Thread by @CTtheDisrupter

Facebook Ads Best Practices 30 Days of 30 🧵 *MEGA THREAD* PART 2
Day 29: How to optimize your ad account on Facebook and the days of iOS 14

A Series of 🧵 for #MarketingTwitter

For more resources go to links.facebookdisrupter.com

2nd point is simplicity.
Just like we're talking about removing bad choices. Something else that people fundamentally don't understand is Facebook is really, really good at delivering consistent results.

Now here's the thing.

Success is defined differently for different folks.
How is Facebook's supposed to know that?
Do you think Facebook knows that your retargeting goal is different than your prospecting goal?
Do you think Facebook knows what this product is?

Of course not... Facebook is seeing net result costs X let's try to do more of that.

You're keeping Facebook dumb because you want to be more of a reactionary investment banker that really focusing on trying to get lucky and his way that's ultimately not scalable.

Remember that retargeting doesnt grow linearly w/ your TOF spend. You'll hit a law of diminishing returns with an ad account that cannot scale & gets more & more unstable the more you throw at it & ultimately has depreciating returns in a way that fundamentally limits your upside

Instead, remove the things that are a liability
remove the things that are unstable
remove the things that make things confusing.
Do you really need to be selling three products?
Do you really need to be supporting four or five different business objectives?

Let me tell you, if you're spending less than like $10k, $20k, $30k a day, you don't need to be selling more than one thing.
Maybe you've got your entire ad account selling one product with DPA on the bottom just to kind of clear things up.

Maybe you're paying attention and trying that DPA also on broad, just to see if that works for you.
*And it might*
Because now your entire business is built around doing one thing well.

Because you've started to pay attention to how every other business that succeeds in the world runs their thing. Very, very few people succeed at the general store concept of a thousand SKUs.

If you were to try to take your business and sell it to like Deloitte or get up an SPAC, and you've got 100 SKUs or a thousand, you're probably going to get laughed out of the room.

Whereas if you're Nike and you have the Jordans, or you've got the big Mac, or you've got Coca Cola
The red bottle, you're going to be able to succeed.
You're building brand identity and people can find the best fit for them.

But honestly, why not focus your entire ad account at trying to get one thing done? Well, why make it more complicated?
Does it actually bring you incremental revenue to make the system dumber?

Does it make it better for you to confuse a machine learning platform that you are spending a lot of money teaching what to do, but you're also preventing it from having the ability of understanding what success looks like.

So do you need to be selling multiple things?
Do you really need retargeting?
Because remember Facebook is retargeting already.

There's a fundamental misunderstanding when people say, "well, I'm good. You can't just rely all on prospecting, but if someone needs to be touched a second time"
Well, Facebook's already doing that for you.

And if you don't exclude that audience from it, and you just let that full funnel thing, see everybody inside the journey, Facebook's going to find the right sales pitch to match each individual person.

Sometimes the ad that works really well and retargeting for one person is going to be the best thing for prospecting for somebody else.

If Facebook could make that determination based off of that user's behavior, and you don't get in the way of the machine learning platform, that is one of the smartest machines ever looking at trillions of data points from billions of users across millions of websites, 24rs a day

If you think you're smarter than that, then you're probably going to be setting yourself up for failure, because the honest answer is you're not.
So that's a choice that you're making.
What type of problems do you want to be solving for?

Also, if you have a really good retargeting ecosystem, and then you change up the ads at the top of the funnel, don't you think that's going to affect what works in retargeting?

So if the retargeting is optimized for the first sales pitch, and then you change the top of the sales pitch, because you're doing creative testing, then you see your retargeting suffer.

Because now you're overcoming an objection that may or may not occur.
So then you have to adjust your retargeting and then your landing page has to change.
Now you're making multiple decisions and testing multiple things, all of which diversifying your spend...

You have lower and lower confidence around each individual decision and all of those becoming more and more complicated.
So you're building up a wildly complex system that costs a ton of money & time to give you a low confidence result that ultimately is a liability your success.

Why are you doing that? That makes no sense.
Like if you play it out in the real world, if you actually lay down on a sheet of paper, what you're doing, it's terrible for business.

Why I try to do That when you could have something that's simple, but the very clear objective.

If your objective is to lower your cost per acquisition, why have anything that gets in the way of that?

Why not give if the system, the most amount of choices to accomplish that goal and then remove the bad choices.

Ultimately we get down to the last thing.
What happens when you have a winners?
Well, people make the mistake constantly...

