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Transcription of Today’s Episode

[00:00:05] This is the show where I bring you the best tips tactics and strategies for using paid traffic to grow your business on autopilot. You also hear what’s working and not working right now. From the Top winds in online marketing so that they get more leads in sales every day without. Having to empty your wall in the process. All right let’s get to.

[00:00:28] Change is hard right. Well change is hard for a lot of people not everybody but some people welcome change. But for most people we get caught in our you know we want things to continue as they are. And whenever something changes we kind of get anxious about it. Well if you do in Facebook ads you’ve got to be able to roll with the change. I think that was an Oreo Speedwagon song way back and like I don’t know when that was an aging myself right now but there was an Oreo Speedwagon sign that’s actually pretty good called roll with the changes. Anyway if we’re running Facebook ads we’ve got to be willing to roll with that change because Facebook ads change a lot and over the past week or so has been no exception. There are actually three big changes that are going on with the Facebook platform right now that I want to dive into. On today’s episode first and foremost thank you guys so much for coming me today. This is the art of paid traffic podcast. I’m Rick Mulready and this is episode number one hundred and fifty five. Hope all is going well for you. So yeah over the past week or so three big changes have been going on with the Facebook as platform number one ads manager and power editor are now one tool. If you don’t have it yet stay tuned it’s coming. Facebook has started rolling it out on the 14th of September. A lot of people already have it.

[00:01:47] When I’m recording this on this actually Sunday September 17th I actually don’t have the new update but I’m expecting it any day right now. So ads manager and power editor are now one tool. We’re going to dive into all that and what that means. Number two there have been some changes with targeting that surprise some people. Facebook rolled some changes out right around the September 13th 14th time frame. And I feel that they came out of nowhere. We kind of woke up and there isn’t JD So we’re going to talk about what those changes are. And then also recently there’s been a rash of accounts getting shut down lately. And I want to kind of talk about that and address my perspective on what’s been going on. So we’re going to dive into all three of those things. Do stay tuned though at the end of the episode. I’m going to share with you how you can win a 30 minute strategy call with me I want to give you all the details when we start to wrap up here on today’s episode. But I do have a lot to cover today so I’m going to jump right into it. All right. First and foremost as manager and power editor are now one tool. Don’t freak out though. OK. When you do have the update like I mentioned Facebook started rolling this change out on September 14th. And as I mentioned I don’t have this change yet I still have both ads manager and power editor However I have seen a couple of my students have been showing me who who have it already. And I’ve also looked at what Facebook has sent sent out as far as documentation goes.

[00:03:24] So it’s not as big a change as you might think. And I know that I had some students that were a little anxious about the update when it rolled out and we’ve kind of talked through and and managed all this. But when you do had this new update when you noticed that power Ed. is no longer in your ads manager menu there you’re going to notice that you’re going to be having to create ads right from within. Ads manager. OK. So you could do this before. Right you still had that green create ad button. So you’re you’re going to click that green three Add button. You’re just not going to go into power Ed. per se to actually create your ads any more. OK. So from within ads manager you’re going to click the create add button and then you’re going to see a box that pops up that says how do you want to create ad campaigns and there’s going to be two options on the left hand side it says create complete campaigns and it says Select guided creation. This is your normal creation that you would have had it within ads manager. OK. This is not the one that I’d normally like to use. I was using power editor and that’s what I taught. That’s what I teach. You know for my in my courses and my students and stuff on the other side of the box the right side it says create campaign shelves select quick creation. This is your power Ed. experience. OK. So just to recap there’s two options now.

[00:04:54] The guided creation this is the same the same experience as if you were creating ads from within. Ads manager before. OK. And then the quick creation. That’s the power Ed. experience it’s practically the same from what I can tell. There’s a couple of small tweaks I notice but for the most part it’s the same as power added or they’re going to be doing a name doing away with the name power from. From my understanding it can be calling it ads manager. OK all of your reporting is now in ads manager which I think makes a ton of sense as I’ve always taught to be looking at your ad stats within ads manager and non-powered there so this is not a big deal. Right. So all of your stats are going to be in ads manager. OK. So just to kind of recap again just because I know that people are kind of freaking out about oh no power is going away. I mean it is. I mean it is going away. But in essence it’s still it’s still there because you can still choose the guided creation which is what you could choose in as manager. And then they are calling it the Select the quick creation. And this is more of the power Ed. experience. And then whenever you’re in that quick creation mode that power at their experience you can always click back to go to guided creation. OK so they’re making it really flexible. What Facebook is trying to do here is they’re trying to simplify the ads process the ads creation process.

