#H2HChat How Businesses Effectively Use Facebook with Dennis Yu

Hey everybody, how are you doing? It's another Monday. Congratulations to the start of a great week. We are here live for another H2H Chat. Very excited. Today we're going to talk to one of the best, one of the experts for all things analytics, but also Facebook as well. And I will make a formal introduction in just a second, but before we get started, let me ask Suzie how she's doing over on the East Coast there. I'm doing great.

I am doing very well. It's been super cloudy. It's been like England weather out here for like the past week, so we're getting some sun today and I'm very excited about that. How are things going on your end?

They're going great, and England weather calls always for beer. So when in England, go to a pub, grab a beer, and you're off and running. So I hope that's the case. Congrats on your new digs there. You've got a whole new background.

I do. It actually also, for those keen observers, features the 11th Doctor, Doctor Who. I know we have some British people, and we've talked about Daleks before. I decided to leave him up there in the corner. If you don't know what I'm talking about, Google Doctor Who because you are absolutely missing out.

My kids are huge on Doctor Who. It's like a big deal in our family, so I'll have to make mention of that to them for sure. Now for the big introduction, we've got Dennis Yu. Dennis, actually we're going to pull you forward just a little bit, just because you're a little in the dark there.

Do you want to go the other way? We'll go the other way. Here we go.

We are really excited to have Dennis. Dennis is the CTO of BlitzMetrics. He's an internationally recognized lecturer in Facebook marketing, having been featured in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, LA Times, National Public Radio, TechCrunch, Fox News, and CBS Evening News. He is also a regular contributor for Adweek's Social Times column. Dennis has held leadership positions at Yahoo, and American Airlines. He studied finance and economics, so not your typical marketer. He studied, like I said, finance from both the Southern Methodist University and London School of Economics. So here I am spouting off about London, and the dude is probably used to drinking a beer in London. Besides being a Facebook data and ad geek, you can find him eating chicken wings. You just spoke to my heart. Dude, chicken wings, really? I love chicken wings. And playing Ultimate Frisbee in a city near you. Dennis, how are you doing?

I'm doing great, Bryan. I could eat some chicken wings with you right now. I'll be in London actually in a week and a half.

See that? Ooh.

Yeah, we'll have a pint together.

You've now gone from dark to blue. I think you're like the blue man in Willy Wonka.

Yes.

You want a light background?

There you go.

There you go.

Perfect. So Dennis, tell us about yourself besides— I mean, a bio says one thing, but just tell us about what you actually do. What is your role on this earth and in your job?

You know that line in Office Space where the guy says, so what do you actually do here? I give the requirements from the customers to the engineers.

Oh, don't get me started on Office Space. I will start quoting that movie left and right. Tell us what you do.

Yeah, so I'm a math guy, and there's a lot of fake math people in the marketing space. And I didn't speak English until I was 7, so math to me was a way of having something definitive that I was comfortable with, that you could actually prove, that wasn't based on someone's subjective opinion. And I competed in math contests. I actually traveled. I was part of Math Counts. I was number 5 in the nation. And actually doing that. I had a near-perfect score on the SAT. I aced the math part. I missed a couple verbal. And having a finance and eco background was a way to say, how do you quantify what something's worth? I always wondered, like, why does an airline pilot make more money than someone at Wendy's? And it's not supply and demand. Why does someone who is a garbage collector in New York City make a lot more money than a garbage collector in New York, and it's not cost of living. There are so many factors based on what people actually want to do, based on negative things you have to pay. That's part of the reason why lawyers make more money is because there are certain things that are distasteful that you have to pay more money for. It's like whaling ships, this kind of thing. It always fascinated me. My mentor, before he passed away, he put me in as the the guy for digital marketing at American Airlines. He was the CEO of American Airlines, and that was an ultimate introduction for me to take what would have been a pure mathematical elegant academic exercise into how do you actually put that into the real world to figure out how much people are paying real time for what a ticket would be independent of whether it's on the internet or not. And I think that level of rigor when you test is absolutely critical. And it's why the marketing people are about to be displaced by the finance people. It's why the marketing people displaced the IT people. And I think us as business people need to think about what that change is, otherwise we're going to be hit by this whole buggy whip, make it better buggy whip kind of thing. So my background is, hey, can we measure it, even things that are not measurable, and try to do something about that. So it's about Being inquisitive to figure out what can we tinker with without pissing people off to try to measure things and make them better.

Right, and the key word being not pissing people off, or the key word T7. Let's talk about what you've done, and then we're going to get into Facebook. Just in terms of testing simply on Facebook, as businesses, look at Facebook, what are they now challenged by to using Facebook correctly?

