Paid Advertising Crash Course

[eliquid]

I'm going to have to end up finishing it this year though. Maybe even within the next 90 days hopefully.

Gotta tie up these opportunities that sometimes get pushed to the side for others.

I'll keep you updated when it happens though.

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[eliquid]

Hi @eliquid, thanks for this informative post, especially the FB part!
I'm running ads on FB next month and have some questions:

1) I've a $100 Adwords voucher from Shopify. Do you think I should wait until my shop has more products first before using this? I currently have only 1 product and the website is very new and tiny currently.


2)

Does this mean I should use a bright yellow ad image with bold black text on it, even though it doesn't align with my brand? I was thinking, in such cases, eyeballs and clicks are more important, right? It will stick out like a sore thumb and disrupt their attention, and force them to focus on my ad!


3)

If I do it in groups of 5 years and multiply that by say, 8 ad placements (4 for mobile and 4 for desktop), that's 40 ad sets in total. Wouldn't this cost a bomb? In fact, I doubt I can recoup all my ad fees even if I managed to sell my first batch of products.


4)

CPM bidding is that "Daily Budget" thing? This? https://i.gyazo.com/1c87197fc705271363be871ca50596fb.png
I can't seem to find any words that say "CPM" or "CPC" in the Ad manager.


5) For FB ad placements, do you have a favorite for mobile and desktop?

6) When starting out on FB ads for the 1st time, what amt of budget do you recommend for the FB ads? Would US$2 a day for 6 days be good? Est. reach a day is 470 - 1800. Maybe you can critique my setup below:

Thanks eliquid!

1. I wouldn't wait. Start building up the remarketing list now and getting pixels seasoned.

2. You want your ad to promise something, and your LP to deliver on that promise. If you have a yellow ad with a pic of a dog, your LP better be the same message.

3. Just because you have 40 ads, doesn't mean they will all spend money or be unprofitable. Unless you test 40 ads, you won't know what the best ad is to even run.

4. Many things in the FB ad tool/editor have changed since I originally wrote this. It is now best to just set it to optimize for conversions.

5. Mobile seems to work out a tad better, but that's for me and my clients/products.

6. I think that's too little. A lot of people start out with $5 a day, but I still think that's too little. If it were me and I was strapped for cash, I wouldn't do less than $15 a day bare min. $100 a day would be better though.

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[eliquid]

Thanks for the advice and reply. Let's say you're strapped for cash and you do US$15 per day. How long would you run those ads for while burning through all the money in order to collect data? About 1 month?

If everything is set up correctly, I'd prob spend at the very least $300 and see what data I collect from that.

How much is a customer worth to your business though?

 

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[eliquid]

@eliquid

I sell a digital product ranging from $30-$300 (tiered price options).

If I’m running $100 a day, is it best to go straight for the sale or collect emails?

Both.

Why not sell something, but offer a lead magnet for email signups off to the side? Maybe give part of it away?

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[eliquid]

It's something I use to do.

However, depending on setup and size.. you're basically moving a keyword from one adgroup to another ( or campaign ). Even if it wasn't a direct keyword ( farming and mining ), you are still negative matching it out of the original, and putting it into a new group/campaign.

The idea is that it could be problematic for you.

I've had setups where I found a winning keyword after months of farming/mining. The keyword had multiple conversions and was doing well.

I negative match it out and put it in it's own adgroup/campaign with the same ads, bid, and positioning and it does horrible for the next 5 weeks until I pause it.

I go back and remove the negative match and it's doing fine back in the original setup.

To me, it's pretty clear cut that could hurt you based on that.

You might not ever experience that though. You should try and see and find out where you come out at.

I no longer do this method with my higher end accounts that are critical. However, it could be something I try again with a lower end account in the future.

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[eliquid]

Almost a 6-month long semi-break.

Things are changing a lot in paid advertising. Hope you all have been hitting it hard!

 

[The-J]

This is an excellent glimpse into the world of paid traffic. I'm looking forward to your book. Have you written any other books in the past? I'd like to take a look.

 

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[The-J]

I approached the sites and offered to pay them based on CPM to place my PIXEL on their site.

