Episode 387 | Before You Run Any Facebook Ads, Listen to This

Mike: In this episode of Startups for the Rest of Us I’m gonna be talking about Mojca Mars about the foundational work you need to do before even getting started with Facebook Ads. This is Startups for the Rest of Us episode 387.

Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us–the podcast that helps developers, designers, and entrepreneurs be awesome at building, launching, and growing software products, whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Mike.

Mojca: I’m Mojca.

Mike: We’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. How are you doing this week?

Mojca: I’m doing very well this week.

Mike: You just got back from an extended vacation, didn’t you?

Mojca: Oh, yeah. I did. It was actually a seven-day vacation. I wish it was a little bit longer but the good thing about it is that I turned off everything. I turned off my phone, I wasn’t on my laptop, and I was completely offline, aside from my Kindle, but that was about it and it felt amazing.

Mike: I used to own a cottage up in the Adirondack Mountains up in upstate New York and it did not have electricity or running water. I noticed that when I went up there–because I just couldn’t charge my phone or anything, I just left it off–just the feeling of being that far disconnected. You couldn’t even hear the refrigerator hum because there was not a refrigerator. It was just very relaxing. I don’t know if you found something with like turning off your phone for that long.

Mojca: Yeah. I was at the beach actually and it felt so good not having my phone and not checking my notifications every two seconds. My brain started to breathe again.

Mike: Yeah. It’s almost like having a giant reset button for your brain.

Mojca: Oh, yeah. It was so good.

Mike: That’s awesome. Today I wanna have you on the show because you are a Facebook Ads Expert and you’re also an Author, a Public Speaker. You spoke in a Double Your Freelancing Conference, you spoke in a FemtoConf, you spoke in a MicroConf Europe this past year, and you’re also speaking at MicroConf in Vegas this coming Spring in about five or six weeks.

I wanted to have you on the show and have you talk a little bit about Facebook Ads because it’s something that we get asked about but I wouldn’t say that we have nearly the level of knowledge that you do so I think that you could definitely shed some light on the topic for us and for the listeners.

Mojca: Yeah. I would love to do that. Yeah.

Mike: Aside from the Facebook Ads Expert, Author, Public Speaker like leave anything out that was a major.

Mojca: Not really, just maybe an interesting story that I actually got fired from my first job.

Mike: Oh.

Mojca: Yeah. That’s how I got into the business of Facebook Ads.

Mike: I was gonna say I hope it wasn’t a Facebook Ads job that you got fired from.

Mojca: It wasn’t a Facebook Ads job, I was a copywriter at an advertising agency. It was similar but not the same. But the thing is that I started to notice that all of our clients were asking about social media—Facebook—and our agency, they weren’t interested in that. We started to drift apart and they fired me. That’s how I got into the business.

Mike: You kind of fell into it, it wasn’t like you actively sought it out and decided, “Hey, I’m gonna do this.”

Mojca: I was thinking about it for a while. I was always saying, “I’m gradually going to make that transfer or that change and gradually go from being employed to working for myself.” But then I got fired and I said, “Okay, this is my chance.”

Mike: Not everything kind of goes exactly as planned anyway. I think there’s a lot of people who listen to this show who’ve kind of just fallen into whatever it is that they got into. I don’t think that that’s necessarily uncommon but it’s interesting that you took that opportunity or took that—I don’t wanna say low point in your career—but like that native experience and turned it around into a greatly positive one.

Mojca: Exactly, yeah. Looking back now, that kick-in-the-butt was the best thing that happened to me.

Mike: Awesome. I wanted to talk to you today specifically about setting up a foundation for how you’re going to run Facebook Ads. We’ve talked a little bit about this before the show about what is it that people need to know, what common mistakes they make. I wanted to walk through what you feel is the foundational things that people need to put into place before they even start running Facebook Ads because I think it’s very easy to get wrapped up in all the things that you need to do in order to set up a Facebook Ads account but not think about the fundamental framework or structures that you need to have in place to actually manage an advertising campaign using those tools that they provided. I wanted to talk through those and just figure out what exactly it is that people need to do first.

Mojca: Yeah. You are totally right about that. I think that when a person decides to use or to start experimenting with Facebook advertising, they all just say, “Okay, I have a product to sell, what can I do now? How can I sell this product with Facebook?” But they don’t think about the other things that you need to have updated or you need to have ready to go when you start advertising.

Mike: Right. I think the first one that you had thrown out there was a lead magnet. I think this is something that most people—myself included—kind of put at the end of the list. But we’re gonna talk about that first because it’s almost like the most important thing that the have to have in place.

