Today on 5 Minute Marketing we’re talking about some common Facebook Ad techniques. Do they work? Are they worth the time and money? I want to share my experiences with you so you don’t make the same mistakes I did.
There is a theory floating around the Facebook Advertising world. It goes something like this: if I set up a video for thousands of people to view, I can narrow down those people to only the ones who watched 95% of my video, and then send a new ad to those people. In theory, it makes a lot of sense. You might have even tried it. We tried it, and we found out it doesn’t work.
We tried this several times, actually, and every single time the group of 95% viewers was the poorest performing group. They bought less than our warm list of customers, our cold list of customers, etc.
The question is: why? It would make so much sense to believe that people who are watching my video would later be more interested in buying my product. They’ve been exposed to my business, they understand what I do, and they are already “warm” by the time I try to sell them something.
On today’s episode I am breaking down my theory on why these potential customers are not really customers at all. I’m also saying “you’re welcome” because I tried this experiment and now you don’t have to.
Listen to today’s episode and find out more about why targeting 95% viewers doesn’t work.
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Do you want to keep being an underachiever, or are you willing to do what it takes to go pro? Most entrepreneurs are constantly looking for the next best thing: the new traffic source or the latest sales tactic, but that approach isn’t going to get you to your goal; it has the opposite effect. It leaves you stuck on the sideline, watching everyone else play the game. It’s time to go pro and step onto the field.
So I’m looking at my stats. Uh, I’m in Facebook Ads Manager right now. Um, those who’ve been following me for a while, you know that we do, uh, a ton of Facebook ads. We’ve been doing a ton more, uh, recently, spending over like, 10 grand a day.
And this year, that was one of my big, uh, goals, is one of the, the big things I had in my whiteboard in my home office, that I saw every day, was the goal to get to, uh, 10 grand a day in spend. And it took us, like six months to get there, but we finally got there, and we learned a ton of awesome stuff along the way. It’s, uh, why we, um, started recreating our signature Facebook ads course from back in 2012 and ’13 and ’14, called Facebook Ads Academy.
Um, i-and a lot of these aha’s went in there, um, along with the actual results that they got. And the biggest one that I see so many, you know, so called Facebook advertising experts or guys that are doing agency work and they’re running ads for a bunch of big-time clients, is this whole ideas that, uh, this idea that you run y-y-you take a, a content video and you put it up on Facebook. It could be 30 seconds, it could be 30 minutes, and you run ads to it, uh, with the, the goal of getting a bunch of video views. And if you know anything about Facebook ads, when you go in there and create an ad, you can decide it you want your ad to, if you want to the goal or the objective to be getting video views or getting likes or getting clicks or getting conversions, uh, on your website, or Facebook messages, event responses. They have all kinds of objects.
Uh, the cool thing about the video views is if you just care about getting video views, uh, y-y-you can get video views for crazy, crazy cheap. Uh, for example, uh, I’ll pull up one of these stats. Um, let me see real quick, see if I can pull it up. But we did, um, a campaign where we were testing that out, uh, in February and then again in April and again in July, just to kind of see. We’re always testing stuff with Facebook, trying to find out the, u-are-is their algorithm changing? Are the features in the ads changing? Is there some new loophole we could jump through? Um, and so we ran, uh, objective for video view. We too a, I took a content video that I put on Facebook, I think it was three or four minutes long, it taught, you know, a quick little tip that I figured out. And we ended up getting over 180,000 views for two pennies per view, uh, which is insanely cheap.
So that video, you know, y-you get the benefits of, it makes, i-it makes me look like I have a ton of credibility, or it shows the credibility that I do have. Uh, when people see a video that has that many views, you assume like, “Man, this, this person knows what they’re doing.”
Um, so the objective, or, or the, the big idea that’s floating around out there is, do that, that’s step one. Take a video, run ads to it with the objective getting video views, spend, you know, a couple hundred bucks and get a ton of views, and then Facebook lets you Pixel those people. So if you know anything about Facebook ads, you can create a custom adience, quote, unquote, and you can say, “I want this audience to be anyone who has watched X% of one of my videos, or all of my videos. So then you would, the idea that I’ve seen taught dozens of times is, you do that, step one, you get 100,000 views and then you create an audience of anyone that’s watched 95% of that video.
So you think, that’s someone who just spent a couple minutes watching a video, gave you their full attention. Now they know who they, who you are, they love your content, hopefully, if it’s good, and you have this audience of, you know, five, 10, 15,000 hyper-targeted, hyper-responsive, hyper-engaged people that have watched 95% of your video. It all sounds right. It’s, uh, that’s step one. Step two is create the audience, and step there is then, run a new ad to just those people that you essentially built this little list of, you know, thousands of people for really, really cheap. And then you run an ad to them and you sell something. You either send them, you know, to, uh, your one page where you’re selling something or through a webinar series or through a lead magnet opt-in where you sell something on the backend, or whatever it is you want to sell. Um, and you should get crazy high results, really, really good ROI, because you’re only showing your ad to someone who’s really giving your their full attention and already knows who you are. Sounds good.
