour and a half long, so they’re a little bit longer but they are they’re full in depth. And it does take that long an hour and a half to walk you step by step by step through all of the different options and help you understand in context what what you need to pay attention to, and how you need to build those ads to get used to started on the right foot, Okay,

Dave S 14:00
and let’s just keep it on that track of the product. Let’s say it’s a fishing shirt, a nice shirt like SPF is cool hoodie, you know, and say say that’s the product, it’s so you’ve got some coffee, maybe you’ve got a copy of somebody out there fishing and they’re wearing this amazing shirt on the river. You know, something that’s catching the attention, you’ve got your copy with a call to action. And we won’t go into all that. But let’s just start there. And then let’s go to audience and targeting where do we give you some tips on audience targeting how you do that?

Amanda 14:29
Alright, so I’m going to give you the three buckets that we focus on. So you’ve got your cold audiences, your warm audiences and your hot audiences. And again, lots of advertisers, when they first start out, they just they create an ad and they put it out there and they go, I don’t really know who I want to target. So I’ll just blindly pick and choose some options. And away they go. They’re off to the races. But with that, generally you’re targeting a whole group of people who don’t know you have never met you before and that’s okay. But occasionally what I see is advertisers going out there new businesses going out there and advertising it. product they want to sell to an audience of people who have never met them before. And that is an extremely steep learning curve extremely difficult to do and is going to cost you a lot of money along the way. So what I recommend is a is focusing on your audience and a bit of a different way of looking at your cold audiences, warm audiences and hot audiences, your cold audiences are those first impression. They don’t know you’ve never met them before. And we can build audiences around that. And those types of audiences are the ones we think about where we have a geographical area where we can drop a pin and do a radius or target zip code or postal code, or target by city and target by location, then we have a engender in there. And then we have our detailed targeting, which is all of the wonderful interests and behaviors that Facebook makes available to us. And that’s, that’s again, a very huge superpower of Facebook is having the depth of interests targeting that they do have available that helps us really narrow down what we’re looking for. So for example, you If I was targeting, if we’re talking about competitive angler, I would be targeting, I wouldn’t just be targeting people interested in fishing, what I would be doing is looking at people who have an interest in fly fishing angling, but then I would actually drill it down, drill it down in additional levels. So you can actually filter your audiences by either excluding or narrowing it even further. So I could say people who are interested in fly fishing, and who must also match an interest in and then I would come up with a whole bunch of different brands, different tackle brands, or different clothing brands. And so I would find all of these different interests and markers so to speak, that absolutely align with the people who I know I would do business with. So I am not as familiar with the angling community but when it comes to wakeboarding and waterskiing, what I would do rather than just targeting the generic wakeboarding and waterskiing, it’s going to catch up a whole bunch of people who really are not that interested or not that competitive. So whatever I would rather do is target people with that broad interest at first because I want to cast my net really wide. I’m not just saying that for your podcast, I actually use the cast wide and that’s a good thing.

So I really want to cast that net as wide as I can at first but then I want to start narrowing it down and filtering it down even further. And so I’d say wakeboarding. And waterskiing sure that it and must also match. And I would choose different boat brands, for example, that I know are wakeboarding boats. So I go, you know, Malibu Tiga mastercraft, and I would put those boat brands in there and then I would say and must also match and I’d narrow it even further by saying must match different wakeboard brands. So find different wakeboard brands, and not everything is targetable. On Facebook, how you have to learn this is is trial and error you have to go in I have some other research tools. I’ve been doing this a very long time that I have a little suite of tools that I do use for doing some deep dive research for audience and targeting. But at the at the basic level, you don’t need that you just need to take a little bit of time and do a little bit of a little bit of hunting and gathering a little bit of experimenting by typing in things that you can think of when it comes to your industry.

