16/09/2021
Jacob Landis, The owner of the ad company Jacob LE, works with a variety of eCommerce companies, helping them increase profitability and scale their companies with paid ads.
Topics Covered:
-
Secret options for retargeting people who have opted out of tracking.
-
How to create UTMs and how to use Naming conventions for your campaigns
-
How to use Facebook Ads Automated Rules
-
Optimizing your ads using different Facebook bid types
-
Mindset tips and realistic expectations for your Facebook ads
And much more…
For more info:
**
Show Transcript:
**Let’s hear the Secret options for retargeting people who have opted out of tracking, the tips on how to use Facebook Ads Automated Rules, and much more from the owner of the ad company Jacob LE, who works with a variety of eCommerceaco companies and helping them increase profitability and scale their companies with paid ads, JACOB LANDIS!
Yaron Been: Can you elaborate for the listeners a bit about what you were doing these days and your background?
Jacob Landis: Yeah, so I run an ad agency working primarily with E-commerce companies, the main focus is on Facebook ads, we’re trying to start to expand just because things are changing so rapidly. And you know, with all the customers, I tell them, Don’t just only invest in Facebook, start diversifying.
And I’m starting to realize for my business, that makes sense. And for certain people, Facebook ads don’t make as much sense.
Performance of Facebook ads on driving sales, good returns, and long-term business.
So primarily Facebook ads focused on mainly driving sales, getting a good return on ad spend, and building the business long term. That’s kind of the main focus.
Yaron Been: Do you see the performance deteriorating?
Do you just feel that everybody’s talking about the update of the iOS and then moving to conversion API?
And for me, I haven’t noticed a real drop in the performance, but I’m not running a lot of ad accounts. So I’m wondering if you as an agency owner, see a decrease in performance on Facebook?
Jacob Landis: Yeah, so I’ve made I’ve talked with a lot of other people in the industry, and things have just gotten kind of crazy, like what’s being reported can be just wildly off.
I will admit, I thought it would have an impact, but I didn’t think it would it kind of like broke their entire algorithm. Because the whole way it’s set up is it was good at finding just the right person who was likely to buy over time.
And the more people that found to do that, the better I would get at finding those exact people. Well, now you’ve taken like half the people, and before they were really good people to show the ad to but now you can never retarget them or follow up with them.
So suddenly, that whole optimization doesn’t work anymore. So like with one ad account, like the results, they’re profitable, and what just instantly to losing money sucks really quickly. And then some companies you know, we’re only doing Facebook ads so we know every sale coming in, you can’t even find on Google would be from that.
And just looking at ads manager compared with like the actual sales it can be like 50,60 70% off, which is crazy. It’s like a tracking thing in addition to on average, I have seen kind of a hit and results are just especially with purchases, a little bit less so with leads, that’s usually something easier to get people to do the first time they interact with you.
And then some of them were just driving like traffic and views and stuff. And that’s not really impacted in the same way. Because it’s not purchased as especially big purchases. $1,000 purchases, that’s what really is taking the biggest hit.
Yaron Been: I’m wondering what comes up that took the biggest hits was using more of lookalikes. I mean,
Was there any pattern that you noticed except for the price that was higher, and they were more based on a probably a longer life cycle of the customer before buying?
Is it also related to the way that you were using interest or look-alike in important to just going broad?
Jacob Landis: I’ve seen an impact with lookalikes, you have kind of like a set audience and especially people who aren’t spending huge amounts of money, it’s for them to perform best, you want to get like 1000 new people in over like 60 days.
So for some people, like through the Facebook ads, that’s challenging, and that number just got cut in half. So that’s taken a hit, I am seeing a hit with broad targeting that was working really well, with stuff that applied to everyone just really wide open audiences, if it has gotten better and better.
And now with those, it just seems like it’s not quite optimizing correctly, it’s, you’re still kind of paying a premium on Facebook to it’s a lot more expensive than other ad platforms. But the algorithm was so good and made sense. And now some of the time it’s just like overall getting fewer results.
But having trouble like sticking with positive results like volatility, so it used to be a week goes by, it’s doing well, the chances of B doing well a week from now are pretty high, some stuff kind of falls off a cliff quickly.
And now some of them are just it’s like a roller coaster-like it’s doing well. And then the next day, it’s just kind of a nightmare.
Yaron Been: I encountered the same roller coaster. But this is one of the reasons that I moved away from the lowest cost. I’m mainly using more conservative bidding, which I’m mainly using a bid cap lately. Not even cost control.
What are you seeing in regards to the bidding?
Jacob Landis: Yeah, so I’ve done a lot of testing and I think that’s one of the biggest things is, you know, go through $2 million of our data, and like research does the learning phase make any difference?
