You're Using the Wrong Social Network, Facebook Lead Ads, Google SEO Trend (Trends Dec 2023 Week 2)

All right, so we are going to talk about the trends for the week, and Neil's going to go first. What do you got, Neil?

So trends for the week, you're using the wrong social network. So Eric, you already saw this, but what do you think the best social network is right now?

For what?

For advertising.

Oh yeah, it's got to be X, you know?

That's right. So it's funny because when you look at like the data and the stats, what we're seeing right now is if you are trying to go out there and advertise on social media, you know, we looked at a lot of the client data we have as well as site data that we have from Ubersuggest as well as Analytics. And what we saw is when we're looking at just social, so we took that out as an individual channel, right? We're not talking about SEO or anything like that. We're talking about paid social. And when we're looking at the revenue that is generated from paid social, and again, we're going to end up just breaking down from a social media perspective. So the social channels add up to 100. Facebook drove 32.37% of the revenue. YouTube drove 28.19% of the revenue. LinkedIn, 11.47%. Instagram, 10.92%. TikTok, 8.44%. X, 4.41%. Snap, 3.18%. and Pinterest 1.02. There's a lot of other social networks, but they were so insignificant, pretty much excluded them. Now, can you guess the platform that had the biggest return on ad spend?

X.

X, 6.8. Pinterest, 5.2. Snap, 4.9. TikTok, 4.1. YouTube, 3.9. Instagram, 3.3. Facebook, 3.2. LinkedIn, 2.6. Even though Facebook and YouTube and, you know, we'll loop Instagram in with Facebook, they can drive mass volume. It ends up being, if you're trying to maximize your return on ad spend, you should first juice up whatever you can get out of X, then Pinterest, then Snap, then TikTok, because it's going to create a higher ROI. Your campaigns won't scale as well because they don't have the volume as let's say a Facebook, But you're going to end up driving a bigger ROAS. And LinkedIn, the reason we're seeing crappy ROAS compared to the other social networks, it doesn't mean it's a bad place to advertise. We think it's one of the best places to advertise is because you're competing against recruiters. Not all are you combating, you know, B2B enterprise companies spending a lot of money. People spend a lot of money on LinkedIn purely for recruiting efforts, which jacks up the ad costs for everyone else.

You know what's interesting? I'm trying to figure out, to your point, obviously, if you want to, you should absolutely max out X if your audience is hanging out there. But there's a problem with daily active users, right? And so I just ran this on Bard, and this is as of December 2023. I'm going to share my screen over here. I'm just looking at daily active users across these platforms, right? So check this out. So Facebook says 2 billion, YouTube unknown, Instagram's 500 million, Instagram Stories users. WeChat, 1.3. And let's just keep going down here. LinkedIn, 700 million. Okay. And is this daily actives? By the way, this could be hallucinating. This could be hallucinating. That's another thing, right? Snapchat, 332 million. And where's X? Not publicly disclosed. But we know that X has like, I think I've heard Elon or heard, I've seen him tweet before. It's like, I don't know, 200-ish or something like that, which is still a significant number.

Yeah. And the data that I ended up sharing was from the last 30 days. But the reason you're also seeing a higher return on ad spend from Twitter is because a lot of big corporations are boycotting them based on a tweet Elon Musk put out. And then what was funny is he then goes and puts on Twitter how Facebook has, I think there was like some trafficking type of content.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. He went after Bob Iger.

Yeah, was it child abuse or sex trafficking? I forgot exactly which one it was, but he ends up breaking that down. And he was asking people like, why aren't big corporations boycotting Facebook? Here's a funny reality. One is a corporation, you know, content just on there in a platform. One is them basing it off of a founder. But the other big thing too is depending on the company, a lot of them will not boycott Facebook. And the reason being is They drive too much volume and just stopping your ads on there can really impact your revenue numbers.

Yeah, again, DAU, daily active users for Facebook is 2 billion. That's just Facebook, right? Instagram just stories is 500 million per day. Messenger's 1 billion, right? You can't ignore that.

Then you have Instagram, then you have WhatsApp. Like Facebook has a whole company, Meta, their daily active users must be through the roof.

