Molly Pittman — Facebook Ad Changes And How To Adjust For Them

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What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast with your boys, Matt Wolf and Joe Fear. Hey, welcome back to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. Hey, my name is Matt Wolf. This is Joe Fear.

What's happening? Thanks for showing up. And, you know, pressing play on the radio. On the radio on your cassette player.

That'S just kind of silly.

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Thank you for. For sticking with us. You know, these are great. Riding down Pontiac, you know, going down the road.

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Ooh. Ooh, we should make those. Ooh, Send those out to our favorite listeners. All right, Hustle and Flowchart goes vinyl.

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I don't know. That's probably not true. But who are we talking to today?

Look it up now.

Look it up after we record this intro.

Okay, okay, okay, okay. Fine, fine. All right. Today we're learning about some ninja on Facebook. Facebook ads. Specifically some Instagram ads as well. With Molly Pittman.

With Molly Pittman. Molly Pittman.

Basically, awkward pause and matches.

Like, who's talking?

Yeah. When we make these intros, we don't pre plan them. We just stare at each other's eyes and awkwardly decide who's going to say what next.

That is actually very accurate. So Molly was amazing. She's done so much. And we get into how literally started as a bartender in Kentucky at Buffalo Trace, which is pretty cool. That's good whiskey. And now is just running the show when it comes to Facebook ads. Chatbot. Just all sorts of cool stuff. Podcasting as well. Her and Ralph Burns do perpetual traffic over with Digital Marketer. And of course, we had Ralph Burns on, what, a month ago or so.

Yeah, I mean, we talked with Molly about some of the big changes that are happening with Facebook and what they're seeing with these big changes and how you can sort of prepare yourself for these changes and optimize some of your ads for what's coming. And also, you know, as we record this, we're actually recording this on January 17th, and Molly has been running an ad with her partner that's done over 50,000 leads in 17 days. In less than 17 days.

Yeah.

So pretty nuts. And she's going to break down that whole campaign and explain it to us.

And tons of other cool stuff, too. Just basically just like, behind the curtain of. Of what's happening literally within this month right now, what the best tactics are and some changes you should be definitely doing to your ads now that we're in 2019 and in the wake of a lot of what Facebook's gone through in 2018 in terms of losing trust with a lot of its audience, its user base. So she actually has some pretty big predictions and trends that you should be following along with. Yep, good stuff all around. So, yeah, I don't know what else, Matt, what else?

Well, we also have a traffic course that we teach ourselves. You can check out if you go to evergreenprofits.com traffic you can get all the details there. We talk about some of the ways that we run our Facebook ads, some of the ways we run our Google Ads. We're starting to experiment with Instagram. We're going to be teaching some Instagram stuff in there. So go check that out@evergreenprofits.com traffic and.

That is actually perfect because. And this is like the traffic course is like a cool foundation. So everything that like Molly talks about in this podcast and really any other tactic for traffic and things like that on any of these podcasts, they, they're like great bolt ons or additions or different experiments you can try that all play really nicely with what we teach in the in the traffic course. So it's, it's, it's pretty cool because all this stuff works together. Cool. So evergreen profits.com traffic and let's go talk about traffic.

See you soon with Molly Pittman.

Hey Molly, thanks for hopp on the show with us here.

Hey guys. So happy to be here.

Yeah, so we, we've been going back and forth for a while and we have a lot of mutual friends too. And I don't think we were talking about it, but Jenny DeRose, she's.

I love her.

I know. She's amazing. Yeah.

We actually used to share an office with Jenny. So almost all of our Facebook knowledge at the moment was us kind of looking over Jenny's shoulder.

You could just extract her brain. She's seriously one of the smartest people I've ever met.

No kidding. I mean it's like she's what, scientist turn Just ad geni.

I know. And that's like the side of marketing that I think I'm least good at. Like the analytical side of things. So I worked on a project with Ginny last year and it was great because it was like great. This is a meeting of the minds.

That's actually interesting. You said you're not that analytical because I feel like I'm personally not either. So that's why Matt's typically deep in the ads for our company. But yeah, maybe that's something we chat about in a little bit, how you do that for sure.

I would love to talk about that. Yeah. For.

Well, before that, let's give us like a little rundown of your history. I know it's interesting. Bartending in Kentucky and doing all sorts of wonky stuff.

I mean that seems like a big jump from bartending in Kentucky to basically running Digital Marketer for a little bit.

