AMY PORTERFIELD: Hey there, Amy Porterfield here. Welcome to another episode of The Online Marketing Made Easy Podcast. Thank you so very much for tuning in.
Today it’s not just me. I have an extra special guest. His name is Rick Mulready. I decided I was just going to let him come into my intro and not have him wait until we get into the Q&A so Rick, are you there?
Rick: I’m here.
Amy: You are my first guest that gets to be a part of my intro. How do you feel about that?
Rick: I don’t think I’ve ever done this before. I’ve never been part of an intro before.
Amy: I know! It’s pretty exciting. I wanted Rick to jump on with me right from the get go because we have planned something extra special. Rick and I talk about Facebook ads all the time outside of my podcast. We meet at Starbuck a lot. He lives in San Diego and I live in Carlsbad so we are really close to each other.
We are constantly meeting and talking about ads and talking about some of our students and some of the things they are seeing and where they are frustrated. I thought we needed to get on my podcast and talk about this stuff so others can find value in it as well.
Rick suggested we do it on a regular basis so he has agreed to come on my show about every six weeks and we are going to do a Facebook ad Q&A. What you might not know is that Rick is my go-to guy for Facebook advertising. When I have questions about targeting or anything with the pixel or what’s new I usually turn to Rick right away.
He has been so amazingly knowledgeable about all of this and I wanted to share it with you. So Rick, most of my audience knows about you because you’ve been on a few times. But, for those in my audience that are totally brand new to you, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you’re about.
Rick: I’ll keep it really short. I won’t get too long. My background is in online advertising. I have been in the online advertising space for a little over 15 years now. I came from the corporate world much like you Amy. I left that world in 2012 and have been focusing on Facebook ads since around 2010 when I sort of got bitten by the Facebook ads bug.
I now essentially teach online entrepreneurs and small business owners how to use Facebook ads to grow their business. But, not just grow their business, I’m really all about automating their business with Facebook ads because that’s what I’ve been able to do and that’s what I teach my students to be able to do.
We also talk about Facebook ads and all kinds of different paid traffic on my podcast, The Art of Paid Traffic, as well. As you were talking about sharing your intro there as far as us always talking about Facebook ads, I thought, “Man, that sounds so nerdy.”
Amy: We are a little bit nerdy.
Rick: We talk about this stuff a lot.
Amy: We really do and that’s kind of a lot of fun. What we did is actually jump into some of my private Facebook groups. We asked my students what they wanted to know about Facebook ads, where they are getting stuck, and what questions they have. Questions flooded in.
We have enough questions for a few episodes but we will take the best of the best today. I have to tell you, I’m a little bit snuffly today. That’s a word from my son Cade. He says it all the time when he can’t breathe through his nose and he has a cold. So, I have a cold today but Rick said I sound fine and we can just keep continuing this, right?
Rick: Absolutely. You sound fine.
Amy: I think we’re good, but if I sound a little funny that’s why. I also wanted to tell you all that before we get into these specific questions, Rick actually has a free training all about Facebook advertising. What’s the name of your training Rick?
Rick: This is pretty much what I was just talking about, it’s how to create a system that gets leads and sales everyday using Facebook ads.
Amy: That sounds pretty good, right? It’s totally free. It’s a webinar that he does and it’s live. So, I wanted to invite you guys to check it out depending on when you’re listening. Rick, where can they go to sign up for your free webinar?
Rick: It’s coming up shortly after this episode airs on Tuesday, April 12. I am doing two live webinars that day and then one on Wednesday, April 13, in the middle of the day. Again, those are going to be live and they are going to be a lot of fun.
Amy: Where do they go to sign up?
Rick: They can go to RickMulready.com/amy and register. It will be one landing page that they can register for one of those dates and times or, if they really want to come to all three times, they can do that as well. It is going to be the same presentation but different questions obviously come up during each of those webinars. They can go to RickMulready.com/amy and register for one of the times that works best for them there.
Amy: Perfect. It’s a really good webinar guys. I’ve been on it before and I think it’s outstanding. You are going to learn a lot. But, to give you a little tease about some of the stuff you are going to learn, we are going to get into the nitty gritty here on this episode and answer some specific questions that you all have about your Facebook advertising efforts and your campaigns.