Not really, I did that for bids, as well. And found the best results with cost cap, that that’s kind of the sweet spot. Because cost cap, you kind of set the mount, you want to bid. And if it’s like, hey, if we find an amazing person just a little bit over, we’ll keep your average to that.
Whereas, you know, bid cap, it’s like, if it’s one penny over what you’re bidding to get in front of that person, it won’t happen. So yeah, the nice thing with those manual bids doing bid tests is you could spend very little on a bad day and a lot more on a really good day. So then it really manages your costs a lot better.
It’s just trying to find that balance especially if you’re taking on a client, you don’t want it to come in and be like, Okay, we wanted to spend $3,000 a day and we spent $27. Yes, we did, we had lower bids.
And so is that balance of trying to get consistent results. And even everyone has their priorities. Some people would rather spend less, or have their spending kind of fluctuate but get consistent results. And some people would rather kind of spend the same each day usually, usually, I do like a 50/50 split.
So we have and then for the lowest cost campaigns, if they’re doing well, I’ll increase them and incrementally like 20% throughout the day,
Yaron Been: For the recaps, you do for the cost control, or the cost cap to be accurate. So if it’s under-delivering so I mean, doesn’t waste money, invest money.
Do you increase the bid with the duplicate and with an increase of bid or do you just leave it alone?
Jacob Landis: So generally, what I found is like a campaign doing fairly well. I don’t like doing a lot of messing with it. Besides, you know, increasing the budget by 20%, I found doesn’t reset it, or you can pause it for up to a day or decrease it.
But otherwise, I generally won’t touch things that are a little less important with cost control ones but just as a general rule, if it’s not coming in quite as much of this duplicate, create a new campaign with a higher bid, and the same ones or maybe if I noticed some patterns, I’ll swap out a thing or two but keep it more or less the same.
And just do a new campaign anytime. Something has been working. I don’t want to touch it because I feel like it’s kind of been optimized and yeah, it has this thing going, and the more you swap out ads and make all these changes, the more messes with it.
Yaron Been: Yeah, this thing with Facebook ads is such a black box. Nobody knows. So you have to base your actions based on your intuition and your experience. But you don’t know because things also might change on the back end, the algorithm has changed.
So let’s say six months ago, the bid cap worked the best. And now maybe something has changed and the lowest costs work the best. And you don’t know. So you can’t keep on rocking the same way that you used to work before you Oh, you constantly need to adjust and test also things that didn’t work in the past because they might start rocking now.
So this is kind of an issue because a lot of people are saying, Oh, the lowest cost is the best or beat cup is the best or lookalikes but it’s constantly changed. And it depends on the market and the product and the price point.
So there are a lot of variables and a lot of unknowns in this black box.
Jacob Landis: Yeah, I always run a mix simultaneously, just so we can hit some consistent and then you know, scaling it up and down based on it because if our targets $3,000 a day, on a good day, I want to be spending 6000 on a bad day, I want to be spending 500 to like test and start turning stuff down or pausing it.
Because otherwise, if you just spend the same day after day after day, no matter the results, every bad day is going to wipe out every good day.
Yaron Been: I like it. I like the idea of mixing and having a lot of stuff and just letting the algorithm optimize and spend daily of whatever is giving you the best signals I wanted to ask you in regards so we talked about the inconsistency and the volatility and the fact that tracking is kind of inaccurate these days.
What can the store owner do to optimize the tracking?
Jacob Landis: Yes, there are several things, I have a full playlist that walks through step by step of like every single thing for iOS 14. Setting up conversion API is just like additional data points additional data that it can send with some people, or even creating new pages, or like specific product pages that we just send to Facebook.
That way, we’re not running into the like, if you see a purchase come in from a page that’s only getting traffic from Facebook, you know that traffic came from Facebook, so you can way more accurately track that. You can add UTM or like URL parameters that just say, hey, it came from Facebook. So that will be in the URL when people click on it.
And that tracks of RIA a cookie sends it to Google Analytics, I found that’s a little bit more accurate, or at least a useful data point to have in there. That data. There are some retargeting audiences that I haven’t heard anyone talk about I, I did find a way to have a retargeting, retargeting people who have opted out of being tracked. So basically what it is, you can retarget based on people’s actions on Facebook and Instagram.
So if someone watched a portion of a video or something like that, for Facebook, the really good one is you can retarget people who have clicked on a link. So we’ve switched over to where every single link goes to the website on a really valuable page. And because clicking on the link was behavior on Facebook, you can retarget that person. So retargeting them, it’s almost like retargeting people who visited the webpage.
Sometimes we even set up, you can do videos on the different products for people who clicked on a link. So it’s like, okay, this person visited the website. Then we show a video, let’s say for a specific product, then you can retarget those people who watched at least 50% of the video, and then you can send them to additional ones on the video chain. So you’re most creating these chains that people who continue to watch videos on a specific product.