Mojca: Oh yeah, absolutely. I think it’s the most underestimated marketing asset when it comes to your Facebook advertising.

Mike: Let’s talk about the lead magnet itself. When you’re creating these Facebook Ads, what forms can a lead magnet take? What sorts of things should you be advertising to people in order to move them through that sales funnel using a Facebook Ad?

Mojca: Yeah. It should be something that’s very valuable and just easy to consume so you don’t want a very long ebook, let’s say, that you offer for free. You want it to be like a snackable PDF, a cheat sheet, or maybe, let’s say, a chapter of your ebook, let’s say just a free chapter, a couple of pages, something that’s easily consumable. Once they download it, they can browse through it very quickly and get the sense of your business, of your expertise, of what do you do, and so on.

Also, one good lead magnet is, for example, an email course or a webinar. Webinars do really, really well with Facebook Ads. If you, let’s say, sell services or a software and you can have a webinar on that topic explaining something your software does, or not your software but maybe just talking about your expertise and what your software, some problem that it solves, that’s a very good start. Having a webinar on that topic is a great start.

Mike: There’s two things that I kind of wanna unpack that you just said. The first one was like a full book is not a good idea. Why is that? It seems to me like the more value you’re giving them upfront, isn’t that better?

Mojca: With a lead magnet, you want that lead magnet to be very snackable. Usually, we advertise the lead magnet to someone that has visited our webpage for the first time. We want to offer them something for free but we don’t want to overwhelm them with different possibilities and we want them to get that value. Let’s say you had someone does visit your webpage and soon after, he or she sees a Facebook Ad for your lead magnet. If it’s the ebook, they won’t go through that ebook, they won’t read it through if it’s a 50 page long ebook because they don’t know you at the moment. They will download it but that lead is not going to be very qualified so you want to offer a very snackable asset like a PDF so they would go through it and they will be interested in seeing more of that.

Mike: I got it. That’s like actually a very subtle difference, I think because like an ebook for example, they might download it and according to Facebook would be a conversion but later on I guess moving them through your sales funnel, they’re gonna end up to be a poor converting prospect because they just didn’t read it.

Mojca: Exactly. I think that’s one of the aspects that a lot of marketers are forgetting about so you don’t want to just collect leads, you want to get quality leads, someone that you can convert at the end.

Mike: Excellent. It’s not even just like how much value you are supplying to them, it is the appropriate amount of value at the stage of the relationship that you’re in.

Mojca: Exactly. That’s a perfect description.

Mike: Perfect. The other thing that you said was that email courses and webinars do really well. Could you unpack that a little bit? Why is it that those do so well?

Mojca: For webinars specifically, it let’s you connect with your target audience in a totally different way. They see your face, they get to know you personally, so to speak. That’s a good connection to establish with your target audience. You want them to connect with you on a personal level because they would be easier to convert.

I’ve done this for such a long time so I have a ton of webinars and I do them very regularly. I see that change in my target audience. Once I started doing webinars, I started collecting a lot more leads because people were drawn to me and were drawn to my personality and my content and they wanted to get advice from me. That really helped with all of the other marketing aspects. The people that came to my webinars came to another webinar that I had later on and they just stuck to it. That was a really big difference, just connecting with them on a totally different level.

Mike: Does that impact the initial conversion rate or you’re really referring to the total conversion rate from first touch to end when you’re hopefully making a sale? Obviously, those two things are different but it goes back to what I just asked about delivering the appropriate amount of value based on the stage of the relationship. Is it localized or is it really like a global improvement?

Mojca: It works both ways. People are really easy to convert and come to webinars. When they see an ad for a webinar, they usually sign up very quickly and they also come to the webinar. That conversion is really, really easy.

The people that come to the webinars are more likely to purchase. That happened to me time and time again. People that actually attended and came to my webinars, they were so easy to convert at the end because we had a totally different relationship than someone that just downloaded a lead magnet and read through it and that was it.

Mike: Awesome. I think it absolutely has a much bigger factor associated with that. Anything with either advertising or demos. I found that demos for example convert really, really well just because there’s that one on one interaction, but I think even in a webinar, you can get a good sense from somebody whether or not they are selling snake oil versus actually committed to solving whatever the problem happens to be.

Mojca: That’s a good point. I worked with a lot of software companies and demos, they work amazing. We frequently have webinars that are just pretty much live demos and people sign up to that and people convert at the end. At the end of a demo, we offer let’s say, a free trial or a special price for the software and they convert really, really well.