Well, a lot of people jump in thinking it's a Facebook issue when really it's a strategy or it's a setup issue. And by strategy we mean that they don't have their goals, content, and targeting in place. If you're missing any one of those 3, you have a strategic issue that can't be solved by someone who knows AdWords or Infusionsoft or Facebook or whatever, and we've done this, I kid you not, thousands of times, and there's always been something strategically wrong. They didn't know what their cost per lead was, they didn't have the right content. We need video content on Facebook, we need video content everywhere. They don't know who their customer is, and this is the biggest of companies, they don't know who their customers are. So goals, content, and targeting, they almost always have wrong. It's not an issue of making ads, right? For a campaign or whatever. Then there's the setup, which we call that the plumbing, and that's Google Tag Manager that drives— remember I said measurement is so key. If you don't have measurement, you have no idea where you're going. You might as well drive in the dark. With measurement, you've got your Google remarketing pixel, Google Analytics, or it could be Omniture. You have your Facebook pixel, universal pixel, Twitter's universal pixel now. There's all these pixels that are tying your email, Your emails, your phone numbers, all your customer data, the web pixels with your social data, with your app data. You have to tie all that together. Unless you start with that as your first step, everything else after that is nonsense. We believe in sequential success in the same way you solve a math problem in a certain way, in the same way that there's a procedure when you as a surgeon, there's an accepted procedure on how you do heart surgery. A liver transplant, right? So if we go through this setup, which is plumbing— goals, content, targeting— everything else after that is actually child's play. And another way we look at that is we say, you can't make chicken salad out of chicken shiitake. So if you don't have the right ingredients, you're not going to— I don't care if you're a master chef, you could be Bryan Kramer in the flesh, and you're not going to be able to make the 5-course meal, whatever you want, right? And we think it really is Boiled down to building blocks, and businesses are so prone to this weight loss, get rich quick, the kind of TV infomercial stuff that people— even my mom buys all that stuff on TV. I'm like, Mom, you bought another one of those Abflex things. I mean, you've got like 10 of them now. Businesses, especially conferences, right? You and I, we speak at a ton of conferences. Susie speaks at— you know the whole space where the topics that people want, it's a question of what they want versus what they need. Sorry to get on a rant, but I have to say this. And the topics that win tend to be the 10 ways on how to— listicle kinds of things, and they are all looking for hacks and tricks. A couple of days ago I was in San Francisco and we taught a full-day workshop with the folks from Facebook. We had 3 solution engineers from Facebook, and I'll show you the deck if you guys want to see it, on how do you do growth hacking on Facebook. That was the title that brought everyone into the workshop in San Francisco, a bunch of these startups and VPs of marketing, some high-level people. But what we actually gave them was the basics and the fundamentals. Every time we've had a conference session or Facebook session or workshop or whatever where the title was, here are the basics of whatever, people didn't want to go. But when the title was like advanced or for pros or expert, all these people want to go. And the funny thing is, do you give them what they want or do you give them what they need, right?

That's a great question. On Facebook, I've done my own way lower level testing than what I know you're doing. Just as a company, or as a personal brand, but on a page, and specifically talking pages, not people pages, but company pages or anything other than a personal page, posting something, anything, does not get any I have not been able to get farther reach without paying something, and so I'd love for you to comment on that. I know we've always talked about Facebook as pay-to-play, but where are we at now?

Well, it's almost Google-ish, right? Because it used to be— the SEOs used to complain that they used to get all this traffic for free, and now they have to pay for it. And we know that when you do a Google search on desktop or on mobile, about 70% of the real estate is ads. Well, on Facebook it's not 70%, but it's a lot less than that because you have the notion of the feed. So the idea of pay-to-play is stronger than ever, but it's not the evil, oh, they're forcing us to pay now, and it's because we're getting squeezed in the newsfeed because we have to pay. What's actually going on is there's just more content. There's just more people producing more stuff. Algorithmically, not because anyone's evil or trying to squeeze money out of you, algorithmically there is not as much— your ads have to perform higher in terms of engagement. That's why the relevance score on Facebook, which is the equivalent of the quality score on Google, is the same thing. A relevance score is nothing more than the intersection between content and targeting. If those 2 are in alignment, then— because Facebook can tell that based on the same factors Google does. Are people staying to watch the video? Are you getting negative feedback? There's 4 types. Are people clicking through? Do they find it interesting? Are they sharing with their friends? It's an ultimate lie detector. What Facebook's doing is they are showing you how people are reacting to your content. If that sucks, it's not Facebook's fault. If you buy a microphone because you want to be a rock and roll star, and you sing awfully and people boo you off the stage, are you going to blame the microphone? I'm wearing a Golden State Warriors shirt. I'm a big fan. I'm a big fan because when they win, then I cheer about that, but the reason I cheer is different than every other fan. I cheer because the custom audiences get bigger. Our remarketing pools get bigger, and that helps us monetize more. Right. So I'm like, yes, yes, that's like another people in a saved target audience of people who watched that half-court shot from Steph Curry, 51 points, whatever. The reason we pay on that is the idea of amplification. We say amplification instead of ads because we know that if you've got something that's working, you're going to want to put more into it. Technology is a multiplier, Facebook is a multiplier, word of mouth is a multiplier, and we know that when we have a hot post, not everyone— some folks in B2B and other verticals will say they can't do this, but you can. We've done it in every single vertical. We found that when When we have a really hot post people are sharing, one paid impression yields 320 incremental organic impressions. That's like going to the store, looking at your favorite drink, buy one, get 320 free. Would you do that? Mm-hmm. The trick is identifying that, and when you do, it works really well. You don't have to be a mega advertiser. You don't have to be the number one team. A lot of people say, oh, well, easy for you to say because you've got the number one team in American sports right now, so yeah, of course you're going to make money.

Right.

This is what we believe fundamentally. We've done this a bazillion times— that's an actual math term— with $1 a day, right? And we think if you have $1 a day, you can do this. I don't care how crap you are. I don't care how busy you are. I don't care if you're not technical. I don't care if you've been burned by all these other consultants or you have some misbelief that you can't do this in B2B or whatever. If you have $1 a day and you have the content, and you put in the effort, post content targeting, set up the tracking, this will work for you.

Let's dive in even deeper. There's a lot of tools out there to do almost everything that you can do on a website. I've seen your posts before on that. I actually am in agreement with you on that, and I see this becoming a landing page-oriented universe versus a website universe where we're getting less and less qualified by the homepage and more and more qualified by the content. What I'm curious about is when people are going to be savvy enough, how long is it before people are savvy enough to use what could end up being the Facebook front end with the landing page conversion back end, or will it all be Facebook one day? Are we ever going to just get rid of the internet and be all Facebook?

