How are your Facebook ad campaigns going?

I had one day recently where all of my calls with my Accelerator members were Facebook ads related. There were some common themes or takeaways among all of those calls that I think you could all benefit from. 

In this episode of Art of Online Business, I’m sharing 5 Facebook or Instagram ad observations and updates for you. 

Many people have been overcomplicating their ad campaigns. It’s time to simplify your campaign structure. Gone are the days of complexity with your ad campaigns. The key is consolidation and simplification. 

These observations will help you get back on track with your Facebook or Instagram ad campaigns so that you can start getting what you are paying for and seeing results. 

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• What’s new with the 28-day attribution window
• How to simplify your campaign structure
• Tips for attributing results to campaigns
• The importance of page load speeds
• What’s going on with Ad Creative
• The problem with many ads managers
• How to get breakdowns 

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• The Art of Online Business clips on YouTube
• Full episodes of The Art of Online Business Podcast on YouTube
• The Art of Online Business Podcast website
• Check out my Accelerator coaching program

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Hey, my friend, real quick, just to remind you that I’ve made some big changes to our accelerator coaching program. So if you’re looking for personalized coaching and mentorship to help guide you to the next level of your business, whatever that next level looks like for you through help with optimizing your sales and marketing, ethical marketing leadership and being the CEO of your business team, building systems and processes, etc.. Go over to Rick Mall Radio.com for Accelerator and fill out the form right there to see if we potentially could work together. All right, Rick, Morty, forward slash accelerator. Now let’s get into today’s episode. And a day recently where all of my one on one calls that day with our accelerator members were meta ads related, Facebook ads related. And there were some real common themes or takeaways among all the calls that I think all of you can benefit from. And so I wanted to share this with you here today and calling them five Facebook ad observations and a couple of updates for you. And I’ll start with one update that you may or may not have heard about yet, but Facebook has brought back the 28 day attribution window. This is huge, my friend. This means that we’ll be able to see like we used to be able to see. And I’m going to use C in quotes, right? Because the data, let’s face it, is not very solid. But this means that we’ll be able to see data attributed to a campaign, an ad set, or an ad beyond the standard seven day attribution window that it has been. 

And at the time recording this, I’m recording this on November 10th, 2022. Not everybody has yet. I don’t have it yet. Some of my members in accelerator have this. And so you will if you want to look for it, you’ll go to your performance dropdown in your business manager and ads manager. And at the very bottom you’re going to see compare attribution settings. I think it is. And you if you have that option, then you can start looking at 28 day attribution data. The 28 day attribution is something that it used to be, right. It used to be industry standard years ago and I’m way back when I was in the corporate world selling online advertising, the attribution window is 30 days, right? That was industry standard. And for years and years on Facebook, it has been 28 days. But when iOS 14.5 came out, one change that that Facebook made was they removed the 28 day attribution window and brought it down to a seven day attribution window. If you’re not really if you’re like, What are you talking about? Right now, an attribution window is basically the amount of data that you can see within a certain time period, right? So it’s seven day attribution window If somebody opts in to your whatever lead magnet today and then they purchase from you nine days from now and you are tracking those purchases with within Facebook, it wouldn’t show up as a conversion for you because it’s beyond seven days. 

If somebody opted in from your you’re running ads to an opt in and then you’re whatever, you’re moving them through a funnel to a purchase. If they opt in today and they make it through your funnel and they purchase on day six that it would show up. Well, hopefully show up in Facebook because it’s within the seven day attribution window. Now they’ve gone back to 28 days, which is great because it’s essentially giving us more insight. And I’m going to say this with air quotes now, because again, as I’ve talked about a lot here on the show, the quality of the data that Facebook is reporting and ads manager is not very accurate. Right. You can look at how much money you spend for your ad campaigns. Link click through rate. Pretty accurate there. But beyond that, I mean CPM, yes, all that stuff. But beyond that, as far as conversion data, as far as landing page views, because of the lack of track ability, if you will, take the data with a grain of salt. And I’ve done a whole episode about what I call triangulated in the data between Facebook and your email, CRM and so on, Google Analytics and so on. So anyway, Facebook has brought back the 28 day attribution window, which is a good thing. I think it’s a great thing. And in a few minutes here, I’ll share another update that they have brought back as well.