Are you ready to dive into it Rick?
Rick: I’m excited. I’ve seen the questions and they are really good.
Amy: They are really good. The first question is from Molly. Molly says, “I’d love a podcast full of examples and case studies about ad spend, list growth, conversions, and I’m especially keen to hear this from the earlier days when you had a small list.”
I know you are full of stories and case studies and examples from all of your students, Rick. So can you share some of those with us and kind of give some insight to those that are just getting started?
Rick: My problem right now is I’m trying to narrow it down to just a couple. I have so many ideas. The first one, her name is Becky Mauldin. I’m actually going to be having Becky on the podcast here in a few weeks (depending on when this comes out, she may have just been on). She is a holistic health practitioner and she works out of her office in a small town in Georgia.
She has been seeing patients on a one-on-one basis and was getting great results for her patients. Word was starting to get out within the holistic healthcare practitioner community and she started having people come to her practice to find out what they were doing. The first thing Becky started to do, she wanted to run Facebook ads to start to grow her business.
She decided to do that and instead of bringing more one-on-one clients into the practice, because she was seeing other practitioners come into the business she saw it as an opportunity. She decided to create a course to teach other holistic health practitioners how to get better results with their patients.
She has created a $5,000 (I’ll explain this, don’t get scared off by the big number) course that certifies other holistic healthcare practitioners. What I love about what she did was she ran Facebook ads and spent about $10 a day on her Facebook ads. She was running her ads to a video series.
We all hear about people doing a video series for their launch and stuff like that so she figured she had better do a video series. She had a video series done and it was really well produced. She ran Facebook ads to it and it just was not converting. She let it run for about a month. She spent about $300 over the month, about $10 per day. She didn’t get any results.
She said it wasn’t working and was going to change things up so she decided to make edits to the video series. Instead of stopping the ads while she was editing the videos she decided to send her (I cringe every time I think about this because if you’re running paid traffic this is a no-no) ads to the home page of her website.
Amy: What? Stop it! No she didn’t.
Rick: I know. She ran ads to her home page and then on the home page it had links out to free videos that led people to get more information about the certification program that she had created. She found that doing that strategy really started to work for her.
Amy: Oh no!
Rick: The process was that someone would come to her website. She told me she didn’t even have an opt in on her website. She sent people to the home page and they would watch her free videos. Those free videos would basically lead to applying for a free strategy session. They had to get on a phone call to see if they would be accepted into the certification program that they had created.
When she was running the video series she was getting leads but no conversions. When she used it to run to the home page, not only did she get more leads, her conversion rate jumped up to about 40-50%.
Amy: Wow.
Rick: Over a six-month time period she spent $3,000 on ads and brought in $30,000 in new people coming into the certification program.
Amy: Wow! That’s incredible. I love that she was only spending about $10 a day and within six months just $3,000. That’s doable when you’re making $30,000 from your efforts. But first of all, let’s talk about this.
Normally we are never going to suggest that you run an ad to a home page. But, the videos that she wanted people to watch were on her home page?
Rick: Yes they were.
Amy: Got it. But they didn’t have to opt in to those videos?
Rick: Correct. It was free content. This was cold traffic. What I loved about what she was doing was that she was keeping it so simple. She was targeting one interest group, one Facebook Page. That’s all she was doing, running $10 a day to one audience and sending people from that audience to the home page where they could consume that content.
What I love about this strategy is that she was giving the free content away to people who had no idea who she was. But after consuming that content they were signing up for these application calls, if you will, to try to get into the program.
Amy: I love this example because a lot of my students aren’t yet selling online training programs and they have coaching services or consulting services and a lot of them want to do high-level, because you said it’s $5,000 to work with her, so she is doing one-on-one calls. That is where they are opting in, they have to give their name and email in order to even get considered for it?
Rick: Exactly.
Amy: Got ya’. Okay. That’s a pretty good example. I like that one a lot. I’m sure you have more but I will ask you some more questions and maybe some more stories will come out of that. Good? Okay.
Moving on to our next question, this one is from Wendy. She says, “I’d like to know more about Facebook strategic marketing. If I run 1,000 people past an ad and only X% convert, where do you recommend one starts testing? Is it the headline or the body copy or target audience?” She really wants to know what she should be looking into if her ad is not converting.