Dave S 18:06
Could you for example, in this situation, I think there’s a couple people that are, you know, we’re talking about a younger guy, a person who has a business, but there’s some older people that are big names, you know, like, Lance Egan is a big time euro. He’s a big time competitive angler, could you if he had a Facebook page, could you type his name in that sort of thing? Would that work?

Amanda 18:26
It really is a hit and miss and it’s not necessarily dependent. It’s not necessarily built on the size of the audience and following it’s really that’s part of the part of what Facebook holds behind closed doors and doesn’t really tell us how they quantify what options they’ll let us target. But if it is available, you can you can search and find it.

Dave S 18:48
Gotcha. Yeah, because yeah, something isn’t I remember that some some stuffs not out there. Okay. So, so that’s the target. Basically, you want to niche down right just like a business you kind of niche down as far as you can. And you get this ultra guru. I mean, any other tips to know in here? I mean, do you can you go down too far?

Amanda 19:07
Yeah, so I actually just pulled up one of my tools and I’m searching fly fishing. It’s pulled up 50 by other interests related to it, but not all, not all of these are going to be relevant for your audiences. So there’s things like sales, there’s face faceless fly fishing, hard fly fishing. federation of fly fishers fly fishing, saltwater.

Dave S 19:30
Yeah, let’s stop there. So Federation’s fly fishing, I’m not even actually sure those other two but Federation to fly fishes is a huge group. You know, it’s a nonprofit, they do conservation work a really cool group. So that might not be the best fit. But But I guess if we’re talking about this competitive thing, but that is that you know, that’s what that one is.

Amanda 19:52
Exactly. So if you have someone like me, who is not as familiar with this industry, and you’re paying me to do your Facebook ads, and I’m doing all this research, I might look at these things go, Oh, that makes sense. Yeah, I’ll add that in, well target that too. And it could, it could be completely off to who you actually want to target. So that’s why it really helps you as the business owner to be able to take the time to either go through this yourself or to partner with somebody and do it together and dig and dig deep because the targeting is so important to your ads. Now to to put this in more context. So this is this is just cold targeting that we talked about. And that’s reaching people who have never met you before. This is how you can make your first impression, your first introduction and that first impression should not be Hey, buy my product. That first impression should be Hey, look at this fish. It should be something that makes your your target audience go Whoa, or like the applause like Yeah, man, that was awesome. Suddenly, along those those lines, and then what we have is our warm audience. So our warm audience of people are the people that we can retarget with additional advertising that then starts to walk through through the funnel and I hate the word funnel. I like to call it an ecosystem but to walk them through the steps. So getting them closer to getting them onto your website or getting them to watch one of your videos for a portion of time getting them who your warm audience is, or people who you who have already shown some kind of interest. Those can be people who have viewed your videos, people who’ve been to your website, people who have engaged with your Facebook page or engage with your Instagram profile. Those are examples of people who are a warm audience. And then we have a hot audience, which are people who are ready to buy you’ve already been serving these people content, they’ve been engaging, they’ve been interacting, they have been watching what you do, they’ve been watching your equipment, they’ve been watching your videos with all of your equipment in it. And now they’re at the point where Oh, yeah, I could really use that right now. Or it’s, it’s this is the current season, I could really use this. Then you serve your sales ads to your hot audience, and your hot audience or people who have already been to your website or who are on your email marketing list or who have shown other other indicators of being highly engaged. So if you were Rather than serve that sales ad right to that huge net that we cast earlier with the cold audience and the very broad targeting, if you’re trying to get those folks to buy, it’s very difficult. But if you serve out stages of content and retarget, and remarket to these people, then by the time you have a product that you’re ready to put out there, or you’re ready to, you know, bring attention on to your product for that sales cycle. Then you have a hot audience of people who are ready, just ready and waiting to be buying that product. You just have to put the ad right in front of them. And there you go.

Dave S 22:30
And let’s dig into

Amanda 22:31
I make it sound easy.

