TRANSCRIPT

Transcript: Facebook Ad Targeting Strategies (with Rick Mulready)

May 29, 2014

AMY PORTERFIELD: Hey there! Amy Porterfield here, and welcome to another edition of the Online Marketing Made Easy podcast. I am truly happy to be here, so thank you so much for being here with me. 

Today we are talking all about Facebook Ad Targeting and the big opportunities that are waiting for you. However, before we get to that I wanted to give you some updates about my current podcast. 

So first, starting in June, I'm going to be recording one podcast per week, which means I'm kind of upping my game. It's going to be a lot more work, but it's going to be worth it because I have a lot to share with all of you. So hopefully you're excited to hear from me a little bit more, crossing my fingers you are. 

Secondly, I'm going to add an extra layer to my podcast and I'm going  to  start recording an ‘Ask Amy' segment, where you get to send me your questions in advance and I'll address them on the show. Now in full disclosure, I  took  this idea from  my good friend Pat Flynn, who now has a show called “Ask Pat”. So I called Pat and I said “Look, ‘Ask Amy' is too good, it's two A's! Would you mind if I used it?” And in true Pat fashion, he said “of course, I'd be more than honored for you to do so. I'm excited for you, go for it”. 

You've got to have more friends like that, right? Pat is such a good friend, so I am going to go for it! So if you'd like me to address any questions you might have about online marketing, Facebook marketing, list building, content creation, webinars, what ever it might be, just go to amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/askamy and you can be one of the very first people to leave me a question. I can't wait to get started so please go there soon with your questions, because this is something I've been really excited to share with you. 

OK, switching gears, let's get back to our topic for today, which is Facebook Ad Targeting. 

Now I've invited my really good friend, Rick Mulready to come on the show with me so we can talk about Facebook ads. 

The reason I invited Rick is because he has an extensive background in online marketing and he's in the trenches every day with Facebook ads. He has a few online courses about ads and he's done some pretty amazing things with his own ads. 

Every week we try to get together – when I say he's a good friend, I really mean it – we actually try to hook up every week and just talk about work stuff. We  meet  at Starbucks and we usually try to get work done but the conversation always goes to Facebook advertising, what's working, what's not working, how to do it, what he's doing, what I'm doing. So we have these amazing conversations around how to use Facebook ads to see big success. By big success I mean growing your email list and increasing your revenue. So I thought, “this conversation that Rick and I have every week would be great on a podcast”, and I wanted to make it more focused with Facebook ad targeting, because that truly is where you're going to see your big wins with Facebook ads. Target smarter and your ads will start to work for you. 

I use the Power Editor to set up all of my ads. We'll talk about the Power Editor in the interview I do with Rick, but just so you know, the Power Editor's a more robust Facebook ad dashboard. It's a Facebook ad tool, but it just has more  bells  and whistles than the regular ads manager. 

On my show notes for this episode, I'm going to show you images of where you can locate all these ad opportunities that Rick and I are going to talk about. 

So use my show notes as your guide, because I'm really going to make sure that you know HOW to do it, not just what you can do. 

I'll point out where to locate all of this inside the Power Editor, so the show notes are at amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/29. 

I won't keep you any longer, we have a lot of good stuff to cover, so let's go ahead and jump in. 

So Rick, thank you so much for being here today! 

Rick Mulready: Thanks for having me, I am honoured to be back on the show here. 

Amy Porterfield: Yes, I'm so glad you are, and here's the deal – we are going to be talking about Facebook ad targeting today. 

The reason I wanted to do this show with you is because as I mentioned in the intro, you and I have been getting together pretty regularly – our Starbucks meetings – and we have been talking about ads all the time. I feel like we have this great dialogue going back and forth about what works and what doesn't work. Would you agree? 

Rick Mulready: Yes, absolutely. 

Amy Porterfield: OK, good. It would have been really weird if you'd said “not really”, the show would be going down hill right now! 

So I thought, let's talk targeting because so many people are interested in jumping into Facebook ads, or they're at least curious as to what Facebook ads could do for them, but one of the conversations that you and I have had a lot was that Facebook ads are not going to work unless you really figure out your whole targeting situation. 

Rick Mulready: Yeah, exactly. 

Amy Porterfield: I think that's just one of the most important pieces of the puzzle, even if you have a so-so type ad, meaning that the creative is OK, the copy is OK, but if your targeting is really dialled in, then I think you can even get good results that way. 

Rick Mulready: I totally agree. I call it the most important part of your Facebook ad campaign, it's the targeting. 

Amy Porterfield: OK, so you totally agree with me here… 

Rick Mulready: Yep. 

Amy Porterfield:  I thought, let's start out with the most basic, and then we'll get into some more semi-advanced strategies, but they're not so advanced  that  someone who's just starting out can't even experiment with them. I think there's something here for everybody. 