[00:06:20] They’re trying to you know bring the number of tools that you have that you have available and streamline it and bring it down into a more simpler thing. Now there’s some questions that you might have like Will your historical data be available in the new ads manager saw the data from your ads. If you’ve been running power and using power or anything like get all that. Yes. All the historical data that was available before will continue to be available in this new this new power Ed. ads manager will call it a merger here. Another question is will your saved filters be brought into the updated ads manager. Have you got filters set up for how you’re looking at things. No. OK so if you have saved filters and ads manager they’re not going to be brought over you and you’re to need to recreate those filters when you get the update. Now if you have columns saved as presets in power editor like things that you want to be looking at only you could set different presets in there. Will they be lost in the new ads manager tables so basically columns saved as preset or not lost. OK we as advertisers can use the column customisations selector. I love that word to save our own customized comps. This question I’m here just grabbing right from Facebook. They had a couple of fake Q questions. OK so the biggest thing there if you did have saved filters in ads manager. They’re not going to be brought over. So just be aware of that.

[00:07:56] Also I’ve heard a couple of stories these are from my students that they lost some saved audiences so I would also recommend just checking out if you had saved audiences making sure that you that they had come over with you and if they haven’t they don’t really I don’t really have a good you know a good suggestion there for you other than are really sorry that happened and that hopefully they’re still there when this when you get the new update. OK. So that is the big news on the face on the ads manager and power editor kind of merging into one. It really is. I mean look this is what you know I always tell my students because I think Facebook changes things so frequently. I mean especially lately it seems like they’ve been changing things like every few weeks and it can be hard to keep up at times. But when you understand the concept of what you’re doing when you’re creating the Facebook ad campaign meaning like what like what’s the objective OK. What does an ad set. What’s an ad. What are you doing within each of these levels. You know when they make these changes or kind of tweak like maybe how you get into a tool or maybe they move some buttons around. It’s just a matter of adjusting to it and everything else stays the same meaning the functionality and understanding what you’re doing as a whole. OK so I’m going to put a screenshot of this of this box here that pops up when you click Create add and I’ll put it over in the show notes for today’s episode. Rick Mulready dot com forward slash one fifty five. By the time this episode comes out though on the Wednesday most people should be having it.

[00:09:42] And if you don’t you’re going to get it pretty quickly because they started rolling this out pretty aggressively. Like I mentioned starting last week. OK. By the way I do want to send a big thank you to one of my students Phil Holli. He’s an awesome portrait and commercial photographer over in Oxford Schier UK. I hope I’m pronouncing that right. He’s the one. He’s one of my students who sent me an update and shares it shared his experience with the new tools so I could really kind of dive in and analyze it and investigate and pass this information along to you. Identity check feel stuff out at photo purity it’s at photo purity ph OTOP you are i t y at photo purity. Thanks if you are listening I really appreciate you doing that for me. OK the next big update that I want to talk about that Facebook rolled out last week has to do with targeting OK as you know and we talk a lot here in the show. Facebook makes a lot of effort to protect its users. Community standards. OK so making sure that the user experience for everybody using Facebook is top notch. And they’re always trying to protect its community standards. Well there is an issue with some people filling in their education and an employer information in their profile. I guess they were putting in some offensive stuff and so in an effort to clean this stuff up as a result for the foreseeable future anyway. Facebook has now removed these self-reported targeting fields like job title and where people are educated.

[00:11:22] So for example if you enter marketing manager and you want to target marketing managers people who were marketing managers you used to have the option to target that job title. Well that is no longer an option. Ok so which means if job title is something that you really relied on with your targeting you’re going to have to get a little bit more creative with your with your targeting and with your with your testing I’m sorry to say. OK. So again this is one of those sort of frustrating things that that Facebook has changed up on us. They did this apparently from from my investigation on this. They said that the reason that they chose to do that obviously in an effort to really you know police the community’s standards and make sure that they are the highest standards that they can that they can have is that the amount of audience sizes for these job titles for example wasn’t that it wasn’t that big it wasn’t a huge amount of people number one in the audience as a Number Two people actually using job titles as a targeting option. So that’s why that’s another reason why Facebook chose to do away with it. Is this something that I think is going to is going to be permanent. No I don’t. They’ve been pretty clear about you know what we’re going to remove them while we try and figure this out. And so I would stay tuned on this but right now they have removed like job title and where you’ve been educated as as targeting targeting opportunities so for example if you want if you put in marketing managers you’re going to see it as an interest. Right. So there’s a couple of different ways so to kind of move forward with this.

