Stay on the cutting edge of Facebook advertising updates that will have a profound impact on your business. Listen as the experts detail five new updates to the Facebook ad platform and how these exciting updates can increase ad engagement and how they plan to implement them in their respective businesses.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN:
- The new ad that generates branding and provides value to your audience while simultaneously highlighting your products («If you’re an ecommerce store or a local retailer, this feature is going to be killer for you).
- How you can easily add eye-catching movement to your Facebook ads.
- The new tool you can use to increase engagement with your ads («and boost your Relevance Score).
LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
Win a full day marketing strategy session with Molly and help a loving father regain the use of his legs!
Episode 63: How Ezra Firestone Sold 84,583 Jars of Face Cream Using Video Ads
Episode 67: The Proven 3-Step Formula to Transform Your Business with Video Ads [Part 1]
Episode 68: 3 Elements of High-Converting Video Ads [Part 2]
Episode 79: 3 Ways to Sell with Facebook Paid Traffic in 2017
Episode 89: [Case Study] How He Generated 11,000 Facebook Messenger Subscribers for 13¢ apiece
Square vs. Landscape Video – $1.5K Worth of Experiments: Here’s How They Compare
Episode 90 Transcript (swipe the PDF version here):
| Keith Krance: | Hello and welcome back to episode number ninety of Perpetual Traffic. The gang is back in town. We’ve got a pretty cool episode today. We’ve got a great Facebook ads update episode coming your way. Super excited to get into it. How are you guys doing?
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| Ralph Burns: | Doing awesome.
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| Molly Pittman: | Great! Happy to be here. Thank you, guys, for listening, as always.
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| Keith Krance: | Good stuff, we’re excited. We love this stuff and like you said, we’re just talking really before we hit record. We love doing this, we love doing this for you guys. We love hearing from you guys about the podcast.
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| Ralph Burns: | Yeah.
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| Keith Krance: | Also I think Molly’s got a little update, got a little momentum going in the GoFundMe campaign.
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| Molly Pittman: | Yeah. A few guys ago I told you guys about my friend Jeffrey. We’ve been friends since we were kids and he was paralyzed in 2009 from the waist down. Jeffrey recently qualified for a surgery in Thailand. There’s a hundred percent chance, if he has this surgery, that he will have feeling in his legs again. Eighty percent chance that he can walk. So you see how, you know, important this is. The only thing coming between him and this surgery is ninety-two thousand dollars. If you didn’t hear a few episodes ago, we are running a contest to help raise money for Jeffrey. If you go to digitalmarketer.com/jeff you will learn more but essentially there are two ways to really donate here.
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| The first is for every twenty dollars you donate to Jeff’s GoFundMe campaign, you will be entered to win a full consultation day with Ryan Deiss and myself. You can come to Austin, we can do it virtually and we can work on your business, sales, funnels, ad campaigns, structuring your team, whatever you are looking for.
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| The second thing we’re doing is if you are willing to donate seventy-five hundred dollars or more, which we’ve actually had a few of these, which is insane, then you automatically win a full consultation day with me. So, same thing, you can come to Austin, we can do it virtually, we can go through your ads, your sales funnels, whatever is the best automatization point for your business. Then of course, if you guys have big audiences, I know a lot of you guys have, you know, email lists and Facebook fan pages. If you can distribute Jeffrey’s GoFundMe page that is very helpful. Right now we are at thirty-eight thousand dollars out of ninety-two thousand, so we’re coming along. We’re almost half way there and we really appreciate your all support. Again, it’s digitalmarketer.com/jeff. Really appreciate your all’s help and Jeffrey says thank you, also.
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| Keith Krance: | Pretty cool to see the impact that we can make with this show and your audience. It just shows what you can do when you implement the principals, really that we teach in this at a broader scale.
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| Molly Pittman: | Absolutely.
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| Keith Krance: | You build up an audience and you can make a pretty big impact. It’s the stuff I think you get to look back on fifty, sixty, seventy years back that you’re probably going to be most proud of is stuff like this.