Hold on... how many people actually continue to do this? This is wicked smart.

Were you easily able to track how many people hit your pixel from that website?

About how much did you pay CPM for these? No ad real estate = much cheaper CPM, no?

Awesome stuff.

 

[eliquid]

I like the pixel strategy. That's some ninja marketing right there. Did you use a custom pixel or a Facebook pixel to do this? If custom, how do you make one?

I made my own.

All it was, was my remarketing providers code put into my own code. I gave this code to the site owner so they didn't know I was using another bit of code instead.

The would have found it out though if they would have executed and researched it when it fired, but no one ever did ( or cared ).

 

[eliquid]

Just read this thread for the first time and was blown away by the incredible knowledge and experiences you've shared with regards to PPC and advertising. Huuuuge thank you!! Will absolutely keep following along.

I have some other stuff ( kinda mostly the same ) that I might have worded differently in other parts of the forum too.

Like for example, I just finished up a few posts here for @TheDillon__ at https://www.thefastlaneforum.com/community/threads/confused-optimizing-this-adwords-ad.73929/

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[Andy Black]

I talked with a potential client today.

I realize something new every time I interact with new clients, which is great. But many times it is also concerning.

More and more people decide to set their marketing budgets on some random advice they get that says, "X percentage of your revenue should be marketing" or "this is what I can afford and if you make me more money, I can spend more gladly".

While those strategies might have some merit, it's typically the wrong mindset.

Example:

The Problem ( and backstory )

Say you have a budding Personal Injury attorney in Scottsdale. He does OK but he don't have a lot of money for his new practice.

At best, he has $750 a month to spend monthly on PPC. ( this is a very real and typical example )

He picks running on Adwords as his marketing platform and his clicks in this vertical and location come out to be near $60 a click on average.

With his $750 monthly budget, he needs to set a daily budget at $25 a day.

$25 a day budget... but the clicks are $60 each. I'm sure you can do the math here, right?

So lets assume the guy can spend $100 a day though. That's $3k a month roughly.

The clicks are still $60 a click. It only takes 1.5 clicks to exhaust his daily budget of $100.

Most times, this guy's budget is exhausted before 1pm EST.

Most times, depending on his CPC setting, he is probably bottom of the page or an average position of 4th/5th when he does run.


His Outcome

Most of the day, his ad is not showing. Meaning he is losing potential customers and cases.

Even the customers he is getting good results with, the data behind those customers is skewed to those willing to click a bottom of the page ad ( meaning they probably priced shopped elsewhere or couldn't get a hold of the attorneys listed above him ) AND those looking early in the morning.

You really can't optimize forward on this skewed and dirty data.

I mean, you can optimize on it... if you always want to be bottom of the page and ONLY run in the mornings going forward because that's all this data is really good for other than "generalities".

In the end, most times this account will fail and not get optimized correctly because the data will be flawed and the budget was set on the mindset of "I should only be spending x% on marketing", or "this is all I can afford".


Alternative

I get it if you can not afford more for Adwords and only put in what you can.

But the correct method to START your marketing spend with Adwords so you get off on the right foot is, having enough marketing budget to secure a 1st or 2nd average position for your keywords to cover a full 24 hour period for the entire month.

Expensive? It can be. But would you rather do it differently and never have the "right data" to optimize to get to profitability and lose all that ad spend anyways later in floundering results?

See, the issue really boils down, "what can I work with to optimize your account".

When you have a low monthly budget, you potentially end up like my attorney friend above that either doesn't have enough ad spend daily to show his ad ( $25 daily, but clicks are $60 ), or you have just enough that if 1-2 people click on your ad ( at say 9am ), your ads shut off before noon every day for the most part.

Based on that, maybe your best customers are online needing your services after they come home from dinner at night and are in an accident. They never see your ad and thus never call you. Saul Goodman gets the call instead and settles a multi-million dollar PI case.

Also, as your PPC guy.. I can't come back to you with insights like, "Hey, it looks like you make the most revenue Tuesday nights from 6pm to 11pm". Why? Because you don't have that data for me to find, your ads shut off most days at noon because you can not afford a better budget for Adwords.