Yeah, it's definitely been a journey and I love to tell my story because I think it shows you the beauty of what we do with digital marketing and online business is you can grow really quickly. Right. Like things can happen very fast. Think about if you're a doctor or a lawyer, you know, your growth is a bit slower, you know what I mean? So I love that about this industry. But yeah. I started as an intern at Digital Marketer about six years ago and before then I was a bartender in Kentucky. Randomly decided to move to Austin with like $2,000, had no idea what I was gonna do and started this internship. They hired like 10 to 15 people at one time and at the end of a two to three month process, you know, a few of us were gon get full time jobs and so I learned a ton in those few months. They had us come up with like business reports to see for business ideas that they were thinking about starting. Right. And anyways, it was a really cool process. I was lucky to be hired. Started doing organic social media. I was placed over with Ryan and that's when Digital Marketer was really becoming a brand. So I was like the fifth or sixth person there and then really got into ads. And still that's my bread and butter, what I love to do. Became VP of Marketing a few years later, so got to really look at things from a broad standpoint, the whole customer journey. And then a little over a year ago went out on my own, did some agency work. Figured out pretty quickly that wasn't really for me it was like having 10 bosses at a time. And I didn't want to build out a team so it just wasn't. Wasn't best. So last year I partnered with Ezra Firestone to get back into education, which is what I really love. So I've got a few businesses that I partner with to run their Facebook ads. And then most of my focus now is back on teaching and mentorships and just helping media buyers get better. And also helping more people come into this space and learn the skills that we have that we all live pretty cool lives because of what we get to do. I know I have a lot of friends that are stuck in corporate jobs they hate. And I'm just kind of on a mission now to, you know, help people that aren't in this space learn these skills. Because every business needs help with this stuff nowadays. You can't really ignore it.

Yeah, no. That's so cool. When you were in Kentucky and you were moving over to Austin, were you. Did you have like aspirations to be an entrepreneur or like, did that kind of come because of Digital Marketer?

Yeah, I mean, I've always known I wanted to do something with business, but I wasn't quite sure. And I was a business marketing major and my advisor in college told me, you should move to Austin. Like for some reason I just see you there, I think you would have a lot of success. And I was like, well, let's see what happens. But it could have gone a lot of different ways. Actually when I first moved there, thought that I wanted to be like, I worked at a bourbon distillery in Kentucky, Buffalo Trace. And I really loved that. And I wanted to stay in that industry, like high end spirits, craft beer. But you know, in Austin that was very competitive. Those jobs were very competitive. So thank God I didn't go that direction. And here we are. And I think that's a testament to, like, I really don't like when people ask, like, where are you going to be in five years? Because none of us know six months. Work hard and hustle and go with the flow. As you guys talk about, you know, things can end up in very different ways.

Totally. I'm curious too, is how did you get into ads specifically? So did something pique your interest at Digital Marketer?

Well, I started doing the organic social media on the Digital Marketer page and Ryan page and. And that's a sort of gateway drug into ads, right? Because there's that boost post button. Like one kind of leads to the other.

And the media buyer at the time for Ryan had just left and so he didn't have anyone to do it. So I just went to him and told him that I was interested and he bought me a few courses. I remember one of them, he was like, you have to promise me you will use this information for good and not evil.

That's true.

So he bought me a ton of courses and then was like, here, spend a thousand bucks, but you need to make more than you spend. And I did. And then he gave me more budget and more budget, and it kind of went from there.

Interesting. So it's almost like a little game. It's like, here, I'm going to give you this much. Just give me more.

Ryan did a great job of leading me to that growth, for sure.

Now, are you involved in manychat in some way? Because I know you had helped make some of the training for ManyChat.

Yeah. So ManyChat was my first client when I left Digital Marketers, so I've helped them with that course. A lot of their user education, I planned a conference for them in September. They had a thousand people there to talk about bots, which was awesome. But they have hired a full marketing team. Now they have a cmo, and I've really moved on from the client game. So I still keep in touch. Love manychat, still teach bot stuff, but, yeah, not directly working with them any longer. Got it.

That makes sense. Going back, the whole not being analytical thing and being all about the ads, I wrote that down. I'm like, I know that's burning a.

Hole in Joe's brain. He's like, I'm not analytical. Maybe there's a chance for me.

That's what I'm thinking. Yeah.

I think there's a lesson there, too.