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| Molly Pittman: | Yeah, using our superpowers for the greater good.
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| Keith Krance: | So let’s get into it. Lots of updates been happening recently with Facebook. We spent a whole episode last week talking about one of the really biggest updates on a bigger scale which is really Facebook Messenger. There’s been a few minor updates and some pretty cool stuff happening so, like always, we’re going to get in here and we’re going to go through some of the most important updates that we can give you a full background on and kind of make you aware of. As well as, as always with this show, we want to make sure that we’re keeping you on the cutting edge but we’re also not sending you in all of these different directions chasing a bunch of shinny objects.
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| Ralph Burns: | #noshinyobjects.
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| Keith Krance: | You got to stay up though, you got to stay up on it. There’s always a fine line, I got to stay in the news but then again, I can get sucked into it, right? So you got to be careful. There’s some important things I think you have to be aware of. What do you guys say we get right into it?
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| Ralph Burns: | Let’s do it.
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| Molly Pittman: | Let’s do it.
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| Keith Krance: | All right number one, I think Ralph’s going to start with number one.
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| Ralph Burns: | Yes! This is a new ad format, it’s called Collection Ads. This literally came out yesterday so really, really cool. I haven’t actually seen it in our ads managers as of yet. From what we can gather it’s combining your product feed. So if you’re e-commerce store or you’re a local retailer this is going to be killer for you. Just because it combines all of the best elements of some of the best performing ads that we see right now Facebook right now. Oh, one of the best performing ads that we have in our e-commerce customers and haven’t really talked about this too much, cause it’s so deep sort of inside the funnel, we referred to it in the Ezra episode, you know when he talked about using a multi stage format in already used video ads. But DPAs are dynamic product ads are a huge part of every e-commerce or any retail store advertising campaign on Facebook just because they’re so targeted and sometimes they give the biggest ROI. Like in the tens of thousands of percent of ROI just for these little ads.
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| Anyway so that’s like part of this but with this new ad format does, it’s called a collection ad, and it combines video which is, you guys know if you’ve been listening to this podcast for any length of time, probably one of our favorite, if not the favorite, specially in the agency, format for ads but also it combines a video which you can do is like a branding video or maybe you know a video ad like we’ve talked about in the three step formula, but also the product fee underneath it. So if you’re in an e-commerce store or you’re retailer, this is a tremendous way to not only get some branding, get some education at the top of the ad with either a horizontal or a vertical video, but then highlight products underneath that. So a user can really watch the video and then immediately buy based upon the content in that video and it’s dynamically updated as well.
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| That’s one of the cool things about dynamic product ads that we’ve seen, is that you can target so deep inside the funnel for people who have maybe added to your cart but didn’t purchase, or maybe viewed your cart but didn’t purchase. We found that the setting of about 10 to 14 days for those types of people really work well for us so this is going to be a new format that we’re really excited about trying out.
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| Molly Pittman: | Yeah.
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| Ralph Burns: | Like Keith said, it’s like shiny objects are everywhere here but we try and sort of boil it down to the ones that we think are the really the most relevant because if we did this podcast just on updates, I think it would take up the entire time of us talking.
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| Molly Pittman: | Yeah.
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| Ralph Burns: | One happens almost every day.
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| Molly Pittman: | Yeah and when I saw this new collection ad type, so it is an ad type at the ad level, so it’s probably not rolled out in most ad accounts yet but it will be available when you see the ability to add a video or an image or a carousel. This is another ad type but they look super cool and especially for e-commerce, the ability to display multiple products in a collection that all relate to one another, I think these are going to be awesome.
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| Keith Krance: | Love it, love it, love it. Let’s hit number two. Molly’s got an update for you for number two.
