Level One Facebook Secrets

Transcription

Today, I want to share with you some Level One Facebook Secrets that I figured out over years of marketing with Facebook.

There are Level Two Facebook Secrets, but just like if you're playing a video game, you have to start with level one to even understand how to do level two.

So, when I work with new businesses that haven't been using Facebook effectively, I'd let them know that right off the bat, they need at least two custom audiences.

First, you have to have 300-1000 contacts as your seeds to start a custom audience. If you don't have that many, then what we're going to build based off of this audience is minute.

So imagine a huge blue circle, which represents the whole Facebook Network. Then in that, who you want for customers, who you want your ads to show up, may be just a little green dot.

What a custom audience is, for those that aren't familiar with it, a Facebook Custom Audience is a group of people that you've uploaded their information to Facebook as a hash, which means it's not readable by humans, but it can be matched [00:01:00] if someone has the same data.

So what happens if two entities want to exchange some information, but they don't want to give up personally identifiable information, what they'll do is they'll create a hash and agree upon a way of formatting that data.

So for example, email address, we'll say, "Okay. Let's do all lower case, the email address, make sure there's no spaces on either end, and then we'll hash that with a-"

And a hash just means that it encodes it into a random series of strings letters based off of the original data. So it's not entirely random, but it's not reversible.

Now you have this unique string of letters and numbers, and then if someone does the same thing with their data and we compare our data and we find anything that matches, then we know, "Okay, we've got overlap here. There's something that we could possibly do together and we haven't compromised personal data, we haven't shared data that we shouldn't share."

That's what Facebook does for these custom audiences.

What they do is they take their whole network, whenever they [00:02:00] get any data like email address or phone number associated with a contact or user on the Facebook platform, they hash it and they store those keys and then associate them to that Facebook user.

Then we, as advertisers, what we can do is we can upload that same kind of data and what that will do is when we upload it, it's hashed either by Facebook, which is a little less secure, or by us. Then they'll go and compare that to all of their hashes. If they find a match, now we have what's known as a custom audience.

I say 300-100 for a particular reason, I'll get into that in just a moment, but the two kind of audiences we really want to create on Facebook are our customers.

So, people who have spent money with us, and there's two types in my mind.

There's either active customers, so those are customers who are actively buying from us, depending on our purchase frequency.

So if people buy from us on a daily basis, that's easy to track. If they buy from us on [00:03:00] a semi-annual basis, it's a little different.

But these are people who bought within an acceptable time frame from us. That's who we'll call "active customers."

Then there's inactive customers. These are people who maybe should have bought again from us, and have not.

You can break it down into active and inactive, but at a bare minimum, we want anyone who spent money with us. Those people actually are going to provide some very valuable data for us that I'll explain in just a moment.

That's what you want to be creating, is that customer thing, and hopefully at least you have 300 customers. 1000 is a better basis, but 300 is good. If we have more than that, then that's fantastic.

That's kind of one of the challenges with Facebook custom audiences, is you really have to have a certain level in order for them to become ultra useful, but we can still find use even in audiences as little as 30.

30 is what Facebook requires as a minimum. You have to have 30 people from your uploaded list that will match with their customers in order for you to create a [00:04:00] custom audience that is usable to start showing ads to.

That's the whole purpose of the custom audience.

You want at least a customer list and a prospects list.

I think anybody that's a prospect kind of tells you that they rose their hand in some way and they said, "Hey, I'm actually interested in this topic."

Now, if they don't buy, they're not as valuable to you as just the prospect, but the prospect could be used as well.

If I'm in a position where I don't have very many customers, but I have a lot of prospects, I feel like those prospects are on mark because of my offer and the way that I acquired their contact information, then I may use that as the basis for the next thing that I want you guys to know about.

It's important to understand how these custom audiences are created, I already shared some of it as far as the hashes and looking for comparison go, but in order for you to have a good match, you need to have good data.

Emails match at about 40%. That's mostly because people signed up with whatever email they had in 2008 or 2009 [unless [00:05:00] they're younger than that]. If that's not their current email address that they're actively using, then that may not be the one they provided you with and so they may not match.

Emails match at 40%,. Emails are good, but mobile phone numbers match at 90%. And, if you have both, you get about a 100%.