I think a mistake that a lot of media buyers make is they actually dig way too deep into the numbers, right? So I'll have students come to me and they're like, molly, my CPM is really, really high. What do I do? I'm like, okay, hold on. What's your actual goal with this campaign? And they'll say, oh, cost per lead. Is that metric successful? Like, are you getting the volume of leads you want at the price you want to? Yes. Okay, well, don't panic about your cpm, right? Because when you log into something like Facebook, there are so many metrics that you can look at. So I think this has actually been beneficial for me that I don't love diving into the numbers to that extreme because it allows me to stay super.

Just looking at things from a big picture, which is really important for scale, because a lot of issues I see media buyers have is they get hung up on something like that and it keeps them from scaling. But I've also been lucky to always work with a data analyst. So when I was a digital marketer, I hired a guy named John Grimshaw, and he's like the other side of my brain, right? And so he was always telling me, you know, Molly, we should make this scaling Move because the numbers say this. And then he now works with me, so we've stayed this mutual brain together. So I've also been sort of spoiled in that I do have someone digging in and making sure there's nothing I'm missing that's smart.

It sounds like a combo approach of knowing what metrics to really look at and why with a goal in mind prior to probably ever running a single dollar in ads.

Yeah, right.

And then also partner up with someone or hire someone who can be that analytical. Just love spreadshee and have fun with that.

Yeah, yeah. I actually remember listening to something from Ezra Firestone, actually, about how when it comes to ads, it's so much better just to look at it in aggregate. Like at the end of the month to see how much did I spend, how much traffic did I drive, how much revenue did I generate? And really, at the end of the day, that's kind of all that matters.

Exactly. And because there are so many nuances and things change day to day, you know, people are like, molly, why did my CPA double and then go back down the next day? And there are a lot of reasons for that. Some of it has to do with healthy Facebook's algorithm works, but mostly it's because how consumers operate. Right. And if you're looking at it day to day, that can be very stressful. And you can make decisions off of data that's not really significant. So I always look at least at a week of data at a time just to make sure I've got real metrics there and I know what decision to make.

It's so timely, because I was literally answering your question. Pretty much reiterated what both of you guys said to a person interested in our course, and they're like, how do you know their exact data?

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And like, all these. I'm like, okay, let's take a step back. Goals, money in, money out. Yeah, totally. It's all about profit.

And that's a huge mistake that's made, too, is that someone will launch a campaign, and they're like, this isn't working. And I'm like, what about it isn't working? And they're not quite sure. Right. And there are many different reasons you could launch a Facebook campaign. Right. Or any traffic campaign, and you can't expect that campaign to generate a ton of sales and leads and engagement and warm up a cold audience. Right. Like, there are different purposes for different campaigns. And the most important thing is that you know what that one success metric is. So you can say this is good or this is bad.

Yeah. It's big advice, and I hope some folks listening think about it in a different way.

Because we spend a lot of money on ads, just driving to content. And that's what we kind of try to teach people, is you got to spend money to drive to content, not just your offers all the time. And I think that's the client that you're talking about. I think that's what people have a hard time wrapping their heads around, is that if you're going to put this content out there, you might as well get some traffic on it. Because once people view the content, they've essentially just raised their hand and said, I'm interested in this topic. And then you could retarget them.

Of course. Yeah. I mean, I just had a call with Ezra about this and how we're going to allocate a certain amount of money each month just to, you know, video ads of he or I speaking or teaching so that we can constantly be present in the market. Right. And then when we do want to release a product or sell something, we've already got that relationship built. And that's smart for anyone, whether you're a personal brand or.

Whether you're not. And it's not just branding. I think that word has a lot of negative connotation around it in the direct response space, but it makes perfect sense because it's how human relationships work. So give someone a little value first. Get to know them, and then.

You can ask them for something in return.

Yeah. And I mean, even in the branding today, branding actually, in my opinion, has quite a bit of direct response implications. Now within the current climate with Facebook ads and Google Ads and things like that, because you can, let's say you're putting out videos on Facebook, you can retarget people that watched 50% or more of those videos because you know, those people are now interested in what you're talking about. Same with driving them to content on your website. You can then retarget anybody who visited that piece of content because you now know that they're interested in what you're talking about. So I think, like, there's this sort of like, meld, this merge going on between branding and direct response. And a lot of people are really sort of hesitant to jump on board with that fact.

Yeah, well, and it's easier to make a case for branding now because of what you just said and tracking. Right. Because think about it, when we used to just have magazines and direct mail and billboards, you know, we complain about Tracking now. Like, really.