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| Molly Pittman: | Number two is exciting but very simple. A few weeks ago, Facebook rolled out the ability to have GIFs as your creative for your ads, and I’ve been wanting for this forever because you guys know how important it is to test visuals that move a bit, per se. It’s really eye catching for the audience. Before, when we had created these ads, for example we ran an ad a few weeks ago that looked like the little chat bubble that you see when someone else is typing on an iPhone or in Facebook, so we ran an ad with that chat bubble but we had to do like a five second video because GIFs were not an option for your ad creative on Facebook yet. So now you can use GIFs in your ads which is really exciting and you don’t have to use the short little videos any longer if you just want a little bit of movement in your ad. At the ad level, when you’re uploading your creative, you simply upload the GIF, just like you would upload a video or an image. Facebook is accepting GIFs as an ad type, as an ad creative type, which is really exciting and I can’t wait to see how they work.
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| Keith Krance: | This is a big one I think. This is I think one of those ones that people kind of forget about because I’ve created GIFs just using a slide show and it’s a lot of work, you know you’ve got to find certain images that work but just to be able to take a GIF that’s already that file format and upload that as an ad, this is a big deal. I think this could be a small hinge that can swing the big doors because it’s not going to throw you off and get you off in some big long project. GIFs are game changers so I we’d love to hear about some of the GIFs so upload them.
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| Molly Pittman: | Yes, test the GIF.
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| Ralph Burns: | Get the GIF.
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| Keith Krance: | Yeah, yeah man take a five second screenshot of your GIF in action in the newsfeed, upload it to the Facebook groups, DM Engage and Facebook Ads University, and we love looking at the stuff. All right, let’s keep rocking and rolling here. Number three, Molly’s got another one for number three.
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| Molly Pittman: | So this one is really exciting also. You guys have heard us talk a lot about Facebook messenger ads and the tool ManyChat if not, head back a few episodes. But ManyChat recently added a super cool feature. By recently I mean two days ago and this is found under their growth tool section and they have now added the ability, and it’s called Facebook Comments inside of their platform, and what this does is you can select a post or an ad from your page and you can tell ManyChat that for every person that comments on that post you want to auto message them. So when an user leaves a comment, you can auto message them. You can select that you want to message them immediately, you can select that you want to wait a few seconds, a few minutes.
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| There’s an option for first level comments only so you know if I tagged Keith in something and then he commented and said oh this is cool Molly, you might not want to message the second tier people, so that option is here too. You can also exclude comments with particular keywords, or only trigger for comments with particular keywords.
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| This is huge and I’m about to test this when I get back to Austin on Monday and what I’m going to do is I’m going to make a post with a Lead Magnet and I’m going to say: “we have a new report it’s about ending the war between sales and marketing. To get your copy simply leave a comment below.” I’ll probably say comment ‘report’, right? So tell him exactly what to type and then every person that comments on that post, we will auto message them delivering the reports and then furthering the sales conversation.
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| Another cool example, I was speaking at Social Media World yesterday and someone came up to me, he runs Facebook pages and ads for a company that sells dog food. They do a lot of post where they have people post a picture of their dog and the name of their dog on a post. He said they’ll get thousands of comments on those posts so they’re going to use this function and they’re going to auto message people that leave a comment with a coupon for their dog food. There are lots of ways you can use this it’s going to be incredible, especially because the more comments on your post the higher the relevant score so you can actually increase the engagement on your ads while still using this messenger feature. So brand new, just a few days old definitely worth a test and I’m very excited about it so cool.
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| Ralph Burns: | That is so cool.
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| Keith Krance: | At the next War Room, the Beverly Hills War Room, April here, in just a few weeks away already, is it April 10 and 11th?
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| Ralph Burns: | I believe so.
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| Keith Krance: | Roland Frasier just posted that Mike Yang, the CEO and founder of ManyChat, will be with us at the War Room and he’ll be doing a little session. Pretty stoked to ask him a bunch of questions. If you guys have any more questions or something comes up bring those to the groups as well.
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| Molly Pittman: | Yes, can’t wait to share with you guys how that test goes.
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| Keith Krance: | When you have tons and tons of comments, it’s one of the number one signals that Facebook sees and it just shows high relevance which rewards you with cheaper clicks, cheaper impressions, more impressions and that’s just a collateral benefit of this whole thing.
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| Molly Pittman: | Woo!