I get hit up all the time.
"This thing was working for three or four days. So I tried to spend as much money as possible on it. And it broke"
Because three or four days is not a winner.

Do you need more winners?
I see this all the time.

People ask "well, I got a winner. So I took it out creative testing and put it by itself..." Why?!

Why?!

Was your ad account not getting better every week?

Why did you move that out of creative testing?

For creative testing, do you have a requirement that says you need to have five winners every week, every month, every year, like, what's the point?

What you need is greater efficiency week over week

You NEED stability.
You NEED Facebook to come down to as few moving parts as possible, so that you can properly implement fifth grade science class principles to actually run your business, because it's not more complicated than that.

So don't escalate a winner. Don't, declare something as kicks when you haven't even seen it struggle yet. And if it's doing really well, why not give it the chance for more resources?

If it presents the situation of like "I'm beating my target efficiency by 20%" throw some budget on it, because remember just like retargeting, doesn't grow linearly with the prospecting, the cost, the impact of budget on your bid also does not grow linearly.

So if your target cost is $50 and you're coming in at a $45, which is 10% better, you can totally increase your budget by 10%. And it's not going to go all the way up to $50, because you're probably going to get at least one more sale.

So now you're building yourself headroom to scale your ad account.
So if you're doing better and better, and something is really working, why not just lean into that?
Why disrupt that in a way that fits some architecture that has nothing to do with success?

So the best way to optimize your ad account is:
#1, focus on removing bad choices so that you have better and better choices to make constantly

#2, simplify it by getting rid of all the things that get in the way of you making the number one most important KPI better.

And #3 don't declare winners before you have any confidence in their actual long-term success. And don't do anything with those other than invest where they're doing wealthy until that's what you absolutely need to do.

Like if you've hit the max amount of efficiency and spend with something, and your biggest liability is you need a second ad. So you can get to the next 500, a thousand dollars a day incremental spend, because that next ad is going to reach a different type of customer.

Well, then you can try to solve for that problem. And maybe that's not even removing that ad. Maybe that's just starting a new creative test. So you're gonna have two or three pillars to build your entire ad account on.

Basically the way that you optimize your account is by building on all of these things. And the #1 issue I see with most ad accounts that they take a look at...
is they're still trying to run Facebook like it's Google, they're still following the "expert's" way of doing things.

Those "experts" don't, on almost every situation that I look at, they don't understand how the platform works. They're still trying to implement best practices for something that is a different medium, with a different algorithm, with different business objectives.

Like why Google best practices don't work on Facebook are really 3 reasons.
1: Google has no control over the customer journey from device to device, platform to platform, no control, because Google isn't an environment, it's a resource you go to.

Facebook is an environment. They own multiple platforms, and they'll see Facebook experience on multiple devices.

Second part of that is Google's #1 objective is to get you off of Google as fast as possible. So when you go to a Google search result, their number one objective for shopping is to get you off of Google onto the site as quickly as possible.

They prioritize people leaving Google as fast as possible. That's their objective

Facebook's objective is to keep people on the platform as long as possible. The platforms are designed to function around 2 extraordinarily different business objectives. Why would you think that the strategy that works for 1 would work for the other
That makes no sense

Lastly, the way that these platforms are able to deliver a result are very, very different.

So remember that Facebook's goal is to find a user, the content that keeps them on a platform so that they can control that customer journey across multiple platforms and devices to sell that attention to somebody for profit

Google's objective is to get people to pay as much as possible for a click that also gets them off the platform as fast as possible. So that's why if you're using Google practices on Facebook, it means you fundamentally do not understand what your job is. That is a BIG liability.

Anytime I see people trying to teach others how to use Facebook and they're solving for more and more problems that ignore the core tenants of lessons that have been taught for years...

The case studies around this, the structure to scale the build, to break things, the power five, all of this stuff that I was working on for years, it's been taught to all these agencies. That's been taught to all these gurus and experts from their Facebook reps for years now.

We're not talking like the last year now, we're talking like 2016 or '17, when a lot of these people just started out. They should have been taught that, but they're teaching people the wrong thing. And those people are then teaching other people the wrong thing.

So you have generation after generation of people that were underpaid, poorly trained, they're taught the wrong things to prioritize.

As a result, you have an entire industry built around, basically solving a problem that is a strategic and intelligence issue with hard work and lack of integrity round data. That's the fundamental issue. That's how you optimize an ad account.