Mike: Now that you’ve got an idea for lead magnet or you’ve gotten one developed, how do you go about promoting that on Facebook? Because that obviously lead the next step like you have to have that asset first and then once you have that, then you have to promote it whether it’s through retargeting audience or to a completely new audience. How do you go about putting it in front of people and finding the right people to do it?

Mojca: You have two different objectives that you can use when it comes to advertising lead magnet. There’s this thing called a Lead Ad, Facebook calls it a Lead Ad. It’s basically a type of ad that lets a user download your lead magnets, PDF preferably, in just a couple of clicks. Facebook collects your email and basically kind of passes it on to you.

The other objective that you can use is more like a traditional ad that is called website conversions. You can choose whatever feels good for you. Lead Ads are very easy to set up so you don’t even need a landing page, you just need that lead magnet and Facebook will take care of the rest.

On the other hand, you have the traditional ads called website conversions. Per my experience, website conversions, when it comes to Lead Ads, tend to work a little bit better although you still need a landing page. The set up takes a little bit longer but it converts a lot better and the leads are more qualified. But anyone listening to this podcast, I do recommend experimenting with both objectives and see what works for you and what type of leads you get from each of these objectives.

Mike: I understand in general why it’s best practice to experiment with those things. But what sorts of things have you seen when you go through and start doing the experimentation? Because you’ve said that the website conversions tend to work better even though the Facebook Lead Ads are easier to set up. What have you seen as a direct result of the experiments?

Mojca: With traditional ads, with website conversions, the cost per lead was a bit higher but the quality of those leads was definitely better than the leads that we collected through Lead Ads. Maybe that has something to do with just how easy it is to collect leads with Lead Ads so a lot of people just collect those two buttons and download the lead magnet and you have their email. Just people really going to the landing page where you have your lead magnet described for example, that’s a bit harder to do. I think, that’s where most quality leads come from.

Mike: Now that we’ve kind of gotten through the lead magnet itself and talk a little bit about how to promote them inside of Facebook, the next step is taking a look at the email sequences that you need to setup because obviously, once somebody has downloaded the lead magnet, you want to be able to email them. Obviously, your Facebook is gathering their email address. Then the next step is to put them in some sort of email campaign. What sorts of things should people pay attention to there?

Mojca: When it comes to email sequences, I think that like you said, this is definitely one of the things that you do need to have set up before you start advertising because once a person downloads the lead magnet, you want to do something with that lead, not just have it on your email list and that’s it.

Usually, I recommend doing five to seven emails long email sequences that talk about a specific topic that has something to do with the product or a software or a service that you’re going to pitch at the end. Each email sequence that you write has to have some sort of an outcome. You want to reach or you want to achieve a goal at the end. You definitely want to pitch that goal or to pitch something at the end whether that is an ebook, a service, a software.

Mike: Somebody just came to mind as you were talking about pitching the product or service in that email sequence, one thing that I was wondering about was going back to the lead magnets, will a good lead magnet be a video versus a webinar or a demo? Because it almost seems like that’s a way to automate that piece of it without actually being there.

I’ve seen a lot of webinar like automated webinar things and they tend to look very scammy. I’m curious to know whether just like a video hosted it like YouTube, or Wistia, or Vimeo or anything like that. Is that a decent lead magnet or not?

Mojca: I have a love-hate relationship with automated webinars. Like you said, they do look scammy and people recognize that and people tend to move away from that kind of content. What I would recommend is, like you said video demos that aren’t kind of gift wrapped into, “Wow, this is a live demo that we’re doing and everyone knows that it’s not a live demo.” Maybe just say, unpack that into, “This is a video demo that has been pre-recorded, etc., etc.” If you pack it like that and offer video content as a lead magnet, that’s definitely a very good way to go about it especially because video consumption is on the rise and people are watching videos regularly so just doing that is definitely a great way to go.

Mike: I was just trying to think about how to combine the two things without actually being present because automated things, if people are working on product themselves, it will be in present for webinar is not always the easiest thing in the world. Video’s kind of the next best but you’re absolutely right. Everytime I go to one of those automated webinars where they tried to pitch you do something live, it really comes across the wrong way just because you’re using that.

Mojca: Yeah. I think it has an impact on your brand as well. People will look at you in a different way once you do that. Like I said, if I do any demos or anything like that, I pack it in a different way. I don’t say, “Yeah, this is the live demo that we’re doing.” Everyone knows that it’s not. But I just pack it, “Here’s a video con, here’s a video over demo.” I’m not trying to say that it’s live or anything. I’d want to kind of communicate that integrity.