I feel like that you could resist the Borg and you could put your tinfoil hat on And all this, but think of it this way. So in your office in San Jose, Bryan, you've got all kinds of utilities that bring power and water and internet and all these kinds of things into your building. Do you feel that that's somehow intrusive or that that is somehow getting in the way of what you want to do? So you want to build your own PG&E and you want to set up your own electric company and water and plumbing and all that kind of stuff. Do you want to set up your own infrastructure or do you just— No. say, you know what, that's what we're using, or I'm using Verizon and I'm fine with that. We're in a market now where Facebook is the Google of social, you know, with 70+% share in the United States, and Twitter is the Bing, right, of social. So if you view it as plumbing, as infrastructure, as connectivity, as things that are not sexy, that's why all the kids say, oh, I'm not spending time on Facebook. because my mom is there, because it's not cool anymore. But that's the way to view it, and it's not that Facebook is the dominant social network where you're hanging out, you know, like you and Ted Rubin where you want to engage with humans. All that's true, but where this is going is to say, look, as a business owner, I really could care less about— or VP of marketing, I could care less about a website. Does anyone really want to build a website? No, they want sales. They want leads. Oh, but it's rented land and I need to have control and things can change. You know what, you've got to be wherever the audience is and you're even subject to— even if you have a website and you feel like you have this false sense of security and control, you're still subject to Google deciding whether your stuff ranks or not. Mm-hmm. Algorithmically, you're still at the mercy of someone else, whether it's Google or Facebook, you still have to pay Constant Contact, Mailchimp, whatever. You still have to pay them to show your stuff. And the same thing for Facebook, you still have to pay for delivery.

Yeah.

You don't have a problem paying FedEx, or however much— was it 42 cents for a stamp? I have no idea. You have no problem paying for that. So you're paying Facebook for social delivery. Now the trouble is, let me let you in on a conversation that we've had with the ads team over at Facebook. What they want to do, and I kid you not, this is not some propaganda thing, I don't work for Facebook, they didn't pay me to say this. What they want to do is make it so that it's literally push-button simple for businesses to be able to— if you could press the easy button and all this revenue would come in, of course you've got to put a token in the machine, put a dollar in the machine, like a vending machine, and all this stuff comes out, of course you'd want to do that. And what you need to make that happen is goals, Content. And targeting. So listen to this and see if this causes you to see things a little bit differently. So they want to automate the entire thing. They're not trying to build a better campaign builder like Infusionsoft, right? That's building a better buggy whip. No one wants to— no business owner or whoever wants to learn how to tinker better. No one wants to use tools that are better. We don't even want tools. Tools are an artificial impediment. They're friction to getting to what I want. They're a necessary evil. wants a shovel. They want a hole. They want the result. We need transparency for that. So think about goals, content, and targeting, which is necessary to drive the results. Goals— I need to know what the cost per is. There used to be 33 different ad units on Facebook. Now there's 10 major ones where you choose the business result. I want sales. I want leads. I want check-ins. I choose the business result. That's goals. They've automated that now with optimized CPM. You choose the objective. You don't even worry about bidding anymore. Content, that's the hardest part. We'll talk about that in a second. Targeting, what are they doing with custom audiences? The most powerful thing on Facebook is custom audiences. Most people don't even have it. They don't know what it is. They don't know you can match your customer database here, and then create lookalikes and do all kinds of really cool stuff on that. Targeting, they've nearly automated. Now, part of targeting that bridges— content is what bridges goals and content. I'm sorry, content is what bridges goals and targeting. That creates the relevancy, that's what you feed the people. You can have the whole framework, but if you don't have the content— all these analogies of water through the pipe or gasoline, if you don't have content, and that's the hardest part. If you can automate that last part of the 3, then you've got full automation. What are they doing? Well, the first step a few years ago was dynamic product ads, which used to be called carousel ads or multi-product ads, all these different variations where You would load in lots and lots of your content, or Facebook would source it for you, where you'd have Mention and these other sorts of apps, which will become more public, to collect your customer feedback to create your content. So then you have your goals, content, and targeting, you have all 3 automated. You're going to see a lot more things related to instant articles and to lead ads and to the stuff coming out with these bots as another way of handling customer service, because customer service is really part of marketing and product marketing related, and marketing is the whole relationship, that whole thing. You're going to see that whole economy, because Facebook, in order to gather that content, they have to first connect all the users, which is what they are right now. They're the electric company. They then have to provide that level of semi-automatable services based on rules, which is the touchscreens at McDonald's that will eliminate the $15 an hour complainers. All those things that can be automated, and I kid you not, Facebook has to solve that problem. They have to solve the measurement problem, which means they have to track everything cross-device. They have to solve attribution, be able to measure what the actual lift is back into search. Because if you do a really good job in social, that will cause more people to search for you too. How do you measure that lift? You have to do holdout, holdback audiences and lift tests and things that most marketers don't even know how to do, nor do they want to do, nor should they ever learn what those things are. Facebook's got to be able to say as simple as, You put $1 in, get $29 back, which is what Facebook put on their blog when we talked about the Golden State Warriors. That's what they have to do, and to do that, it's not that they want to replace or kill your website. So for fun, I think here I can share my screen so you can see. Let me show you this one thing. This is part of that presentation that— can you guys see this? Facebook is your website?

Yes.

Okay, so just for fun—

I saw that graphic, it's a great graphic.

Yeah, and some people want to complain about it, but anything that you can do on your website, you can do on Facebook. Ironically, it's not us saying you don't need your website. It's us saying that if you care about business results, you've got to be where people are, and then you're going to do this across all of your other networks. All of your other networks will help you amplify whatever result you want, because if you go by business objective, excuse me, and not by tweets and likes, reactions, and views and stuff like that, then you can actually think like a business person, and you can do allocation down the line in the funnel. That's what we want to do. That's what we want people to think. It's funny that the tech guy is telling business people to think like business people. One of the things, when we ran marketing at Yahoo! Personals, I was at Yahoo!, I did the analytics there. And I had a whole team of people that basically did charts and we measured things. For Yahoo Personals, which is a dating site, you pay $30 a month to sign up. People were looking and they were searching, but see, what am I trying to say here? They felt that somehow online they would get a different experience than in the real world. If you're a loser in the real world, if nobody wants to hang out with you, if— let's see, how do I go back to showing just me?

Stop your screen share. Yeah, eliminate screen share.

Okay.

There you go.