So one of the observations that I made on that coaching day was I see a lot of people overcomplicating their ad campaigns when today on Facebook or Meta, I still can’t call it meta on Facebook and really frankly has been this way for the last couple of years. But I see a lot of people not grasp, not grasping it, but like really like trying to focus on this is simplification of your campaigns. Gone are the days of just as an example, gone are the days of breaking out detailed targeting audiences, for example, into separate ad sets. You know, I looked at a campaign the other day and they had five different ad sets with one targeting audience in each of the ad sets, and that’s old school stuff. Like, I love that, but it’s but it’s old school. Facebook is. Not the algorithm is not set up to optimize with that little data. Now I see little data because the audience numbers tend to be on the smaller side. Maybe it’s a million, right? We really want multiple millions of of potential audience size in each of those assets. So what I recommend doing instead is simplifying your overall campaign structure. So you have one campaign, then you might have, you know, say maybe three ad sets in there. One is your warm audiences, one is your lookalike audiences, and all of your lookalike audiences are combined into one ad set. And then your third one is you’re straight up cold audiences, like whatever grouping of cold audiences that you want to do. 

Again, this is about testing, right? Because you might you might put your lookalikes and your warm audiences into one ad set to test that out. Right? And so it all works. It’s just a matter of being willing to test. But the key here is consolidation and simplification, like 3 to 5 ad sets, tops. And then, you know, I talked to somebody the other day, they had like 16 ads in an ad set. I was like, Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We got to like and their budget wasn’t that big. We got to like, we had to really narrow that down. And so, again, it does depend on your budget. But we’re talking if you’ve got an ad set with a $100 budget, let’s just say you’re maybe putting 3 to 4 ads in 

that ad set and then testing those, or you can be using dynamic, creative and let Facebook’s algorithm do the testing for you because it is so smart. But the key here, the observation, the takeaway is simplification, right? Don’t overcomplicate the setup. The idea here is to make Facebook and the algorithm do the work for you because it’s a whole lot smarter than we are. By the way, speaking of letting the letting the algorithm do the work for you, one of those ad sets might be having a wide open targeting, right us. Men and women between or women or men or whatever it might be like between a certain age range. 

And that’s it. You’re doing the entire like this is something that was unheard of years ago. We used to never do something like that. But the algorithm is really smart. Let it go find the people for us. So the next one is you have to be able to directly attribute results to your ad campaigns. I see this a lot right now. If you are sending people to the exact same registration page or opt in page four or sales page from various channels, meaning like you’re sending traffic to whatever that opt in page for your lead magnet or what have you from your ads, from your from your organic Instagram, your Tik-tok, YouTube, etc. You are not going to be able to specifically see how your ads are performing unless unless you are using UTM codes and that sort of thing. The idea is you’ve got to be able to distinguish and directly attribute results based on channel. And if if nothing else, you’ve got a paid ads. Funnel, you know, to to to look at the stats from that and then you organic ones and you can group together if you want like simplification. But the idea here is you’ve got to know where your results are coming from. So to make it super simple, have a specific ad or excuse me, have a specific funnel for ads, have one for your organic, etc. you can literally duplicate the campaign in your funnel tool or whatever you’re using. 