We have such extensive tracking now. And so, you know, to run a video ad. Well, now I'm building a retargeting audience of people that I can retarget and I can literally trace back, you know, sales later to that video or back to Ezra. He has an e commerce brand that sells cosmetics, and his most successful funnel is a pre sell article with five makeup tips for women. That's what his ad is about, his Facebook ad. And then within that pre sell article, there are calls to action for his physical products. So he's running a conversion campaign, optimizing for purchases. Right. But building all of this social proof around this ad and running people to an article first. Right. But I just looked in his account yesterday. He's had 5,000 new purchases in the last, you know, since January 1st. Just using that strategy, I think he spent like $237,000. Right. But just because he found one presale article that's really interesting to the market, build social proof on that ad, and then that article perfectly transitions to what he's actually selling.

Brilliant. It's the long game, and sometimes it's not that long, but content to something. Yeah, it's. Seeing the full picture is so valuable.

Yeah. So a digital marketer, we have a note that when you started running ads for them, you actually forexed their profitability. I'm curious, was there one kind of thing that, wow, this really, really worked, or was that just like a series of a whole bunch of different things? I'm just kind of curious about how that happened.

Yeah, definitely a series of things. And that was like 4Xing the company over a certain amount of years. So, I mean, that had to do with product creation, but a lot of it did have to do with Facebook ads. And our strategy there was really heavy on Legion. Right. So producing a bunch of different lead magnets about topics we know the market was interested. We had Facebook ad templates. We had a social media swipe file. We had blogging templates, email marketing templates. We had all of these really valuable lead magnets that I could easily get cheap leads from from Facebook. And then those would just trickle down into our funnels. Those people would become a part of the email list, and a huge portion of them would become customers. But I think one of the smartest moves that we made while I was there was launching a continuity program which is now called Digital Marketer eng. So that's $38 a month. We built all of the materials that are a part of that continuity in just A few months we've really hustled. And all of these lead magnets led back to specific courses inside of this continuity that you could purchase. And then, of course, we would upsell them the full continuity.

That continuity program really helped to build the business because we knew every month we had a certain amount of money coming. And so it allowed us to scale in a very stable way and then release other products.

That further monetize those customers. It was a really fun experience. I feel like I got 100 years of education.

In those five years, and I'm really grateful for it.

I love it. And that sounds like a good combo of just, hey, ramp up the lead bucket, you know, and then have some kind of recurring. Recurring, which is amazing. It's not even software. And a lot of folks are thinking, oh, good, continuity program has to involve software. But you could do it with content like this education in some way.

Absolutely. Definitely.

Yeah. $38 price point. That's kind of an interesting one. But I'm sure you can see I.

Was just pulled out of nowhere, I think.

So.

On DM Labs. I remember at one point. I don't know if I'm currently a member or not, but I was a member of DM Labs at one point. I remember it was like $36.32 a month or something like that.

60.

Yes.

It was just such a random number.

Completely random number.

There you go.

Don't overanalyze your price points, folks.

Right. I know it was fun. And really the community. I got it wrong. It's Digital Marketer Lab. You're right. And the community that comes with that is Digital Marketer Engage. And I think that's why really people stay in that program is because they stay for the community and the access to people in the industry. So something good to note, too, if you're thinking about building a continuity. It's really hard to get someone to stick around for education because sadly, a lot of people don't go through the courses. And so if you can have. That's why software is amazing. There's a huge.

I'm losing my words, but pain of disconnect there. And so the community really acts as the pain of disconnect for that membership. And it's also great because you continue to build the relationship with the customer there. And then when it comes time for tnc, Right. Or to sell more expensive products, they're ready to roll because they just want more.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Buy for the training, stay for the community. That's kind of our philosophy with our Course right now.

Yeah.

Awesome.

So pivoting over to what you were saying about Facebook ads being completely different in 2019 as compared to last year, and you've already made some massive leaps. So is it like 50,000 leads? I think over that?

Yeah, yeah.

Just this year alone, over 50,000 leads just in 2019.

That's 17 days to the time.

Yeah. Context. This is January 17th when we're recording this.

