Ecommerce Influence Podcast Ep. 250: What’s Working To Scale Accounts On Facebook And Instagram Right Now
by Austin Brawner and Andrew Foxwell
If You Are Advertising On Facebook And Instagram, This Is An Episode You Don’t Want To Miss!
As we see an increase in Facebook and Instagram usage due to COVID-19, many of our clients are scaling up their advertising. Today’s episode will cover what’s working right now in paid social and how our clients and partners are scaling up!
Episode Highlights
6:37 The specific audiences working right now for top of the funnel advertising
9:57 User-generated content that’s providing additional scale
11:30 What’s working right now to scale up middle of the funnel advertising
12:22 The audience advertisers should be targeting
13:23 Bid strategy – are cost caps working?
15:35 How to acknowledge the challenging times on the website and product
19:14 Optimizing dynamic creative within campaigns
20:58 What optimization is working in low funnel
21:33 How to address shipping concerns
22:44 Other messaging opportunities to address delivery concerns
Transcript
So obviously lots has changed in the world and yeah, so today we wanted to really dive into what's been working on Facebook and Instagram right now.
Andrew Foxwell: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think it's interesting to kind of look at this time. It's very unique. But the interesting thing about our industry generally, I would say two thirds of eCommerce companies that I've spoken with and then to two thirds of those that are through agencies as well that we work with, we work with a lot of agencies now and, and are consultants with them, is people are scaling actually.
And it's pretty incredible because there's just so much more usage. Facebook has said there's 70% increase in time of usage on Facebook and Instagram. They said their family of apps, which obviously would also include WhatsApp. But from an ad serving perspective it's really Instagram and Facebook. So that's incredible because we're seeing CPMs and pricing that we've just really never seen or haven't seen in a long time.
Maybe the last time I saw these was back in the days when I was scaling Blenders Eyewear back in the 2015, 16 timeframe. So it was a while ago. So what we're going to go over today is basically a big laundry list of the research that I've done on what's working for us and then posted it in our group, the Facebook and Instagram pro ad buyers group on Facebook.
If you're not a member of that, we'd love to have you. About 1800 strong now, some of the best advertisers in the world. And people gave us some other ideas of what's working. So that's what we're going to go through and we're just going to fire through them because I want it to be incredibly tactical.
Austin Brawner: Cool. So this episode is going to be great for you if you are running a brand and you're advertising on Facebook and Instagram. If you are running an agency, if you're a freelance marketer, anybody who's on paid social, this episode is going to be for you and give you some things to try. So why don't we kick it off, Andrew. What the hell is working right now? What are you seeing?
Andrew Foxwell: So, so let me go through what's working for us first. So what's working for us first is, first of all we've seen this in a little bit in the Q4, but is wider audiences on top of funnel. So this really means sometimes no targeting with only in exclusion of website visitors or your email list. So the bigger and the wider you can go, the better off you're going to be.
We did see instances where last year at 1% 2% lookalikes were doing okay, but we've now seen that basically the more leash we call it in the advertising world, you give a top of funnel prospecting audience, the better off you're going to be from a performance standpoint just because Facebook has more places to show it. So that's the first one.
Austin Brawner: Is there any like guidelines on budget there? That's always the question that I have. And I get that question a lot. When you're going for like a broad audience, is there a limitation on the minimum budget? You need to have to be able to target that or are you commanding that across the board?
Andrew Foxwell: I think it's tough on a big wide budget. It's hard to know. Generally my feeling is, let's just take $100 CPA as an example, $100 CPA, you want to try to, I'm not saying you have to exit the learning phase, which would be, 50 conversions in seven days is how Facebook determines this.
But there's a lot of nuance to this. There's things called learning limited. I don't want to get into that now. But generally you want to try to walk towards learning phase. Or walk towards exiting learning phase. So if you have $100 CPA you're going for 50 conversions in a seven day period, then that 50 conversions, let's just say divided by seven days, is seven conversions a day. So if you take a hundred that means that you need your ad set to these 700 or the CBO campaign budget to be $700. So that's a lot.
Austin Brawner: And that's just running one ad. No tests.
Andrew Foxwell: So it's like, so it's really a matter of how do you kind of balance that? To me, a lot of people are, it's common to start with like a $500 a day budget or $100 a day. It's common. It's like a fairly common thing that we're going to hear. So for me it's like, okay, can you give it $100 a day and can you try a wide audience and maybe a a campaign budget optimization campaign or a CBO of let's say a grouping of 6% lookalikes or 8% lookalikes of 8% percent lookalike of purchasers, 8% percent lookalike of add to carts within the last 180 days or whatever.
And try those two wide ones totally wide and then a look alike. And if even $100 a day on each of those CBOs, that's an interesting test. And so it's there's like sort of the answer that Facebook gives you and then there's sort of like the recommendation and then there's what you have to do practically as an advertiser. I think. So consolidation is helpful from a budgetary standpoint.
To read and listen more, visit: https://www.ecommerceinfluence.com/scale-accounts/