All right, you guys see me okay? Yeah. If you are a loser in the real world, if you're fat, if you don't make any money, if nobody loves you, if you're just whatever, why would all of a sudden online would it be any different? Why would you be a different person? Why would more people like you? Oh, well, the law of large numbers. Maybe if I send out a million things, then this many people respond, and X percent of those, and I just work the numbers, eventually this dream girl will want to marry me, and she's got lots of money, and she's the sugar mama. That's the mentality people had. They felt that online was going to be different than the real world. That's what we saw at Yahoo across all the different properties, and that's what we saw on Facebook. All these people, bottom line is they wanted to ignore the core problem, which is, dude, your product sucks. You're not taking care of your customers. You're not— I mean, that is not— no, you know, the doc— but unfortunately, us, we're marketing doctors, and we have to try to solve the symptom but not the problem. When the patient comes to the hospital and they've got lung cancer and they've got, you know, whatever, you know, they got in trouble for drunk driving, you know, with a personal injury attorney, you know, they got in trouble for drunk driving, we have to try to get them out of that problem, to bail them out. But we don't want to tell them, hey dude, you need to stop going out Friday nights and getting slammed.

Let me ask you this. We've just got a couple minutes left before we get into some Q&A with everybody. There's lots of questions already coming in without me actually having to ask, which is great. Also, congratulations because we're all trending on Twitter. That didn't take long. Your content's doing great, and so is everyone out there sharing. Definitely keep your questions coming in on #H2HChat on Twitter, and we will make sure that the second half here that Suzy gets to to bring those questions to Dennis. Dennis, I'm curious if you can actually give us a specific example of how a brand or a page— maybe it's the Warriors, maybe it's something else— actually proves the model of what you're talking about, actually converted in ways that you're talking about, and did things that are technically just not known yet, and people are just not— they're just missing out on how to actually use Facebook the way that you're talking about as a business or a tech person or math person?

There's one guy I will not name, and he calls himself the data scientist or whatever. I think it's really so simple, you don't need a math degree, you don't need— this guy doesn't even have a college degree. You don't need any of these kinds of things, there's no hocus-pocus. It's really this simple. Do you have people that are already converting on your website or through email or because search is working for you? Do you have some marketing channel that's already working for you? Yes. Can you digitally identify those conversions and track that path? Yes. And are those conversions worthwhile to you at an acceptable cost per conversion with enough conversions, enough of whatever business result that you as an owner or CFO or someone on the board cares about. Not a marketer, not someone who cares about social media, but from a business standpoint. Do you meet that criteria? If the answer is yes, then it will work because Facebook is the ultimate remarketing machine. Remarketing and amplification and content marketing and word of mouth and SEO and PR— not PageRank, but public relations— all of those are the same thing. This is where the board comes in. If you're generating business results, you can increase the yield on that. Now the reason why it works for the Warriors, for example, is we already can measure the path of people that are buying tickets and people that are buying merchandise. And so the idea of remarketing is if you're coming through a particular channel and then you didn't buy, then the pair of shoes or the hotel or whatever you're looking at follows you around all over the internet. That's remarketing. as people know as web remarketing. Social remarketing is— so you looked at that one thing on Amazon, you didn't buy it, now it follows you over into Facebook, and it gets smarter because it recommends other things. Maybe it's not that I'm just going to keep showing that pair of red shoes over and over again until you're like, okay, I relent, I will buy. That's where the state of remarketing is now. It's called sledgehammer remarketing. At a certain point, it was like, all right. But if we're smarter about it, then we can go cross-channel. What happens if you don't open the email? Then we can show it in the social. What happens if in the app we give you an offer, but you don't take the offer? Like with Rosetta Stone, we were selling the core product, which levels 1 through 5, which is normally $500, we were selling it in the app for $199. Same product, digital download, all that kind of stuff, because we were doing app remarketing. Right. People who've been to the app, we then remarket onto the site. People who did something on the site are not remarketed into social. People who did something in email are not. So any one channel, if they did something in one channel and it's converting, if you have one channel that's working, PPC is working for you, great. Then duplicate that to have another remarketing flow into social. So when you think about all these channels as remarketing, that is the ultimate in personalization. Remarketing is nothing more than personalization based on someone's last behavior. I'll give you another example. A friend of mine, he wanted to sell his— he has all the rights to the Elvis stuff, Elvis bedding, Elvis pillows, Elvis blankets, Elvis pictures, Elvis stuff. Wow. He wanted to get his stuff into Walmart, and he won that TV show. What is that TV show where the celebrities vote for you, Shark Tank or whatever, that kind of thing? What we did was we took his stuff, Made a good video. He struggled on the content. Remember we said goals, content, targeting. Goals, I want to get in Walmart. Content, that kind of sucked. Pictures are not enough. Targeting, we want to target the buyers at Walmart who work in Bentonville, Arkansas. So $1 a day, hitting those people over and over again because we have job title and workplace and all this stuff in Facebook. A lot of people don't know that. That's the best thing there is in Facebook outside of custom audiences. And lo and behold, this stuff's in Walmart. And this works for anybody when they want to do this media inception kind of targeting. Let's see, a friend of mine— well, I've got a bunch of these friends. So, you know, Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg, right? They're New York Times bestsellers, all this. They're the best folks in landing page optimization, conversion, all this kind of thing. They've written tons of books. And their grandmother— no, I'm sorry, their grandmother had a problem with Sears, right? Sears, they were supposed to come in and do some kind of remodeling. They totally screwed it up. 5 or 6 contractors later, I think, they still had it screwed up. This poor woman, she got cancer. All these bad things happened. They didn't take care of the issue. It's still not fixed. We took that and we dollar-a-day amplified it to the executives at Sears, and it worked. My friend—

How did it work? What was the outcome?

The outcome is they relented. came in to offer to fix the thing properly because the previous contractor said it wasn't done properly, and they also gave her half of the money back. I think she paid $40,000, so they gave her $20,000 back. I can even show you the blog post on that if you guys want to see it.

That's incredible. I've heard even on April Fool's Day, one guy that actually targeted his roommate and only his roommate on one ad and said, looking for a new roommate. His roommate actually clicked on the ad and saw that it was his apartment and wondered why he was being booted out as a person who was obviously renting the room. You can get really targeted.