I’m hoping Facebook rolls out a way to have multiple things where it can be like they watch half of this video, and they click the link to the website. I’ve messed with that a long time. And you can only do one or the other.
Yaron Been: But if you create two audiences, and you create like, in the targeting, and you include and you do two layers of like, an end operand. So you can create this.
I’m just thinking because I’ve never tried this, but I think because you can create a custom audience of people who viewed like 50% and a custom audience of people who clicked, and then if you layer them, one on top of each other in the targeting, maybe it’s a combination of people who did both. Am I correct?
Jacob Landis: Yeah, I messed with it and couldn’t get it. Because I want that audience to only be people who recently clicked on a link and watch a portion of the next video.
So you can continue to show stuff to people who clicked on a length and watch something, it’s just, I mean, you should still do the same retargeting audiences, still, half of the people are in that I generally like to kind of create these chains where people continue to get stuff because it’s always like, okay, trying to get into people’s minds, like there’s some reason that they keep coming back to this website, when not making a purchase.
So like, we interview clients and customers and look compared to the competition and figure out, okay, for some people, the price, you know, they don’t know if at all, pay often, be a good investment, or do what it says or like quality or other things like that.
So usually we do like testimonials or things where they get like this chain of different things for basically a busting every single objection that people ever have to the product. And you can kind of sort of do that with retargeting this way. But it’s a lot easier when it’s like people added to the cart, and now you can target them with specific to that, they initiated checkout retarget them with that you can do that with people who have opted out with iOS 14.
And you mentioned the UTM. And I think it’s very important because some people overlooked this, but for me, I think the fundamental part of tracking and doesn’t make sense not to have any UTM.
If you’re a real marketer, I guess even every store owner should have like a UTM for every traffic channel every medium. Not necessarily for everyone, for every campaign, but at least for every medium and source.
They agree. I do absolutely. I mean, there are programs like high ROAs, which we’ve implemented with some clients where I feel like it does a better job of tracking. But basically, you can do that same thing yourself.
They’re using those ATMs, they’re making it pretty automated, they’re making it so you can see the performance of each ad, I mean, it brings it into that platform. So it does have value. But some of these are like 1000s of dollars per month, you have to be spending a lot for it to be fully worth it.
But you can build your own. I’m trying to build my system where you can drill down to the like the ad set level ad level, it’s just kind of like including that or tagging that in the UTM. But even just having source equals Facebook, just doing that is going to give you a big data point, because people in their advertising, all of a sudden results are reporting correctly, or seems like Facebook’s off.
And they’re like if you don’t have that data in Google Analytics, it’s a very important data point, you’ll be missing when you’re creating your ad, your URL parameters source equals Facebook, just that is going to make a big difference.
Challenges with creating dynamic UTM for every ad.
Yaron Been: Can you elaborate on the challenge that you’re encountering?
In Facebook is there a way to create, dynamic UTM parameters for every ad? So it won’t solve your issue?
Jacob Landis: It will.
So the dynamic it like it will pull in like the campaign name and things like that I found it’s like so much in, you have a really good system for either naming your campaigns or even creating names to be pulled into Google Analytics. So my campaign names are very, very long. It’s too much for Google Analytics.
It’s like 80 characters for the campaign and 80 characters for because it’s like a tagging system where I’ll say, CR three, which is CR V three, which creates a video, the third one, which is the specific ad. And by having that in the ad name, I can use a tool like Supermetrics or other ones.
And I can just pull in, like what are the results of every single ad with this specific creative. So that tagging system has been cool, was a big game-changer. It’s getting a little more challenging because that’s relying on Facebook, but you can just pull in your campaign names.
If you have a system always use the same one. If the ads are all names, different things, that’s when there’s the issue because if you pull in the ad name, and they’re all different, it’s just kind of a mess. And you can’t go into Google Analytics and search for a specific ad or an ad set.
Or it’s really important to develop a system, either one that you’re naming for the ads themselves and then pulling in with UTM or you can custom set them in the UTM’s I have my kind of system where it’s always the same I’m gonna pull it in. So those are both really good systems. I know that’s a little technical.
Yaron Been: No, that’s fine. That’s fine. That’s great. Can you elaborate on the naming convention that you use because I use my stuff, and but maybe I can get inspiration from your ideas because I have like an Excel spreadsheet with dropdowns for like campaign name, targeting, then the GEOS, and the type of products and the type of creative etc.
But a lot of people don’t have naming conventions, are they just using like default ad? Minus copy, copy two to copy three. You know, they don’t have this.
Can you elaborate on the naming convention that you’re using?