Mike: Okay. Kind of going back to the email sequences, you said pitch your products or your service at the end. Did you mean by the end of the entire series or was there something specific, should your goal for the entire email sequence of five to seven emails be the same at the end of each email or is it wise to kind of divide it up and have different mini goals or something like that along the way? I’m not sure how to get too complicated with it, that’s really what I’m saying.

Mojca: Yeah. I don’t wanna get too complicated with it as well. I think it depends on how well structured your funnels are. Some people have the same goals for every email sequences and some people have mini goals. Some people have two different funnels and two different email sequences for two different target audiences so it all depends on what setup you have.

If you’re just starting out, I do recommend just making it easy on yourself and just have one goal. As your business gets more structured, you can definitely work your way down and just kind of create different funnels and work your way from there.

Mike: I think that’s the best advice; don’t create more complexity just for the sake of creating complexity.

Mojca: Yeah. I did that, I did that once and I regret it.

Mike: I think we all do.

Mojca: My Drip is going crazy with the different funnels and it’s just too complicated and whenever I login, I just get so stressed. It’s my own downfall too.

Mike: Now that we’ve got the lead magnet in place, we’ve got the email sequence set up, what’s the next step? It seems to me like you need to dive into Facebook at some point along the way if you’re gonna get into this Facebook Ads. What’s the first step in setting up Facebook Ads?

Mojca: The absolute first step that you should do is implement a Facebook Pixel to your webpage so you can retarget anyone that visits your webpage. You want to do that as soon as possible so you are collecting all of that data before you launch your first campaign. That is one step that a lot of people just forget to take once they are ready to implement their first campaign they’re like, “Woah, how am I going to retarget people?” The first thing, the absolute first thing is to implement a Facebook Pixel to your webpage and it’s a two minute task so it shouldn’t take you too long and it just has a lot of benefits to it.

Mike: You can just install this on your website even if you are not running the Facebook Ads, you can always just put it there and then go off like create the lead magnet and then email sequence and then come back to this.

Mojca: Oh yeah, absolutely. You can do it right away and maybe come back to it after two months. You don’t need to be creating the campaign immediately after you implement your Facebook Pixel. Actually, the preferred way is not to launch a campaign, especially not a retargeting campaign, immediately after implementing a Facebook Pixel.

Mike: Why is that?

Mojca: The most effective campaign to start with is a retargeted campaign where you are retargeting for example people that are visiting your web page so people that already know what you do. Without a Facebook Pixel implemented to your site and without all of that data collected, you won’t be able to retarget people so you would be stuck with interest targeting and targeting based on different interests and behaviors which is a good approach but definitely not as effective as retargeting.

Mike: Got it. Once you’ve got the Facebook Pixel in place, is there anything especially need to pay attention to when you’re implementing the Facebook Pixel or is it just like you install this one little snippet and everything takes care of itself?

Mojca: You install this one little snippet but you have to install it in the right place.

Mike: Oh, okay.

Mojca: Yeah.

Mike: You really have to follow their guidelines of exactly where it needs to go?

Mojca: Yeah. You need to put it in the head section of your webpage. A lot of businesses do a mistake and implement it into a body section. For example, that Facebook Pixel triggers just on their homepage, not on their whole webpage. Just be careful where you implement it. Facebook has really clear instructions on how to do that. It’s really, really easy. You just have to implement it once in the head section and you’re good to go.

Mike: Awesome. Now that we’ve got the Facebook Pixel in place, what’s the next step? How do you get started setting up who’s gonna get targeted? Assuming the Facebook has been there a little while–should you start with retargeting? Is there a different approach that you should use?

Mojca: If you have your Facebook Pixel implemented for a while, let’s say for a month and it has collected a lot of data from your website visitors, you definitely want to implement a custom audience. Custom audiences is a fancy word of you uploading your email list or just connecting your Facebook Pixel to custom audiences and just build up your retargeted audience, so to speak. That’s definitely the first thing that you should do because custom audiences take a little while to properly populate, it doesn’t take a day but it does take an hour so you want to take care of that before you launch your first campaign.

Mike: This is one of the situations were even though you wanna get it done right away, you wanna be able to allocate that hour to go over and get this taken care of, it could very well take you two, three, five hours, depending on how long it takes Facebook to process things and put things together for you.