[00:13:05] If you do want to reach someone with a job title so loves us to say I want to reach marketing managers with my AD Well I might test targeting it as an interest and then use the ad copy to further filter who I’m speaking to and get my message in front of those people right there in my ad. OK. So this is something that we talk about a lot here as a way of if we have to go broader with our targeting than we really truly want to. We can use the ad itself whether it’s the image or the video. And then also the ad copy to further filter that targeting down to speak directly to who we want to attract with our ad. OK so that’s one strategy that I would do. The second thing I would do is I would still test out I would still say still because we talked about it I don’t remember which episode we talked about prior on the on the podcast here but using the axiom data targeting that we have available to us in audience insights. OK. So when you go to audience insights you’ll see the lifestyle section. It’s right there in the main screen about halfway down and right under the lifestyle subhead are there you’ll see a little link that says request audiences here from axium data guru. Once you click on that this is totally free. OK. All Again all an audience insights. So Facebook has partnered with this third party company called axium to get their data. OK.

[00:14:38] So when you click on that link you can enter descriptive information about who you’re trying to reach and your audience including job titles. OK. And then it will you you fill out the form and you give that you give it as much information as you possibly can about who you’re trying to reach in your business and so forth. And then it will give you that you should like 24 48 hours. It’ll it will give you audience recommendations to test. It will send you actually report with audience opportunities audience recommendations to test out. OK so that’s another thing that I would do to try to sort of overcome this sudden if you will. Facebook doing away with targeting by job titles so checking out axium data. I’ve heard mixed results on this. OK kind of tested out to kind of see what data it kicks back to us. I have lots of students who have tried it out. Some said it was pretty good. Others said it didn’t work out at all. But I mean as with anything that we’re doing here a paid traffic and Facebook ads it’s about testing stuff right. So that’s what I’d recommend is I would recommend checking out the axiom data opportunity that you have available to you within audience insights and again that’s totally free. So look I just want to kind of recap this as advertisers. This is one of those frustrating updates. But you know if we want to be advertising on the most effective and cost efficient platform today which is Facebook you’ve got to be able to roll with these sorts of things and and keep moving forward.

[00:16:12] So if you were really affected by this being like you I one student particular Heather I’m thinking to you who is you know really relies on. This is her main audience that she’s trying to reach and she really used job titles a lot. She was pretty frustrated by this and I totally get it. But you know now it’s an opportunity for look at to look at new ways to look at different types of things that we can test to reach our target audience. OK. All right. Now the third thing that I want to address is this recent rash of accounts being flagged and disabled. OK. Facebook is really cracking down on a biding by its policies. About a year year and a half or so ago we went through this sort of thing to where Facebook was really was was shutting accounts down for for advertisers that were not abiding by its policies. That lasted a couple of months I think few months or so and people were really anxious about that. And you know we had to kind of watch that closely this was the time where they were really cleaning up if you will the average type of advertisers that we’re on Facebook and you know that didn’t go away but the intensity of it did and now it has picked back up. So again we’re here in middle of September and for the past month or so I’ve been hearing a lot of stories from people having issues with their account being being flagged or disabled and some of them you know very like just completely legitimate accounts. And they had some issues there. So it’s all about the policies guys so they. And speaking these policies Facebook’s policies they recently updated them.

[00:18:04] So if you not check them out in a while you’d definitely and I talked about this a lot. You definitely need to be referring to Facebook’s ads policy. So if it’s been like you know three months since you’ve checked out you’ve got to be checking them out. I would be doing it every few weeks to make sure that you’re up on what Facebook is putting in there into the policy section so Facebook dot com forward slash policies forward slash ads. Again Facebook dot com forward slash policies forward slash ads is the link that will get you over to their policies. OK. So the big thing that I’m seeing the big issue that I’m seeing with these accounts getting disabled or flagged is when it comes to high negative feedback. OK. And also making false claims in the ad copy so let’s start with the high negative feedback issue here. So first and foremost negative feedback is a score based on the number of times that people hire ad or they choose not to see ads from you. You know how in the upper right hand corner of an ad there’s a little drop down a little carrot menu there and you can choose like you know hide the ad or you don’t want to. You choose not to see ads from this person. And then this negative feedback is the score is like low medium or high.

