So what IS working right now in Facebook Ads land?

Great question.

Often we feel like nothing is working and have to stop ourselves from throwing our computer against the wall.

Things that used to work just up and stopped overnight.

With no explanation as to why.

The Meta ‘experts’ keep emailing and calling and telling you ‘you just need to get out of the learning phase’, like that’s even possible without throwing more good money after bad at ad campaign that clearly isn’t working.

So let me share with you what IS working right now on today’s episode.

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For the speed readers, read the transcript below.

Call me crazy, but I love Facebook ads. I don’t know why. I’m very strange. But I proudly wave the flag of being a Facebook ads nerd. Facebook ads have helped grow my business iland co. to a million dollar a year business.

And I love sharing teaching and managing ads for others and sharing my insight on post iOS updates. All the algorithm bits and bobs, and how you can implement some of these winning strategies in your ads accounts right now. Back when I very first started, I used to see a lot of the talk was to test you know, one interest at a time. I’m talking to you about what’s working for me right now in Facebook ads land.

I know Facebook ads often feel like a dark art and things change so frequently, just when we think we’ve mastered it. Facebook goes and messes with it. And then we feel like we’re back to the drawing board. So today I’m going to share with you what’s working for me right now post iOS 14 update. What’s happening inside of my own ads account for iland co. My online fashion store is an account that I’ve spent probably close to a million dollars over the past eight years. So I want to start by saying I am a bit of a Facebook ads Australia nerd. I actually love Facebook ads.

It’s probably one of the things that I love most about running a business is spending time in there creating strategies thinking about what I’m going to do next. Measuring the results to see what needs tweaking, what needs turning off. I really really love it. And it’s a strange thing to love. Most people don’t.

A lot of people come to me for help asking for coaching, asking for me to run their ads for them or to set their ad account up. Because it does feel and look overwhelming for them for the most people. Often when we start our own businesses, we are either professionals or we are passionate creatives. So looking at Facebook Ads account and ads manager day in day out is usually not most people’s happy place. But for some reason, my brain I’m a bit strange. I love it. So today I’m going to talk to you about what’s working right now because so much has changed. Not only just in the past. I mean, six months, 12 months, but even from now to when I started Facebook ads Australia, it’s a completely different game.

Post the iOS update Apple, we hate you so much. We would have to spend time getting really granular on our audiences trying to figure out who it is that we’re exactly targeting, and test different audiences. So we would be building look alike audiences off the back of our email list. But then we’d also be looking at doing interest based audiences testing different interests.

Back when I very first started, I used to see a lot of the talk was to test you know, one interest at a time.

So you might have an audience, for example, of women in Australia are of a certain age and one audience you are testing their interest is Myer and then another one another campaign that you’d run side by side testing a different audience.

The only difference is instead of liking my other interests would be David Jones and then testing those so it was it was really really granular and if anything, it’s probably gotten a lot easier this day and age because after these iOS updates after apples gone and done all of these, you know, security, opting us out of being tracked options. 

Those audiences don’t really matter so much anymore.

So, in actual fact, it’s gotten easier.

Yes, we can’t pinpoint exactly who it is we want to add to appear in front of however, Facebook algorithm has gotten so much better, their machine learning has gotten so much smarter. So we don’t really need to worry and stress so much about testing those audiences.

Because if we build a great creative, a great ad, and have a great offer, the machine learning figures out who to put that ad in front of easier than it did years prior. So what I am doing right now, the only ads I’m running inside of my ad account for iland co, are all broad targeting. And when I say broad targeting, all I’m telling Facebook is the gender, the age and the location of the target audience that I am trying to get in front of. I don’t add in a single interest anywhere.

The thought leaders in Facebook heads, advertising and paid media right now are all saying that for every customization so every interest that we add, we are almost being penalised by Facebook in the cost that it takes to get a sale. For every customisation we add so every interest if you go in and then layer 15 interests, you will find that your cost per conversion or your partner your cost per acquisition will actually be higher than if you were just letting the machine learning do its thing and optimising just based on those very, very broad audiences.  This is why I’m no longer running retargeting audiences

I am just running broad audiences because I am finding that those broad audiences are doing both the heavy lift and both the heavy lifting for cold audience targeting and retargeting because if you go in and you set up your URL, your URL parameters when you create your Facebook ads Australia, and I highly encourage you to do this, the information is pulled through to Shopify.

Under conversion details for each of my orders in Shopify, I can see exactly where this customer clicked through to my website first, how many times they came back, and then also that last click where they’ve come from in order to make that purchase. And so I often will see, it’s the level one broad audience that first brought them in, and then maybe a week or two later, it’s a different level one audience. 

Again, a broad targeting audience that has brought them back to make the purchase. And that’s okay. And what I’m also concentrating on rather than measuring just by the row as the return on ad spend. What I am taking more notice of and working hard to try and stabilise is the average cost per sale. So that is where I’m finding the level these these, I call them level one, these broad audience ads are the ones that are the most stable, they’re the ones that will get me say, a $50 sale over and over and over again, they don’t fluctuate as much as what the interest based or the lookalike audiences used to for me. And also, they’re fairly, you know, steady and consistent. They don’t drop off and just all of a sudden stopped working and like a lot of the other audiences I’ve been testing in the past have. This is why I’m no longer running retargeting audiences

It’s not so much about trying to pinpoint those audiences, because we’re just going in and selecting a really broad general audience. But it’s just getting the creative right. It’s getting the whether it’s the video, the slideshow, whether it is the headline or the text, or the description, and then the call to action, right? That’s what’s more important right now more than ever before versus just trying to get right you know, the audience targeting right so like I said, if anything has gotten easier, in my opinion.

Check out eComm Facebook Ads Academy.

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