Now, this data isn't really something you could find out today as easily, but about a year and a half ago before Facebook stopped showing the match rates on custom audiences, I was able to do the testing on this.

So if you have mobile numbers and you have some email addresses, you're in the best. If you only have mobile numbers, you're fantastic, you're at 90% percent.

But if you have emails and phone numbers, then you're in a really good shape in order to have a good audience that you're going to want to be able to use in multiple different ways.

The real power of audiences for getting new customers is actually look-alike audiences.

Look-alike audiences are audiences that are based off of some other audience. [00:06:00] What it does is, if you're not familiar with what Facebook does, they track everything about you. I think we all know that.

But they organize that there's something that's called a graph. A graph is essentially, you can think of it as a circle attached to other circles.

The central circle would be you, and then every interest, everything you've clicked on, everything you've watched, everything you've visited, adds another spoke on this wheel that comes out from you.

That's what's known as a graph, and it's a representation of data and its relationship to other data.

Facebook has created what's called open graph, which is this huge collection of data and all of the association of that data to other data, principally centered around its users.

So when you upload that list of 300, 1,000, 2,000, 30,000, whatever you upload of customers, let's say in particular, and active customers, if we could, what happens is Facebook is able to now create a profile [00:07:00] of what your buyer looks like.

This is much more detailed than any interest that you could identify.

For example, with FixYourFunnel, I would ideally be targeting people who use Infusionsoft or have interest in Infusionsoft. I can use the Infusionsoft interest, but that's not nearly as effective as using a look-alike audience based off of my custom audience of active buyers.

That profile that Facebook is able to create may have 40, 50, 100 commonalities between those contacts that are in that custom audience that an interest just is too one-dimensional to be able to comprehend.

When you use interest, you actually are not going to be as effective as if you use a look like audience based on the ideal person that you're looking for, which is your buyer.

That's what you really want. You want to create a look-alike audience based on your buyers and you want to let Facebook discover the ideal [00:08:00] contacts to target with your ads.

What's going to happen is when you create this audience, it's going to be 1 million plus. You're going, "Well, there can't be possibly a million people that would buy what I have to offer!"

I know that's true with FixYourFunnel because there's not a million Infusionsoft accounts. So, even though it shows me a million, I know that's a bigger circle than what I actually want.

But, I also know that Facebook, what they do is, when they have that circle that has a million users in it, it's not a one-dimensional circle.

You could think of it almost as being a circle that extends up like a cone.

Up at the top of that cone are the closest matches to my buyers, at the bottom are the loosest matches to my buyers, and all inclusive in that is a million users.

What Facebook wants to do, and when you understand the chartered mission, so to speak, of any ad platform or any traffic source and you play to that, you're going to find that you're always [00:09:00] going to do much better.

Well, so what's Facebook's stated goal? What are they trying to accomplish?

And what they're trying to accomplish, as far as what they've said, and we go off of what they say and what they do with any organization.

So what they've said is, they want to connect the world. They want to connect everybody.

Okay, that's important. That gives us some understanding why they use this graph to connect everybody together.

But when we look at what they do in terms of tweaking their algorithm for what shows up and what doesn't, we have a pretty good track record to look at. Then we can extrapolate from that who they'll show ads to.

Basically, what they've done is they always do all they can to preserve keeping people in the app and to have the best experience from their perspective possible so that they won't leave.

If they abuse that relationship too far, then people leave. And believe me, Facebook is measuring these metrics on probably the hourly basis, or probably even quicker than that. But what they're looking at is constantly, what is our [00:10:00] monthly active users? Weekly active users? Daily active users?

They're tracking that stuff so they can see if they're doing anything that's screwing up the goal of the company. They do everything they can to preserve it.

In spite of that, they've made tons of mistakes. They've screwed up everywhere, just like everybody, but that's their stated goals. That's what they're trying to do.

If you look back to Google with AdWords, their goal is the same thing: provide quality results to their customers.

Because of that, they wouldn't want to show an ad that didn't get sufficient clicks, and what they would do if that ad didn't get enough clicks is they'd up the rate because it was out of line with their mission.

When you narrow down the results that Facebook has to work with for your ads too far, then Facebook's just going to charge you more money.