That duplication option is your friend, right? You know, I’ve got a member right now and they’re running a ton of traffic to an evergreen funnel, but not a they’re not distinguishing. I mean, they weren’t before I got my hands on the campaign. They weren’t they’re not distinguishing between ads, traffic ads, revenue versus their organic promotion and revenue. Right. So it’s like, all right, if I’m spending this much money on ads, I’ve got to be able to attribute roughly, at least in this day and age, how much revenue we are we are creating. And part of this, too, is, again, going back to what I mentioned before, being able to triangulate the data, if you will. You’re looking at Facebook ads, data. Now, this is also going to be helpful with the 28 day attribution window that I was talking about before. But looking at the Facebook ads data, looking at the Google Analytics data, hopefully you’re using UTM codes in there, you’re looking at your email, CRM, you’re looking at your shopping cart, whatever you might be using, and you’re triangulate, you’re like using all that data to try to tell the story of what’s going on. But you’ve got to be able to address it to directly attribute results to your ad campaigns as best you possibly can. All right. Another observation number for your page load speed is very important. Your page load speed of your landing page where you are sending traffic from your ads is really important, my friend. 

Before you launch a campaign, I want to recommend that you test the page load speed of that landing page, because here’s what’s going to happen. If you have a really slow loading page and you’re sending traffic to it from your ads, what’s going to happen is someone’s going to click on the ad and it’s going to take a while for that page to load people. We don’t like to wait, right? So they’re just going to click back and they’re going to click away from the page. Number one, you’re going to lose that traffic. Number two, it’s telling Facebook’s algorithm that it’s not a good user experience, and that is going to hurt you in your campaign. So save yourself this trouble and do a test before you even launch the campaign. Right. There’s a ton of tools to do this, like just Google page load speed, test, choose a tool and put your URL of the landing page in there and see what the results are. If you’ve got a slow page, like I said, it’s going to affect your ads and the results that you are seeing a lot of the tools that you know, and again, they’re all free. It’s like Google’s dev site for the page load speed. There’s ping dum, there’s other, there’s other ones. And when you do that, it’ll tell you the like not only will tell you the results, but it’ll tell you what to do to improve those results.

A lot of it, a lot of it is the image size that are on the page, like they need to be compressed because they’re too big. Right. And we experience this too. By the way, we are a team recording this. We are just starting our project of redoing our website because it is so slow, it is so heavy with the video that’s on there and the images and so forth, and it’s loading super, super slow, which as far as landing pages go, or if we’ve got a landing page from click and stuff, you know, we are always looking to optimize the speed of the page and I want to recommend that you do the same thing again before you launch a campaign, the landing page that you’re sending traffic to check out the page load speed, see if it’s any good. You know, as far as what is good, it’ll tell you on the page. It’ll give you like a rating and all that stuff. The next observation ad creative. This is nothing new. Ad Creative has been the most important thing with Facebook ads and Instagram ads. By the way, whenever I say Facebook ads, I’m talking Instagram ads as well. So ad creative. It’s been the most important thing for good year and a half now, right? It’s all about creative. And when I say creative, I’m talking about the actual ad itself, the copy, the image. If you’re using a video and what have you, right? Unless your ads are performing super well and meeting all your KPIs, you want to be regularly testing different creative and I mean regularly like. 

Weekly like a lot you want to be. You want to be constantly testing creative to try to always beat your winners, if you will. I see this a lot where people are running the exact same ads or an ads manager or an agency is doing this, which I’m going to talk about this in the next point. They’re just running. They’re just not testing. And this is the game when it comes to to ads, you’ve got to be testing creative, right? You’re testing the hook or the angle of the ad itself, which is the first couple of sentences of of your of your ad, which, you know, what’s the angle of that copy testing, different images and so on. This is another reason where dynamic, creative can be useful and worth at least testing to see if it helps you out. So ad creative. This was another thing where I was seeing campaigns where they were just like they just had like one ad running. Those are the most are the old days of of ads. And that’s what I used to do early on just because we broke everything out and tested. So anyway, ad creative, make sure you’re testing a lot of different creative. The last observation, and then I’ll finish off with a new update that Facebook just recently announced. The last observation, and I’ve said it on the on the podcast here before I’m sorry to say this, I’m not trying to offend anybody. 