The first way to target your Facebook ads is with Interest. 

You would find Interest when you're setting up your Facebook ad, Rick and I only use the Power Editor, so when you're in the Power Editor, you've already set up your campaign and your ad sets, now it's time to set up your ads. Under Audience, you'll actually start setting up Interest. 

I'll put some pictures on my show notes so you can see what this is all about, but talk to me a little bit about what Interest is all about. 

Rick Mulready: Sure, well before we get to Interest, you have to do the demographics, which is basic stuff like age range of people that you want to target, country – if you want to get really specific, you can target zip code and city, that sort of stuff! 

Amy Porterfield: Great point. 

Rick Mulready: But when someone thinks of targeting on Facebook, they think of interests and whether they realize it or not, this is where you can put in, for example, Facebook fan pages of people, groups, magazines or TV shows, or whatever it may be – that are similar to your industry or niche, or whatever you're going to be working on or who you want to target. This is where you're going to be doing that, within the Interest section. So you put the Facebook fan pages in there. 

Amy Porterfield: OK, perfect. Let's say I wanted to – I've done this before, I had a big webinar all about list building, so when I was running the ads about list building, I targeted the normal Facebook pages I target that are big on social media, but I also targeted AWeber, Infusionsoft, MailChimp, because the fans of these pages are interested in building an email list. 

Rick Mulready: Yeah, for sure. 

Amy Porterfield: So that's the kind of thing that you would do, you would target other Facebook pages and in that Interest section, you're literally typing in the name of the Facebook page. 

Now one thing that comes up all the time, you know what I'm going to say… 

Rick Mulready: I do. 

Amy Porterfield: People say “I try to type in the name of a Facebook page and nothing happens”, so talk to me about that. 

Rick Mulready: I get that question all the time as well. Basically, you have to test to see if you can target the page that you want to target. If you know the name of the page and you start typing it in and it doesn't come up as an option to target, the first thing that I would suggest somebody do would be to go back to that Facebook page that they want target, and make sure that they have the exact name of the page. I've had it happen so many times, where I start typing in the name of a page and it doesn't come up. I literally copy and paste the exact name, then it comes up. 

Amy Porterfield: Ooh, that's a good thing to know. 

Rick  Mulready:  For some reason, I don't know why it does that, but you do have to name the page very specifically, and then if it does not come up as an option, you can't target that page within the Interests section, unfortunately. I've asked Facebook about this before, you and I have talked about this a lot. I've asked other people as well and nobody has a good rationale as to why you can't target a certain page. Even the feedback I've got from Facebook itself, not a very good response. They don't have a good answer. 

Amy  Porterfield:  The same with me, I actually asked somebody at Facebook “why is this happening?” His response was that sometimes Facebook pages are not indexed properly by Facebook, so they're just not popping up. Whatever that really means, I don't know, but it's maddening. But here's the great thing, there were some pages that wouldn't pop-up for me – some pretty big name Internet marketers that I wanted to target their Facebook pages, and then months later I tried it again and they did pop-up. I don't know why that is, but just keep trying. 

Sometimes when people hear that you can target fans of other Facebook pages, they think were doing something sneaky or against the rules. But this is completely white hat, I would never teach anything that's not. This is something that people do every single day and get really big results. 

Now there are some things that you can do to manage this side of the targeting, meaning if you use Evernote, which I know both Rick and I do, you could start a list or maybe just start different categories and start listing a bunch of pages that you might want to target. Because if you keep this more organized, you can pull from that information as you continue to set up your ad sets inside the Power Editor. Do you do anything like that? 

Rick Mulready: Yes, for sure. The best thing to do before you start doing this is to brainstorm a list of people, publications, other groups that are within your niche or 

within your industry that you potentially want to target, even competitors. We're not being sneaky here when we're starting this up. It's just a matter of – where is your target audience? Where do they hang out on Facebook, so you can target your ads to them? So just start compiling your list and start building off of it from there, and really keep a track of which of those interests are working well for you when you start your campaigns. Then you can whittle it down from there, to see which ones are working the best for you. It's definitely good to keep a list in Evernote for example, of potential targets for you. 

Amy Porterfield: Let's talk about Graph Search. I think that's a great way for people that are still little uncertain as to what pages they should target, I think Graph Search is a great tool. So for those of you who don't know – and this isn't available to everybody, the last I heard it wasn't available to anybody in the UK. Did you hear that as well? 

Rick Mulready: Yeah, it's weird how Facebook rules these things out. In some countries, some things are available, other countries have other functionalities available. 

I was just going to add to the Interest part, I have no explanation as to why this is. We're talking about being able to put an interest in there and have it show up as a possible target, well you might be able to target somebody that I can't. I've seen that before, fairly recently, where I've been able to put a page in and target that page, and then somebody else is trying to do the same thing and they can't do it. 

