Facebook Is Wrong! Im doing this the old fashioned way!

In this podcast, the speaker talks about testing a different approach to Facebook advertising. They usually follow Facebook's recommendations, but on this particular account, those strategies aren't working. They decided to create a funnel for their ads, starting with a long video that is shown to a broad audience. Once someone watches the video for 10 seconds, they are shown the next video in the funnel. This continues until they reach the bottom of the funnel where they are shown retargeting ads. The speaker believes this method is working well and is considering adding static images or GIFs to the funnel as well. They emphasize the importance of guiding the consumer through the journey rather than relying solely on Facebook's algorithms. Hello everybody and welcome back. So this is a podcast today that I want to talk about something that goes against everything that Facebook is telling us to do. So what do I mean by that? Well broad audiences, advantage plus, we're seeing ads manager change to basically put in an image or a video or a carousel and leave it all up to Facebook. And I've throughout this podcast talked about the fact that we don't hack, those days have gone, we have to have more trust in Facebook and I still completely agree with that. But I did a little bit of testing and I found some pretty good results. So what was my test? And bear in mind everyone this is just a test on a particular account because all the things that Facebook is telling me to do on this particular account aren't working. Now I know there's a few things that go against this particular client account, their website can be a bit better and it looks a bit old fashioned but it's an expensive job getting a basic website built let alone this one, it's probably a £20,000 website build. So that's off the cards for now because we've got to get traction with a particular client we've been working with nearly a year and we have good months, we have good days, we have good weeks, we have some bad days, we have a bad month but generally we're going in the right direction. But by doing what Facebook says which on a lot of our accounts we do, we are doing Advantage Plus, I do test broad, hands up still not sold on it, I only got an email yesterday from Facebook saying go broad, still not sold. In most of our ad campaigns we'll have a broad audience but we are still finding that interest based audiences are still good for a lot of our clients. I know it may not be the future and I know that interest might not be there in two years time but for now I still think things are working so do the things that you get the working. Now this podcast isn't to stress you out and go oh god I've got all my ads set up and now Nick's told us to do something else, it's not about that it's just always about finding different things to try. A lot of the peers in my industry doing the stuff that I do, none of us really agree with exactly the same route of doing stuff, we just find stuff that works, we understand how to set something up in a certain way, we do it for ourselves and a lot of our clients and that's how we work but we're always open to finding out about different things. So this particular podcast is about taking someone on a journey from the minute they see their ad, your ad, opposed to letting Facebook decide what to show them and when to show them. So this is, I'm trying to create and we're still through the testing phase of creating the whole funnel with a top of funnels videos, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel. The middle of funnel and bottom of funnel is kind of failing me a little bit at the moment simply because even though we're spending a few hundred pounds at the top a day so it's still a half decent budget, my client would really want to spend two thousand, three thousand a day at the top of funnel. So the client's got money but when we do turn up our budgets we find that the ads just don't deliver again so they like delivering on a smaller budget. So are we going to go back into the only increase the budget very slightly every couple of days? Yes we are for this particular test. So what I'm doing on this test and if I explain just at the top of funnel, we have one main video, it's 46 seconds long, it's got a great hook, it's a great video, we've cut up this video various times, done different hooks, different text overlays, all sorts about what the product is and this video still being the longest is the one that gets us the most conversions. So we've stuck through that evidence, we've stuck this as the main video. This is now actually going out to a broad audience. Now with this particular client, we've always found that interest based audiences work best but on this particular occasion, right at this moment in time, for the last ten days, this ad has been going out to a broad audience of male, 25 plus. Now when that video gets fed out to that audience, it will repeat showing the video as long as Facebook wants to show that video, it will repeat showing that video, we're going to find new people to show the video to, until someone watches it for ten seconds. When they watch that video for ten seconds, they'll fall into the audience of watched this video for ten seconds, yep, I'm not going to go into how to build those but in our audiences, we can build how long, they've watched the video for how long. But we're also going to exclude on this video so we get people who've watched it for ten seconds, meaning that they will only go through to the next video at Top of Funnel, so there's three Top of Funnel videos, they'll only go through to seeing video two when they've watched ten seconds of video one, okay? When they've gone into video two, because they've reached that ten seconds, we're excluding them from seeing video one again. So what I'm trying to do here is actually bring the consumer down a particular funnel to see the content I want them to see and when, okay? So the first video is gaining that interest, it's a long video, we're probably not seeing that many people see the whole thing, but we're seeing enough people watching ten seconds of it and then they fall into the second Top of Funnel video which is shorter, filmed differently, different hooks, talking about different things to do with a particular product, okay? But they're only seeing this video now, repetitively, as long as Facebook wants to show, if Facebook decides to show them twice, show them twice, we're still going for conversions, okay? This isn't awareness, this isn't video views, this is, all this is still to get a conversion. They're now watching, so Joe Bloggs, to start again, Joe