Mojca: Yeah. You can actually, as soon as you implement a Facebook Pixel, you can actually create your first custom audience of just retargeted audience of your website visitors, you can create it immediately. Even if you come back after a month, that audience will still grow and regularly update day after day. You don’t need to wait for a month and then create a custom audience but you can do it right away and just wait for it to populate properly even if it takes a month.

Mike: Got it. You uploaded, you set up this custom audience, you recommend getting started with the retargeting audience first.

Mojca: Yeah. Correct.

Mike: After that, now you’ve got this retargeting audience set up, now what?

Mojca: Now, what you wanna do is because you want to start retargeting and you want to start retargeting people with a lead magnet, you need to let Facebook know somehow what a conversion is.

Setting up a custom conversions is the right thing to do as a next step. You have a custom conversions tab in your Facebook Ads Manager. Basically what you need to set up is you need to let Facebook know what your Thank You page is. For example for this lead magnet, this is the Thank You page and you connect Facebook to that Thank You page. Anytime someone lands on that Thank You page, the Facebook Pixel gets triggered and Facebook recognizes that as a conversion.

When you set up custom conversions, you will be able to optimize for those conversions. For example, you will create a campaign that’s called website conversions and you’ll say, “Okay, I want this website conversion.” Facebook will optimize everything properly. When someone downloads or converts, Facebook will analyze that person and then target similar people to that person because they are able to optimize based on conversions because you created that custom conversions in the first place.

Mike: Now, I know that you can go in there and you override that and just say, “I’m gonna manage this based on behaviors or interests or things like that.” Is that something that you would recommend people do or do you generally recommend that people just let Facebook analyze that data itself? Because I think the concern that people have—myself included—is that what an incentive does Facebook have to make them convert for you because the more that they put those advertisements out, the more clicks that they get even if it doesn’t necessarily convert. It kind of makes you pay more. It’s almost like not in their best interest to drive the greatest returns on that. What kinds of things do you have to comment on about that?

Mojca: When it comes to retargeting people, especially if I work with smaller audiences, I tend not to narrow down based on interests or behaviors, it will impact the results if I narrow it down especially if an audience is already really, really small. If an audience is a little bit bigger, I do experiment with narrowing that down. That said, as you said, Facebook has its own ways of analyzing who to show your ad to. Based on my experience, that works really, really well. I mean, not only would generate a lot of leads for a very effective price, those leads are actually of good quality as well.

That said, if you do work with interest targeting and if you’re using interest targeting as your targeting approach, or behavioral targeting for that matter, you do want to narrow it down based on different behaviors so you don’t want to, for example, target two million people and let Facebook do its job because they won’t attract the most quality audience, to be honest.

Mike: I guess one of the ballpark ranges of, in terms of size, when should you decide to start tweaking based on behaviors or interests and things like that versus when should you just let Facebook do its job. Is there guidelines around like different sizes?

Mojca: If you have, let’s say, a retargeted audience of 100,000 people, I would definitely start playing with narrowing that down.

Mike: Got it. Anything less than that, maybe you could probably make a judgement call around 50k or so but less than that is fine just let them retarget.

Mojca: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It really depends on the service that you’re offering of yourself or whatever. It’s not really the size of the audience but the ballpark figure would be around 100,000 people. You can start playing around with it with a little smaller audience, like you said 50k. That said, what I do recommend is just keeping your eye on that campaign in case you noticed that, “Okay, that approach definitely isn’t working.”

Mike: Okay. Again, all of this stuff that we’ve talked about just in the past couple of minutes is really for a custom audience built around retargeting?

Mojca: Correct. Yeah. Because like I said, retargeting is the best way to start with Facebook Ads.

Mike: Okay. Now that the we’ve got the custom audience based on that retargeting campaign, we’ve got the custom conversion set up for our Thank You page, is there anything else that we really need to pay attention to or does that really put us in a good position to start optimizing from there?

Mojca: That definitely puts you in a good position. You will have all the assets in place to successfully launch your first campaign with Facebook Ads.

Mike: The other one that I’ve heard people talk about in addition to retargeting audiences is look alike audiences. Can you talk a little bit about specifically what those are and how those play into people that you’re retargeting from your website?

Mojca: For sure. Look alike audiences are basically cold audiences that are created on top of some data that Facebook has or basically the data that you provide to Facebook. For example, let’s say you have collected a lot of data on your website visitors, you have 1,000 website visitors connected to your Facebook Ad account. But you do want to experiment with cold audiences but you’re not sure what interests to use, what behavioral targeting to do, you’re not exactly sure how to go about that. But you do know that your website visitors are very qualified.