Dave S 22:32
Yeah, no, no, it’s no I know, it is. It’s I remember, like I said, a couple years ago, I took a course I mean, it was a it was a huge court. It was almost it was actually too much. You know, it was like just overload. But let’s dig into the Facebook. I want to talk about the pixel, right, because you got the Facebook, on your website, I mean, and then also just you’re talking about the warm and hot audiences and how you track these people can you go into if somebody didn’t know anything about the pixel and kind of tracking Can you describe how they get started there?

Amanda 23:00
Your facebook pixel, let me tell you what it is first and then and then how you would be using that your facebook pixel is a tiny little snippet of code. In other words, it’s just a little string of text. And it goes on your website goes into the header of your website. And what that little string of text does is it tracks visitors that come to your website and reports back to Facebook and says, Hey, we have visitors over here who also have a Facebook account. And you can put them on to an audience of people and retarget them. Or it can just report on basic Facebook or basic website activity from your Facebook users. So what you would use that for is if you are sending people to your website from Facebook, so say you have an ad running and you’re sending people from Facebook over to your website, you want to know that they actually arrived on your website, then you want to know what pages that they’re looking at on your site. And then you want to be able to say, Okay, if they didn’t make a purchase, or if they didn’t download that PDF, or whatever you’ve sent them over to your website for at a later date. You can create another ad and you can retarget those exact same people who are on your Your website. So it’s a very, very valuable audience. It’s a very valuable warm audience. It plays a big key role in moving people through your through your funnel and system. And it you can go completely geeky off the deep end here with it if you wanted to, you can really customize what Facebook is tracking and measuring. So for example, if you have items that you are selling, you can customize how the pixels on your site so that you can track anyone who adds an item to cart anyone who checks out and makes a purchase the value of that purchase and report all that information back to Facebook. So you can connect the dots on your return on adspend. And then on top of that, when it comes to running your ads, if you have your pixel living on your site, Facebook is better able to optimize how those ads are delivering to the people within the audience that you chose to find the people who are the most likely to take the desired action you’re asking for it. So if you’re asking for a purchase, Facebook will optimize that ad to go and find more people who are most likely to make a purchase but it If you don’t have the pixel on your website, Facebook can’t optimize for purchase, because it has no idea what a purchase actually looks like on your site. So that doesn’t have a way to track or have a volume of data and information to say, Oh, this is working, or Oh, this isn’t working, we need to start serving the ads to a different segment of this audience. Oh,

Dave S 25:17
yeah. That’s there’s a there’s a ton to dig into there. For sure. That’s, that’s a good I mean, I guess that’s a good primer. And, and like we said, we can go deeper. You know, if folks want to go deeper with it, I guess one question I did have on so you have the pixel on your website? And then what about the other warm and hot audiences just going through the face say say they just click your Facebook or do other things but never go to your website? Is there a way you know, how are you tracking those those leads?