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| Ralph Burns: | Yeah.
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| Keith Krance: | All right. We got another one here. The next one I’ll touch on here is back to video ads. One of the changes that Facebook is making is something that’s going to be forced into every video ad on Facebook, I don’t know. What I do know is that they are testing and rolling out auto sound on with the video ads. Just as we finish grinding you guys over the last year to try to figure out a way to tell that same story when the video is silent, especially in that first ten seconds, Facebook comes out with auto sound on videos. They’re already starting to do something as well where the video will kind of minimize to the corner, right? To the top left or maybe bottom right, depending on your device. What they’re testing right now so as you’re scrolling the news feed the video will keep playing and kind of be up on the top left corner. Just like some of the news sites are doing. CNN does this, sometime MSNBC does this. I don’t think Fox News is doing this. Facebook is doing this as well. What Facebook also mentioned is that they’re going to be minimizing these videos on your device. So if you leave the Facebook app and now you’re on, say chrome, or you’re scrolling your text messages, or you’re just on your home screen, Facebook will minimize the video and so it’ll still keep playing.
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| This is the stuff that they’re coming with, lot of different reasons why, but it’s something that you really want to keep in mind. I think this is going to make video ads even that much more impactful. You go back to the echoic recall, echoic memory that Roy H. Williams from the Wizard of Ads talks about continually in some of his second and third book and at his workshops. If you have something that people can hear over and over again, kind of like that play list that we talked about. Anybody that has an iTunes playlist or a Spotify playlist, as one song is finishing, hear subconsciously, automatically starting to kind of play that next song in their mind. It’s the same thing but if you have some kind of messaging or something that you do in your intros or in your ads that you repeat over and over again, kind of like a jingle, that’s why jingles can work if it has some kind of a good cadence.
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| Ralph Burns: | Yeah, exactly.
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| Keith Krance: | As long as it’s got some kind of good melody or cadence that can make it even easier for people to remember.
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| Ralph Burns: | So many of the updates, as we’ve done here on the podcast, but also the stuff that we see almost every day is related to video too. I think Facebook, just in general, if you’re not using video in any way shape or form, Facebook is just of geared towards movement now, which is so cool. With the introduction of the GIFs that we can now use that Molly just talked about, but video I just think is still. Going back to like the basics here, I mean obviously these are updates, but video is still so king right now. So much of the traffic that we run right now and so much so that Facebook has devoted an entire channel to it. You can have a video, you know feed, on your mobile device in the app which is crazy.
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| I think you’re going to see so many more developments in videos as it evolved over time. And that window kind showing up when you’re on your iPad, oh YouTube has that right now but Facebook doesn’t, which is really, really helpful. You can disable it or minimize it, maximize it. So many new developments are going to be on the video side cause I think that’s the direction it’s going.
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| Keith Krance: | Just look at Instagram Stories. Instagram Stories have been slowly starting to blow up. As Facebook has implemented, what other platforms? Like Periscope and Snapchat are doing. Instagram Stories is blowing up, people that are on the cutting edge are doing tons and tons of these and guess what? Instagram Story ads are now available for all businesses globally. This is a big one. So, short videos, longer videos, don’t get so sucked into how perfect or how long my video should be, get out there and just do it, and test it, and try it. It’s going to positively impact your brand in a big way and it’s going to positively impact all your other campaigns that are non-video. They’re going to be more affective. If you’ve got some other video ads running, promise you.
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| Ralph Burns: | Which totally leads us into our last point here. Keith, nice segue.
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| Yeah, this isn’t really an update but it’s an awesome article written by the guys over at Buffer and Brian Peters who wrote this. Totally ninja article, probably one of the best articles I’ve seen that’s, I think, getting shared very quickly here in our circles for sure about like what type of video, what format of video works best on Facebook, as well as on what placement. Whether it’s mobile or whether it’s desktop. This article, which you can find at digitalmarketer.com/podcast. This is Episode 90 is how they actually break down what format works best. They look at square formats, landscape formats, letter box with text formats, as well as letter box without text formats. This is something that we’ve tested, probably not as methodically as these guys inside the agency, but we came to a lot of the same conclusions. It was just really cool to see someone testing it methodically.