Yeah, that's our— is it Brian Switchcow? I forgot who's doing that. I'll show you. This is something that doesn't It doesn't matter. Here it is. Can you guys see my screen now?

Oh, Bryan, yeah.

Yeah, Sears Home Delivery Service breach of contract, right? So they wrote this letter, you know, this grandma, they write in letters because they think that's how you complain, but they don't realize social media is the ultimate megaphone, right? Here it is, stage 4 cancer, they totally screwed this thing up, she's 74 years old, all this, right? All this blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and literally take this URL. I'm copying this, and then I can— here, I'll go to it over here. You can take any URL, you can promote it. I'm in the Warriors one, but it doesn't matter. I can be in any one that I want because it doesn't matter where I'm promoting it from, really. I'm just trying to— I'm using Facebook as the ultimate inception vehicle. It's a delivery vehicle. That is the ultimate postman, right? It's not Facebook because people are hanging out. Promote your page, send people to your website, boost your post. Boost your post, that's what we do all day long. 80% of our ads are this. But I could send people directly to the site, and then here, look here, I can say I want to target all the fans of Bryan Kramer, or actually let's do this. You see this browse? Demographics, work, employers. Alright, so Susie Bright, name a company, we'll see how many people work there we can reach on Facebook. Sears, right? Name somebody.

Let's say, did you say Sears?

Oh, you name somebody, I don't care.

Oh, okay. Name someone, let's do, what's a good company? Let's do, who's a good friend of ours?

Look, we're flying to Portland tonight, and here's SEM PDX, right? That's the organization in Portland. There's 7 people that list themselves as working there. We can target them, right? All the people that— here's a bad one. All the people that work at Facebook. Wow, there's 61 million people that list themselves as working at Facebook.

Isn't that meta when you actually target the people back at Facebook?

Oh, that's our favorite thing. We do that all the time. Where we'll present together with Facebook, and then we'll target that back to people on Facebook who do marketing and PR and this sort of thing, and then they share it. So we'll go to these things, and some of the folks from Facebook will come up saying, all right, Dennis, stop it, we see your stuff all the time. I remember I keynoted at some conference a couple months ago, and Jeff Fowler, who does digital over at the Wall Street Journal, he came up to me later and he said, all right, you know, I get it, you're doing the workplace targeting. It's super meta. Here's an example of stacking authority for amplification. So remember I told you a couple days ago we gave a joint presentation with Facebook? This was their presentation, merged in with some of our things, right? And here's the— this is from their solutions group, right? There's some great slides. You know what I'll do is I'll actually take these slides and I'll post them, like one or two of them, and say, hey, would you guys like to see how this works? Would you like to see how to create audience matrices? Would you like to see how to do Facebook creates these things for us, but the amplification is we take this and then we amplify it to all the people who are at the conference or have been to the page or registered before or all this kind of stuff. Here's the conference page. It was sold out, which is great. There are some high-end speakers that are here, but the thing is because we have admin on the page, we can actually share, and the group too, we can share that content and recycle it and amplify it, right? That's what makes this whole thing so amazing. A lot of people don't realize that, right? Here's another one. Go ahead.

I was just going to say, I think what we're going to need to do is we're going to have to have you back on if you're open to it for an actual Maybe webinar workshop because you're getting into some stuff that's so fantastic. Totally. And the stuff that I use all the time but not as in-depth as you do. I'd love to have you back on if you're open to it. I'd love to. As an actual workshop that we can present back to everyone. I think if we walk through this, it would be great because you're going through some pretty awesome stuff. I also want to make sure that we have some time to get some questions. We're running just a couple minutes over on the question side, so I hate to cut you off there, Dennis, because it's really, really awesome stuff. Let's do it. But let's dive into the questions. Suzy, go ahead and shoot off your first one.

Okay, awesome. We're getting some really great questions in the Twitter stream. Congrats once again, guys, for trending. We did it earlier than we usually do, but that is 3 and a half months straight every week. Way to go, team. Please keep your questions coming in. This is a great, great, great chance to get some questions in for Dennis who's an absolute expert. Dennis, we're going to go ahead and do some rapid-fire questions here.

Sounds good.

We have a lot of stuff from our community. All right, cool. A question I have from our buddy Nancy Rubin. Nancy, I'm so glad to see you joining us today. She says, in a busy environment such as Facebook, is effective targeting more important than content?

If you have a 3-legged chair or tripod, is there one leg that's more important than the other? Would you rather cut off your left arm or your right arm? You need both. Even if you had the best content and it was to the wrong people, you're dead. If you had the right people but the wrong content, you're dead. You need all of them. You need goals, content, and targeting.

So if we're talking about, say, an entrepreneur, right, or someone just starting a business looking at doing an investment, are you saying that this is a perfect tripod? We have 33%, 33%, 33% investment.

I don't think it's 33% each. I think it's a sequence, and you have to hit these things in a particular order. This is what we call the social amplification engine. Later we'll go through the checklist. We'll do a free webinar with you guys to show I'll show you how, but you need to have these things in place. Now the thing is, if you set them up properly, you don't need to keep going back to them all the time. If your setup is done properly, you don't have to keep readjusting your plumbing for tracking. What you will do over and over again is you'll continue to produce content, right? But once you have core content at every stage in the funnel, you don't have to keep producing new stuff every day, but your content will be the main area that you tune.

Gotcha, gotcha. So it's that initial investment in creation, but the recognition that you're not going to have to keep reinventing the wheel every Right. Does that make sense? Alright, great question here from our buddy JS. JS, so glad that you could get away from your meeting this morning to join us. He says, do you eventually see video use in Facebook Live and Messenger becoming the main draw and/or reason, raison d'être to use Facebook?