Amy Porterfield: You've got to love Facebook, right! They keep us on our toes. 

So be patient with yourself, keep trying things and don't always think that you're doing it wrong because sometimes Facebook is the culprit, so that is a little mindset trick that I try to remind myself. When I think I'm doing something completely wrong a million times over, it could drive me crazy. It's not always our fault that it's not working inside the Power Editor or whatever you're playing around with on Facebook. 

OK, so getting back to Graph Search, it's basically a search functionality inside your Facebook account, so when you log into Facebook you should see across the top a really long search bar. What I've found is that if you have a short search bar, you likely don't have Graph Search yet, it's the old search, but if it's pretty long across the top, you can use Graph Search to find out what other pages you might want to target. 

So inside that search function, you can type in things like “pages liked by people who like…” and then whatever it might be. So I can actually say “pages liked by people who like Amy Porterfield”. When I type in ‘Amy Porterfield', I'm actually talking about my Facebook page. Now I can see what other pages my fans are frequenting often, because that will give me a good indication of other pages I might want to target to find new fans. 

So can you think, Rick of other kind of formulas you can put in there? 

Rick Mulready: Yeah, for sure. I'm glad you brought this up too, because this is one of those simple little tricks that unfortunately a lot of people don't know about. As you're brainstorming those potential interests to target, this will give you additional ones to think about. 

So you can do “favorite interest of people who like…” and then you put your page name in there, you can do “groups of people who like…” and you put your page name in there, you can do two pages, so you can say “pages liked by people who like XYZ page and XYZ page”. You can say “pages liked by women who live in Canada, who like XYZ page”. 

Amy Porterfield: So that's another thing, I'm glad you brought that up. You can get very, very detailed in terms of location as well. You could actually type in “pages liked by women who live in San Diego who like running”, I don't know if those are the exact words, but you can get really specific like that. Then all the pages that these women like are going to pop up. 

So if you're looking to use Interest, and that's usually where if you're just starting out with Facebook ads and you want to target smart, Interest is the way to go. Rick and I have used Interest for years now, right Rick? 

Rick Mulready: Yeah, for sure. I think one thing to note about interest targeting is that a lot of people ask a lot of questions like “Facebook has shifted what Interest is all about, they've gotten more broad…”, or whatever it might be, but I have not found that. I still have amazing success with Interest targeting. Like you said Amy, this is perfect for people who are just starting out, who might not have an email list, maybe they're not getting a lot of traffic to their website yet, but they can start off with just the Interest section and get really targeted with their ads. 

Amy Porterfield: Yes, for sure. And don't let me forget Rick, I want to come back to numbers. People are always asking “how many people should I target?” We're not going to get there yet, but let's make sure we touch on it before we jump off. 

Rick Mulready: OK. 

Amy Porterfield: So after you input all the different Facebook pages that you want to target, another thing right under Interest is Behaviors. Talk to me a little bit about Behaviors and what this actually does for you. 

Rick Mulready: This gets a little bit more advanced and essentially what Behaviours is, Facebook partners with these third-party data companies, which track peoples' purchase behavior off of Facebook. For example, if you are in the mortgage business or if you're a Real Estate Agent, you can target people who are likely to move, or maybe are recent home buyers, or they recently moved – Facebook is gathering this data because they partner with these outside companies to track this behavior of people off of Facebook. This is pretty cool because they make it available to us marketers, who are looking to target our ads to people who are maybe going on… casino vacations! Whatever it may be, business travellers, etc. Well this is where we can do this, in the Behaviors section. It's a little bit more advanced. I get a lot of Realtor type questions, so Behaviors might be a good opportunity to target. 

Amy Porterfield: You can target people that are currently renting versus those who have purchased a home. You can get really granular with your targeting. Underneath Behaviors is Categories, and Categories is definitely more advanced, but just in case people are seeing the different options and they have a question, tell us about Categories and how they are they different from Behaviors? 

Rick Mulready: Again, this is a little bit more advanced and to be completely honest with you, I don't use Category targeting… 

Amy Porterfield: I don't either. 

Rick Mulready: Simply because it tends to be little bit more general. I would much rather my targeting be as specific as possible. Right now they have Facebook Categories and Partner Categories, which are very similar to what I just described with Behavior targeting, so they partner with these third-party companies to get data about demographics – how many children you might have, their ages, and so forth, politics and that kind of stuff. With Facebook Categories, if someone likes a page about cooking, you could do something like a broader category to target people who 

like food and dining, that that sort of thing. So rather than saying – I'm trying to think of a show on the Food Network, maybe Chopped or something like that – so if you're into that sort of thing and you want to target people within a category like food and dining, that's where you would do it, in the Facebook Categories. 