Another question she has is, “How do I even know if it is converting well?”
Rick: That’s a great question. I get this one a lot because a lot of times people are pretty good at getting their ads set up but once the ads are running they don’t know what to do or what to look at at that point. I always encourage people to really simplify this whole step in the whole Facebook ads process.
What I mean by that is to keep it really simple and look at the top one or two stats based on what the objective is. For example, if your objective is website conversions then the most important step that you are going to be looking at is your cost per conversion. You will then look at how many conversions you have gotten versus the amount of money you’ve spent.
If your objective is clicks to website you want to be looking at the click through rate. What is the percentage of people that are clicking on your ad and going to the landing page? You want to look at how many clicks you’ve gotten to the landing page and how much money you have spent.
She says, “If I have run 1,000 people past an ad and only X% convert,” I am assuming she means 1,000 people are clicking on the ad and a small percentage are actually converting on the landing page. I am making assumptions of what she’s talking about there. If that’s the case then it sounds like the ad is doing pretty well, people are clicking on the ad but the issue is once they get to the landing page they’re not actually converting.
First I would probably look at the discrepancy between the ad itself and the landing page, meaning something isn’t congruent there, the messaging, the coloring, or the images, some sort of congruent issue between the ad and the landing page itself. If your ads are running and you’re not happy with the results, everybody wants to know what good results are, you get that question a lot right?
Amy: Oh yeah, for sure.
Rick: It’s very general then how we can answer that because it’s very specific to whatever niche you are in. Let’s start with a cost per conversion. I am going to give you a very general number. I would try to keep it under $8. Everybody always says, “Rick said $8.”
That’s a very general number. Depending on what your niche is that could be extremely high. It could be extremely low. Try to keep it under about $8 or so. For a conversion rate on the landing page, I like to see 20% and above. If you’re below 20% you need to change something up. If you’re above 20% on that conversion rate on the landing page, meaning the percentage of people coming to the landing page that are actually converting, you want to be above 20%.
For click through rate, you absolutely want to be above 1%. Relevant score, is a number that Facebook gives you and we don’t know everything that goes into the relevant score, but suffice it to say it’s how often or how much there is interaction with your ads. How many people are liking it, comment on it, sharing it, clicking on it through to your landing page? The more interaction you get with your ad the higher the relevant score is going to be.
The relevant score is on a scale of 1-10 so the closer you are to 10 the better off you will be and also the lower cost you will pay. The closer to one, that means there is not a good connection between the ad you are running and the targeting audience you are using.
The last thing I will say on this, if I do need to make a change what do I change first? I think that was also something Wendy was asking. Headline, body copy, target audience? I would start with the image. That is the most eye catching thing people are going to see with the ad in the newsfeed.
I would start with the image. However, if you are getting really poor results it’s probably the target audience. It is the most important thing. You’ve got to be really clear about your target audience. If you feel really good about your target audience then I would look at changing the image first, see how that does, and then go from there.
Amy: I was just recently talking to Jonathan, a guy on my team, that is running a lot of our ads. He does amazing work and he said, “I will tell you something I know for sure. That is, when it comes to your ad images, if there is a bright yellow in your ad images it tends to convert the best.”
He thinks it is something with the juxtaposition of the blue in Facebook and the yellow really standing out. He doesn’t have any scientific data over that but he said right now the images that have a lot of yellow in them convert the best.
I say that, Rick, because I’m curious of some tips you have about ad images. Are there some tried and true rules you follow for your ad images?
Rick: We have to remember the mindset of people on Facebook. They are there to share with their friends and family. It’s a very informal platform. They are sharing updates with friends and videos and pictures and all that type of stuff. The more causal looking the image the better.
Again, it has to align with whatever your business is. I have also seen a lot of great results in my own business and also in my students’ when you have images of you in the image itself looking straight ahead almost making eye contact with the user on Facebook, those work extremely well.
You and I have talked about this a lot in the past about an image with you in the image itself where your eyes are looking to the side and your eyes are looking at some sort of text on the image, that can work extremely well too. But I think a lot of people get caught up thinking they should go find stock images or they should get a professionally done photo. You don’t have to do that.