Bloggs has watched the first video, he's watched it for eight seconds, he'll still see that same video if Facebook thinks that there's a chance he'll convert. When he watches it for ten seconds, or he might already convert on the Top of Funnel video, which is great, we are getting that, that's happening, but when he watches it for ten seconds, because he hasn't decided to buy yet, he then sees Top of Funnel two video, and again, he can either purchase on this video, or he'll watch it maybe one or two times until he watches it for ten seconds. He then gets excluded for watching it for ten seconds, and then he sees Top of Funnel video three. Same again happens. All these videos are excluding themselves if someone watches ten seconds. I've now got Joe Bloggs who's seen Top of Funnel video one for eleven seconds. He falls in to my audience. He then sees video two for ten seconds, eleven seconds, twelve seconds. He then falls in to the next audience which is, he's watched ten seconds of video two. He then sees video three. We are at this moment in time getting orders positively at each section. Number three is slightly down, but what we've done is we're sort of manipulating the budget on these audiences. So Top of Funnel one has more budget. We're spending two hundred pounds a day, two hundred dollars a day. Number two has a hundred dollars a day, because there's obviously not as many people, so we're trying to keep the frequency of the video right, okay, so we're not, we don't want to show the same video over and over and over and over, okay, we're trying to balance this amount of video out. So the Top of Funnel one is always going to have more people. It's the first video people see. Top of Funnel three is making sure that enough people are funneling to that. Now at the moment, it's a little bit under where I want it to be. So this morning I've kind of been in the stage where do I make a decision to turn off Top of Funnel video three and just have one and two? Because at the moment, my Middle of Funnel, which is just a dynamic ad based, I've got one ad which is Middle of Funnel, and in that, excuse me if I've got this all wrong, one Middle of Funnel ad, and in there, there's four ad sets. One's about the technical side, one's got some offers, one's got another offer where you can get something for free, and they, no one, Joe Bloggs won't see these retargeting ads unless he's watched ten seconds of one, two, and three video. But it means that the people going into the retargeting are very, very hot people. They've all taken in content that I, as the advertiser, wanted them to see on the journey. That's the really important part here. I haven't just gone and write dynamic, creative loads of ads out there, Facebook, decide what you want to show. And I know everyone's talking about it, but for this particular client, and maybe you, that format isn't working and I needed to try something else, and this is successfully working. The only bit I need to figure out now is how I recreate the Middle of Funnel. Now I either leave it as it is and just let Facebook decide what to show, when it wants to show, or I make more videos or statics. Now the problem is with a static, where we are now, is a static isn't like a video that you can create an audience of anyone who's seen that static. You can't do that. So my idea was, which we haven't implemented yet, because this was a yesterday idea, is making those statics into GIFs, meaning the static, as far as Joe Bloggs looking at his feed is concerned, he just sees it as a static, but we actually have it as a video stroke GIF, which means it's 15 seconds that it's just sitting there for. Now we can say, let's take people on a further journey. Video one, video two, video three. Static one, static two, static three. We've now got like a six stage funnel from someone coming at the top, seeing three videos, now they're seeing three statics, before they even get the Bottom of Funnel retargeting ad, which is our anyone who has added that product to their cart will only see the Bottom of Funnel ad, which at the moment is built dynamically, which is a great offer, which is like 20% off the product you buy today sort of thing. So the standard offer has always worked for us. They don't see that at the moment, unless they've added to cart, but I could, which is my thinking now, Top of Funnel, three videos working great, apart from that third video might need a little bit of work, do we take it out, do we keep it in, not sure. Leading into the same kind of structure again, you could use video or you can use static. The static is obviously going to be a video, so that I can put them into audiences, and I take them down this trail. That is where we are at the moment. Have a think about how this sort of strategy could work for your business, and your product or your service, so you're taking someone down a journey. Now it goes completely against what Facebook is saying, Meta is saying, it's all about leaving it to them, and I get it, and I understand it, and it works, I know. But sometimes you've got to think slightly out of the box, and I'm going back ten years, I'm going back five, ten years, standard marketing funnels, and so far my experiment is working. Now I'm about to do the same thing with a heat pump client, as you know if you're in the UK, heat pumps is on the news this morning. They are a big firm, and we're thinking we want them to see particular messages when we want to see them. So we've spoken back to the marketing team, and told them about this sort of experiment we're doing, and it's working, and they're completely sold, and they're like, let's try it. Luckily they're great, and they want to try all these different things, so now we can say to them, hey, you want to reduce your energy bills, or whatever it might be, and we can then bring them down a journey. So video four is explaining how a heat pump works. So all the objections that we find from our reviews and stuff, and by focus groups, and finding out what people are thinking, where they're getting confused, on all these things, even your own product. Take them on a journey, opposed to letting Facebook show them a particular ad when it thinks it's going to show them. I know Facebook is trying to get us conversions, but sometimes I feel in marketing, we need to guide the consumer to where we need them to go, what we need them to see, but at the same time, we've got to look at our metrics and make sure that this is working the way we want it to work. Give it a go, I'll update you in another week's time about how this is going, but hey, maybe we've found a new thing. Hope you enjoy this, and I'll see you in the next one. Bye bye.