[00:19:23] So if you have high negative feedback you want to make sure well that basically if you have had negative feedback that simply means that people are choosing to hide your ad or they’re choosing not to see your ads and Facebook sees that again it wants a great user experience right. So it is seeing that as this is not good. People do not want to see this ad. So if you are seeing high negative feedback on your ad I would say first and foremost is you want to make sure that you’re checking out the relevant score. What is your relevance score. Is it a high relevant score is it a low relevant score. OK. And you want to be keeping that relevant score high. Remember the relevant score is a scale of 1 to 10 and it’s it’s basically how relevant is this ad that you have put together. To the audience that you have chosen to target with that ad. OK. So making sure number one that your relevant score is nice and high. And then also I’ll be watching that frequency. OK so often oftentimes people get to tired of seeing the same ad over and over and over and over. OK. So if the frequency I like to say keep it within that one the three range if it’s getting four and above that’s getting a lot so the app the people you know that just means the average person is senior add four times. OK. That’s not good. The higher the frequency they’re they’re going to they’re not going to be happy with that. So they’re more likely to give that you know hide the ad or they don’t want to see the ad from you. And that is going to raise your negative feedback. So when they get tired of ads what do we as advertisers need to be doing.

[00:21:04] Always be thinking about how can you make your ad different how can you make it interesting. How can you make it pleasing to look at compelling to look at be thinking about that when you’re putting together your images your ad copy video whatever it is that you’re doing in your ad and remember that so that you are trying to attract your ideal audience while providing a good experience for the Facebook users. OK. Now there are some instances where the relevant score is high like eight nine or 10. And also they had high negative feedback and I’ve been hearing that accounts had been disabled. Even with that and I’ve actually spoken with Facebook about this directly and their direction is still that if your relevance score is that high you should be fine. But like I said we’ve still seen instances where accounts are flagged and disabled with high relevance score on your on the ads. And then also the high negative feedback. OK now if you were seeing this sort of thing in your ads high relevance and also high neat hide negative feedback I would immediately be checking your stats. Things like you just mentioned frequency. The click through rate the landing page conversion and then you might proactively reach out to Facebook to chat with them about it. OK. Because if you’re getting a high relevant score and a high negative feedback something’s going on there.

[00:22:37] OK so that’s the first thing I would do is check your stats on that make sure that frequency isn’t super high and then look at the performance of the rest of your ad you know as yours is your click through rate I’d say at least to 1 percent. How’s that landing page conversion. Also if you’re sending people to an opt in page or a registration page are you at least 20 percent on that conversion rate because if you have a low conversion rate Facebook is seeing that and taking that into account in the performance of your ad and your stats are going to reflect that. Okay. Again they want to know that your audience wants to see this ad Okay. And so I just want to repeat that be different than anyone else when you’re putting together your ad. Is there a way that you can make your ad not look like an ad yet while attracting your ideal audience. Right be different than anyone else with your with your ad. OK. Now for the false claims stuff. This is something that has always been an issue. Right. You cannot make claims on Facebook especially with time limits. Facebook is really cracking down on this right now. So for example you can’t say that that somebody is going to earn a certain amount of money within a specific timeframe or you’re going to get 1000 leads or 10000 Facebook fans within the next 30 days or something like that. Facebook sees that as a promise or you are like you can’t say and this is pretty obvious. We’ve been talking about this forever is you can’t say like lose a certain amount of weight in the next 30 days. OK. So Facebook sees this as you’re making a claim you’re making a promise and you cannot necessarily back that like how are you backing that up.

[00:24:28] OK so you cannot make any kind of claims with time limits in your ads and they have been sort of like they’ve let people through. They’ve caught other people. I don’t want to get caught. Other people don’t like using that. But basically some people have been affected where their accounts been flagged or disabled while others are doing something very similar and they’ve you know they’ve gotten they’ve gotten through just this go bye bye bye Facebook’s policies. OK. You can say the same types of things. Just how do I even think about how best to be talking about this when you want to make a claim. OK. You can still get across what you’re trying to say but it’s all in how you say it. OK. And that really leads me to this sort of part two of what we’re talking about here. I’ve been hearing a lot of talk lately that Facebook doesn’t like Internet marketing or are like people doing ours and they’re banning people who have online businesses I don’t buy it it’s all in how you’re communicating in your ads and in your landing pages. OK. Like are you. We have to remember here that Facebook is not only reviewing your ad reviewing our ad but they’re also looking a couple layers deep like on the landing page so your landing page also has to abide by Facebook’s policies so is your ad OK. But then on your landing page are you making any kind of unjustified claims on that page or promises. OK so you’ve got to make sure that your landing page is within policy and there is consistency between the ad and the landing page. OK.