Yeah. I'll tell you like, so that particular campaign you're talking about there, that's a really cool project I get to be a part of. So it's a docu series about the keto diet and so obviously very relevant in January. Right. And the docu series was also featured on Dr. Oz while I was running the ads. I've never run ads alongside of TV before and that was really cool. But anyways, we were getting people to opt in for this docuseries and then Naomi Whittle, who is the host of the docu series, she has other products that she sells throughout the funnel that have to do with health. But definitely what I'm finding in 2019, I think 2018 was definitely a tough year for Facebook in general. Right. Cambridge Analytica stuff happened. Zuck went in front of Congress and Facebook lost a lot of trust with the general public. For people like us, we get it, we're using Facebook, we're given Facebook data. We love that data. Right. We nerd out about that. But when I go back to Kentucky for Christmas, it's like, Molly, you're working on Facebook. Aren't they stealing our data? The general population is not the same wavelength as us. Right. So you have to see from Facebook standpoint, like, I mean, if they lose the trust of the public, it doesn't matter how many advertisers there are, like, their business model is going to go down. And so I think, and I know that Facebook really, especially in the last part of the year and definitely now has had to change their algorithms so that it's really optimizing for what is truly best for the end user. One of the biggest indications of that is social proof on an ad. Social proof along with your click through rate is what indicates your relevance score out of 10. The higher the more relevant your ads are, the cheaper your ads are and the more Facebook is going to show your ad, the more reach you're going to get. So instead of Facebook going for what's going to make us the most money, this advertiser over here wants to spend $100,000. Their ad is pretty much Just going direct to a sales page, asking someone to buy. There's not really any engagement, but they're going to give us a lot of money. We're going to show this ad. Facebook's really, really, really had to shift more to this social proof aspect. And so sort of how I figured this out and what this means for everybody is, for example, this launch, I just told you about 50,000 leads in like 12 days. What I did for that is I didn't actually create any new ads. Like, I had run ads ads for them last year. So I just picked two ads that they had that had the most social proof from last year. And those were the two ads that were in all of my ad sets. And this campaign took off like I've never seen. And by the way, the cost per lead was about $1.20 for those ads. Really insane and insane amount of volume very quickly. And so a huge part of that was because the ads already had really high social proof out of the gate. Facebook weights those high and they just take off, right? So one of them ended up with like, like 11,000 shares. The other one had 8,000 shares. And a really good frame of reference is like, if your share to reaction ratio can be like more than 30, 40, even 50%, Facebook really loves that, right? Because if someone loves your ad enough to share it, like sharing an advertisement, you know, that must be a very interesting and engaging ad that people are going to like. So my strategy now, especially for people who have run ads in the past, same thing with Ezra. What I just talked about him spending $237,000 so far this year. That's just on two ads. We just ranked all of his ads from last year by page post engagement, chose the two ads that go to that presale article that have the most social proof on them, and he's having the exact same results. So even if you don't already have ads with that social proof, you really have to think about. So for this launch I'm doing with Ezra right now, I obviously didn't have any ads that already had social proof because this is new. So what I did is I took two photos of us that we never, ever meant to be in ads. Like, one's a selfie and one is us sitting by like a river. They do not look like ads. They look like completely just organic posts. And then I wrote two ad copy variations. One is telling my story, right? It's very personal. And then the other is about this campaign that I generated 50,000 leads and how I wanted to help others do the same. Very long form copy two very personal photos. And these are getting really good engagement. And so in this entrepreneur market, things are more expensive. But just since Sunday, we've had 4,000 leads generated from Facebook for about four bucks apiece just from those two ads.

I think Facebook's just really having to move more towards social proof. And I think native advertising has always been a term that we've thrown around, but it's more important now than ever. Facebook wants this to be social, right? Versus Molly. A year or two ago, I would have had a cool gif made scrolling through my slides for the webinar, talking about everything they were going to learn. It would have been like an ad. People might have taken action, but.

People can get behind a person and a story way more than, okay, there's this webinar I can join. So I think that's what's so important for people to keep in mind moving forward. And just one more thing, too. Facebook has gotten a lot smarter, which is great. A lot of the really specific targeting that we used to have to do isn't as necessary anymore. I don't know if you guys have used campaign budget optimization, but that's something I'm having a ton of success with. So just setting the budget at the campaign level using five or six ad sets that are bigger potential audience sizes, 10 million plus, where I used to stick between half a million to a million, and letting Facebook optimize all of that with just two very personal ads in each ad set. That's what I'm finding to work right now.

So.

Cool.

Yeah, no, there's a couple things I want to try to dive into on all that that you just said. The first thing is the native advertising concept. Do you think it's important these days to use.

When it comes to advertising, Is it important to use a personal name brand versus a company brand just to kind of make it feel more native?