I personally don't recommend it because as I said before, it tends to be a little bit more general, but everything is worth testing and this would be little bit more advanced for your targeting. 

Amy Porterfield:  I just wanted to mention it, but it's not something really that Rick and I would teach to our students, but I just wanted to mention it. 

So let's move on to my favorite areas of targeting and these are the areas that are really getting some amazing results. 

We're going to talk about Custom audiences and Lookalike audiences. Two different types of audiences you can create inside the Power Editor on Facebook. 

What I'll say about this is Custom audiences and Lookalike audiences are fairly new, meaning for so long, Rick and I used Interest and demographics and got great results. But now that Custom audiences and Lookalike audiences are on the scene, that's where we're really spending a lot of our time. 

We're going to explain what they are and then how you can use them, just so you get a really good understanding. You might not be ready to use these yet, you'll have to see once we explain them if they actually work into your business model, but they're definitely worth paying attention to. This changes the game in my opinion. 

So let's talk about Custom audiences first. I'll tell you what it is and I want Rick to jump in here and give a little insight, he always has some really good feedback about how to use them and different ways to use these types of features. 

So a Custom audience is basically something that you set up in Facebook. What you do is you take an existing list you have, which is your email list. Let's say you have an email list of 3000 people, you actually export that list from your email service provider and then you upload it to Facebook. Then Facebook is going to check against their database to see how many people they have on their database that match yours. You're only uploading email addresses, so they're going to check against the email address and then they're going to actually create a Custom audience for you that says 

“out of all the people you uploaded, 1500 are a match. So here's your list of 1500 people that you can target inside of Facebook specifically”. 

So that's why it's so very valuable, because this list you upload could be just your buyer list or people that bought a certain product and now you want to up sell to a different type of product, or maybe they're just people that have signed up for your email list and you want to make sure you get in front of them on Facebook as well. 

Do you have anything to add to that, Rick? 

Rick Mulready: You explained it really well. As you were going along I was thinking what I could add to it. The biggest tip there, and you mentioned it, you are only uploading a list of your email addresses so no column headers, no first name, no last name. It's just one column, it's a TXT file or a CSV file of your email addresses that you're uploading from, whether you're using AWeber, Infusionsoft or Ontraport, or whatever it may be, it's just one nice, neat column of just your email addresses. 

Amy Porterfield: Perfect. And to get this to work you need at least 100 matches, so if you have a really small list and you upload it and Facebook only finds 58 people that are a match, then it's not going to work, is that right? 

Rick Mulready: Yeah. And the other thing too, a big question I get when I'm talking to people about Custom audiences and uploading their email lists and so forth is “Rick, I'm trying to generate leads with my Facebook ads, why do I want target people who are already on my email list?” The reason that you would do that, obviously you're not running the type of campaign to this audience that you're looking to generate leads from, because they're already on your email list. This is where, like you said Amy, if you have a list of buyers or if you have different segmented lists of maybe multiple products, you can target your ads to the people who bought one product, who might be interested in another product. So you can do it that way, you can get really creative with it. 

Amy Porterfield: I'm so glad you brought that up because this reminds me, in the Profit Lab, a program I'm currently teaching right now, what I teach is to create a giveaway and then create a Facebook ad and drive traffic to a lead capture page, where you are getting their name and email and you're going to give this giveaway. Some of the students ask me “why would I use a Custom audience to get people to opt-in to my free giveaway, because they're already on my list?”, basically the same question you just asked, but for me in the Profit Lab, I teach people to create a funnel, 

so once they opt- in, you send them a series of emails and you eventually sell your programs, products and services to them through email marketing. 

So if they're not currently in a funnel, let's say you have 2000 people on your list and maybe they get a weekly email, but they're not necessarily in a funnel to buy something, get them in that funnel, so that you can now start sending them emails based on ‘they asked for the giveaway and now you're going to lead them to your next promotion'. That's another reason why you might want to do it. 

Rick Mulready: Exactly. The other question I get too is that, again “they're already on my email list, why would I want to target them with ads?” It gives you another touch point with them. They're already getting your emails, but maybe they don't open them, but now they're on Facebook, they get to see your ads. It's another touch point where you can be in front of them. 

Amy Porterfield: Perfect. So glad you brought that up. 

OK, so you've got your Custom audience. Here's where the magic happens in my opinion. The magic happens because now that you have a Custom audience, the first thing you can do with that – after you market to that list with your Facebook ads – you can actually create a Lookalike audience. 

So with a basic Lookalike audience you can upload your list, create your Custom audience, and then tell Facebook “create a Lookalike audience based on this list I just uploaded”, and what that means is that Facebook – because they know EVERYTHING about us, unfortunately – we can use that to our advantage here, and Facebook will create another target list for you that is very similar to your list that you've uploaded. In terms of similar, we're talking Behaviors, Interest, likes, dislikes, all that good stuff – Facebook knows this, so they're creating a list for you that's very similar to the list you uploaded. 