Amanda 25:45
So So, business owners, what I would normally recommend to focus on when you’re first starting out is you want to first increase the amount of people that you’re reaching, and increase your engagement and video views. So if I can give you those three things that you need to know On increase your reach, increase your engagement, increase your video views. The rationale behind that is those are your cold audiences generally. And then from there we want to start retargeting. So then once we have once we put the energy and effort into getting people to engage when an engagement is a like a click a comment or a share. So if you’re putting out some pretty awesome scroll, stopping images, you’re going to get a lot of likes from your target audience. And that’s an engagement, we want to grow those numbers. Once you have lots of people engaging, we can retarget those people with additional ads that are now trying to ask them to get off of Facebook and go to your website. So out of that group of people who have engaged when you serve an ad to them, asking them to go to the website, a portion of them are going to do that. So now we’re starting to grow your website visitors audience, we’re starting to grow that and increase your warm audience. And then over time, then we’re going to start serving them some sales content, we want them we want them to commit to a purchase. And then over time, you’re going to have a number of people who have actually completed a purchase or have done a purchase and checked out with their email address. So now you have a group of email address. You can then take that that list and upload that back into Facebook as a customer audience. And then you can retarget customers. Or you can use that data to now go and make a look alike audience of people who are very similar to that. So now we’re Facebook is going to make a look alike, which is a cold audience. We’re starting to cycle all over again, a cold audience of people, but it’s based on the digital data that you are providing to Facebook to say these people, these email addresses, these are my people. Go find me more people just like this. So the more you The more you do your Facebook ads, the more data you have, the more you’re growing your audiences, the more you’re growing your warm audiences. And the more you have a larger digital footprint to be able to leverage and retarget and use for creating look alikes. So this whole system is kind of like a snowball that grows momentum. So I have a lot of businesses that have come to me and they say Facebook ads don’t work for me. Yeah. And a lot of the time I find that’s because they dove in through a couple hundred dollars down on an ad ran it for a week. And then didn’t know how to read the results and really didn’t get any sales out of it. So in their minds, they shut down and say, well, it just didn’t work. And that’s because they’re trying to go from zero to 100 from a cold audience to a sale and they did not get the results they were looking for. Well, you need to build that momentum. We’ve got to get that ball rolling somehow. So you start by focusing on getting increasing your reach, engagement and video views. Now, if a month in those numbers haven’t been budging, then we’re going to say Facebook ads are maybe not working. But those are the first numbers you need to get to budge and once you get those growing and get momentum rolling with that fantastic, okay, now we’ve achieved a goal because now we have earned attention span that we can now retarget and that earned attention span is yours for 365 days for your video view and engaged audiences. For your website visitors it’s only 180 days you only have six months to retarget your website visitors so there’s a lot more urgency there to be able to put ads in ADS dollars and keep that momentum rolling. But as you start to build that momentum You have a year to retarget these people. And so we keep growing that list and growing that list. And then we start focusing on getting those folks to take additional actions, whether it’s going to your website, signing up for a webinar, getting a PDF download, we just want them to take a higher level of commitment. And that higher level of commitment is usually exchanging a piece of their personal information such as, give me your email address, I’ll give you this awesome thing. Great. And that’s an exchange of value. And that is good enough. And then we get to the point where Okay, now we want to make a sale and that’s an exchange of dollars. That’s a much higher commitment. And in my for a lot of things that I work on that I do for myself for building my audiences, my cold, warm and hot audiences. I still consider a lot of people who have made a purchase from me as a warm audience. They’re not a hot audience yet because I have different tiers of different levels of what you can purchase. So just the fact that if they’ve bought a low cost, very low barrier entry item, they have opened their wallet and they have exchanged monetary value which shows me that, okay, you’re willing to spend money on this product or on this learning on this education that tells me you are now qualified, you are an ideal target audience, for me to be able to serve additional ads to at a higher level and then move you through the scale. But if you haven’t opened your wallet and exchange any any dollar value, then you just you can just go hang out on my, on my, on my audiences where you know, there’s Yeah, sure I share lots of value in good content, but I’m not doubling down and focusing on how I can help that group of people. I’m focusing on the people who are spending dollars with me and how can I help that group of people increase and get better and just by the virtue of doing what I do, and helping people and making their businesses businesses successful, it’s attracting more people and increasing my digital footprint increasing my reach increasing everything so it’s a snowball, and yes, it is sensitive, you take your foot off the gas pedal, stop spending for a month, it all falls down. So it is important to have a strategy in place and understand And how much budget you are willing to commit to that strategy. And to be able to spend on an ongoing basis, it doesn’t have to be, you don’t have to have a daily spend, you don’t have to be investing thousands of dollars into Facebook ads. But I would much rather see you as a small business or a small business owner, spend a budget of anywhere from $100 to $500 a month on a regular basis. Then, you know, busting on ceiling, I have got an item I have to sell, you know, let me throw $500 on this ad for one week and see where it’s going to go. I’d much rather see you spread that across the entire month and focus on high quality content on growing your digital footprint, reaching more people getting more video views getting more engagements. Yeah,