Jacob Landis: Yeah, for the UTMs, I’m still trying to perfect that exact system where it’s super clean and easy. I do like having I use just CRV for creative videos or CRP for creative photos.
And then I’ll have a document where you can link to all the ads. I do like having primary text is pretty important. So I just do PT 05. So then at any point, it’s in the spreadsheet. So you can see this exact headline is doing well.
The big thing is consistency with things like if you’re targeting chocolate lovers. Just if you do c-h-o-c lovers just always use that exactly, all lowercase. So it’s identical each time. Because then when you go into your analytics and go to see all this stuff, that’s when you can search, you can search for that exact thing it makes sense. It’s not a single ad that is named 20 different things, and it’s just kind of a mess, a different thing.
Yaron Been: True. And when I asked it, it’s totally fine that you elaborated about this, but they asked regarding the campaign and ads at the naming convention, not about the UTM.
How do you name the campaigns? Do you have like a structure for naming the campaigns?
Because for me, when I have people that I coach, so I tell them. Listen, whenever you create a campaign name, you should create you should have a system and this should system should be understood even if someone from outside takes a look.
So let’s say you outsource the Cloud account to an agency they need to understand from the get-go, what’s going on? What are you using interests? Are you using lookalikes? What is the target market you’re using?
So basically, these are the naming conventions that I strive to have in my campaigns and asset levels. Do you have something similar?
Jacob Landis: I do. Absolutely. And yeah, I think it’s very easy to figure out. I mean, sometimes you can use shorten words, but you’re right.
For them, I send them a spreadsheet. And it’s very, very clear what every single thing means. So either like the top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, the bottom of the funnel, or cold, warm, hot.
Usually, at the start of the country, I only do one country for a campaign, I just found different countries kind of optimize differently. So name a country trying to think what else we always include the data is creative.
That’s actually yeah, like, valuable when you have all these different things to be like, Oh, that’s when we started this one. I’m trying to think, yeah, if it’s interest or LAL we do for local alike. Yeah, that’s kind of the essential stuff.
Yaron Been: It’s kind of similar to what I do. And in regards to look alike just to get an idea.
What do you see was performing better in the last six or 12 months?
I mean, was there anything consistent? Because for me, I see that their 1% look alike. It’s very, very expensive, lately.
Do you have seen any pattern in regards to lookalikes?
Jacob Landis: I’ve actually found they’re different in each ad account. I mean, one of the big things is just testing absolutely everything. So when I do a new one, I have generally found if it’s an option, doing it for purchases is better.
And if anytime you’re trying to get purchases, like setting that as the objective, setting that as the look-alike, because then it’s really going to try to find people who are most similar to that. Usually, I’ll do 1 2 3 5 10 lookalikes for all of those.
And whenever I’m testing things like that, everything else is identical. Exact the same as exact same copy, exact same everything. Do it once or twice. I mean sometimes stuff optimizes differently, Yeah, it’s it’s interesting. It seems to be usually on the two ends, like one or two or 10%.
But you never know It’s not even some obvious pattern where it’s like, Oh, more expensive stuff, this percent does better. It’s just, that it’s kind of unique to each ad account and always worth it.
If you have enough spend, I mean, you can test every single 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10.
Yaron Been: And it’s not only that, it is unique. I agree it’s unique to each ad account. And I have multiple accounts running the same ads, same creative, same everything, and performing differently. So nobody really knows what’s going on.
Automated rules on ad accounts.
What about automated rules? Do you use them in your ad accounts?
Jacob Landis: I used to do them all the time. It’s a little more challenging now because those rules are based entirely on the data Facebook ads are giving you which can be very off.
Now I’m more manually kind of implementing them. Because usually I have access to we often use Shopify access to the Shopify store, access to Google Analytics, access to Facebook, and you could kind of see if you’re getting more of a whole picture.
So I absolutely do the same kind of rules, daily scaling, up to twice per hour up 20%. I have these exact ranges of if we’re trying to be at two and a half times return on ad spend or two times. If it’s this, almost like formulas.
I’m just doing it more manually now. Because I had to go in for a while to space off Facebook’s ad results. And it just clearly started doing things I didn’t want it to or when there were discrepancies. It’s just going off that Facebook data which has issues right now, how about you? Are you using this?
Yaron Been: Yeah, so I used to use them a lot. But then it started pausing competitors I didn’t want to post. And for me, I have an issue whenever I reactivate the asset, I’m afraid that it will have shitty performance and it very often it happens at the first day after you reactivate from what I’m seeing, so the performance is going really low.
So I’ve moved away from using the automated rules. And I also do it manually, I just make it a point to enter every morning, I don’t skate during the day, I just, I just Just touch it once every day.