To me, that is the that best way, if you have a really small email list and you don't have a lot of Facebook fans yet, you upload your Custom audience and then create a Lookalike audience, now you could get up to a million people on that Lookalike audience. 

Rick Mulready: Exactly. And the cool thing about this is that, like you said, Facebook knows so much information about all of it's users because there's all the information on the pages and so forth, so it has a lot of data, and that's what it's using – the data of the people that have matched on your Custom audience, to create these brand-new 

audiences of people with similar attributes to those people on your email list, for example. 

They recently – within the past couple of months – rolled out creating a Lookalike audience out of your Facebook fans. 

Amy Porterfield: Yes talk to me about that one. 

Rick Mulready: This is only going to be helpful if your Facebook fans are targeted. I know all of your listeners have targeted Facebook fans, so it's going to be beneficial because they are targeted. Facebook is going to do the exact same thing that it's doing with your email list. It's going to find people with similar attributes to your Facebook fans. It will create a new audience out of your Facebook fans for you. 

The other thing I've started doing too, and I've seen really good results with this, is that often – and this might lead into further discussion in a few minutes when we talk about audience size – I've seen a default size when you create a Lookalike audience, regardless of the size of the initial Custom audience that you're creating a Lookalike audience out of, I've seen the default number be between 1.9 million and 2.3 million people. 

Amy Porterfield: Which is crazy, so let's say you have a list of 3000 people on your Custom audience, Facebook's coming back at you with almost 2,000,000 people on a Lookalike audience. 

Rick Mulready: Correct. So what I've started doing with this and experimenting with is once you have your Lookalike audience is you can also layer in additional interest targeting on top of the Lookalike audience. So what it does is it further refines down that audience within the Lookalike audience, and I've seen really, really good results with that. 

Amy Porterfield: Cool. Like I mentioned, I'm going to show you a lot of graphics in the show notes so that y ou can see what this all look s like, so it's amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/29 and you can see all  the  how-to,  step-by-step  kind  of stuff. 

But what Rick is saying is so valuable. Rick, let's just get to it – we're going to get to it a little earlier because we've got more to talk about with Lookalike audiences – but let's talk numbers. 

When you create a Lookalike audience, you actually have a little scale you'll see, you get to move this little button one way or the other. What are those two options there? 

Rick Mulready: Reach and Similarity. 

Amy Porterfield: Reach and Similarity. And what are the two differences? 

Rick Mulready: Similarity matches the top 1% of people on Facebook who are most closely related to the people on the audience list that you're creating that Lookalike out of. 

Amy Porterfield: And that's the one you want to go for? 

Rick Mulready: Yes, absolutely. It's always worth testing both, but again, the more specific you can be with your targeting, the better. I'm trying to think of all the campaigns me or my students have run recently, and nobody is running Reach because you have Similarity where you can get the top 1%. Reach is a bit more broad, it's within the top 5% of those people on Facebook that are matching your audience. So my recommendation is to go with Similarity, because the more specific you can be, the better. 

Amy Porterfield: It's Similarity and Reach. And Reach is the 5%? 

Rick Mulready: Yeah. 

Amy Porterfield: OK, so we want more Similarity. So what do you think is an ideal target audience size? 

Rick Mulready: If you asked this question to five different Facebook people, you're going to get five different answers. I tend to look at my ceiling of the number people, around the 600,000 to 700,000 mark, roughly in that area. Then as far as going low, what's the minimum, I'll even go for 1000 people, so I'll shoot pretty low and get pretty targeted with that. 

That's the beauty of Facebook advertising, you can get so specific with your targeting. 

Amy Porterfield: Here's the thing, I'm not going to get too technical because it's really hard to do so on a podcast, but just so everybody knows, the Power Editor is where we do all of this. Inside the Power Editor, you set up your campaign first, let's say it's your ‘Lead Magnet Fall 2014' campaign, and then your ad sets is what you'll set up next, so 

Facebook will walk you through a wizard, where the next thing you do is set up your ad sets. What Rick and I are talking about is creating multiple ad sets. You can run the same ad, but think of these ad sets as targeting groups. So one might be  your Lookalike audience for your fan base, another might be your Custom audience of buyers, another might be a Lookalike audience based on those buyers, so those are all your ad sets. Would you agree with that Rick? 

Rick Mulready: 100% 

Amy Porterfield: Good, I just wanted to make sure I was explaining that right. So that's kind of how it works. Speaking of numbers, if Rick is  saying  somewhere between, was it 600,000 and 800,000? 

Rick Mulready: As your ceiling. 