Dave S 31:39
that’s that’s amazing. So, and one thing I was just thinking about there, I know in the past, in my experience, there’s this thing where, you know, you could have your campaign going and everything’s going great and boom, boom, and then you keep adding Money, money, money to a certain point it kind of starts dipping off, right that you can’t just keep, you know, put in a million dollars and get the same return. He talked about what that’s all about

Amanda 32:02
it that’s depending on the type of business and the nature of the business, you can hit the point where you exhaust your audience. So depending on the size of the audience, you might have a very small niche. And there might be only so many people within that niche that you can reach with your content. And the quality of the content is also going to impact those those costs. So you, you may have an ad that you’ve been running $5 a day for several weeks, and it’s been performing quite well. But then it gets to the point where you’ve reached the depth of that audience. It’s starting to recycle, your impressions are starting to climb. So the number of times that the same people are seeing the same ad is starting to increase. They’re seeing it over and over and over again. You’re exhausting that audience. So the responses are going to be decreasing, and your ad costs are going to be increasing. Or you might have had the best product in the world. And it was amazing, and it was amazing. Everybody needs this and everybody in your industry needs this and you’ve been selling like hotcakes, but then you hit the end of the road where everyone who needs this has already bought it. And they’re looking for something new. So you can get to the point where your ads just stop performing exceptionally well and then they start to become a little more mediocre. At that point, it’s time to either change up your offer or change up your ad creative, you can offer the exact same thing and just change change how you’re wording it and change the image behind it so that people are not getting tired of being hit with the same thing over and over.

Dave S 33:24
And you split, you’re able to split test ad creatives like the either the copy or the photo the picture.

Amanda 33:32
You can you can split test anything. Yes, you can. You can split test your images and creative you can split test the audiences that you’re targeting. You can split test your headlines, your call to actions, everything and Facebook has made this easier for you as well. So now when you go to create an ad, depending on which objective you’re choosing to target, you have the option right at the ad level when you go to upload your creative and putting your headline and copy you have the option to add additional variation Right there. So you can say add another headline and type in another headline variation, add another headline. And what Facebook will do is dynamically serve out different headlines to different segments of your audience to see which one is getting getting the best results. And then it will start heavy delivering the higher performing ones to your audience. Now, keep in mind, if you are testing ad creative there, the more variations of creative you have, the more the more budget, you need to support this actually, with any AV test, you need to have the budget to support it. So if you’re going to AB test something and you’re only you only have $20 that you’re putting on it, I don’t recommend that I say focus that energy and those dollars into one thing concentrated very well. If you have $500, and you want to split test, let’s go for it. Because what Facebook means is a minimum of 500 impressions. And what that is, is number that the the ad being shown at minimum 500 times could be shown 500 times to 200 people, but the ad has to be shown a minimum of 500 times for Facebook to gather enough data to be able to Give you a quality score to say yes, this ad is performing well or no, this ad is not performing well, it also needs that amount of data to optimize the ads. And when we say optimizing, it’s it’s kind of like when you first start doing the ad, Facebook is kind of out there with a blindfold to the audience that you’re saying, okay, go target those people over there. Facebook kind of has the blindfold on is just blindly like walking in the direction you told them to avoid, okay, start serving out the ad, the more people who are engaging, the more that blindfold is coming off, they can see exactly who you’re trying to go after. And can better optimize those ads. So if you have too small of a budget, you’re spreading yourself way too thin. Facebook doesn’t have enough data enough people can reach to optimize it. So if you had one ad creative, and you were spending $100, it can it can achieve that in a short period of time. If you have one ad or you have 20 different versions of an ad you come at it with $100 each of those ads is just getting a small trickle of that budget and is not reaching 500 impressions to be able to properly optimize you’re spreading your ad dollars. Way too thin.