You can grab your iPhone or your android device and start taking pictures that way. Again, remembering why people are on Facebook in the first place, it’s a very informal platform, so think about that when you’re putting your images together. We always talk about having text on images as well. That works extremely well but you have to remember the whole 20% rule where the image can’t be taken up by more than 20% text.
Amy: Good stuff, definitely. One of the things you mentioned when we were talking about Wendy was the fact that maybe if some people are clicking on your ad and then are not converting once they get to your registration page for your opt in that it might be an issue with the registration page. One thing we’ve done inside my own business is we tend to put a lot of copy in the ad and then we have less copy on the registration page.
We have pretty high conversion rates from ad to registration page because there’s not much to do on the registration page. They are kind of sold on the idea because in my ad I have all of the details about my webinar and what they are going to learn and all that good stuff.
Liz actually asked a question about this. She said, “I see ads from other people who post long stories or lots of copy in their ad but how do you set this up? When I tried to set up the ad the fields are limited to the number of characters that I’m allowed.”
Rick: That’s because the people with the longer copy are setting those ads up in Power Editor. I don’t think there’s a limit to the text you can put in there.
Amy: I don’t either.
Rick: I’ve heard people put in 1,000-word posts, literally. When you set your ad up in the standard ads creator, meaning when you’re in Facebook and you click create ad and it kicks you right to the initial page, you do have a limit in there. If you want to create those long posts you’ve got to be setting your ads up in Power Editor.
Amy: Okay, cool. I wanted to make sure that was really clear. Moving on to the next question, Jo says, “When is it best to post a regular ad versus a video ad versus a multi- image ad?” For example, are image ads better for consumer products but videos are better for services or business opportunities? She would love to know your take on that.
Rick: I don’t think you’re going to like my answer here Amy. Jo is probably not going to like this answer either. The answer here is that there is really no right answer. You just kind of have to test out different ad formats based on what you’re trying to achieve with your ad campaign and what your business is all about.
For example, if you’re thinking about using a carousel ad, meaning you have multiple images you can run through the ad, that could be great if you have multiple products to sell or if you have different opt ins that you want to promote or maybe you’re running a testimonial ad and you have different testimonials. Maybe you want to run to different blog posts. There are different ways you can do it. These are all great ways to test. It’s just a matter of which aligns best with what you’re trying to achieve in your business and with your campaign.
A regular image ad versus a video ad, I love video ads right now. I saw a stat last week, I think the stat is 100 million hours of video are being consumed on Facebook everyday.
Amy: Wow, everyday?
Rick: Everyday. Everyday. That’s crazy. So what does that mean? It means Facebook is really putting a lot of emphasis on video on the platform right now and as an advertiser that’s a really cool opportunity to really have a really cool connection with your target audience. They get to see you on video, if you want to be in front of a camera, and they connect with you in a different way than they would from a standard image ad.
I would test both. I have lots of different students and I’m doing this myself. We are testing a video ad versus an image ad to see which one performs the best. We’ll do that and let’s just say our goal is to get webinar registrations. We’ll run the video ad with the website conversions as our objective and we’ll run a regular image ad with website conversions as an objective and we will see which one performs the best.
Whichever one doesn’t, we’ll stop that one. A long-winded answer here, you just really have to test to see which one performs the best. There’s really no right or wrong answer here.
Amy: Okay. At least that gives the listeners an opportunity to think they can experiment. There are options here. We’ve heard so many amazing things about video ads. We’ve talked about that before on the show and I’ve talked about it inside my Webinars That Convert program. Definitely, there’s an opportunity there that I want people to kind of check out and experiment with, for sure.
Of course, the standard image ad, I use them all the time. I have great success with them. I haven’t really used the carousel ad at all. Have you used that yet?
Rick: I haven’t. We might be testing it out coming up here in the next few weeks from a testimonial perspective. We might have some of my students as a testimonial featured in the carousel ad. There are lots of different ways you can do that.
Amy: You test it and when you come back in a few weeks, when we do the Q&A again, we will talk about it.
Rick: Whoa, pressure. Okay.