Obviously, if I’m launching something new, so I’ll be on the numbers. But when I have the big cup when I’m using it the majority of the time, the big cup, so I’m less afraid of overspending and wasting money. But I think that Facebook’s automated rules are a very important tool that people are also overlooking, at least for the beginning.
And you can I agree that it’s hard to track, especially these days with regards to results. But you can also set rules for like CPC or CTRs. So let’s say you’re seeing CTR, or CPC that is more expensive than two bucks. So you can kill the ad basically, assuming that your benchmark is way lower than two bucks for CPC.
So stuff like that just allows you to sleep better at night, because let’s say you don’t have connectivity, or you have something wrong with your computer. So you know that it’s not going to waste a lot of your money.
So this is in my case. I’m not using this often. But I think it is a good tool that people are overlooking.
Jacob Landis: Yeah, especially just how much time you can dedicate and even how much you’re spending in a sense. You know, if if you’re spending 5000 a day, I think it’s really worth, you know, me going in there 10 15 times really trying to eke out like the very best performance where if it’s a smaller ad account like you’ll drive yourself a little crazy, you don’t want to be spending so much time in there every single day. It makes total sense.
Yaron Been: Yes, So I had a period that I was spending, like a lot of money every day, and it was for my own store and Shopify had a lot of hiccups during that time.
I think it was a lot in the last October more or less well before the Black Friday and stuff like that. And there were a few days that my checkout went down like Shopify had a lot of issues and checkout was down and the conversion rate dipped.
And I was afraid because I was spending a lot of money. So I created an automation that pulled data from Google Analytics. And if the conversion rate dipped, under like 1%, it called my cell phone, or even if it was in the middle of the night, and I wouldn’t be able to go on pause the assets, because
I was so scared. investing so much money in wasting so much money, because Facebook, Shopify were so inconsistent. So but this is, but this is only if you’re spending a lot of money and you’re really scared of wasting it. So this is, this is what I did.
Okay, so let’s talk a bit about your customers and when they are onboarding, so tell us a bit about the type of customer that your agency is serving. And I would also like to know what are like common misconceptions or things that you see very often that people give you the ad account, and you’re like catching your head, and you’re saying, Oh, my God, there’s so much room for optimization and low hanging fruit over here?
Jacob Landis: Yeah, absolutely. So I’ve worked with a variety of companies, I’ve probably done the most with different food, beverage, and some tech products, there’s just something very tangible. And the big thing with Facebook, there are so many nuances.
So it makes sense to kind of focus on specific areas because you learn a lot about those types of customers and what they respond well to, yeah, with onboarding, I mean, we really try to get paid based on the result. So only really worked with people who have a really high likelihood of succeeding in big areas for improvement. So normally, people running ads occasionally, if it’s like an unbelievable product with huge sales that just aren’t leveraging a channel like Facebook will work with them.
But often, I like going in there and really trying to optimize things, I mean, more and more the things, how you’re structuring the ads isn’t going to be a game-changer in terms of, I don’t just go in there and be like, Oh, you’ve got four ads per ad set, like, let me change this to five, and everything’s gonna change overnight.
But if they’re missing out on really good retargeting audiences, or even they’re not doing any ads to past customers, one thing that we do, that I hardly see anyone doing, we have like a thank you thing that goes out to people who’ve just bought the product.
It’s like not trying to pitch them on anything, not trying to sell them, it doesn’t even lead back to the website. And it was like, three times return on ad spend. Wow, who just like on their own, like, Googled it, and went back to the website.
But I think like loyalty, I think a lot of times we think of it in terms of numbers on a page versus like relationships, or I think the people who are going to be really successful going forward really understand that long term relationship and lifetime value of the customer, it’s gotten so much more competitive, and some of the people, they’re fine, breaking even on the first sale.
So they take home $50 On the first sale, or even lose a little money, they spend $50 to get a customer, but they have such good customer loyalty, such good repeat purchases a wholesale system, get people on the email list that they know over the next six months, it’s not going to be a $50 sale, it’s going to be 200.
So I think people focus a lot on that initial thing. So just another big area is just the conversion rate on the page. You know, if you’re at two times return on ad spend, or something like that, we can try to make some tweaks to get that up. But like one of them, we tripled their conversion rate.
So it’s much easier going from 1% conversion rate to three and a half than it is you know, taking your Facebook ads and getting your like cost to get in front of people your cost per click down like with one person?
Yaron Been: Can you share what you did?
What changes did you make to this page in this split test that produced such a lift in conversion rates?
Jacob Landis: Yeah, so I think a big part, I think a lot of e-commerce Store owners. I mean, it’s always worth testing, but it’s much harder if you just sell on the general concept and just throw people on a page with like 20 different things.