Video is great for engaging, and video is good at different parts of the funnel. But I don't think— because video is hot right now, I don't think it's going to be the thing. Sometimes you just want to chat the answer and have the chatbot come back, right? Sometimes if you're a teenager, you prefer to chat instead of having to get on the phone every time. So video is heavy. Video requires that you do your hair properly. Video requires all these other things. So just because video is hot, I don't think so. You have to figure out which is the right response based on the particular situation, which means You have to map out your funnel, every stage in your funnel, and that's where people fail, because the combination of the goals, content, and targeting combination is actually requiring that you define if-then logic for every step of your funnel.

I have a question here from Rob. Rob, thanks so much for joining us today, always great to see you in the Twitter feed. He says, do you think Facebook is in danger of a coming exodus of users? Do you

see everyone as, you know, they're going to leave the electric company, they're going to leave the water utility? Just because something isn't cool doesn't mean that people are going to leave it. Now certainly it's not cool to say that you're hanging out with your mom, but you're not going to disavow your mom. And so it goes back to what we said before, where it's about, if you're a business owner and you care about results, You're going to use whatever works, and that could mean some things that you don't think are particularly sexy but are necessary. If you're a cook, you're going to have pots and pans. Are you going to get away from pots and pans? Probably not, right? But it's not about fashion, it's not about the latest— oh look, there's a squirrel over there. It's about what drives sequential success, and so whether you delegate that out or And I think the things that are repeatable, you know, I used to have a Toyota Camry, and I don't know how many editions of Camrys Toyota has gone through, but man, those things are reliable. And I don't want the first edition of any kind of car because it's likely to break. I want stuff that's been tested over and over again, that drives me sales. And it's not the tool that people care about, the customers, right, the customers that are buying from us. The people we serve are the clients, the customers of the customers. Clients of the clients are called customers, but the people who are actually buying, they don't care about the tools. They care about are they getting their needs met. So who cares? I don't care about Facebook or ExactTarget or Infusionsoft or whatever. I have no preference for any one or the other. All I care about is, as a math guy, where can I allocate my effort

So one thing I would say though is people at this point, we know that there's a choice of social networks. You can go to different ones and people use them in different ways, as opposed to say the electric company where I have to get electricity. And in most places there's a monopoly. I can't even choose between which ones I get electricity from. And studies like, of course, I'm sure you know the most dramatic one from 2014 where the Princeton students used disease modeling to say that Facebook was going to lose 80% by 2017. Obviously, that's very extensive. However, in general, as you know, Pew and other places have documented that there is at least Facebook usage is stabilizing, if not somewhat declining. Facebook itself has said within the past couple of weeks that it's very concerned about this. Right. People aren't posting as much personal information. Where do you see the platform going? What do they need to do to retain their population so that marketers like us can continue to really benefit? What are your thoughts?

Facebook has an archipelago strategy, which is very smart. Can you see this slide? This is Facebook's 10-year roadmap. Did you know that of the top 10 apps in the App Store, 4 of them are Facebook? Because of Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. So Facebook is a social network. Yeah, it's probably topped out, because once you have saturation— it's just like Google with search. Once you have saturation, what more are you going to do, right? So Facebook says, well— Right. Just like Google said, all right, we're going to go into Alphabet. We're going to do self-driving cars and robots and solve health problems and genetic nanotech and all this kind of stuff. Facebook is saying the same thing. They're saying, look, for us to be able to personalize, we have to own the infrastructure. We have to figure out over here connectivity and AI to be able to actually deliver to people what they want and anticipate this. The newsfeed in social networks is but the very first step in being part of the board. Or Minority Report or Skynet or 1984, whatever your kind of view of this negative or positive utopia of robots. Some people embrace FALC, which is fully automated luxury communism. I happen to believe that's a great idea, even though I sort of don't like some of the things associated with that. But you see, with connectivity, they really are— one of their key tenets is connecting everybody and actually doing it for free, and soon without any strings. Free Basics has strings on it, lasers, good grief, these drones that fly for 90 days. And when you mentioned the Princeton study or these other things, yes, those things— let's say the worst, worst that could possibly happen on Facebook where Something really bad happens, they have a security breach and everyone leaves. If Facebook dies and now us as business people have to drive results from something else, guess what? If you have your plumbing and your goals, content, and targeting in place, you're going to be just fine because you're going to be wherever your customers are. Gary Vaynerchuk and I have argued about this a few times, it's not going to be Unless you're a marketer to marketers and you have to somehow be cool, as a business person, you want to touch stuff that's already proven to work, unless you have so many extra cycles and your stuff is so polished and so perfect and everything is under complete control and automated that you have the cycles to explore new things. I believe your experimentation budget should be no more than 10% or 20% of your total budget, and that's assuming you have the basics done. If you don't have the basics done, And 99% of the marketers, well basically 100% of the marketers that we see, big companies to small, they don't have their basics in place. So why are you worried about all this other stuff that may happen in some weird potential eventual might happen or not scenario?

Gotcha, gotcha, and I like that. I like that it absolutely is true, right. We can take all of these different tenets that we are talking about and apply them to other platforms. I think it's always important though, right, we've got to balance out our skill set, make sure not to invest in one bucket. Thank you, excellent answer. So I have a great question from my buddy Tina checking in over at Cisco. Thanks for joining, Tina, always a pleasure. She says, what would be a sense of current industry benchmarks for success? How do you benchmark a successful Facebook paid campaign? This is such a big question for so many people, right? What are your thoughts on this?

Benchmarking, it's the same thing that you have for anyone else. The answer is, unfortunately, it depends. Let me show you what that is. If you were to ask the same question to Google on what is the average CPC Or CTR, or cost per lead, or cost per sale, or ROAS. That's actually irrelevant, even though people ask this question, right? You have to know what your particular set of results are, and we actually did benchmark this to tell you that the average cost per download, I think, is $3.66, $3.67. The average cost per fan is $1.07.

Hmm.