If your budget is so low that you set your CPC's low to try to squeeze more out of the budget, you are also hurting this whole process. Any data I get will only reflect the low end of the spectrum for Adwords. Because your average position is now 4th-5th, your ad really is showing at 8th or 9th a lot of times, and maybe sometimes it shows in 2nd and 3rd. Again it's an average, but lets assume because of this low average that your higher ranked competitors get the lion's share of clicks and leads. You get barely any leads yourself, and most days you might get 0.

After a while, you are left with keywords that don't get clicks or at least a very horrible CTR overall. Maybe you get a few leads, but nothing compared to your competitors. When you look at how much it costs to get those leads, the numbers just aren't profitable.

Well, that's because you got the left over leads that either couldn't reach your competitors or couldn't afford them. Maybe you got people who were also "researching" the bottom of the page just to make sure they can validate their top choice they already made up in their mind, your competitor that is sitting above you.

No matter the reason, you are going to look at this data and assume, "well Adwords sucks" or "the guy I hire sucks". In reality, your data and experience is reflective of your low budget. The data you gleam off this tells you to pause several keywords and ads because "they waste money" and in a fit you decide after pausing them you need to pour in your last $3k into outbidding your competitors for a hail Mary pass.

After 14 days, the money is spent and you get even worse performance.

Why?

Maybe because those keywords and ads you paused because you thought they sucked, only sucked because you were at the bottom of the page. At the top of the page, they more than likely did well and would have made you money. You paused ads and keywords based on bad data and left runnign the ones with low spend. At the top of the page, these keywords spent more money but they were actually keywords and ads that just didn't have enough data prior to justify running them anyways.

No, the data wasn't wrong. You just interpreted the data wrong because it was dirty and only reflective of certain parameters.

This is why I advocate spending more the first couple of months so you can "buy good data".

In the prior example, you didn't go into the account with a "BUY data mindset".. and in buying data, you need to buy the right data within the correct parameters.


It's no different than if you bought a list of homes in your area to send direct mail to. Do you just buy any list, or do you niche it down and pre-qualify the list?

Any list could be addresses and names from anyone who lived in the area since 1967 and hasn't been updated since 1989.

A good data list would be a list of addresses and names that was updated in the last 12 months and only of homes that were valued at least $375,000+

Which is the better data to get you results?


Conclusion

I'm not saying you have to spend thousands more and go bankrupt to be successful with Adwords.

I'm also not saying you need to do this every single month to be successful.

However, if I was starting out fresh ( or already had an account and had bad/marginal results ), I would find a way to get the money to run 30-60 days worth being #1 or 2 all hours of the day for a full 30-60 days so I could jump start my account with the right data for optimization. Depending on volume, you might only have to do this for 1-2 weeks.

If not, you potentially will spend months floundering around and wasting that money anyways. Months spent floundering around could lead to you going bankrupt or closing down an advertising channel prematurely that could be sending you in buckets of profitable leads/sales.

Questions?

Interesting.

I must admit I assume the click-to-enquiry-rate, click-to-sale-rate, and customer LTV don't change based on ad position ... until data tells me otherwise.

Here's what I think I'd do in that scenario:

1. For someone who has a budget of $750/mth where average clicks are $60, then I'd likely try to find a few longer tail keywords that we can dominate and that (often) have a better conversion rate to boot.
2. I'd focus the budget and efforts there and try and get profitable.
3. I'd start by counting impressions first (bidding on loads of long tail keywords with the same bid price and seeing where the search volumes are, where we're getting impressions, and what our average positions are). There'll likely be a few pivot-table deep dives going on to try and determine pockets we should focus on (keywords by device, time of day, day of week, etc).
4. This would inform me and the client what to focus on.
5. We then try to get clicks... but for a handful of keywords (likely long-tail exact match or modified broad).
6. We can see the search term -> ad -> landing page funnel for this handful of keywords.
7. We can check how it compares to the competitors, and maybe work on the ad copy and landing page.
8. Weekly tests and see how it goes.