Oh yeah, WhatsApp too. Okay, that's not disclosed. But here's the thing, Pinterest only 98 million and that's monthly active users. So it's much smaller. Um, than, than these other ones. So, uh, I think WhatsApp has over 2.7 billion active users.

Uh, it's not telling me what's the daily active users.

That's monthly active, MAU.

Uh, I just Googled it. So, um, global monthly for monthly is 2.7. Yes. According to Statista.

Yeah. But your key takeaway here is I think Let me know if I'm wrong. It's to maximize these channels first.

Oh, they don't have this. From 2019, it was 500+ million daily active users. And if you look at Statista, the monthly active users only goes back to 2021, and it was a billion roughly less than what it is today. So I don't know what it was in 2019, but you can probably assume a billion plus for daily active users.

Which channel?

WhatsApp.

Okay, got it, got it, got it.

Based on that assumption, I would say it's at least 1 billion daily active users. So Meta as an overall company probably has, you know, call it 3 to 4 billion daily active users. But with that, keep in mind a lot of users on Instagram will also use Facebook, will also use WhatsApp. So I don't know how many of those are actually unique.

My key takeaway for this one is to maximize, if your audience is hanging out there, maximize the ROAS on these other ones. You know, obviously like you have to have a balance, right? If a lot of your users are hanging out on these other ones, like don't forego them either.

Yeah. And look, you got to do whatever you believe is right for your business. If, you know, you feel that Elon or anyone didn't say anything unethically, you're going to get massive ROI from it. And what I would do if you were a startup or a smaller business, first focus on the channels that are going to give you a better ROAS and then worry about the more competitive channels like Facebook later on.

Yeah. All right. So mine is kind of this whole what's old is new again type of thing. And so people will be like, okay, you know, direct mail is dead. And it's like, okay, direct mail is new again right now. In this case, remember Facebook and Instagram lead ads, Neil?

No.

Okay. So Facebook lead ads is basically like when you can just fill out your lead form directly. Yeah.

Right then and there on Facebook and they don't even have to go to your website.

Correct. Same thing with Instagram. Right. But the thing is, when they launched the product a couple of years ago, it was really crappy. And everyone just like tried it and then like, it's like, okay, the leads are too crappy. You know, you can't edit the form fields and all that. Now here's the thing, this has actually changed.

Well, back to it really quickly. My buddy did the Facebook lead ads for a gym. So he would market all the gyms throughout the United States and have like a 90-day New You program. And when he did it on Facebook and captured the lead right then and there, the lead quality was just junk. It was cheaper, but he, in total, if you look at, let's say, and he was spending around $300,000, $400,000 a month. It was cheaper and he was getting way more leads, but he went back to sending the traffic to his own website. It was more expensive. He got way less leads, but he generated more revenue and more profit overall.

Yep. So what we're doing now is, I mean, if you want to increase the quality of your leads, what can you do? You can probably add more qualifying questions. Sure, you might get less form fields, but they're going to be higher quality. You can now do that within Facebook and Instagram lead ads. So here's what we started to do. We started doing this for the email list too, because when we were initially struggling with $11 CPAs, we're like, dude, that's not going to work. I was like, just go try lead ads, right? Lead ads immediately dropped the CPA to like, I think $4 or something like that. And it's just going to get better over time. And we're like, okay, that's going to scale well. And then even with our regular conversions now, we've dropped it to $5, but we're going to continue to push lead ads. And then for fun, what I did last weekend, I was like, I want to kind of just try this for like retargeting for our own stuff. For bringing in leads for an agency, right? And we're doing retargeting for this. It's like $20 per lead or something like that. Now, are the leads quality? No, I would say for every 10 or so, maybe one's qualified. So 10%, right? So still though, you might be paying $200 for a lead. If you have a high lifetime value customer, you should be doing it. So anyway, that's my experience. And like basically not only just for lead ads, but whatever has been old that might've worked maybe 5, 10 years ago, Maybe think about testing that again because it might just start to crush it.

Yeah, it is. It's all worth the experiment. Even if you had a bad experience with something in the past, doesn't mean that it won't perform, you know, great nowadays. And Facebook and some of these other platforms, they want to keep people on their own platform because they make more ad revenue. So it's worth testing out their new features because they're going to continually work to make it better because it makes them more money.