Oh, this is different. There's examples of this where, like I'm showing you here, where it varies by industry. You can't compare a sports team with a law firm, with a software company, with the local Italian restaurant, right? They're all very different. But the best way to benchmark is you see what's actually working in your other channels. So if you're looking at your email or your SEO or PPC, and you have your cost per click, and you have your cost per lead, and you have your bounce rates, and you have all these sort of indicative troubleshooting metrics, why wouldn't you apply the same metrics across all channels, not just on Facebook, right? Yes. Because what you're trying to measure is your goals, content, and targeting. And we actually have some benchmarks here. I'll just show you real quick. 1% of your viewers should register for your webinar. You should be able to get your cost per click on Facebook to be half because of the sharing that YouTube doesn't enable. You should get 90% of your conversions to come through mobile on Facebook because of view-through across device. You should have— you're paid at under 10% of organic unless you're in the growth stage. You should have Canvas outperforming non-Canvas. Canvas is basically landing pages within Facebook that you can get fancy. You should be boosting 80% of your posts, and 80% of your ads should be boosted. You should get 50% view-through. On your videos. You have people who, of the impressions, 50% should view, and that should make it be viral. You should get 50% of folks who then view to make it past 10 seconds to tell whether your video is working or not, right? And you should have the majority of your paid be against engagement, not against just the bottom of the funnel. You should have different flows for these different people at different points in the funnel. Your average CTR should be north of 5%. Largely because of mobile. You should be able to benchmark what a fan is worth, what an email is worth, so that you can measure on the margin where you're going to put stuff.

Wow.

You should have 95+% of your stuff be likes, because no one is using reactions. You should model out your demand curve. You should know how many posts per day you have. Some people say— you see all this nonsense of what's the right number of times to post per day and all that. The answer is infinity, as long as you have good content.

Mm-hmm.

We found that it doesn't matter who the brand is, if you have good content, you can post 30 times per day, if you have good content. People don't hear the if part. You should be able to measure what that lift is. Here's an example. We did a lift test spending $20,000 per day with Facebook. This was Rosetta Stone, measuring what the impact of video was. We found that when we showed people videos, they were more likely to convert to other channels. They're more likely to open email, more likely to search, because we could measure that because of the way we did our test and control. and we saw what that difference was. If you're not measuring the cross-channel lift— look, if you don't even have your measurement in place, it doesn't matter any of this other stuff that you're doing, because if you do things on Facebook or Twitter or whatever, and you're trying to measure the conversions through Twitter directly, you're going to miss on probably 80% or 90% of the conversions. You're going to mismeasure anyway. Lift testing pre-assumes that you're able to measure as people go to these other channels, which means you have to have holdbacks. To measure the value of the assist. Like, look, here's an ad. We spent $300, and we got $44,000 of revenue, because it was against the custom audience. And so I don't think I have the slide in here, but the idea is that when you do something in one channel, when you do a really good job, ironically, in Facebook, that revenue goes to these other channels, so you have to measure those users. If you're not measuring the users all the way across— like, here's another example. We hit them on mobile and they buy on desktop because Ticketmaster has a lousy purchase experience. People aren't measuring this. Here's another one, sponsors. Oracle and Kaiser Permanente and Jamba Juice and all that, we measure what the ROI is on these things, and it's not how many impressions and shares we got. We're measuring coupon downloads, people that are checking in, because we're connecting our systems together. So the benchmarking questions on what's the average CTR, how do I know if it's working well? That actually pre-assumes you have your plumbing in place, and that's where people fail.

Right, so your advice here, and this is amazing, I think what this is doing is it's giving our audience, and I know it's giving me as well, and I'm the analytics person, right, a sense of just all that you can do with all of this and what a benchmark really looks like. So it sounds like though You don't want to put the cart before the horse, or before you get your plumbing. You first want to set it all up and then figure out exactly what you need benchmark-wise. Am I correct?

So Susie and all these other guys here, if you don't have your plumbing in place to be able to measure traffic flowing between different audiences— and by the way, Google Analytics is only part of the solution— if you don't have that in place, how could you possibly know whether you're succeeding or not?

What's the solution, Dennis? What's the total package that you're talking about?

So we put together a 50-page guide, and I will show you right now. I only have a minute left. We have 18 of these based on the 3 roles that we have, whether you're a student or a business or a partner. And so there's 18 of these checklists, and each of them is like 50 pages plus. Let me just show you what we mean by digital plumbing. And then everyone here can go download for free. I didn't mean to even show this, but you asked it and it seems like that's the theme here. All right. So people think they know what digital plumbing is, they think it's Google Analytics. Well, yes, for your website, but your website is only one part of this whole thing like we talked about, right? So if you've got everything tied together, your email, your web, your app, and your social audiences tied together, then here's what you're going to do. You're going to go through this checklist to make sure that you've got your conversion tracking, and your analytics, and your pixels, and all of these plumbing sorts of items in place, and you're going to follow this checklist here. You see this is like 50 pages? So this is Tag Manager, this is Google's Business Manager, this is, you know, the MCC for AdWords. These are making sure you're firing all the same events, all the same conversions, You've got all the audiences tied together, and then we go step by step through every one of these on how do you set up these pixels. This thing is surprisingly difficult. How do you import your email addresses? How do you set up multiple events that you're firing for? Let's say that you're selling— you're a SaaS company, and you're selling subscriptions, and sometimes it's $10 a month, and sometimes it's $100 for the whole year. You've got to be able to track that and pass those values back. Let's say you're using MailChimp or Infusionsoft, how do you pass back when an action occurs there so then Facebook can be smart enough to do something or not do something, or Twitter to do something or not do something? The if-then logic, right? How do you do this? This is what we're talking about. How do you set up cross-channel remarketing?

Go ahead, Dennis, why don't we go ahead and grab that link if you don't mind? Maybe just after we get off, you can share the link back on Twitter for everybody.

Yeah, it's just blitzmetrics.com/gtm. Oh, good. That's Google Tag Manager, but it's actually the whole plumbing thing. I think we charge $37 for it, but we'll leave a code that's open for the next 24 hours. The code is BLITZGUIDE. If you come here and get this guide and you put in BLITZGUIDE, then you'll get it for free. It's got to be all caps, BLITZGUIDE. Awesome. Oh, $1. Sorry, I thought it was free. $1.