 

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[eliquid]

Can I ask your opinion on landing pages, I'm running a PPC campaign for my employer, a large car dealer, I'm bidding on used car search terms and sending traffic to the used car results page relating to the search term the user used for example if someone searches on Google for 'used ford fiesta for sale' they would be sent to a page listing all our used Ford Fiesta stock. I read on a PPC blog that I should be using a custom landing page, what's your thoughts on this, it's a bit tricky for a car dealer with lots of various makes and models.

I'm kind of wondering about this too for the car industry. For example, landing pages have always been easy for me when generating leads for things like plumbing, email services, and some ecommerce products. But I too am kind of confused about the car industry.

My assumption has always been that the landing pages for the auto industry are more like templates with scripts that dynamcially change content based search query, kind of like Unbounce's dynamic keyword insertion features. For example, if I search used honda civic 2007 in philadelphia pa then it's pretty easy to change all of that content dynamically. In fact, I saw cars.com dong something like this awhile back. They would even match the BG image to the search query (for the most part). But maybe I have been wrong all of this time. So I'd also love to hear more about this.

On another note about landing pages, awhile back one of my ppc managers sent me a weekly report for the wrong client. It was an ecomm store in the sun tan lotion niche. The store was doing making 100's of thousands of $$ per week and they were just sending traffic straight to the shopify home page. It kind of blew my mind to see that they weren't doing anything with dedicated landing pages.

With inventory like cars that can move daily and not get replenished ( like stock in a shopify store ) with the same model, this would be the best way to handle it, by making a page for the models instead of the indiv cars.

What you are trying to do is make the page relevant to the query. So if someone types in "ford fiesta for sale" and they hit your page that lists 10 of them instead of just 1 specific one ( by VIN ), then you would be fine.

Also, there will be times when you just have 1 ford fiesta for sale and not get another one in for 10 months. As a large car dealer, I wouldn't spend time manually creating a LP and AD for 1 car that might sell today and never be back in stock. Not unless you have automated software to do this that can build the page, build the ad, insert it into Adwords, and then take down the page AND take the ad down when the car is marked as sold so you don't have to manually do it. I get that selling the car can be a lot of money, but if you have several models like this its a lot of work daily to keep track of and do.

As far as the suntan lotion stuff... Could the report have been reporting/covering more than Adwords when it came to sales? I've seen a few agencies that handle Adwords for clients, but they build reports for Amazon, Adwords, eBay and other channels for the client when it comes to revenue even though the agency doesn't manage those channels. If so, this could be throwing you off.

Sometimes hitting Page X ( like the home page or default product page ) is enough to get good sales with Adwords.

It's doesn't mean its the best, most ROI, or least expensive. It just means the owner is making money.

If a bottle of suntan lotion costs $0.15 to make and you sell it for $20.. and your poorly written ad, poorly done LP and Quality Score of 3 makes you have a cost per click of $1.. well you might be able to spend $15 at those metrics, make a sale, and be happy with that ( maybe ). Mostly because not only did you score $5 as profit ( miserable I think ), but you got the customers email and got them on remarketing too to sell them more later. You might have also upsold or cross sold them in the checkout funnel.

While you only made $5 on the direct transaction, your LTV on that customer might average $34 instead of $5. It very well might end up at $107 for LTV.

Someone at the agency or business might realize that and think this campaign is awesome. $15 spend in ads for $34 or $107 LTV.

Remember, this is with poor ads and LPs and a bad Quality Score.

Since everyone thinks this is good, no one is going in to bother with making a better ad or a better LP to raise the Quality Score. Things are fine "as-is" for the owner/company. The agency doesn't bring it up because their customer is happy.

Someone could go in and tweaks things to get the $15 ad spend down to $5 and save them $10, but they probably aren't because they could also screw things up too in the process and then the agency could lose a happy paying client.

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[eliquid]

What eliquid said is correct - selling the scripts isn't a viable business model. People will just share them.

When I was doing adwords, I put a fair amount of thought into the problem of automation and then wrapping that up into a business.