What you can do is create a lookalike audience based on your website visitors. What Facebook will do is they will analyze your website visitors and they will analyze their behaviors, their interests, their demographic data, where are they coming from, how old are they, and they will create a brand new audience based on that information. A lookalike audience is an audience to feel that, don’t know who you are, it’s a cold audience but it’s built upon, for example, website visitors. It’s built up on a custom audience.

Mike: Got it. They work together not necessarily directly opposing from one and each other.

Mojca: Yeah. Correct, correct.

Mike: Okay. Once you’ve got all of these fundamentals in place, at this point you obviously can go and you need to start optimizing things but I think the other approach that I can think of here is to go back and start almost like creating a sequence where people are moving through a sales funnel. Does that really not makes sense in this case where you’re moving them from one Facebook conversion to the next? Is it the point to really just get their contact information or email address and put them on your newsletter?

Mojca: Creating different funnels definitely makes a lot of sense but I also wanna come back to what we previously talked about. You don’t want to make things too complicated for yourself. If you already have a funnel that starts let’s say with the lead magnet and then with the demo and then gradually ends up with a pitch, you definitely want to implement that to your Facebook Ads. But if you don’t have that funnel already developed, you want to make things as easy for yourself as possible and maybe just use one lead magnet. Once they go through an email sequence and at the end kind of connect Facebook to your email sequence again and start pitching them when they enter the pitch sequence in your email sequence as well.

Mike: Got it. That makes a lot of sense. One of the things I did before this episode is I went on on Twitter and asked people if they had any questions for you. I’m gonna go through a couple of questions here and just kind of rapid fire through them and let you kind of answer them.

The first one is from Jamie Laurence. He said, “Is it morally wrong to use Facebook Ads? It feeds the money machine and makes us culpable in data collection.” I think what he’s really referring to is the new information kind of coming out about like how much data Facebook is actually collecting on people, which I think people knew but I don’t think they had ever looked at it before, had a way to look at it.

Mojca: Yeah. I think that’s a fantastic question and it’s definitely something that we need to be talking about. I talk about it with my clients, I talk about it with my students, I talk about it with everyone that wants to talk about it. I wouldn’t exactly say that it makes us culpable because the data collection that we’ve seen was a different one, it was a misuse of data, it was a criminal offense. It’s not similar to the data collection or targeting options that you see on Facebook. There are different nuances to it. That said, what I do think is that you have to decide on your own.

When you do Facebook advertising, the truth to it all is that you will be investing in Facebook. You will be investing in that business funnel, you will be investing in data collection as well. If you feel fine with that, by all means, just continue advertising and just use Facebook advertising as it is intended for you to use it. If not, just not don’t do Facebook anymore, don’t do Facebook advertisements anymore.

To be honest, I did have a couple of clients that left for that specific reason. With the upcoming news, they just decided that they don’t want to invest on Facebook Ads anymore, they don’t want to support that and I support their decision. I know where they’re coming from so I’m fine with it. That said, I do think people will still advertise on Facebook. But coming back to the idea, what I do recommend is just using Facebook advertising as it was intended for you to use it.

Mike: Yeah. I saw an interesting–it was a meme but it was a picture about the US government going in and starting to look at Facebook and how they’d announce that they were gonna do an investigation. On the page itself where they said they were investigating them, it said, it had a Share this through Facebook link.

Mojca: They probably had a Facebook Pixel implemented to their page as well.

Mike. I’m sure that they did.

Moving on, Jeremy asked, “Can Facebook Ads be visual rather than text based? My product is visual and I’d rather show it to people than tell them about it.”

Mojca: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I do support any visual based ads. What I do recommend is—I’m not sure about the product that he was referring to—if you have an opportunity to use video to show off your product, by all means, do that. It’s a similar approach that ecommerce businesses have been using all that time. They are really, really visual based, they have a lot of images or videos of their product. If you have a product that’s similar to that, you can, by all means, go ahead and use the same approach. Like I said, coming back, I do recommend using video in that case, it brings the best results.

Mike: With the video, this kind of goes into how you structure your Facebook Ads, maybe we touched on that for a couple of minutes, but obviously, there’s lots of different ways that you could advertise on Facebook. One of them is to have a video and you could also have like long form copy, short form copy. Could you just kind of touch very briefly on each of those and what your experience has been with them because I don’t necessarily think that we’ve talked about the specifics of what you’re going to put in your ad once it’s out there.

Mojca: Yeah, for sure. First of all, referring to long form copy, what I recently discovered through multiple A/B tests that I’ve done with all of my clients is that long form copy works really, really well, especially if you are advertising a software or a service business, long form copy tends to work really, really well.