So we were testing like sending to a single product or sending to like a suite of products. So we kind of rearrange how those were but they’re going to The just general page and we took them to like, way more targeted, which also made it easier with the ads to like, really sell the like specific product, this specific result.
It’s much harder just in the general stores to get people excited, especially brand new people. But if you can get people really pumped about the product or suite of products, that alone can double-triple the conversion rate, absolutely.
Yaron Been: Yeah, for sure. I mean, for me, I send most of the time to the specific landing page to the sales funnel. I don’t really get why people send to the homepage, maybe to the collection page, but to the homepage? I don’t. I’m not sure that makes a lot of sense.
But it obviously depends on the type of the eCommerce store and your brand and how many people are aware of the brand. But generally speaking, yeah, I think that the best results are produced when you’re showing a specific ad to a specific product, and you sell them to the specific landing pages for sure.
Thank you page!
I wanted to ask you a question about the thank you page. And because I find it interesting. And I also saw that you suggested it in the eBook and the free ebook that you’re giving away.
When did you show the thank you page?
Because in eCommerce, a lot of customers, say, I don’t want to hear from you until I see the product in a way, because first, they’re assuming that the product is good. And it’s when it arrives after like let’s say seven days or five days, and only afterward, they are willing to keep on interacting with you. So, I was wondering when did you show this thank you page? When was it like the day after? Or a few days after the sale? The initial sale?
Jacob Landis: Well, yeah, it’s interesting, I do think you don’t want to be pestering people constantly, but like, everyone makes it to the like, Thanks for your order page. I mean, often you can do upsells and down sells, but I think every thank you page is an opportunity to accomplish something.
Building brand loyalty, getting people involved with social media, even like a really good referral program, like you know, if you’re willing to spend $50 to get a customer and that can fluctuate, say, Hey, show this to your friend, we’ll give you $25 They’ll get $25 off their order, building that loyalty and then it’s like guaranteed you’re getting them for that.
So I really think of every thank you page has some opportunity. I mean, sometimes even just like pitching another product or certain things with I mean with like information, it could be different things and other courses are free things or other options. Also, the email people get right away.
It’s another opportunity to just have long-term goals with getting people really excited about the brand excited about the product. Even if it’s just making them happy about the brand, that’s an accomplishment.
There was one like CD company I’m trying to remember but it’s like I like millions of ELLs are like It’s like this three-page long letter I’m just like how much they love the customers and like each one is like over the top like you put your CD into like gold plated like this and that which got them famous because people are sharing it but just is entertaining. It made you like the company a belt. Even just character like I think unique and stand out.
Yaron Been: I think it said the company was founded by Derek Severs. And maybe I think as I heard this story in, in the Tim Ferriss show, see the company. This reminded me of a conversation that I had a few weeks ago with Casey Hill from Bonjoro.
What they are doing they are let’s say you get a sale from Shopify, you decide on an event beforehand. And for every event, it notifies you via your cell phone or the desktop that the customer bought from you and it gives you all the detail about the customers and then you can record a personalized thank you video and send it over to them via mail.
And this is something that we’ve been testing in the last few weeks. So everybody anybody that purchased from our store so we have a dedicated person from our team that takes her name and personally thank you for thanking them for buying and obviously afterward trying to upsell in the video and then they have like a script that is personalized with an upsells so this is something cool that I’m still testing but I definitely suggest people should check this out as well.
Jacob Landis: Yeah, I think it’s a brilliant idea.
I think that’s one of the biggest areas of growth or biggest feature of marketing is like really personalized videos to a specific person and just developing this system do that, in large numbers, even if there’s a lot of things coming in just going back to kind of that direct person to person contact, because you know, with phones and things like that it’s possible to blast through a 100 In an hour, or 50 in an hour, just systematizing it and having it having a team member.
And yeah, it’s another opportunity to pitch a product, I do think you wanna do it as kind of an opportunity, not trying to, like strongly sell people.
It’s just for a sales pitch that you build the relationship and just like, hey, just so you know, I wouldn’t want you to miss out on we have this other cool thing, like it’s worth checking out.
Yaron Been: And by the way, there are a few deep fake companies that are testing. I haven’t tested this yet. But so a few websites, where you can record one version of your video.
And then based on the data that you feed it, the name is going to create an audio and also seem as if you’re pronouncing their name.
So you create one video and it’s going to be personalized for each customer using the fake technology, which is, which is kind of crazy.
Jacob Landis: That’s awesome! Sometimes the thing like that I’m a little nervous. Just because people are really good at picking up on things that are slightly off. And that can turn what would have been a positive experience into like a really negative one.
They used a robot to make it seem like they were talking to me, and they spread it on Facebook and social media all over the place. Even beyond the custom messages, yeah, just being able to like follow up and especially one company we’re working with, just like, it’s so many team members who were just like, constantly is like talking to people directly.