The scripts, by themselves, are not going to work. What CAN work, I think, is building out a backend in something like Python or C# where you get access to the person's account, and then create custom algorithms to change bids, ads, etc. Google has a mechanism for this, but you can't get access to production adwords accounts without submitting a request that includes screen shots and a design document of the functional prototype. It's a bit of a catch-22. Not impossible to work around, just a barrier to entry.

If all of that is too much for you ( it was for me ), then the best option is to use the built in rule system to manage the account. You can't integrate with outside APIs, but you can do a fair amount of the account management automatically (adjusting bids, etc.).

Yes, their API system is a bit of a catch-22.

Past that, you still need a lot of experience as a coder and Adwords/PPC person to know how the algo you are creating should work and why.

For example, you don't wan't code that isn't well thought out to have some kind of flaw where bids are increased based on poor data digestion within the algo. You could raise bids or lower QS without knowing it until it's too late.

SERPWoo ( the SaaS I created ) has small flaws and bugs we find all the time. Me and my partner have been coders for over 20 years each. We've also been digital marketers for about the same time each too. You will also find small bugs and issues. Now compound that with someone's paid ad budget and you see what kinds of issues you might run into.

I'm not saying this to scare you or run you off.

However, you need to know what you'r dealing with on all levels and I am just trying to share that because I feel it's what you need to know to make an informed decision.

 

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[amp0193]

When do we stop launching ads like #3, and start launching "branches and leaves" like the ad below?

When there's enough data that you can make a confident decision to which ad is better. Could take a week, could take a couple of months... just depends on the search volume. The closer together the CTRs, the longer you'll need to run to determine the winner.


When you find a winner, then make a new ad to test against it.


When split testing, be sure to select the option "Rotate Indefinitely" under Settings --> Ad Rotation, so that you can get an equal share of views between the two ads.

 

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[The-J]

Sorry about the delay.

I pretty much always try to run Conversions. A conversion can pretty much be any event you want and since I'm driving traffic to a page for a reason, I want more and more of w/e event I am going after with my page.

I almost never run anything to get likes to a page. Most times those campaigns end up not getting me leads or sales. Leads and sales are all I am looking to get when I do paid ads on FB.

To build a page or group up, I wouldn't use paid ads for it. Not unless I had some viral giveaway attached to it. Only then would I ever do paid ads to a group or FB page.

For campaigns that seem to be getting good traction, I kill ads when they spend 2-3x more than their goal. So if I am trying to get leads or sales at $45 and the campaign started off getting sales at $60, I'd keep running and tweaking. Same is true up to about $130 or so. If the campaign started off badly though with no sales, I might let it get to about 5x with 0 sales before cutting it. The goal is to get conversions so you can tweak down. For some campaigns this will be hard to do though... so say your goal is $5 a lead/sale. That's going to be really tough on Facebook to only let it run for $15 or $20 and give up, so for something like this I might let it run for $100-$200, or even 100 clicks and see the stats on landing page views, etc.

For creating ads quickly.. if you are just wanting to change out images ( one of the most important things about the ad ) you can do that easily within FB itself with the duplicate button. This is where I focus a lot of my time with ad creation. The text around the ad is important too, but I try to nail the image down first, then work on text, then button ( shop now, etc ). Once I have some good images, I work on maybe 5-10 version of the text which isnt hard to get into FB manually.

Rep++, that's excellent.

For those who want to run conversions but feel like it's too expensive to run the 50 conversions/week to get FB to optimize properly, choose a higher point on the funnel to optimize for. This will probably get you worse results, but your budget is your budget.

@eliquid FB has outlined pretty much everything a beginner needs in order to start running FB ads (start with your goal, install your pixel, get 50+ conversions/week to optimize properly, know your audience, test creatives and placements). With that + the information you've shared here, is there anything you feel like FB is misrepresenting?

 

[eliquid]

Wanna chat a bit 1x1 with me personally about paid advertising?

I'll be speaking at the 2018 FLF event in Scottsdale.

Specifically, I'll be talking about SaaS at the event, but I'll be around to talk to people about other stuff like paid advertising.

If you want to meetup during the event ( or slightly before/after ), this is your notice to attend the event and make contact with me.