But my friend, a lot of ad managers, ad agencies are simply not doing a good job. They’re not serving their customers in the highest possible way. And this like it bugs the crap out of me every like, I see this all the time. You know, I hear from our members like they’re working with somebody and they’re telling me I’m like, What is going on? Why? Why, why are number one, why are you spending that much for what you’re getting in terms of results or lack thereof When you hire an ads manager or an agency? My friend, you are paying for results. I don’t mean a pay per result, although that’s possible. And some ad managers have that model. But you’re paying for results you’re not paying for, Hey, just run this campaign for me and here’s my budget. Go for it. No, no, no. You’re paying for results and you’re either getting those results or you’re not. Like, that’s one great thing about ads. It’s it’s data. You’re going to know really quickly whether it’s working or not. And if you’re working with an agency, you should be giving them monthly goals to be hitting and within a budget, right? It is their job to do everything they can to hit those goals within reason. Right? Of course. But like if you’re like, hey, here’s $3,000 or here’s $5,000 a month, here’s my lead goal for this specific lead magnet. 

Okay, go for it. You’re going to find ad managers or agencies that some will write the copy for you. Some are taking care of the creative for you. Others just run the ads. It all depends on what you want and what you’re looking for. Et cetera. But when when you give them that directive and say, Here’s my budget, here’s what I’m looking for in terms of results, you let me know what you need from me so that you can do what you’re supposed to be good at. That’s how it’s supposed to work. It’s not a case of, you know, here’s three, here’s $5,000 for budget, go for it. Right? And then they’re like, Well, we can only run two campaigns for that, or we can only create this many at No, no, that’s not how it works, my friend. And unfortunately, I hate having this. I hate having to share this sort of thing time and time again. But I do, because I want you to be cautious of, you know, if you’re hiring somebody, make sure that you are going for results and not just to run something for the heck of it. Right. And if you’re already working with somebody, make sure that you’re getting what you were supposed to. And if it’s been six months and you’re paying all this money to have them run your campaigns and you’re getting no results, something is up and you need to revisit why that might be the case. 

And if you want my help in that, then that’s what we do. It’s one thing we do with our our members inside of accelerator. So just go over to our accelerator page on the website. Rick Moretti dot com forward slash accelerator. All right. The last update is Facebook has brought back and again, this is another thing that they they sunsetted after iOS 14.5 is the breakdown meaning you can now see breakdown information conversions, for example, based on age range, based on if you’re grouping together countries or what have you in a an ad set, it’ll break down your conversion results by country, by placement, etc. So it’s in the breakdown dropdown menu right next to the performance menu inside of ads manager or business manager. And you can see that data now they have recently brought that back. So it’s really interesting that Facebook is kind of bringing some of these things back, you know, after they did away with these things or at least sunsetted these things in terms of the public usage after the iOS update. But I think Facebook I don’t think I know Facebook also knows that they’ve got to do something to keep advertisers and to try to get as much data as possible for people to understand what’s going on with their campaigns. So there you have it. There’s my five. How many? Six, six know, five updates or five observations and then two updates that Facebook has has brought out.

So, number one, the 20 to 28 day attribution window is back. They’ve announced that and or they haven’t announced it, but they’ve it’s starting to show up in accounts at this time. The item I haven’t seen any kind of announcement on it. The other thing is they brought back the the breakdown. In terms of you can look at placement or age or based on conversion data observations. Simplification, my friend. Gone are the days of complexity with how you set your ad campaigns up. Simplification is allowing the algorithm to work better for you. The next one, you’ve got to be able to directly attribute results to your ad campaigns. The next one, your page load speed, where you’re sending traffic to is super important and then ad creative. Again, it’s been this way for a long time now, but Facebook ads is all about ad creative. You’ve got to be testing and then just be wary of and don’t be afraid to question if you’re working with an ads manager or agency and you don’t feel like you’re getting the results that you should be. You don’t need my permission, but you’ve got my permission to question what’s happening. To take a deeper look. So those are my observations. Those are a few updates for you on the ad side. Thank you, as always, for listening to today’s episode. I appreciate you, my friend. I’ll see you right back here for the next episode of The Art of Online Business podcast.