[00:26:10] That is that’s in Facebook’s policies as well. There has to be consistency between the ad and the landing page. Right now if your ads have been fine for a long time and your eyes like you’ve had no problems Facebook’s your ads have been running for a long time. Maybe in Facebook’s eyes they were on the border of being approved or disapproved and that might be a reason if God forbid this is happening to you right now that you’re getting flagged. OK. Another thing that Facebook is looking at if your offer or your messaging seems kind of spammy Facebook is going to have a problem with it. Look this is all what’s what’s going on here. This is all about Facebook has five million advertisers at this point right now. So they could be choosy to ensure the best user experience possible for its users. Remember we’ve talked about it for a while now here in the middle of 2017 Facebook kind of hit that critical mass of advertisers versus or advertising I should say versus the number of users. Right. And so because of that and Facebook are the ad growth has slowed down a little bit which is why they’re coming up with you know inventing new ad spaces and just sort of evolving here which I think is awesome but it’s it can mean it couldn’t be more choosy now and kind of cleaning out if you will making sure that the advertisers who are advertising on Facebook are providing the best user experience possible for its users. OK.

[00:27:42] So if if you have gone through this where your accounts been flagged or or shut down and you think that you know this is completely unjustified I would very much encourage you to continue. I know it’s frustrating I know it is but continue to try to go back to Facebook and just show them the things that that back your argument up if you will and don’t be you know a jerk about it. I’m sure that you won’t. But don’t be a jerk about it but just let them know why you think that you are abiding by the policy or that you understand where maybe there was an error but you’ve really got to be abiding by the policies and it’s really how you’re communicating what your message is and who you’re trying to reach. And not only in your ad and also on your landing page as well. OK. So the what I’m trying to say here. Go read the policies again. If you haven’t done it in a while and make sure that you’re bonding by them you know in your in your ads in on your landing page. OK. So I hope all of this up with all this was really helpful for you. I know that it can be frustrating with all these changes going on and some of them you know some of them big some of them small some of them like we don’t really understand like a super frustrating but you know as advertisers on Facebook we’ve got to be able to roll with these types of changes hopefully this provided some explanation and lessening the anxiety about what’s been going on there.

[00:29:16] And if you have any questions or any feedback about what we’re talking about here on the show which actually leads me into my next my last part here as I mentioned at the top of the show if you would like to win a 30 minute strategy call with me all you have to do is go over to Facebook Messenger and give me your feedback on the podcast here and specifically I want to hear what you like to see more or hear more I should say light topics gas style of the show frequency length. Any ideas you like to share with me. I would love to hear them from you so to share your ideas and feedback with me. Just message me over on Facebook I’ve set up a link for you Rick Mulready dot com forward slash messenger and when you message me with your ideas and feedback as I mentioned I’m going to pick one person at random at the end of the month to win a 30 minute strategy call with me and as I if you remember if you’ve been listening for a while I did this at the very beginning of September it was a sort of a short little contest and it was so successful I love it. I spent a lot of time on message or talking to talking to everyone and I got amazing feedback from people as I said you know and actually part of the feedback from people is that they liked this sort of thing they like sort of a little contest here and there.

[00:30:34] And for me it was so successful and I loved getting the feedback and chatting with all of you that I want to continue doing this so you know for the foreseeable future here each month I’m going to be picking a winner at random to win a 30 minute strategy call with me. I mean we can talk about Facebook Ads growing your business online marketing strategy growing what growing a team. Whatever it is that you like to talk about we can do that during a 30 minute strategy call with me. So again just shoot me your ideas and feedback about the podcast here what you think. And that’s over on messenger Rick Mulready dot com forward slash messenger. Thank you so very much in advance for doing that really really appreciate it. Now coming up on the podcast here I’ve got more Strategy Session episodes. Feedback has been really good on those I’ve got more of those coming your way as well as Q&A episodes because I’ve been getting a ton of questions lately which I absolutely love and it’s been a while since I’ve done a Q&A episode here on the show so that’s more that I’ve got more Q&A coming your way here on the podcast.

[00:31:38] So until then my friends keep testing your pay traffic to find out what works for you and your business and then do more of what’s working and I’ll see you in next episode.