Meetup - 2018 Fastlane Summit - Confirmed Speaker List

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[MisterBHZ]

Something I want to point out with using video & image ads on FB.

With video ads, when people click the video (not the button), FB sends them to your site but with the video at the top of the page. The user will have to scroll down to see the actual site.

For me, this isnt 45fg2good because it leads to high bounce rates with people clicking off in a couple seconds. I'm assuming this is happening because people are sent back to the video they just clicked with my site below it. And, they aren't scrolling down past the video but yet I still get charged for someone clicking to my site.

With image ads, when people click the image (not the button), FB sends them to the full site with nothing at the top. I have much lower bounce rates & people actually stay on my site for much longer.

This is something that I've noticed for awhile & wanted to share with those that may not have noticed when using FB ads.

 

[eliquid]

Google doesn't mess around.

This is an awesome thread. Thank you for all the info and value provided. I took detailed notes so I could validate an e-comm idea.

Built the site, listed the product, built two rudimentary ads for Adwords and two for Facebook.

Both were driving minimal traffic in the first 24 hours. I expected this and just wanted to play around with things.

Well, 24 hours into Adwords, my account is suspended. "Your account is suspended, we've detected suspicious payments in your account" I fill out an appeal and they reply back within an hour saying I'm in violation of their terms. No further info is provided.

The only violation I can think off is my copy was a bit off so maybe that caused the flag. Technically it could fall under a "misrepresentation" which they appear to take very serious.

I'm writing to share so others that rip through here don't repeat my hasty mistake. Go fast, but double check and read the TOS so you dont make rookie mistakes.

Spanked but not down and out!

Yeah, I've noticed Facebook doing this a lot recently too.

A client that I was helping recently got their new FB account banned. So I set up a second one for him, also banned.

We set up a third and got it running and just bill him under my card now.

He wasn't doing anything wrong or shady. All of his ads were good. His card for payments was good.

Facebook wouldnt give us any clue why. We filled out the form to provide ID too for him.

Sometimes it these platforms get nervous and tripped up on some filter.

 

[eliquid]

Anyone got any questions out there yet?

I'm wanting to prep for my presentation at the event in Feb. Your questions here could help me prep out there

 

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[eliquid]

You said earlier in this thread that FB has too many targeting options. Is there a maximum number of options that you test in one given campaign?

I try to test only 1, max 2 things per campaign. So if I am testing age in one campaign, I might only test interest in another and that will be it.

Do you typically start by casting a wide net and narrow the audience as results come in or start with you ideal customer and work backwards?

Thanks in advance.

I do both, but only bc I can spend the money.

One campaign will be a wide net using FB's algo to narrow down by conversion.

I'll build the same campaign, but focus in on my desired/expected customer and use FB conversion algo to narrow down even further.

After a week, I can tell which is going to work out the best conversion wise and I will leave one on, and the other I will turn off.

If you can only spend enough money for 1, do the wider net if you can wait it out.

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[eliquid]

What sort of automated rules do you utilize the most? Any scripts?

So 2 answers:

1. For those rules/scripts I use on almost every account.. it would have to be a budgeting script ( some clients are REALLY anal about not spending over X per month, not even a dollar ) so I use a script to ensure accounts go into pause if they reach 20% of the final budget just to be on the safe side. Sometimes I do this daily too instead of monthly now that Google will and can go over your budget.

For rules, I love to use 3 rules that help ensure kws are in positions that provide the most ROI for the client. Let's just say they help me stay on top of the page and not bottom or 2nd page.

2. I do use other scripts and rules, but it depends on client and need. I have a few I can't talk about bc its my advantage moat. Scripts that do some heavy analysis like split testing ads for me and refining negatives, etc.

What are your thoughts on DKI? If you use them, do you have any tips for effective use?

I don't really like DKI. Mostly because I use excel to build out a lot of the campaigns quickly. I might use 1 DKI ad in the build, but that's very rare. Typically I try to have 3 ads per adgroup and DKI is almost never present for me because I'm my groups are so tight I can pretty much use a H1 or H2 that contains the term and the term will have little variation since the groups are so tight.