Amy Porterfield: OK. So if those are the numbers, again we hear so many different – I would probably agree most with Rick, sometimes I say less and then when Lookalike audience came out, I said “if you have a list of a million, you can try it”, but I do like around that, you know, that 600,000 to 800,000 people as your ceiling. 

Let's talk about what you mentioned, you said you can take a Lookalike audience and you can target that audience for your ad, but then when you add the  Lookalike audience – and I'll show you this in my images, in my show notes – you'll see that you can then target further, so he's saying “add another layer to it”. 

Our good friend James Wedmore, what he does is he'll get a Lookalike audience, and let's say it's 1 million people, he'll then say “these people also need to be fans of…” let's say he has a list of 10 Facebook pages that are really similar. So he starts listing these pages and that number quickly goes down to become more targeted. So that's kind of what you were talking about before, right? 

Rick Mulready: Yeah, exactly. And just to clarify on the numbers thing, because I know you get a lot of questions on that from your students, Amy. Even though your target group is 500,000 people, it doesn't mean you're going to reach all 500,000 people. There are a lot of factors in there, because what Facebook is going to do is say “your target audience based on all the targeting that you've set up, your audience is 500,000 people”. However, maybe your objective is website conversions, meaning you want to get people to opt-in on your landing page that you're sending people to. Facebook will then say “out of those 500,000 people within your target audience, we're going to 

show your ad to as many people who have shown the propensity to actually convert”. I'm really impressed I used the word ‘propensity'. 

Amy Porterfield: I'm really impressed! 

Rick Mulready: So Facebook is going to show your ads to as many people who are most likely to take the action that you have set up, so in this case we're talking about website conversions within your target audience. So that's number 1, not all of those 500,000 people are most likely to convert for you. 

The other thing too is, let's say you're running your ads for five days, well those 500,000 people aren't all going to be on Facebook within those five days of your campaign. That's something to think about too, you're not always going to reach that maximum amount of your audience within your target. 

Amy Porterfield: Plus it has a lot to do with your budget as well, right? 

Rick Mulready: Exactly. 

Amy Porterfield: So that's another thing, how much money you spend is going to determine how many people you actually reach. So there's a lot of factors there. 

Rick mentioned earlier, your objective for your ad might be website conversions or it could be clicks to website. You're going to choose that campaign objective when you set up your campaign. That's one of the questions you're going to get asked. So be clear on what it is you're trying to do with your ads. You can experiment with different options there as well. 

Remember, the reason why people are getting such huge results with Facebook ads right now is because you can target at all of these different levels we're talking about. If you're feeling like “holy cow, this is a lot”, you've got to take a deep breath and think “OK, I'm just going to put my foot in the water” and use Interest maybe, and then as you get more comfortable with that, you start going into Custom audiences and Lookalike audiences and then you become a quick pro, because I can promise you, it's not that complicated once you dive in there and get going with it. 

So we've got Lookalike audiences based off your Custom audience – the list you uploaded – you can create Lookalike audiences based on your current fan base, so Facebook will go and find people most like your fan base, as long as you didn't buy those fans, this is a good way to experiment. If you bought the fans, it's likely they're 

not targeted at all, but if you've been growing your fan base over the last few months or even a year or so, definitely try that Lookalike audience for your fan base. Do you have to have a certain number of fans to do so, is it like 100? 

Rick Mulready: Yeah they dropped that number a while ago, I think it's around 100. My recommendation is just try it, as long as they're targeted, just try it. 

Amy Porterfield: Perfect. The other way that you can target with Lookalike audiences is website traffic. Now this one is really cool, talk to us about that. 

Rick Mulready: Website Custom audiences. So this essentially is a form of re-targeting or re-marketing, so you're able to put a Tracking Pixel onto your website, or if you're working for a client, you can put it on their website, or maybe you're working with Lead Pages and you have a specific landing page that you're sending people to. Well you can put the Website Custom Audience Tracking Pixel on the page or on the website that you want to track the traffic to. What that will do is, Facebook will build an audience out of those people who are coming to your website or your specific landing page, and then you can use that audience to target your ads to. This is where you can get really, really creative with all different kinds of things here. 

Amy Porterfield: Let's back up a little, because I might have confused people. So you have your Website Custom audience and the reason it's called a Custom audience and not a Lookalike audience is it truly is people that are going to your website, so it's tracking those specific people going to your website, so that's your Website Custom audience. Then what you can do is, you can actually take that audience once it's all generated inside the Power Editor, and say “now create a Lookalike audience based on that website traffic”, so go find me more people that are like the people that are already visiting my website, which is really cool too because that's where you can get really targeted. 

But talk to me about this 30, 60 and 90 day Pixel, because this has confused me, so let's just get it really clear how that works, so talk to me about what is and how to do it. 

Rick Mulready: Sure. So it's not really a 30, 60, 90 day Pixel per-se… 

Amy Porterfield: See, I am confusing people even more, this part for some reason is so confusing to me. So, OK, set it straight. 