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| One of the big winners and one of the big discoveries, which we’ve certainty seen, is that on mobile, in most cases, you’re going to have higher engagement with a square video versus just a normal landscape video. They test a lot of different factors here, not just engagement per se, but also cliques and a couple of other metrics with some cool graphs that you can sort of pick apart and make it a part of your overall strategy. There were some other things that I think were really, really important to come away from, we talked about this. We talked about it on episode sixty-seven and sixty-eight when Keith and I go through the three step ads formulas, which we use quite a bit and the EDIE format, which Keith outlines. If you haven’t watched or haven’t listened to that podcast, go back and listen, it’s a real good one, still relevant today.
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| One of the things they discover in this article is text only video versus talking head video, which is something that we’ve sort of always sort of questioned. Which is the best and how should it be used based upon the format? It was interesting that average engagement for talking head versus text, we would probably think that movement as a talking head, would probably be the winner but they found out that text only is actually the winner in mobile and in desktop. Another one that we always talk about is sort of the pattern interrupter, so the opening part of your video, which is sort of the first step in the three step video ads formula, which is whether or not you should do movement or you should do sort of a static image with lettering. What they found is that for three second video views, image and text and video and text are really a tie when it comes to engagement for three second video views as well as a bunch of other metrics.
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| Really super interesting article. I mean obviously it’s not an enormous test but I think it’s probably one of the best articles that’s out there that test all these sorts of things including length of video versus engagement. We tend to air on the side of longer videos, right Keith? But we really do like short videos as an adjunct to those. It talks about who much more engagement is with longer videos overall, that are longer than ninety seconds. Obviously it’s going to depend on your content, and they use Animoto in this test, which is one of our favorite tools, specially for customers who might have a hard time to actually create their own videos. It’s a tool that we now integrate to the agency, almost exclusively, it’s a great, great tool for all you guys to at least explore, take a look at and get going on video ads.
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| Keith Krance: | When you’re reading articles like this really, really, really important to take the context into consideration of the test.
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| Ralph Burns: | Absolutely
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| Keith Krance: | For example, we did a test a while back as well where we tested just text on the screen and the only thing we were looking at is what’s giving us that longer average length. Like which one is averaging fifteen seconds per average video duration compared to nineteen compared to thirteen, or maybe twenty seven. We tested three different version, one was just face to camera, one was face to camera and text on the screen repeating what he was saying, and one was just text. The face to camera combined with text was the winner. The one thing to understand is somebody might do a test where they’re doing face to camera compared to text only and they might find that the text only ends up being an average longer length video and it might end up costing less money because it’s got higher view through rates and click through rates and views, etcetera, etcetera.
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| However, you always need to be looking at the long term effect of every ad that you do, specially videos. Sometimes you might have an ad format that looks like it’s a better performer because the initial metrics are better, but it doesn’t mean it’s the best long-term play or it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have the other one running. If you have a face to camera compared to just a text overlay keynote-style video, you might not be able to find out which one is really making you more money till six months down the road.
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| If you have a brand, if you have somebody that represents your brand, my guess is the face to camera is going to be the one that makes you much, much more money, have much more brand affinity down the road, but it completed depends on your situation. If you’re selling a software as a service then you’re probably going to have a better longer term effect using maybe an animated video. Just showing the challenge, the frustration, and then the solution that your product or service provides. Think about these things.
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| We talked about this in the episode at the beginning of this year, kind of forecasting this next year and one of those things was looking at all your traffic holistically. How much money are you spending on Facebook? How much money are you getting back in general, or just on marketing in general. People are getting into the weave quite a bit, so this is the stuff you got to learn from. Read this article carefully but also try to figure out how this will affect me, my situation, as well as my long term situation. Sometimes just because one ad format might not beat out the other ad format, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be running both so you can resonate with different people. One can have a better brand impact.