Like, they’d show up and just like, pick some random customers and like give them free stuff and just like share it on their social media and like, be just hyper-focused on creating that community and things like that, or just positive feelings about the brand memorability. It’s so important.
Yaron Been: I agree.
Can you elaborate a bit about the free course that you’re offering? That is called the formula from zero to launch?
Jacob Landis: It is yeah, so it’s being built out.
It’ll probably be done in the next month. I feel like it’s missing. So I wanted to make it completely free just like a new lesson. I currently have a free Facebook ads course this is kind of an expansion when I want to think about people.
If you want to do a campaign, like what’s absolutely every single step in the process to get right where you understand things with Facebook ads, learn kind of the core skills of like copywriting structuring landing pages, setting up the split test, and then actually building out the ad.
So basically, you know, when I go to work with someone and do a full thing, it’s like, here’s the entire process start to finish, here’s the thing, it’ll probably take like 10 hours to go through. But it’s really cool.
You think about in less than a week, you could go through every single step of basically starting a full campaign, getting all the right software tools, things like that. Just especially working with so many people doing other courses and training, just I’ve realized there’s a need for people to be able to basically I want to people avoid every mistake possible.
I haven’t seen every mistake that the hundreds of companies I met with or worked with have made and I want to prevent people from making any of those because there are some that can be the difference between ads doing well and completely tanking. And that’s huge. I mean, if you have an ad doing well, you can scale that up, that could be huge. I would just hate for someone to make a mistake that kept them from them.
Yaron Been: And I also wanted to make sure that you have an amazing YouTube channel, you’re giving away so much awesome free content. I’ve seen very long videos about Facebook ads and actually encountered by chance and counted, one of your YouTube videos about a conversion API implementation.
So you’re already giving away awesome content. And the thumbnails look awesome. So I highly encourage people to check that out. Is there anything that I forgot to ask because I want to start there concluding the conversation?
Is there anything that I forgot to ask or any last tips that you want to share with people?
Jacob Landis: That’s a great question I’m looking over. Yeah, I think the only other thing, I do think just a really solid system for testing and analyzing is like one of the biggest things I see people missing.
One of the biggest areas for improvement I find so many people are just not creating nearly enough ads are playing it really, quote and quote safe, which is actually not playing it safe if you just do kind of a generic thing of your product against a white background, and just kind of turn those out that’s like, very, very low chances of success.
So I think especially some more corporate, they’re afraid of, like, really trying something like bold or like, that feels out there. And it’s pretty amazing if you test stuff that’s like really out there really creative. Seven times out of 10 mistakes, gonna be like, Wow, that did not work. But always, almost always the very, very best ones, the top-performing are ones where people really took a risk.
With testing, I think, the first three seconds of a video are by far the most important. So like with one of them, we’re creating like 100 videos a month, and we’re testing, which to people sounds like crazy, and it is a lot of work. But really, it’s like seven or eight videos with just like different shortened versions, or we’ll test six different openers or six different things. And really build that in because, like 60% of the results of an ad are how much those first three seconds really captivate people. And like what keeps people watching. And there’s like grabbing attention but also weaving it in with the product.
You know, sometimes you can nab that attention, but people will watch but that doesn’t mean you’ve captured the right attention. Or sometimes that can even send the wrong like No if you’re on Facebook saying oh, these people are really liking this video, but it’s not your target customer. So I don’t think you have to be afraid of saying, hey, this isn’t for you if this, this, or the targeting not being as good just trying to really make it. So it’s like, every person that this ad is perfect for needs to be like, light up and be like, Oh, wow, this is the very specific thing. You actually want every single person that doesn’t apply to scroll right past it, and they had no interest whatsoever.
Yaron Been: So qualifying the customers via the ads as fast as possible. But one question about this, I totally agree. But on the other hand, there, it’s hard to find a sweet spot, because it’s also hard to manage and create so many ads.
What is in your opinion, the minimum amount of let’s say versions, or as that one should run?
Because obviously, the more you run, the better. But on the other hand is how to manage, as I mentioned. So in your opinion, what is the minimum?
Jacob Landis: So I think that will depend quite a bit on the budget. I mean, some people I’ve met with just don’t have the resources to be creating creative or things like that. And honestly, sometimes that means it should probably like it or take more time to kind of build it up. But they’re ready to like jump in with really mediocre things, and hardly any.
And it’s like, this is just going to lose money, like how’s that going to benefit? Anyone if it’s not in the place it needs to be, you also don’t want to create like so much that you can’t effectively test things. Usually, we wanted to be able to spend at least what we’re willing to pay per customer to test a specific app.