Dave S 36:00
sense. Yeah, that makes sense. And that seems like if you take that exam example, again, fly fishing, it is a small niche. So that’s something you’d have to be aware of is that, yeah, you could probably spread that out pretty quick. But let’s, let’s keep on that. You know, and I guess we’ve talked a little bit about the budget. So you mentioned you probably $100 at least a month, you know, you probably don’t want to go too much lower than that. which is roughly like you said, I mean, if you do $5 a day, you know, or somewhere in that range, basically, you’re probably going to be okay to get started. And once you go so so things are let’s see, I mean, how do you know if things are going well, I guess maybe answer that quickly. How so you What are you looking at in this good brings us into the review and the analysis? What is what’s a good ad look like? What’s it look like when you’re not doing a good job?

Amanda 36:45
When you when you do more than one as of when you first run your ads. Facebook doesn’t even know what’s good or not for your for your ads. You can only compare yourself to yourself, you can’t compare yourself to another business even if they’re in the same industry. So you might have a neighboring business right? right down the street and their ads are performing like, like crazy. And yours are just not. But you can’t compare yourself apples to apples over the other business, there’s so much more in behind it, whether it be the other business has had their their website domain for so much longer and they send high quality traffic over there and the traffic, there’s no bounce rate on their page, their page loads instantly. It’s better positioned for sales, and they make more sales and more data, more data for Facebook, more momentum, etc. So you can’t compare yourself apples to apples against the business down the street. But you can’t compare yourself to your own results. So when it comes to doing that, you have to spend some ad dollars just to start just to give yourself a baseline once you have an understanding. So again, example rolling back to the romance novelist that I’m working with. You know, I don’t I don’t know what the average cost per click is on on buying a romance novel. Not Not my my usual thing that I see. But now we’ve been running some ad dollars through there and now I know that okay for our cold audiences. I understand What our average cost per click is for warm audiences, I understand what our average cost per click is. So that I can, I can start to create better content to try and beat those numbers. And when it comes to analyzing those numbers, what you’re looking for Facebook actually gives you a quality, it gives you an ad relevance diagnostic score, which is really freaking fancy way of saying, it gives you a thumbs up or thumbs down. So if you’re in your in your ads manager, and you drill down all the way to the ad level for the ad that you want to look at, Facebook will give you three different scores. One is a quality score. So it tells you the quality of the ad, whether it was below average, average or above average. And it gives you an engagement score, same below average or above. And it gives you a conversion score. So of the action you’re asking people to take Do you want them to watch your videos? Are you trying to get them to purchase on your site? Are you trying to get them to click to get to your website? So what the objective was our people converting are they doing that desired action so that it’ll give you again, below average or Above ranking for how well people are converting on that ad. So when you look at those three different categories, you get this little report card, and it really does feel, it really does feel like back in the day getting your little report card. I’m like, Oh, I got below average, I got an F in this category. I got an F in creative, amazing. So yeah, you can analyze

Dave S 39:19
your errors. You don’t have your parents looking at you. It’s just Yes, you.

Amanda 39:24
Yes, you all by your lonesome self going, Okay, well, I got an app, but no one’s telling me how to make it better. And so now what you can do with that information is look at that. And by the way, when it gives you your ranking above or below average or above average, it is relative to the the is comparing you to other advertisers who are also targeting the exact same audience. So it’s not comparing you to all of Facebook. It’s comparing you to the other advertisers who are also bidding on the on the people in your audience. So it keeps it a little more a little more high quality. I guess you could say you So you can see if you had, if you have above average scores across the board and all of those. Basically, it’s saying that you’re getting your you’re spending your ad dollars as efficiently as you possibly can, you’re giving the right content to the right people. If you have below average in any of those, then it’s giving you a little indicator that Oh, hey, maybe maybe your ad creative isn’t as good as it could be. But you’re still getting lots of engagement and lots of conversions. So don’t worry too much about it. But if you have below average hitting and all those categories, stop, drop and roll, just stops, stop spending, stop spending the dollars and re rejigged what you’re doing, and then go back in and try again. So that’s quite helpful.