They're gonna say, "Fine. We'll show your ads, but we're going to charge you more money and we're not going to show it as frequently because of that."

What you want to do is you want to make sure that what you're doing is allowing Facebook the room to show the ad to the right people, but give them enough [00:11:00] criteria that they can get it eventually showing to the right people.

It's in Facebook's best interest to make sure your ad is successful. If you don't constrain them too much, they'll make that happen using their machine learning that they have on the ad platform.

So, the million list is great.

Now there are some exceptions to that. If you're working with someone who's a local business, then geography is obviously an issue.

We can have a million around the world, but we only want a million, let's say, in California. Okay, then we would use geography to limit that million audience and that will make the audience slightly smaller.

That's acceptable, because you wouldn't want people outside of California.

Maybe you're looking at, you just want people in Chicago. Okay, then you can use the geography limits to say, "Okay, I want this look-alike audience of my best buyers, but I want only those that are located in Chicago."

That's perfectly acceptable. Those are appropriate limits to put on Facebook so that it will only show the ads the people you actually want.

[00:12:00] Then you also want to use exclusions.

If I'm running a Facebook ad to a look-alike audience of my buyers, I probably don't want to show that ad to my buyers. I just want to use that audience to find people like my buyers.

You can do an exclusion of the buyer list. Whatever list you used to see that look-alike audience, it's perfectly acceptable to do that as an exclusion.

You may also choose to exclude people who have viewed your ad but haven't interacted with it in some acceptable way over a period of time.

That's good so you don't get people complaining about seeing your ad all the time.

I've sometimes done that because I have an ad that's been running for two years and has been very successful. It has over a million views on the video, and so it's in my best interest to keep letting it run, but sometimes I was sloppy with my audience and people would say, "Hey, I've seen this thing forever. It's not actually for me."

That might be Facebook not doing their job, to a certain extent, but also it's something that you can do something about, so go ahead and exclude those people.

So, a [00:13:00] look-alike audience is super important. That's the one part.

You want to be looking at how you can help expand the audience that your customer can get to by giving them this ability to be able to target their buyers.

You could use the same thing for yourself as well, but target people that look like those buyers. That's where I would want it run.

For me, personally, what I like to do are video ads, just because I can get more information relayed quicker. Facebook's liking that, especially if you do portrait videos instead of landscape videos.

If you've been following anything I've been doing, you'll notice I've been doing a lot of Facebook lives. With those Facebook lives, I'm trying to get across really important points I know important for people that are considering what we offer at FixYour Funnel.

In doing that, I'm also doing it as a portrait video and after I've done that Facebook live, I'm boosting that as a post to see which one gets some good traction. Then based on that, I'll then run ads promoting that to my [00:14:00] look-alike audience.

That's the same process that you can use for almost any business in terms of introducing and creating an audience that you are going to start cultivating.

Then what I'll do next, this is just my general approach. It is a approach, it is not the approach.

Once I've got the video views- and video views are extremely inexpensive on Facebook. The video is playing in the app, it's not taking them out of the app. That's something that Facebook has a greater tendency to show over direct call to action ads.

So, because direct call to action ads are less desirable, they're also more expensive and so what I'll typically do with those is people that watch my video at any percentage that I feel is acceptable, those people will be people I will target with a direct call to action ad.

That could be a lead ad, it could be a click to a website ad, it could be a number of different things, but it could be a call to action to text in a keyword.

I'll also do that on my video ads, just because that's the smart thing to do whenever you're [00:15:00] doing video ads is having that web form, so to speak, of the keyword and the phone number. That's been very effective for us.

So that's level one.

Get your audiences created, those two basic ones, and then custom audiences.

Level one is for everybody off the bat.

Every business, in my opinion, with very few exceptions, but almost every business should be doing a custom audience of their buyers, or at least their good prospects, and they should be doing a look like audience and then driving traffic with that, at least exposure ads for the big initiation of branding with a call to action for some direct response element to it.

That's a baseline for every business that I can think of that I've ever been involved with or would want to be involved with. There are a few exceptions, and those are going to be more complicated, but by and far, most are going to need that level one.

Hope this helps you.

This is Ryan Chapman with FixYourFunnel. Keep moving forward.