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| Ralph Burns: | Yeah, it totally depends on your sale cycle. For a lot of our customers they see their real ROI, like thirty days out is when all of a sudden, they start making these multiples and I mean that has a lot to do with the fact that they’re constantly being shown, not just in the newsfeed and our ads, but also in their email sequence follow ups and on their YouTube channel, and everything they sort of do in the follow up, it’s sort of the same messages, the same person, the same personality, which is exactly what you’re talking about. There’s a consistency, there’s a brand, that goes along with it. They get that recall and it all started that engagement, all started with a video ad.
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| Could we do link post ads or image post ads for those ads and probably have success? Yeah but I think the longer term success, you have to think holistically about your businesses. You know video is so powerful if you’ve got a face, if you’ve got a brand. You want to continuously reinforce it throughout your entire sales cycle and your entire sales funnel. It’s going to end up making you more money in the end. Far more ROI of your initial ad spent.
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| Keith Krance: | So just a real quick recap, we went over about six new updates. Number one, Ralph hit on the new collection DPA, ad placement for Facebook. Molly talked about GIFs, animated GIFs, as a new ad creative format, really powerful. Molly talked about one of many chat’s new features, where you can now you can create a new auto reply when people comment on your posts, not just inside messenger. I talked about Facebook rolling out auto sound on video ads, so they don’t start silent, they start with the sound on, also talked about Instagram story ads rolling out and now available for everyone globally. Then Ralph went in and talked about an awesome article by Buffer comparing square videos to landscape videos and different types of videos and comparing those, and types of video formats and how each of those did. Once again this is digitalmarketer.com/podcast. Today was episode ninety. If you like this show, if you loved it have you hit iTunes and leave us some feedback. Once in a while we’ll highlight one of your reviews that we read and we liked. Because we read these, we really enjoy the feedback from you guys, especially when its impactful on your life.
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| So I’m going to read one out here. If you go to iTunes you can leave reviews. Sometimes it’s not real easy. It’s hard to do from a mobile device, I don’t even think you can do it from a mobile device. I’m going to read Corbin Dallas’ here. This is one in January 2017 and this is awesome. It’s a five star review. I’m not going to read the whole thing cause it’s a pretty long one. He’s like, “so last year I must have spent over twenty thousand dollars on courses and education for myself. Then these three amigos come along and give amazing knowledge, instructions, jokes, and inspirations, and feel goods. All for flipping free and their stuff is better. They actually care about you too. Dear reader of this review, it comes across in Keith’s voice specially so a big thank you for doing what you do. Molly is so top of the line, cool, and awesome voiced while also being down to earth and not coming across as too advanced for us mere mortals. Ralph, he’s from the future where they can design their voices to sounds as radio voiced awesome as they want, plus his Sean Conner-y voice deserves his its show. Yeah, he’s really good at what he talks about and really good at teaching it by giving really great examples. That’s what we really appreciate.”
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| Ralph Burns: | [Sean Connery voice] I’m blushing, Krance.
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| Keith Krance: | Yes, yes. We’re going to have to get you to get your own show. Can I be your emcee?
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| Ralph Burns: | [Sean Connery voice] Perhaps, if you’ve got ten million pounds.
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| Keith Krance: | Oh, this is good. “Yeah you, yeah you stop reading this review right now and download about thirty episodes and start binging. Afterwards you better leave a five star review otherwise our three heroes will think you don’t appreciate them and love them. Now get after it.” We’re not pushing you to do the five star review but definitely what he said there about going back and downloading all the episodes. We do it all the time, coaching clients that come in, agency clients of ours, we’re always giving them recorded webinars, we’re always sending them to different resources we have as well as specific podcast episodes that we know will help them. Appreciate you guys doing that. Thanks again to Corbin Dallas for leaving that awesome, entertaining review.
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| Ralph Burns: | [Sean Connery voice] Thanks, Corbin.
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| Keith Krance: | Yes, and thank you, the listener, again. We will talk to you next week. Bye, bye.
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| Molly Pittman: | Thanks, guys.
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| Ralph Burns: | See ya.
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