Dave S 40:41
How long do you Wait, how long should you wait? Give it How much time do you give it before you can read kind of fix things?

Amanda 40:49
It depends on how much you’re spending. So again, if you’re spending 25 $50 on on quote, unquote boosting a post, which again, it’s okay to do that. It’s okay to take if you have a post that’s performing relatively well. Compared to all of your other posts on your page, go and put some ad dollars behind it. That is a fantastic indicator of content people want to consume. Just make sure it doesn’t have more than 20% text in it before you do that.

Dave S 41:09
The big question is, I guess the bigger one was, how is it working? You know? And how long do you let it run? You? You mentioned a month I say, let’s take this exam. So let’s just say we’re doing $100. Let’s say we’re doing $5 a day, $150 a month, somewhere in that range? How long do you have to let that roll before you can actually? Or what are the impression numbers you need before you can start knowing if you’re doing well.

Amanda 41:31
So it’s definitely tied to how much budget you’re spending. So if you’re spending $5 a day, and it takes, you know, four or five days to reach that 500 impressions, then it’ll take you about four or five days to really get a better understanding of if the ads working or not. If you’re contacting if you’re spending, you know, $100 a day you’re going to know within a couple hours if the ad is performing or not. So it really is relative to how much you’re how much you’re spending.

Dave S 41:54
So it’s the impressions. It’s basically at once. Yeah, you got to get the you need the 500 impressions. That’s The big number

Amanda 42:01
500 impressions Yeah, but then you’re also going to be able to tell just relative to how well your other content performs, you’ve really like I said, you need to get some spend in there to get a baseline. And then you need to be able to use that to compare to your other ads and say, Well, last time I did a video ad, it got, I got, you know, this many through plays, which is a 15 second play at two cents per through play. And then this next time I ran a video ad campaign, it’s coming in at five cents per through play, which is more, significantly more in the world of Facebook ads. So then it makes you sit back and go, Okay, well, five cents of through play isn’t really that bad. No, it’s it’s worth it for me. So you let that ad continue to run and then the next time you go to run it, you compare the two and say, Well, what did I do in that first one that worked better than the second one, and then you just make improvements. Now if you have a video ad that you put together and you know, the first one was getting two cents per through play 15 second play, and then you start running it and you’re coming in at 15 cents per through play. Well, now you have a baseline of what you But what you achieved before and now you’re looking at this one going, whoo, that’s, that’s not working, that’s not good. And I typically see that when people try to jam logos into the first three seconds of a video. Heads up, people are not making it past, getting past six seconds is a huge win. Like give yourself a high five if people are watching more than six seconds of your video, Facebook is optimizing to get people to watch 15 seconds or more of your video. And really nobody’s making it to completion. I just did in my just this last week where we wrapped up the this last run of the boot camp. Looking at reporting and optimizing I was just showing an example where where one video had 14,000 people watch three seconds or more. And by the time I made to 100% completion, when we’re looking at the reports only 400 people made it to 100% completion. But in my world, I don’t care because I just need people to make it over that finish line of either three seconds 10 seconds or 15 seconds because I can retarget people based on those amounts. Watch time. So if I get people past the 15 second mark, I am happy girl so that it’s crucial. So that’s why I’m not jamming a logo in the first three seconds because that is such crucial, crucial attention span time that you don’t have to waste. So you’ll learn over time by running ads and comparing them against your previous results. You learn very, very quickly what’s working what’s not and how to reject but if you have your your own blinders on and you’re not actually looking back at the results, and putting an effort into improving, then you’re just gonna get caught in this vortex of flushing your money down the Facebook ads drain and not making any improvements and not growing your audience and not making any sales down the road. So then you’re gonna fall into that category of Facebook ads don’t work for you, but just by looking at the results you can really really see some huge areas for improvement.