Yep. All right, you're up.

So let's talk about a new Google trend, and this is going to change the way you create content. So, you know, there's 2 charts that I actually want to show you. The first one Eric is showcasing now, we talked a little bit about this, or he'll share his screen, in one of our previous podcast episodes. Back in the day when I started blogging, the average result on page 1 of Google was 2,300 words. The longer form content you wrote, the better off you were. I went so crazy, I started creating ultimate guides that were 30,000 words. No joke. They were literally as long as a book. They would get a lot of backlinks, rank high, get a ton of search traffic. A few years ago, from when Brian Dean ended up doing a study with Ahrefs and a few others, it dropped down to 1,447 words. And more recently, we're continually seeing the trend go down. And it's because of the TikTokification that we talked about in the past, in which people are used to more short-term content. TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, everyone's pushing it. And when you look at the average word count per industry, and we'll break some of them down, automotive, And these are for popular articles that people are cranking out. 474 words. Construction, 427. E-commerce, 581. Economics, 619. Education, 749. Energy, 640. Engineering, 306. Entertainment. Engineering, by the way, had a lot of video content. That's also why you had a shorter word count.

Oh, wow.

Entertainment, 856. Insurance, 675. Investment, 604. Real estate investment also had, by the way, a lot of video content. Real estate, 567. Retail, 606. Sports, 612. Same with video content there. Technology, 907. Travel, 887. Travel had a lot of images, like tons of images, more than any other categories.

Interesting. Let's pull up your next one, yeah?

Yeah, and then when you look at each industry and the type of content that people are producing that generates the most traffic, and Eric's about to share the graph, because there's different types of content that you can end up creating, right? You got like how-tos, list-based content, just general blog posts. There you go. Thank you for making it bigger. I'm getting old. What type posts, why type posts, video posts. Et cetera, and what we found for most industries, the most popular forms of content were how-to and list-based. No joke. And what this is getting at is like it's going back to the basics. You know, everyone's making their content marketing so complicated, but a lot of people in most industries prefer how-to content and list-based content. It's really that simple, and everyone's just like. Going out there and be like, okay, we're going to try this crazy new strategy and this is how we're going to rank number 1 on Google instead of just basic stuff. Like Eric is going out there on his Single Grain website, which has been working out well for him. He's creating comparison-based articles like, you know, Mailchimp versus HubSpot, right? I think you're doing tons of content like that. And then he's shaking his head yes. And he's doing it with AI and then he's going and having a human tweak it. It's not sexy content, but it's producing traffic for him and it's producing really qualified leads for his agency.

So— Oh, so sorry, just to clarify on that one. So the Mailchimp, that's old stuff we did for affiliate, but more so like services type of keywords. But yeah.

Yeah, so comparison, like give us an example of the services-based keywords that you're doing.

So for example, you might do like PPC services or PPC management or something like that.

So he's creating massive articles or just basic, articles on like what it is, how's it work, how do you get started, then having a human go in and modifying it and he's generating leads from it. And this is the kind of traffic that I believe when you share the stats, it was getting around 17,500 visits so far.

Oh, that one's different. So that's another experiment we're running. But the one you're talking about, Neil, is AI-assisted content where we're taking like blog content or podcast content like this and we're making it into the how-tos, the listicles and all that.

But the service-based content that you're creating, the basic stuff, and actually all of them are basic and I don't mean it in a bad way, I mean it in a good way. When you're creating the service-based articles, how much traffic is it driving you?

That's driving even more. That's driving, I think in the last, this is a 6-month experiment, I think it's driven like 30,000 visits, clicks or so, and it's going up.

All right, so the point I'm getting at is, and I don't know all of Eric's strategies like the back of my hand because he has so many of them and good for him for that, but whether he was creating the service-based articles or the comparison-based articles for affiliate, or he was creating basic how-to stuff that he's taking from the podcast and using AI, This is basic content that's driving him a lot of qualified traffic and leads and generating him revenue. People are making their content marketing too complex. And what we're seeing is shorter articles are performing well and people like the basic stuff like how-tos and lists instead of like crazy advanced stuff.

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