Amy: Pressure, for sure. We have a few more questions. This one is from Liz. She says, “When Facebook rejects and ad with a generic reason, is there any way to get more insight as to exactly what violated their standards?”
Rick: Yeah….
Amy: Great question.
Rick: Such a great question. Unfortunately…Well, they are often going to be very vague in their rationale. They are sort of going to cut and paste the reason for the fact that I was rejected. You kind of have to try to read into it a little bit to see what they are getting at. You can often times reply and try to find out what the issue is.
I am going to look up the URL here…Facebook has a Facebook ads chat helpline now.
Amy: What?
Rick: You can put this in the show notes page, but if you go to http:// www.facebook.com/business/resources and scroll about halfway down the page it will say, “Contact us for help.” Right now we’re recording this later in the afternoon here Pacific Time so the chat isn’t live. I think the Facebook support is based in Phoenix and in Austin, Texas. I think it is on Central Time Zone.
I notice around 3 o’clock Pacific Time or so the chat line goes away and you will only see a place to send them an email message. But, if you go on during the day you will see a live chat and you can get on there and ask them questions. I have had really, really good results with it. I have actually had people call me from Facebook too.
They are like, “We don’t have the answer to your question but we are going to find out and call you back.”
Amy: Wow! That’s an incredible resource. Thanks for sharing that. I had no idea that was up and running now.
Rick: You can use that if you are unsure why they aren’t approving your ad. You can write in and they will look up the ad and get some more answers for you.
Amy: Good stuff. Here’s another question. We’re going to talk about Facebook pixels. I know you did an entire episode on your own podcast about pixels. Is that right?
Rick: I did, yes.
Amy: I’m going to put you on the spot, do you remember what number it was? Go ahead and look right now and we’ll put it in the show notes as well. I think it was a really great episode. Inside my Webinars That Convert program, if you’re a member of that, I did an entire hour-long special training all about the new Facebook pixel to make sure my students really understood how it worked.
One question that came up from one of my viewers was that when she does pixels it never seems to register. She says, “Even though I’ve gotten conversions I’m not seeing the results with the analytics for my pixels.” Can you give a few quick pointers just to make sure your pixels are properly set up and that they are actually reporting for you?
Rick: Sure. It’s Episode #66 of the Art of Paid Traffic.
Amy: Cool, because that’s a really great episode guys. If you’re curious about the new Facebook pixel, how it works, the whole rundown, if you want a free training Rick does so on his podcast episode. But what would you say to people that are struggling because they think their pixels aren’t working but they swear the set them up right?
Rick: The ads chat helpline is another great resources. If you have placed the pixel correctly…just a quick little pixel recap, we have all of the pixels because they haven’t phased out the conversion-tracking pixel yet, but if you haven’t done this yet I would recommend you start to do this. Facebook has the new Facebook pixel (that is what they are calling it). You have one pixel that goes on your website’s theme and tracks all of the pages on your site.
For any page you want to track a conversion, before you would put the conversion- tracking pixel on the page as well, now all you have to do is put a standard event code in there. I don’t know if you want to link this up but I talk about it and give a resource on the podcast for that.
Amy: Okay, cool.
Rick: What Facebook has given you now, they have nine different standard event codes like registration, a lead, sale, and that sort of thing. You take the little snippet of code, don’t worry about it because when we talk about it sounds really confusing but it’s really not because Facebook has really, really good instructions on how to do this, you take the little snippet of code and put it in the middle of the base Facebook pixel code on the page you want to mark as a conversion.
If you have a webinar registration page then that snippet of code will go onto the thank-you for registering for the webinar page. If that is placed correctly and everything is good I would make sure you are using the Facebook pixel helper, which is a free Chrome extension. If you are using the Chrome browser just do a Google search for Facebook pixel helper, download that little bad boy, and get it on your Chrome navigation bar.
Amy: I love that tool.
Rick: That will tell you 1) whether the page has a pixel on it or not, and 2) if it does it will tell you whether there are any issues or not. It will help you trouble shoot any issues that might be occurring there.
Amy: That’s a great resource, definitely check it out. And check out Rick’s podcast episode all about pixels. Even if you’re using them, I think it’s a really great resource just as a refresher to make sure you are optimizing them and really understand how it all works. It does sound very complicated but once you get in there and start doing it, it makes a whole lot of sense.