Rick Mulready: The biggest thing that comes up for Website Custom audiences is you have a Pixel, how many times do I need to place it onto the website that I want track? You only have to place it once. So my recommendation there is – and I am not a techy person, I would literally be sending this Pixel off to my web person and have them do it for me. If you're tech-savy, go for it – but if you're going to be tracking your entire site, which is what I recommend, then you can set up different rules to track specific pages on your website. I don't want to get to technical, but basically that Pixel goes before the closing head tag of your websites theme, and then you're tracking the entire site. 

Amy Porterfield: I just asked my programmer to do it, it takes them 5 minutes and we're good to go. So you take this Pixel, Facebook will give you this Pixel, you put it on your website, and then how can I track to say “OK Facebook, I want you to show this ad to anybody who's been on my site in the last 30 days”? 

Rick Mulready: Once you have your Pixel placed, then you can start setting up your specific audiences that you want to track. What I mean by that is, once the Pixel is placed, then you can start to track anybody who is coming to any page on your website, and that's one audience. 

Amy Porterfield: And it's a rule that you're setting up inside Facebook. 

Rick Mulready:  Exactly, because you'll have an option that says “I want track people who are coming to my entire website”, I forget the exact words that it says, or “a specific page(s) on my website”. You can get really, really creative with this, and this is why it's so fun. 

Let's just say you have a sales page and you want track people who are coming to your sales page, but they're not buying. In that case, you want to be tracking people who are coming to sales page but also people who are coming to that ‘thank you' page after they buy. Then you can show your ads to people who landed on your sales page but then didn't get to that ‘thank you' page, so you can get really specific with it. 

Talking about the 30, 60, 90 days, Facebook allows you to track people within different time periods. So you can track people who have come to your home page on your website in the last 30 days. 

Let's just say I want track people who have come to my website within the past 60 days – you have a separate rule for each one, you have a 30 day rule, a 60 day rule – I don't know how specific you want to get with this, but then you can start excluding audiences, for example if I want to track people who came to my opt-in page but 

didn't opt-in, you want to show your ad to them again. You can get really creative when it comes to Website Custom audiences. 

Amy Porterfield: You can. And just so people know, there's a place when you set up your targeting where you can type in the name of a Custom audience or a Lookalike audience. There's a place where you can add it and another to exclude, so you can add a Custom audience or a Lookalike audience and then you can exclude one as well, that's what Rick is talking about. Target everybody that came to my sales page, exclude this list of people that actually reached my ‘thank you' page, which means that they bought. So there's an exclusion and an addition there. 

Another thing that you brought up, you suggested to me to set  up  this  Website Custom audience right now because it's not retroactive. 

Rick Mulready: Correct. The data starts compiling as soon as you place that Pixel. It doesn't go back 30 or 60 days. So if you place it today, then the data starts compiling going forward. If you get a lot of traffic to your website, that audience is going to start building immediately. So you could start using it tomorrow if you wanted to, of course you're not going to have 30 days worth of data, but as soon as that audience number starts to build based on your traffic, you can start using it as a Custom audience. 

Amy Porterfield: Perfect. So just if anybody listening now thinks “this might be kind of cool, I've got some website traffic, I want to play around with that”, set it up now and then when you're ready to use it, it will actually have been generating for you. 

So we talked about Interest, Behaviors and Categories and then we also talked about Custom audiences and Lookalike audiences. We also talked about how many people should you target, because that's a big question that comes up, and really although Rick and I threw out some numbers for you, just experiment, because when it really comes down to it, although this session is not about Facebook ads tracking, one thing that I know for sure is that I'm always looking at how much I'm paying per lead and how much I'm paying per customer. Those are pretty much the two things that I look at the most. I'm not as concerned anymore with click through rate and a bunch of other metrics you can look at, because I use Facebook ads to build my email list. It's really important to me that I'm watching how much I'm paying for that lead. Would you agree? Are there other areas that you think are really important to watch out for? 

Rick Mulready: You nailed it. So many people get caught up with different numbers, “my click through rate doesn't look very good”, but yet they could be getting a lot of conversions based on how much money they're spending. That's really most 

important, build your email list, get those conversions. Mostly worry about what the cost per conversion is and ultimately what is the cost per customer? 

Amy Porterfield: Yes, just some things to think about for sure, and overall I know this is a tough question because it has to do with so many different factors, but people are going to want to know what is a good cost per lead, what should I be paying per lead? And I know we've talked about this many times, but we threw out some numbers based on some of the experiences we've had. What would you think is – not exceptional, not like what the people that have been running ads forever are getting – but if you're fairly new and you're running an ad to let's say a free e-book, how much do you think people (if they're doing a good job) should be paying for that lead? 