Videos as well, along with long form copy. For example, if I’m working with a client that is trying to promote their software, we use long form copy so it’s a very long sales page like copy along with a video of them. It tends to work really well. But for other businesses, I have a couple of ecommerce companies that I worked with this as well, we don’t use long form copy but what we do use is a lot of images of their products.

But if you have a software company, if you offer services, what I do recommend is A/B testing with copy. Launch an ad, one ad with short copy, same visual, one ad using a short copy, one ad using a long copy. I’m definitely taking a bet on that and I think that long form copy will prevail on that case.

Mike: Awesome. The next question comes from Ed and he asked, “Will Facebook tracking effectiveness drop as more people use ad blockers?”

Mojca: Yeah. I love that question. They have been actually saying this for years now. For years, my clients have been coming to me saying, “More and more people are using ad blockers, is effectiveness going to drop?” Actually, we haven’t seen a bigger drop since I started talking about this with my clients two years ago. I think maybe that that drop is gradual, but to be honest, right now I would say that it’s not going to affect Facebook advertising as we might think that it’s going to affect it.

Mike: Our next question comes from [Kelso] and he says, “Do you have any case studies that you can point us to for successful ad campaigns? The second question he says, “How deep should you go with segmentation?” Do you have a couple of things we could link up on the show notes?

Mojca: I’m actually working on them but you will be able to find them on my webpage, definitely.

Mike: Awesome.

Mojca: A couple of results, with Facebook we’ve seen—I’ve worked with an ecommerce company—and we’ve seen up to 400% ROI. That was actually a standard especially when we did retargeting, we had 400% ROI. Or for example working with software companies, one software company in particular, we were paying $20 for an acquisition where lifetime value of a customer was $500 or right now I’m working with another software company and we are paying $50 for a conversion and they’re paying on Google $500 for the same conversions. It’s been incredibly effective.

But as far as segmentation goes, I definitely recommend as much segmentation as possible. That said, you always need to be careful of potential reach, you can segment all you want but if, let’s say, a specific custom audience that you really segmented out, the potential reach is only 20 people, that will not be effective. Be careful of that.

Also you need to keep in mind that the more segmentation that you have, the more work you’ll have with your Facebook Ad campaigns so you really need to decide if you want to do that or not. Segmentation is incredibly effective when it comes to Facebook Ads, like I said, it’s a tricky thing to do especially if you’re working with a bit smaller audiences, but if you have a lot of data collected already, by all means, segment as much as you want, I really recommend it.

Mike: This kind of brings me to a couple of questions. I kind of specifically had like when you are looking at what your ad spend is gonna be and what your minimum reach are, are there kind of guidelines that you would follow? Say make sure that you’re spending at least this much on a daily or weekly basis and make sure that your reach is at least this because otherwise, it’s probably not worth your time. Is there some quick calculation you could do based on “performance metrics” or average conversions kind of going through those Facebook Ads to figure out like if its 20,000 people, you have to have a conversion rate of at least 10% in order for it to be worth it if your cost per good sold is X. Is there anything like that that you can go and point to?

Mojca: Everyone asked me about that and that’s a very, very hard question to answer because for example, I’ve worked with multiple software businesses and they are so different when it comes to conversion rate and ROIs. With each and every customer, and with each and every client, I have to figure out a way of how to properly measure that and how to properly determine how big of an investment we need in order for our Facebook Ads to be effective. If you’re starting with Facebook Ads right now, if you haven’t done this before, I do recommend starting it slow. Don’t say, “Oh well, we have a well established business and we can spend $10,000 a day on Facebook Ads. Let’s just do that.”

Even if right now you have a lot of assets that you can promote, you have the money to do that, I definitely recommend starting slow with investing $50 a day or $100 a day and just kind of seeing what do you can do with that money and establishing where the ROI is coming from and what you need to do and what kind of cost per lead magnet download you can get for that kind of money. Just filling your way through that and then investing more and more once you get the hang of it.

If you do have a small business, so to speak, for example you’re just starting out, you just launched your new product, it hasn’t generated any revenue yet but you do want to experiment with lead generation with Facebook advertising, I recommend starting with $10-$20 a day and just seeing how that goes.

Facebook offers a lot of different tracking options, you can really track your ROI, you can input for example for each lead or for each conversion, you can connect that conversion to a specific value and Facebook will track ROI. It all comes down to your setup and so on.