So we’re willing to spend $50, to get a customer we want to spend at least $50 on each ad, if not a little bit more. So then you can. So that’s why some of the higher spend higher volume, especially now with it being so volatile stuff kind of falling off the cliff faster.
So you just can never rest on your laurels and be like oh, things are just cruising, they’re going well, this will stay. I almost mentally think of each thing as potentially being ready to crash. And I mean, if things are going really well, we’re spending 80% towards working 20% for testing. If nothing’s really working, it’s all going into a specific test.
We’re not continuing to run stuff that’s just shown not to work show not to be profitable. So it’s really dependent on that.
But I do think it’s worth investing the time and effort to really try to stand out. And you know, it’s totally fine to wait for a bit to build that up to you want to actually be prepared and ready when you jump into the ads because and if you’re hiring someone to do it, you know that there’ll be the fee toward them or to make it worth their time. So you have to be spending a chunk of money to cover that person’s fees to make sure you’re being profitable. Testing it out. It’s usually less profitable. So it’s a commitment.
I think some people just jump in instantly thinking it’ll be easy, or they hear these ads about seven times return on ad spend. And assume they can just throw up an image. And it’ll be simple. And it’s challenging to get things really profitable to keep them going consistently.
That being said, if you get something that’s really winning, it’s good. Yeah, there’s so much upside potential. And I think that’s why people get so discouraged when things don’t go work right away. And it’s like you could have nine dismal failures, we usually have an amount we’re willing to test are willing to lose.
So you could lose $1,500 9 times. But if you have something that’s really cruising and being incredibly effective, I moved a scale, like over a million, or like a single ad over several hundred thousand because it just worked so well.
And you just leave it running. So there’s a huge upside. But a lot of stuff doesn’t work.
Yaron Been: And This is so important, and especially because of a lot of gurus and as proclaiming and showing portraying an image that is incorrect, in my opinion, that everything works. And you can scale and seven figures that were that you mentioned, I think it’s very uncommon to have a seven. I mean, multiple losses of 700%.
For me, I’m running profitably with like the loss of 2.3, which is enough, I’m not, I would prefer to have more, but this is the honest tolls. When are not, when you’re scaling, it’s, it’s harder to keep, like the perfect results. So it’s important that you emphasize this and the fact that you have to test a lot.
And you have, as you mentioned, you have a lot of so-called failures, which are just opportunities to learn and optimize. But when you hit the jackpot, so you can really scale and uncover all your lessons, your losses were profits, as some people often misunderstand.
Jacob Landis: Yeah, I think it’s a small thing. But actually, mindset is so important. And it has helped something that I know is gonna always be proud of a process, I’ve stopped using the word failure. Because if it’s just baked into the process, and what everyone has to go through failure almost implies that you did something wrong. Or that, you know, if you fail, that’s like a really negative. You know, if your whole business goes under, that’s a failure.
But if you have to relaunch 28 things before you get something that works really well, that’s just baked into the process, and that’s always gonna be present.
The reason I think that matters, I just see so many people that go in with these crazy ideas, and just aren’t willing to stick it out get so discouraged, oh, that was like to this doesn’t work, and just burn through that money, but don’t see like what the process is, and like, have a good system of okay, how much do we think this is going to go down? How long will it take to get there? So that’s a huge part of onboarding people as being like, here’s what the next three months are going to look like.
And here are the exact numbers. You know, it’s always like, three months for now, if we’re sitting down having a conversation, what would I need to tell you for you to be like, I’m so happy with everything we’ve done. This is going great.
Yaron Been: Yeah, awesome. Yeah. And it reminded me also, that I’ve been reading a book about experiments. And they talked about a case study that booking.com did, and only like 10% of their test, and they split test every day, like 1000 split tests every day, I guess. And only 10% of the hypothesis are successful. And 90% of the test, there are so-called quote and quote, failures, they don’t produce what they wanted. But this is the honest truth.
Like, I don’t know if it’s necessarily this exact number in life, but generally speaking, not everything is always positive. But these are opportunities to learn and improve and optimize. And this is very important for people to understand.
Jacob Landis: Yeah, and that’s one thing I want to incorporate into the course I’m doing is just having worked with 100 companies and knowing what unrealistic expectations just being like, here’s like, what to expect.
Here’s when, you know, wow, we’re doing something wrong at the end and ship pause it, we’ve needed to completely pause things and reset and restructure versus what’s kind of like, yeah, it’s not going to be quite as profitable at the start. Yeah, we need to do some tests. Usually creative and landing pages audiences as well.
That’s usually a little bit secondary. Especially with Yeah, just create a really important.
Yaron Been: Awesome, awesome, great, thank you, Jacob. It was really fun, a lot of insightful information, a lot of tactics, which I really enjoyed, and also some mindset stuff.