Rick Mulready: I think if you're in that $3-$8 range, you're doing pretty well. 

Amy Porterfield: Here's the deal, when some of you hear $3-$8 per lead, you're thinking “Are you crazy? I can't be spending $8 per lead!” Here's where it comes together. If you haven't checked out my podcast right before this, number 28, I talked a lot about how to use Facebook in a different way. You start to look at Facebook as an opportunity to grow your email list and turn those leads into customers, then you start to look at the numbers a little bit differently. I would pay $8 for a lead if I'm going to take let's say 10% of that list and convert them into $1,000 customers. So you need to look at your end game and what are you eventually going to promote or sell, how much is that and how many do you think you can convert? You'll have no idea until you get started and you start experimenting, that's why it's so important, spend $5- 

$10 a day even, just to experiment with all of this, but that's when you start to look at Facebook differently. You'll pay for that lead if you can convert that lead into a customer. 

The way Rick and I teach it is that you'll convert that lead into a customer and one of the best ways to do it is through email marketing. Once they're on your list, you're no longer competing with all of that noise on Facebook and you're  starting  to communicate with them in a way that adds immense value, as well as leads them to your services, programs or products via your email communication. So that's where we see really, really big results. 

So I don't know if you want to add anything to that, I know we're coming to wrap things up, but there are so many great things you can do with targeting, I just wanted to make sure I got you on the show so we could talk about it. 

Rick Mulready: One final thought, and I think you did mention this in your previous episode, is that when you are looking at what you're paying for your cost per lead, let's just say you're paying $5 for your lead, think about it like as long as you're monetizing that, meaning you're going to be selling to that person at some point down the road through your email marketing – if you're paying $5 per lead and then your going to make $10 per customer back, you're basically saying “OK Mark Zuckerberg, here's $5, and he's going to give you $10 back”. 

Amy Porterfield: Exactly! 

Rick Mulready: I'd take that all day long. 

Amy Porterfield:  All day long. And that's why Rick and I are so obsessed these days with everything in terms of Facebook advertising, because there's just so much you can do with it. We've seen it work over and over again inside my Profit Lab right now. I'm seeing great results for my students that are really seeing the return on their investment, but you've got to look at it as a strategy. It's no longer OK to just post on Facebook, try to grow your fan base and hope that it's going to work for you. Most likely it will not. I hate to say that, but it's the truth. For some people will, but rarely. 

So if you get involved and start experimenting with Facebook ads, you'll be so pleasantly surprised as to how much of an impact you can make on Facebook and how it can affect your email list and your revenue. It's a different way to look it. I know Rick and I are going to be talking about this a lot over time. Facebook is definitely the place you want to be, you just want to start looking at it in different ways. 

So Rick, before we get off, you've got to tell people, I know you have a few different Facebook ad programs – for those more advanced, for those beginners, all that good stuff. Where can people find out more about you and your Facebook ad programs? 

Rick Mulready: Thank you. My main website is www.rickmulready.com and we've been talking about email lists, you can just jump on the email list there, you'll get all kinds of information about those training programs and information about Facebook ads that will help you in everything. We talked about a lot of different things today. We talk about all these types of things on the email list and on the site there. Thank you. 

Amy Porterfield: And you have a podcast yourself, I was just on your podcast where we talked about Facebook marketing, so what is the name of your podcast? 

Rick Mulready: It's called Inside Social Media. By the way, I had someone tweet me and they said “I could listen to you and Amy talk about Facebook for 10 hours a day”. That's a long time! 

Amy Porterfield: That's a long time, I would not have much  to  say  after  about  a couple of hours, so not sure about that. But it's been a true pleasure and I'm so glad you're here. Thank you so much for adding insight and feedback to all  of  this Facebook ad targeting stuff. I think it's so very important and I hope to have you on the show again soon. So thanks again. 

Rick Mulready: Awesome, thanks Amy. 

Amy Porterfield: Take care. 

So there you have it. I hope this Facebook Ad Targeting with Rick gave you some clarity around ad targeting in general and also got you a bit excited to explore some of the Facebook ad opportunities. 

There's a lot out there to explore and I really, truly hope that you take advantage of that. 

Don't forget to check out the show notes because I'll make sure to show you some images of what all of this looks like inside of the Power Editor, so you know where to locate the different targeting options. You can go to amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/29 to check out those show notes. 

And one more thing, if you enjoyed this discussion about Facebook ads specifically and you'd like to see me do even more of these types of discussions where I get into certain parts of Facebook advertising, then let me know below the show notes, leave a comment, let me know that you want more of this and I'd be happy to dive in deeper to Facebook ads. I'm just not sure if there's a big need for it, so if there is I would love to share more with you. 

Thank you again for being here, it means the world to me that you took out the time to listen to my podcast, and I cannot wait to see you again next week. 

Take care. 

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