- Sep 23, 2015
- 574
- 468
I own a FB ads agency and have launched about 6 ecommerce brands (mostly dropship, but 1 inventory holding). For the agency side, we manage over $1M per month in ad spend for various clients, mostly ecom brands.
I've learned a lot from BHW over the years. In fact, I've learned more here than any other source. I've been doing internet marketing full-time since around 2016, but even before then I was still reading and learning from BHW. So here are some Facebook Ads tip/tricks that will help you address iOS14 and get better results for yourself and your clients.
*This is all original and used in the real world, in high spending ad accounts. Nothing theoretical or repeated from some course. As always, YMMV.
1. Use Offline Events + Zapier (or your connector of choice) to push ALL purchase events to an offline event set.
This has been a lifesaver and it almost nullifies the attribution issues with iOS 14. Plus, it will help FB's AI with targeting and making better use of data. Here's how you do it:
**Pro tip: Use your new offline set like a pixel to build value-based lookalikes.
2. For retargeting, use events that occur ON FACEBOOK.
We replaced all our AddToCart based retargeting audiences with FB or IG engagers. So if someone engages with the brand on either platform, we retarget them. We only are using 180day AddToCart for retargeting in some ad accounts. All that 3, 7, 14, 30day AddToCart retargeting has been replaced with FB/IG Engagers for those day ranges.
Because Facebook is ONLY tracking the lowest funnel event for each user once they leave Facebook, you're missing out on impressions by sticking with the old addtocart retargeting style.
3. Our top performing lookalikes right now are:
6. When you're spending < $100-$200 per day on an ad set, the 20% rule for adding budget doesn't really matter.
Everyone always says: "Don't increase budget by more than 20%!" - This just doesn't matter when you're not spending a lot. For example, say you start out with ABO, $20 per day on each ad set. Scaling that will take forever and it's probably not going to exit the learning phase anyway. So just double the budget to scale up faster.
**Note: The 20% rule does seem to apply once the ad set starts spending a lot. Not because of any learning phase jargon, but because a 100% budget increase on an ad set spending, say, $1000 per day, is going to make the algorithm enter a lot more auctions trying to spend your money. Just be smart about it.
7. Ad copy / marketing angles are critical, plus help to train the algorithm
You need to make sure you understand how to use marketing angles. For example, if you're selling a supplement that helps people sleep, it's obvious that copy about sleep can be used. But you can also drill down into the effects of poor sleep hygiene or other things.
Positioning your copy as a story for longer form can work really well. Also, writing one short sentence that's a "hook" and the burying the rest of the story/copy under the read more tab will impact your ads performance due to people clicking to see what's under the read more tab. Even if they don't click through, you're helping the algorithm learn who is and who is not interested.
8. No ad buyer/agency hits a home run 100% of the time.
This is more for the people who are doing ad buying for clients. If you're up front with the potential client about wins/losses, you will have a better chance to convert them. If you tell the client, "we crush it and scale every single ad account. We get results every single time." it's not going to help. First, that's simply not true. Second, the client is going to ask (or at least think), if this person can basically print money with FB ads, why are they talking to me and not doing it themselves?
A good thing to say (in my experience) is: "We'll use the strategies that work for almost all of our clients. However, we can't address any underlying business issues like fulfillment problems, bad checkout experience, etc. We'll put you in the best possible position to scale, but we can't guarantee that you'll be printing money hand over fist. No agency can guarantee that with any honesty."
9. Keep it simple until you are scaling up
Just keep it SIMPLE! If you have a $100 per day budget, you don't need freakin' exclusions at TOF, MOF, BOF. Just follow the best practices and let the AI do the work to deliver purchases or leads, or whatever you are seeking. The flip side, if you've scaled up and you're NOT doing exclusions, your TOF isn't really TOF anymore and your segmentation is meaningless.
I think too often we are all looking for a magic bullet or some hack that is going to force our ads to perform. There's no champagne room with FB ads. If your copy and creative are not good, no amount of button pushing in the ad account is going to save you.
10. If you find yourself losing control of an ad account, go back to basics
If you have an ad account that's scaled up and spending 4 figures per day, and you find yourself losing control and performance becoming unpredictable, go back to basics. Remove some exclusions, consolidate ad sets - whatever you want. Just try to simplify the account. I can say that this almost always works for us. Don't start throwing things at the wall haphazardly or try to wrangle a massive ad account with tons of automated rules. Just take a deep breath, rebuild the ad account in a simple way using your top performing creative/copy.
Conclusion
That's all I can bring myself to type right now. The first tip, the one about offline events, is really the golden nugget here. Nobody is really doing it right now, at least that I know of. It works like a charm.
Good luck and happy ad buying!
Forgive any spelling or grammar errors. English is my first language but I'm too lazy to proofread at this moment.
I've learned a lot from BHW over the years. In fact, I've learned more here than any other source. I've been doing internet marketing full-time since around 2016, but even before then I was still reading and learning from BHW. So here are some Facebook Ads tip/tricks that will help you address iOS14 and get better results for yourself and your clients.
*This is all original and used in the real world, in high spending ad accounts. Nothing theoretical or repeated from some course. As always, YMMV.