I

lied to you.

I'm

not

trying to sell anything here. Yeah, this is great information for our audience and they're really enjoying this. I have a few last questions. My buddy Mike Haberman is on and Mike, I always love Love, love, love your questions. He says, this reminds me— he loves H2H chat, but he's very honest. He says, this reminds me of walking in Greece and trying to read the signs. It's all Greek to me. Love Mike, my buddy. He says, how does a novice get started?

You have to go through—

Your top few things, starting at the very beginning. Very novice.

The novice thing is, as a business, you're trying to drive some kind of result, and the most powerful thing is to do the dollar-a-day strategy, right? To think like— when you think like a journalist, that's how you create authority. So this here, where you're benchmarking by your business objectives, you have to start with your funnel. A lot of people want to start with all of this crazy, you know, VR, AR, the latest thing that just came out. That's all a bunch of nonsense if you have time. We have to, because us as marketers, we have to produce content and test things out for everyone else. But start— if you're a novice, start by modeling your funnel and figuring out what you could do for $1 a day. In other words, think about goals, content, and targeting. Your goal is you want to incept your customers, or incept the media, or incept the most authoritative people. Your content is something that someone has said about you, which is Third party. It can't be what you said. It has to be what Bryan Kramer said about you. It has to be what Facebook said. It has to be someone in your industry who's authoritative. It could be a customer that's authoritative. And your targeting is all of those media workplace targets, right? All the people that work at Uber, all the people that work at Sears, all the people that work at whatever. You're going to create an audience of that. You're going to have that as a saved target audience. Can you guys see my screen?

Yeah.

Am I sharing my screen?

Oh no, we're seeing you.

Oh shoot, I was just showing— okay, I know we're short on time, but I'm going to show you this one thing. This is like, if you don't have time and you're busy and all this, this is the one thing— can you see this now? Yeah. Right, I'm showing the funnel here? Okay, the one thing you need to do is come into here and create $1 audiences. Remember here, we can create these audiences here, but here's where you're going to go. You're going to go into your Ads Manager under Tools, Audiences. This is hard to find, so just replay it later if you need to. Tools, Audiences. Then I'm going to create an audience. There's 3 kinds of audiences. I'm going to create a saved audience. You see this blue button, Create Audience? Now, Saved Audience. And I'm going to do this one thing. I'm going to call it my Mega Influencer Audience, which is my influencer, the influencer. And then I'm going to come in here. Under browse, demographics, workplace, work and employer, and I'm going to put in all the people that I would like to accept. All the people, if I could be on the COVID of any magazine, any TV show, any radio, any industry association, I'm going to put them all in here. Now once this thing is saved, because then you hit save, then when I am here on my page So let's say if I go to BlitzMetrics, and I've got these different posts, and I'm going to share these third-party authoritative posts, right? Like here, oh, this is today, H2H chat, and I'm going to come in here and— oops, I've got to run it through Business Manager. Here it is, I'm almost there. Anytime I've got something on social or on Facebook now that I think is interesting, because I've got that saved audience, I'm going to come in here and hit boost post, and I'm going to select one of those saved audiences that I made. If you have 4 or 5 saved audiences, great. If you have just that one that I showed you, great. But this is the one thing you have to do. Okay, see this third option, people you choose through targeting? Now I got all the people that work at USA Today and Time Magazine and the Wall Street Journal and New York Times and all this kind of stuff, so I'm making sure that they're seeing this, right?

Wow.

And this is the dollar-a-day strategy, so here I'll do 14 days. And now it got mad at me because I've got to spend at least $1 a day. That's where the $1 a day came from. Now I'm going to say $14 for 14 days, and I'll hit boost. That's what you're going to do all day long, over and over again. This is the $1 a day strategy. You create that saved target audience, and then you just boost. You never need to go back to Ads Manager. Just do this over and over again. And later, if you're advanced, do custom audiences, do all this crazy funnel stuff. But do you see all these people that we're targeting now?

Yep.

I didn't have to leave the newsfeed. I can take any one of these things, right? Sometimes I get disapproved, and I can boost it to make sure the right people are seeing it. A lot of people say boost sucks. Boost is incredible. That's because they don't know what

they're doing. Obviously, we're going to have you back on a webinar and do a very focused session, if you're up for it, where we're going to walk through not just this, but a very step-by-step tutorial. How does that sound?

Let's do it.

There's a lot of strategies and a lot of things that we'll put together. You and I will work on that with Suzy and we'll get that together so we can get everybody going on that. Obviously this is just an incredible amount of intelligent work, so thank you so much for sharing that. Suzy, anything left that you wanted to share?

I would just encourage you, if you get a chance, to check out the Facebook feed— Facebook feed, haha— Twitter feed. Because we have some additional questions coming in, just awesome stuff in here, lots of different thoughts. We already have a good number of people downloading the guide, they're loving it. You definitely have a lot of new fans in your feed right now. Thank you so much for joining us. Awesome.

One

other thing, Dennis, if you want to come back over to video on you. Dennis, what is the code again for the promo code so everybody can have that?

It's BlitzGuide, B-L-I-T-Z-G-U-I-D-E, is one word, all caps.

I'm downloading it right now, it's great stuff. Dennis, again, we'll get you back up on the webinar. Thank you so much for being here today. Suzy, I know I'm putting you on the spot, do you know who's coming up on Monday?

I do, I do. It's like we've done this like 50 times at this point. It's Kari Anderson, our dear, dear, dear friend is joining us. for H2H Chat. We could not be more thrilled.

Good, and knowing Kari, she's going to throw out more awesome little words of wisdom that you guys just don't want to miss. Oh yes. So thanks again, Dennis, really appreciate it. Suzy, great to see you. Everyone out there, congratulations on another great H2H Chat. We'll see you this upcoming Monday, same time, same place. See you then. Cheers.