Thread by @CTtheDisrupter

Facebook Ads Best Practices 30 Days of 30 🧵 *MEGA THREAD* PART 1
Day 29: How to optimize your ad account on Facebook and the days of iOS 14

A Series of 🧵 for #MarketingTwitter

This is how to optimize Facebook ads in 2021. Let's go!

What Works?
The same stuff you should have been doing all the time
and we're going to cover how you should actually do it.
Step-By-Step, in Deep Detail

Best Practices are only MORE important & valuable now, more than ever!

Begin to Win at Facebook!
Get E-Books, Join the Mastermind Slack Program or to Sign up for the “How to Build a Winning Facebook Ads Account in 2021” course @ FacebookDisrupter.com

Lets cover 2 things -
A: What you can be doing right now to make things better for you long-term
and
B: Things that you should not be doing right now, because they're not setting yourself up for success

Let's cover how you can choose your problems
What things are going to look like
Let's get down to simplification
Removing bad choices
Getting our winners together
Let's optimize FB ads in a way that's going to win the long term, not just trying to fix problems by creating others

Okay. 1st thing

What we're really doing, we're talking about optimizing our ad account is looking to see greater efficiencies with our spend. Now let's get really clear on what this means.

This does not mean how do we spend more money!

This means how do we get a result to
A: be more stable
B: be more projectable
C: be something that we can rely on so we have higher confidence in
D: be more and more efficient because
E: we want to scale all the results.

What matters most to a business isn't that you can spend more money.

Nobody gives a damn about that.

I mean, plenty of people do, but that's myopic & completely foolish

Where you care about is:
Can you get more revenue?
Can you get top line or bottom line growth?

Success is not "Can you spend more money"

Spending more money is easy

You can spend a million dollars tomorrow

You're probably going to lose.

You can go out of business, but you can spend it

Spend doesn't mean success

Consistency and improvement in efficiency does!

So when we're talking about optimizing...
The #1 thing that we're talking about more than anything is how do we get more stable, better results in a way that we have high competence in.
So we can grow our account.
That is actual business results!

We're not media buyers trying to look good.
This isn't like we're an ad agency, and our sole objective is to increase spend, or making the person that hired us look good to their boss.
No, no, no.
We're interested in actual real results.

This is not selfish. Myopic, ego driven thinking. This is business decision-making

Because your success is what actually matters here. So with that being said, let's get down to the three big pieces.

#1, there's a fundamental misunderstanding of how you improve an ad account.
One of the biggest, biggest misconceptions I see talked about so often from so many different people is very simple.
They try to say, how do we spend more money where I'm winning?

How do I isolate this thing that's doing best.
I want to spend my money there.
Here's an ad that's doing great, if I ramp up a bunch of money there, it just stop working for me, right?
Because you're saying this
"Thing is working. How do I break it?"

This thing is doing well. How do I prevent from happening?

Remember your bid, what you're paying in the ecosystem is your budget and your estimated action rate
If you're getting a bid, a cost, that is good for you & you throw more money at it, you're going to see a worst result

That's the way the system works
Because you're trying to say...
"I've got outlier, strong performers. Let me go after what I can rely on and then break it."

If you go after what you rely on and go after what's working and you spend more money, and then it gets less efficient.

What you are doing is you are limiting your upside
You're basically going after what isn't broken and trying to fix it. And that will fundamentally destroy it.

I see that being done month after month, year after year, and the same types of people are saying the same thing

I see the same type of folks still struggling with the same problems they had 3, 4, 5 years ago because they're ignoring the core tenants of how Facebook actually works.
So let me tell you how Facebook actually works.

You have a large data set and its effectively a scatterplot with points all around, high cost ones, and low cost ones. Now the mistake many people make is they say
"Well, here's low cost ones. How do I invest more and more here?

How do I break what's working?"

Then they can complain about a lack of stability and success.

That's not how you work Facebook.
That might be how you work other platforms.
But remember Facebook, isn't Google.

That's why we're not using interest groups.
That's why we're not targeting off of highly constructed retargeting audiences in huge customer journeys.
What we're doing basically is making a big effort to try to keep Facebook as dumb as possible so that we feel good.

We're not doing any of that because you know, actual success is what's important to what we're trying to do.

So what we're going to do is we're going to remove the bad choices.

So we're going to go around and say, what is actually the biggest liability?

What are the things that we cannot count on?
What are the things that are these high data points?
Let's reduce our average by removing the pieces that are above average in price, and take the pieces that are the worst performers and remove them.

Let's remove bad choices until the only good choices will only choices we have left are good ones, and it's going to take a process.
But if we can focus in on removing bad choices, you're going to get more and more efficient over time.

Remember Facebook's #1 goal is to deliver you consistent results.
If you haven't seen consistent results, it's probably because you've been prioritizing breaking the things that worked instead of ignoring and removing the things that are a liability.

Why keep things that are a liability to your success in play while also destroying the things that are doing well for you?
That doesn't make any sense.

But that's what many people do because that's the advice from many experts and from many ad agencies that have ignored most of what they've been told for years now. So when we go in and we remove bad choices, what we're doing is remember there's this giant scatterplot right?

We have whole bunch of costs, expensive ones and low cost ones.
*And if you're an ad agency, you've been seeing this deck since 2014. And if you've been ignoring it, shame on you and I'm here to try to help.

So if you take out the higher cost ones, the median average cost is going to go down a bit.
So let's say for instance, and I use this a lot and it's definitely inside my course, and I highly recommend you check that out, but let's give him a very simple answer.

If you have, let's say 5 ads:
1 coming in at $30
1 at $25
1 to $20
1 at $15
1s at $10
Let's say five ads.
Let's say there's an even distribution. So your average, you're getting the same amount of spending wrong.

All one of those things that are coming into net average of 20.

Now the wrong way of thinking is saying
"Well, how do we spend as much money as possible at that 10?"
Because what's going to happen
You spend more money there & that $10 goes to a $15 or $20 because you're spending more money there.

Because you're raising the average cost of your best player.
What happens when you raise the average cost of your best player, you no longer have the low one.
So your average cost goes up.
That just makes sense.

You might say
"Well, you're spending more money on something that's better yet."
It's not going to stay better if you're spending more money against it, cuz it's going to get worse, cuz you're spending more money against it.
That's how the bid works.

You've already been explained to how this functions.
So don't try to break things by ignoring how the bid and the ecosystem works.

If you want to improve your account, a simpler way of doing something that you can control, which is very important & something that is high confidence, which is also important & something that is stable & projectable, & the outcome also does scale the budget to the good winners

Here's what you do... you turn off the $30 ad!

Now your ad set that was running at 20 bucks drops in costs because you've removed the highest cost piece.

So your average goes down because you're removing the worst thing... that's how math works, and Facebook too!

It's like when when teachers are grading on a curve, if you just eliminate the biggest thing, and then you raise everybody else's score.
That's the same type of algebra.

If you have a whole bunch of data points, and then you just get rid of the worst, 10% of things, you're going to get better. It happens just like that.

Cuz you're not forcing your spend to the absolute best pieces, you're letting the system reallocate that budget to where it sees more opportunity. So you're mitigating & diversifying the impact of an increase in budget, across places where you have the opportunity.

This additional budget might not all go to the "best option", but you're also not breaking the thing that works. If you're letting the system figure it out, and maybe you don't get a completely linear movement,

But you're probably going to do better.

If you can probably do better in a way that works probably all the time. And I think that's really simple to do over, over again with super high confidence that makes Facebook simple, and well, the system is just gets easier and easier.

So why would you set yourself up for a set of problems that ignores that in a way and a lesson that we've been taught for years?