Mike: Thanks. That’s extremely helpful because I think that the ballpark numbers that people have, people just don’t even really know where to start in terms of how much to spend, I mean is it $5, $10, $20. I think that the guideline of $10-$20 a day, at least to start of with especially if you’re just starting out and you just have a new business or product that you’re pushing out there, it sounds totally reasonable and I think within the reach of most people. We hear people talk about like you just mentioned, $10,000 a day, some products are just not even gonna make that in a year. It’s just not realistic.

Mojca: Yeah, yeah.

Mike: I think the last question I had was how do you go about managing or documenting your custom audiences and the custom conversions because one thing that I find, especially when it gets into like marketing automation side of things, you tend to lose track of stuff over time even if you’re working on it right now, it’s very easy to forget all the specifics of it and a week or five weeks or two months down the road. How do you go about tracking those things in a way that’s going to be easy for you to come back to later?

Mojca: Yeah. I absolutely know what you’re talking about because you have different campaigns within Facebook, you have different custom conversions, different custom audiences, just a ton of different things that you need to be tracking off and you need to have a higher level approach and just a higher level view on.

First of all, what I would emphasize is to properly name your custom conversion so you don’t get lost in, for example, lead number one or lead number two, you want to name them properly. Kind of the formula that I use on Facebook when it comes to custom conversions is I describe that custom audience as much as possible. For example, if you’re using a retargeted audience, I use website visitors 180 days landing page or website visitors 180 days this blog post. I use very specific names that I always know what this is when I come in Facebook.

Same for custom conversions and I document everything in Google Docs or Spreadsheets. I also document a lot of my custom conversions especially audiences and basecamps so I have documents for each client, for different audiences, it piles up, I tell you. Just using Spreadsheets, I think that is kind of the best way to go about it just to keep track of everything and for you not to get lost in the amount of data and different audiences and custom conversions and every other assets.

Mike: Awesome. I think that’s probably a pretty good place for us to wrap up. Is there anything that you wanna add or leave the listeners with?

Mojca: Maybe just giving one advice. I know that the Facebook might look very overwhelming. When you decide that you want to start advertising, you come on Facebook and you open up your Facebook Ads Manager and there are a ton of different options that you can choose from, don’t be afraid, it’s all very manageable. Facebook is really trying to simplify the process of advertising. Just like I said, start slow, invest a couple of bucks in launching your first campaign and see where that takes you and I promise that it will be worth it.

Mike: Awesome. If people have questions for you or they wanna follow up and kind of check into what you’re working on or if they wanna have you manage their Facebook Ads, where can they find you?

Mojca: Yeah. I would love for them to write me, I have my email so mojca@superspicymedia.com. I would be more than happy to answer any questions or hesitation or to just help them with setting up their first campaign. Send me an email at mojca@superspicymedia.com or if you’re interested in my blog posts and videos that I publish, services, you can find me on superspicymedia.com and you’ll find everything there.

Mike: I also see a link here for the facebookadsacademy.com?

Mojca: Oh, correct, yeah. I have the Facebook Ads Academy. If you’re just starting out with advertising and you need someone to pretty much hold your hand and help you with launching your first campaign or if you already launched the campaign and you have a question of how to set things up or what does this mean or what do these results mean, Facebook Ads Academy is definitely a great way to start. It’s basically a community of small business owners, we just help each other out when it comes to Facebook advertising, give each other advice, comment on specific visuals or copy.

Mike: I could say from experience that looking through the Facebook Ads Manager right next to somebody else who’s supposedly using the exact same thing, sometimes the interfaces can be very different from one to the next. I remember you telling me over FemtoConf that the ads manager, they’re running like a couple dozen of them at the same time basically A/B testing between them. Your interface could very well be different from somebody else’s.

Mojca: Yeah. I actually heard that they’re running hundreds of different Facebook Ads Manager. You might have a Facebook Ads Manager version that I do not have. I used to remember FemtoConf, I think they were like three different versions of Facebook Ads but it’s just that we were working with.

Mike: Yeah. They were like six or seven people in the room which makes that even scary.

Mojca: Yeah, it was crazy.

Mike: I think that about wraps us up for the day. Mojca, thank you very much for coming on the show. I really appreciate you having you.

Mojca: Thank you so much for having me.

Mike: We will see you at MicroConf in about five weeks or so too.

Mojca: Yeah. I’m so excited. This is going to be my first time in Vegas.

Mike: Awesome. You will be there straight through Growth Edition through Start Edition.

Mojca: Oh yeah.

Mike: If anyone is there, feel free to stop by and say hi.

Mojca: Yup.

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