Dave S 44:47
That’s perfect. All right, Amanda, I think we’re gonna have to leave it there and maybe check back the Devon live we did go deeper via we skimmed the surface of this but it was awesome. So this is a good intro. So the digital gal.com If they want to find you what you have going to your boot camp.

Amanda 45:03
Yep. So if you want to learn how to do Facebook ads, if all of this is kind of appealing to your senses, I highly encourage you to check out the Facebook has four week boot camp. It’s just wrapped up this week, but we reboot again in September. You can get in now and watch all four replays or you can sign up for the September run. We teach you week one how to create your ads using ads manager getting beyond the boost button. Week two I teach you audiences and targeting how to go and find your target audience and how to make those warm, cold and hot audiences. Week Three I teach you budgets and strategy I teach you how much money you should be spending on your ads realistically for a small business and, and how to build a strategy to be able to reach those right people. And then week four, I teach you how to go back you go into ads manager look at the results that are happening and figure out how you can make improvements to make your ads even better. So it’s a it’s a full well rounded start to finish. Look at how you can run Facebook ads as a small business and it runs across four weeks. It’s a ton of information. That I jam at you right away. But it’s once you are in the boot camp, you’re in it for life, and I rerun it every other month. That’s cool. So all the changes that happen, you have the opportunity to get in and continue to learn and grow as Facebook’s platform continues to grow and expand, pretty

Dave S 46:15
cool. So you’re in the group. And then if somebody takes that say they go through it, they you know, they got all the content, once they’re going how much time if they were just doing all their ads on their on their own? Would they need to put in per se per week to have an efficient campaign?

Amanda 46:32
I don’t necessarily know timewise. Because it definitely depends on how much how much resources and time you do have to dedicate into it. But I would say overall, it is going to take you roughly about three months of running some ads, putting the effort in before you really start to see an impact a large, measurable impact on your efforts. So month one, you’re in learning phase month, two, you finally you’re starting to get some results and figure out how this is working. And you’re starting to make improvements and by month three, then you’re going okay. All right, I see how this works. I get it now.

Dave S 47:05
That’s it. That’s it. Awesome. All right, Amanda Well, I appreciate you coming on and sharing your wisdom and everything we’ll keep in touch with you and check back with the soon.

Today’s takeaway, do your homework and serve and add to the people that want your message. That’s that’s the beauty of Facebook. You know, it’s, it’s just the best way to know exactly who you’re targeting. So so go deep and do your research and make some make some good stuff produce something valuable to a person who wants it. A little insider tip as well. I want to give a shout out. Amanda has a $500 Facebook ads course which covers everything you need to know. But if you sign up for the $50 per month Facebook membership group she has you actually get the entire course for free. So that might be a good way to do if you want to save some money. Get into that. 50 bucks, take the entire course and then cancel after the first month. Amanda won’t hold it against you have to do that. And I think that’s pretty valuable. So it’s also a good chance, take a minute and just leave a review, even if it’s just a star would be awesome to hear how we’re doing. I can’t wait to connect with you on the next show and help you with what you’re struggling with. If you get a chance, you can reply back, send an email to Dave at outdoors online Co. And let me know I’d love to hear if there’s somebody out there listening that could use some help. All right. Howdy.

unknown speaker…. 48:37
Thanks for joining us today and for your support of the marketing podcast. If you found this podcast helpful, please share it with one other person and leave a rating and review on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to the show.

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“If i get people past the 15 second mark, I’m a happy girl” 

-Amanda Robinson

Conclusion with Amanda Robinson

Facebook Ads expert, Amanda Robinson, breaks down the 4 steps to creating Facebook ads that save you money.  We talk how to get started with your Facebook pixel and then how to take a cold to a warm and then serve a hot audience.   Amanda shares some tips on analyzing your ads so you know how to adjust and improve as you go.