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[Andy Black]

So 2 answers:

1. For those rules/scripts I use on almost every account.. it would have to be a budgeting script ( some clients are REALLY anal about not spending over X per month, not even a dollar ) so I use a script to ensure accounts go into pause if they reach 20% of the budget just to be on the safe side.

For rules, I love to use 3 rules that help ensure kws are in positions that provide the most ROI for the client.

2. I do use other scripts and rules, but it depends on client and need. I have a few I can't talk about bc its my advantage moat. Scripts that do some heavy analysis like split testing ads for me and refining negatives, etc.




I don't really like DKI. Mostly because I use excel to build out a lot of the campaigns quickly. I might use 1 DKI ad in the build, but that's very rare. Typically I try to have 3 ads per adgroup and DKI is almost never present for me because I'm my groups are so tight I can pretty much use a H1 or H2 that contains the term and the term will have little variation since the groups are so tight.

.

Yep. I don't use DKI at all. I see it as a sign you can create your ads properly...

(Except for that trademark workaround which I don't use anymore.)

 

[eliquid]

Did you know Google is going to take your ads, rewrite them on their own, and then set their versions of your ads live in your account automatically?

Yeah, this could be good.. or horrible. Depends on if your clients expect approval of their copy before set live ( like many of mine ).

Wanna know more?
About ad suggestions (beta) - AdWords Help

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[eliquid]

For those looking for "averages" in the industry with Adwords...

 

[eliquid]

Just bumping. Had several people Liking the thread recently and I got alerted on it.

Thought I would bump for new members.

 

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[The-J]

2. TikTok is the place to be, if you can pull it off. When it fails, it fails hard. When it's good, it's some of the best you can get outside of Search. Their ad manager is just bullocks though. Many people that jumped off Facebook, jumped into TikTok. Sadly though, only a few of them got TikTok right.

I've been doing some TikTok advertising. Haven't figured it out yet. Other people seem to have figured it out though, so clearly I'm missing something. Here's what I've picked up so far

It seems that what used to work on Facebook doesn't work on TikTok, requiring media buyers and businesses to rethink their funnels.

Creative has always been key, but on TikTok, creative is so important since you can just retarget people who interacted with your creative. Test a lot of things and see what works. Native looking content seems to work the best.

Targeting is VERY different from Facebook. But lookalikes and custom audiences seem to work mostly the same. You can't just upload a customer list to TikTok and be able to target them, though, unless you have their Apple/Google advertiser IDs.

TikTok relies on this "infinite loop" of retail, where people use review content to influence their purchasing decisions, purchase the product, then post review content on the platform themselves and interact with other people who are still in the consideration stage. This is genius, and it seems that the brands getting it right are able to utilize this. An example is creating a bunch of UGC discovery content, running it to top and middle of funnel, and interacting with anyone who has questions related to common objections. Then getting customers and influencers to create more UGC content, ideally positive reviews.

The algorithm feeds shoppers a ton of shopping related content, most of it organic.

There's a ton of misinformation on the subject spread by people who got something to work but don't quite understand why it works. Test everything. And don't listen to me, either, I'm just a noob at this too.

 

[eliquid]

The interesting part was the CPE difference that varied from .30 to 3.00 and the amount of difference in engagement.

I think I make (and have been making) the typical mistake Sanj spoke about that 90% of marketers make. Choosing a product before clearly defining an audience.

This is what I try to tell people about Ad networks like FB.

You cant always blame your product or audience. The fact you make the ad 4 more times and got wildly different results is proof sometimes it is just out of your hands.

However, you should def. improve what you are doing. That could be y our product or demo or something else.

Always make copies of ads though. When you find something that could be your next winner, you dont want to throw it away just because 1 ad didnt get you sales from FB. Make copies of it and run it and be sure.

 

[eliquid]

@Greg Rutkowski glad to have shared my experience.

 

[Seebs10]

Just read this thread for the first time and was blown away by the incredible knowledge and experiences you've shared with regards to PPC and advertising. Huuuuge thank you!! Will absolutely keep following along.

 

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[eliquid]

@TheDillon__ Still working on a few things that got in the way. It should be ready shortly

 

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