1. Use Offline Events + Zapier (or your connector of choice) to push ALL purchase events to an offline event set.
This has been a lifesaver and it almost nullifies the attribution issues with iOS 14. Plus, it will help FB's AI with targeting and making better use of data. Here's how you do it:
- Make Offline Event Set
- Connect Zapier with Shopify/Woo, or whatever ecom site you use.
- Connect Zapier with Facebook Offline Events (it's a specific connector in Zapier)
- Configure the Zap.
- Consider changing the attribution in your ad account to 7day click, as opposed to 7day click 1day view. That 1day view attribution will attribute purchases that are view-through so you decide if you want those reflected in the ad account or not.
- Now in the Ads Manager, use the column PURCHASES, PURCHASE ROAS, PURCHASE CONVERSION VALUE to see your actual attribution.
- Now you can see that Facebook was missing around 20%-40% of your purchase events. Use this new data to make better decisions.
**Pro tip: Use your new offline set like a pixel to build value-based lookalikes.
2. For retargeting, use events that occur ON FACEBOOK.
We replaced all our AddToCart based retargeting audiences with FB or IG engagers. So if someone engages with the brand on either platform, we retarget them. We only are using 180day AddToCart for retargeting in some ad accounts. All that 3, 7, 14, 30day AddToCart retargeting has been replaced with FB/IG Engagers for those day ranges.
Because Facebook is ONLY tracking the lowest funnel event for each user once they leave Facebook, you're missing out on impressions by sticking with the old addtocart retargeting style.
3. Our top performing lookalikes right now are:
- 3% Purchase (value-based)
- 5% Purchase (value-based)
- 2% AddToCart (value-based)
- 2% Website Visitor 180day
- 3% Purchase 180day
- Objective: Conversions
- CBO/ABO: ABO
- Ad sets: 4-5 ad sets
- Ads: 3 ads per ad set (mix of flat lay product images and some <10s video)
- Placement: All placements
- Objective: Conversions
- CBO/ABO: CBO
- Ad sets: 4-5 ad sets, duplicates of the top performers for a date range
- Ads: 3 ads per ad set (mix of flat lay product images and some <10s video), duplicates of top performers.
- Placement: All placements
6. When you're spending < $100-$200 per day on an ad set, the 20% rule for adding budget doesn't really matter.
Everyone always says: "Don't increase budget by more than 20%!" - This just doesn't matter when you're not spending a lot. For example, say you start out with ABO, $20 per day on each ad set. Scaling that will take forever and it's probably not going to exit the learning phase anyway. So just double the budget to scale up faster.
**Note: The 20% rule does seem to apply once the ad set starts spending a lot. Not because of any learning phase jargon, but because a 100% budget increase on an ad set spending, say, $1000 per day, is going to make the algorithm enter a lot more auctions trying to spend your money. Just be smart about it.
7. Ad copy / marketing angles are critical, plus help to train the algorithm
You need to make sure you understand how to use marketing angles. For example, if you're selling a supplement that helps people sleep, it's obvious that copy about sleep can be used. But you can also drill down into the effects of poor sleep hygiene or other things.
Positioning your copy as a story for longer form can work really well. Also, writing one short sentence that's a "hook" and the burying the rest of the story/copy under the read more tab will impact your ads performance due to people clicking to see what's under the read more tab. Even if they don't click through, you're helping the algorithm learn who is and who is not interested.
8. No ad buyer/agency hits a home run 100% of the time.
This is more for the people who are doing ad buying for clients. If you're up front with the potential client about wins/losses, you will have a better chance to convert them. If you tell the client, "we crush it and scale every single ad account. We get results every single time." it's not going to help. First, that's simply not true. Second, the client is going to ask (or at least think), if this person can basically print money with FB ads, why are they talking to me and not doing it themselves?
A good thing to say (in my experience) is: "We'll use the strategies that work for almost all of our clients. However, we can't address any underlying business issues like fulfillment problems, bad checkout experience, etc. We'll put you in the best possible position to scale, but we can't guarantee that you'll be printing money hand over fist. No agency can guarantee that with any honesty."
9. Keep it simple until you are scaling up
Just keep it SIMPLE! If you have a $100 per day budget, you don't need freakin' exclusions at TOF, MOF, BOF. Just follow the best practices and let the AI do the work to deliver purchases or leads, or whatever you are seeking. The flip side, if you've scaled up and you're NOT doing exclusions, your TOF isn't really TOF anymore and your segmentation is meaningless.
I think too often we are all looking for a magic bullet or some hack that is going to force our ads to perform. There's no champagne room with FB ads. If your copy and creative are not good, no amount of button pushing in the ad account is going to save you.
10. If you find yourself losing control of an ad account, go back to basics
If you have an ad account that's scaled up and spending 4 figures per day, and you find yourself losing control and performance becoming unpredictable, go back to basics. Remove some exclusions, consolidate ad sets - whatever you want. Just try to simplify the account. I can say that this almost always works for us. Don't start throwing things at the wall haphazardly or try to wrangle a massive ad account with tons of automated rules. Just take a deep breath, rebuild the ad account in a simple way using your top performing creative/copy.
Conclusion
That's all I can bring myself to type right now. The first tip, the one about offline events, is really the golden nugget here. Nobody is really doing it right now, at least that I know of. It works like a charm.
Good luck and happy ad buying!
Forgive any spelling or grammar errors. English is my first language but I'm too lazy to proofread at this moment.