I always tell you guys I am not a techy girl at all and I was able to figure it out so I have every bit of faith that you will be able to figure it out as well. So Rick, how about one more question?
Rick: Alright, let’s do it.
Amy: Nicki says, “Let’s talk targeting. Is there a way around hoping your target pops up in the Power Editor? I have a long list of different pages that I want to target. Many are popular names or companies and 99% of them won’t pop up for me. It’s frustrating.”
Rick: Yeah, Nicki, I hear you. I feel your frustration. It happens to all of us. I would kind of question you when you say many are popular names and companies. I would say my first question would be, “Popular for who?” If it’s popular in your niche and you’re in a smaller niche then they might not appear but if we’re talking about Tony Robbins, someone told me recently they couldn’t target Tony Robbins and I said something was up.
Amy: Yeah.
Rick: Something is buggy on your end there. But, yes, unfortunately if you put the name of a Facebook Page into the interest section (now Facebook calls it the detail targeting section) and it doesn’t appear, I’m sorry.
Amy: That’s not a great answer.
Rick: I know. Sorry, that’s it. Let’s move on. No, I’m sorry that’s happening. I know it’s frustrating. But here’s what I would do: 1) Go back to the original Facebook Page you are trying to target and literally copy the name of the page and then go back into where you’re setting your ads up in Power Editor and paste that name in there. Sometimes that will work.
Another little trick that sounds super weird and I don’t know why this works but it does, sometimes I’ll be typing in the interest field the name of the Facebook Page and nothing will appear. If I click into a white spot on the page and then click back into the interest field where I’m typing something and start over again, that will often times clear that out. I don’t know why that happens.
Amy: I was just going to say, that makes so much sense!
Rick: It makes super sense. I don’t know why that works but it does sometimes. That’s the next thing I would try. The third thing, if you have tried those two things and it still doesn’t happen, I have asked Facebook this directly and they don’t give me a good answer, I’ve been told Facebook is saying that page hasn’t been indexed or whatever. I don’t buy that. I don’t think it’s a great answer.
The reality is, unfortunately it’s not an option. You can’t target that page. With that said, I would check back in a couple of weeks to try again. I have had plenty of instances where I am trying to target a page one day and can’t do it but I come back three weeks later and all of the sudden I can target it. I’m like, alright cool, it’s on.
I really don’t have a great answer for you as to why this happens but unfortunately it is a reality.
Amy: I’ve had that situation too. One week I can’t target it and I come back and can and then I do a little happy dance because I’m so excited. Definitely keep trying. And keep your list. One thing I want you to do, Nicki, is get that list you’ve got and keep adding to it and keep trying things. I promise you there are going to be pages that are going to be great for your business that you should be targeting. Sometimes it takes just a little bit of detective work so keep at it.
So Rick, I want to thank you for being on the show. I am extra excited that you’ve agreed to come on more regularly so we can do these live Q&As together and really get to the questions that my audience is dying to know about and they need answers in order to keep moving forward.
First of all, I just want to say thanks for being here and thanks for agreeing to come back sooner than later.
Rick: Absolutely. I love doing this. You know how geeky I get about this stuff. I get all amped up. We’re going to be talking about it anyway so why not talk about it on a podcast episode.
Amy: Exactly. I’m glad we’re on the same page there. I just want you to remind people, I know you’ve got a live webinar all about Facebook advertising coming up. Remind people the title of the webinar and where they should go to sign up if they are listening to this in a timely way, meaning right when we came out with it.
Rick: I’m going to be talking about how to create an automated system that gets leads and sales everyday for your business using Facebook ads. I am going to be doing three live webinars over two days. The first two are on Tuesday, April 12, and then on Wednesday the 13th, the next day, I will be doing another live webinar. So there will be three live times you can join based on Tuesday, April 12, or Wednesday, April 13.
You can go to RickMulready.com/amy if you would like to register. That’s just going to be one registration page and you can choose whatever time you would like to attend that works best for you.
Amy: Perfect. I know it’s going to be incredibly valuable so I really encourage you guys to go check that out. Thanks again Rick. And thank you all for being here. I cannot wait to connect with you again next week. Bye for now.