And I loved the idea when I heard it. We implemented it three different times, and all three times, what we found was the 95, even the 95% viewer audience … We created audiences that, uh, people that only watched three seconds of the ad, 10 seconds of the ad, 25% of the ad … and when I say “ad,” I mean that first content video … 50%, 75% and 95%. And I wanted to see, “How do these audiences react differently?” Are the buyers the ones that are watching the whole video or does it not matter? Or does it, do these people buy at all?
So we ran a campaign, I think it was, uh … We tried it again. Uh, I always, eh, kind of want to stay on top of it, so we tried it again o-during the Black Friday promotion that we did a couple weeks ago, and again, this was the third time in a row that when we were running ads to something that was for sale, the audience of video viewers was the worst-performing audience by far. By far, it, it got out-performed, obviously, when we were targeting our warm list, people that are our fans or our email subscribers, they convert the best. Then cold audiences that we’re targeting people that follow other experts in our niche, or they liked certain tools in our niche, or they like, they have certain interests that we know they’re entrepreneurs or they’re looking to start an e-commerce business or whatever it is. Those people always convert really well.
Then we branch out even further to authors or to broad categories, like someone who’s interested in email marketing. Uh, those audiences are even bigger because they’re really broad. Those usually convert pretty well for us. And guess what the worst-performing audience is across the board every time? 95% viewers of our videos. Why is that? Y-I-I don’t know why. If I could look at Facebook’s code, I would know why, but here’s my, my theory, and I’ve run this by a couple of guys that, um, uh, they, they do Facebook ads 24/7/365 and they know people, um, on Facebook’s ad teams, so they have reason to believe that this is true.
The thought process is: Facebook, th-th-the code that makes Facebook what it is, the algorithms behind the scenes, they know which one of us are likers, clickers, commenters, sharers, viewers, uh, opt-in type folks, people that opt-in to stuff, and buyers. They know all of that, because every Facebook advertiser out there has their Pixels set up all over their website, and when you guys come to my website and you opt-in for something, boom. I send some, a ping back to Facebook and they know, “Hmm, okay. Jim or Sarah, they’re an opt-in person. They, they’re elite. They like to opt-in for stuff.” And as soon as you buy, boom. I-I ping Facebook again. Now Facebook knows you’re a buyer. But if you’re just always a viewers, all day every day and all you do is view videos on Facebook, that’s who Facebook is going to send me when I’m telling Facebook that’s what I want. That’s why they’re so cheap, because those people are cheap, usually.
Um, again, there’s an exception to every rule. I’m sure in some niche, selling some product, somewhere, some place, that that strategy of pro-promoting a content video that’s a couple minutes long, you know, all the way up to a half hour long and getting people to watch a ton of that video and then showing another ad to those viewers to get them to buy something, I’m sure that works somewhere, but I have now tried four separate times and it has bombed every single time.
And in the end, that’s actually good news for you. The good news is, doing that s-who-that whole set up, that whole campaign is fricking tedious and it’s annoying. You got to make a content video, you got to set up one ad and set it up the right way and hope it works. Then you got to build this list of people and you got to learn how to set up custom audiences. Then you got to set up a separate ad campaign with a separate, you know, marketing funnel or wherever you’re going to send people, and it’s, it’s twice as much work. And after all that, twice as much work, three or four separate times, that audience has bombed every time.
So, um, you know, don’t go out there and bash everybody who’s promoting that. I’m sure they’re not lying that they’ve seen it work before, hopefully, um, but I’ve run it three, four different times now and it has bombed every time. So, um, don’t do that. That’s the, the lesson for today.
So hope that helps. Uh, we got a ton of cool stuff coming for you guys, uh, both on the SamCart side. We’re working on some pretty game-changing, kick ass stuff that we’re going to be, uh, releasing in the early part of 2019. I can’t wait. And, uh, anyway, that is about it for today. I think we went over the five minute mark, um, but oh well. Hopefully, uh, hopefully [inaudible 00:09:42] delivered for you guys. So that’s it. Have a good rest of the week and I will check, catch you guys soon.
Do you want to take your life and business to the next level? Then get my new book, The Going Pro Manifesto. Inside this new book, you’ll discover the secrets that most entrepreneurs overlook that will help you scale your business to the seven figure level and beyond. You can grab your copy at BrianMoran.com/pro. [/expand]
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