I don't think so. It just changes the way you do it a bit. So. Because that was coming from my personal or not my business page. But. But it's Molly Pittman, right? It's personal brand. The story was way more appropriate. But I had a client, Panda Planner, they produced these really cool planners. Right. That help with positivity. And so the way that I used the same strategy for them was they had a really great. A few really great testimonials where people explained what their life was before Panda Planner and what it was like after. And I had one for our mom avatar. Right. I Had one for more of a spiritual avatar. So, for example, the spiritual avatar was Ruth. Right. And this was a pretty long ad in quotations, so that you knew it was someone else talking, not Panda Planner. Right. There is a carousel ad of Ruth using the planner. So very personal photos. And the story was telling how Ruth was going through a divorce, she lost her job. She had a lot of anxiety and stress, and she started using this planner, and she was able to get her finances in control. She started meditating. So even though this is a brand, they're telling a story about a customer. Right. And we're targeting a market who we know is experiencing these same pain points. Right. So if you're a brand, you just kind of want to tell stories about others. Right. If that makes sense. It's a bit more than a testimonial. But that was the best performing ad for them last year, was all about Ruth because people could really. They could relate to that same thing. We had a mom avatar and, you know, she had missed, like, a kid's, like, birthday. Right. She had a lot of kids, she missed their birthday and she felt terrible. And she was dealing with all of this mom guilt. Right. Which the market can obviously relate to. And. And then she found Panda Planner. She's organized. She meal preps now. Her kids are happier. There are photos of her. You know, how could you hide that? As spam.

Which is the game we're playing now, I think.

I think that's super cool. And it's interesting that, yeah, Facebook really wants this. More like, oh, no, we need good feels on the news feed now. Which is great for all of us mere mortals that are just like, hey, let's just throw a cool experience. Or if it's a customer, customer. It's very simple. You can approach a customer and maybe there's a few questions you can ask them. Very simple testimonial. Get their story and then maybe a cool personal picture. Anyone can give this a shot.

Yeah, well, I think so many people don't even go through that process of actually just kind of defining that avatar either. Like, they don't know who they're talking about. They're throwing up a piece of content or an ad and just trying to spread it wide without actually even thinking about who they're talking about to.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, that's so important. If you guys out there, Google Digital Marketer ad grid, there's a really extensive blog post that if you're having trouble with coming up with your avatars and especially how those relate to Your ads. The process that I created there will help you a lot because it's important to know your avatars but also know your hooks. The reason someone wants a product. So for example, one of the reasons for Panda Planner is that there is positive psychology built into this planner to decrease stress. But that meant very different things for Ruth who lost her job and was going through a divorce than it did the mom avatar who missed the birthday parties and is trying to keep all of her kids stuff straight. That process will really help you define your avatars, define your hooks, but then make sure you're writing ad copy that speaks really deep to what that hook means for that specific avatar.

That makes sense. Now, would you recommend a specific number of avatars to test an ad set or a whole new campaign, let's call it on Facebook?

Well, I think it depends. Like if you're just getting started and you're needing to do testing, I would create three or four avatars, but create different campaigns for each. Right. Because the targeting and the ads in those campaigns are going to be very different. Right. So like for example, for Panda Planner I had a campaign that was just the mom avatar, right. And the ad sets for different interests, like mom blogs, they might follow, products they might purchase, you know, stuff like that. And then within each of those ad sets, I was testing two ads, right. And then new campaign. Okay, Spiritual market. Well, that's going to be very different. I need to target, you know, people who teach meditation and you know, self help influencers and self help books. Right. And then I'm going to have the two ad variations about Ruth. So that's how I've found to keep it the cleanest.

That's good. Yeah. And that's a simple breakdown right there.

Love it. Are you using any platforms off of Facebook? Are you? I mean, obviously Instagram's kind of tied into Facebook. Are you using Instagram or Google or YouTube or any of these other platforms to drive leads or is it pretty much all Facebook?

Definitely Instagram. And I mean, honestly a majority of the traffic I'm running right now is on Instagram just because it's cheaper. Right, But I kind of forget to say that because like you said, Instagram's just a of part placement inside of Facebook. Right.

But that's something that I got out of the calls with the call I just had with Ezra. He is setting up campaigns for his content specific just to Instagram feed and stories because it's like half of the cost right now because there's a ton of volume there and not as many advertisers. So definitely Instagram, YouTube and Google. Absolutely. More so for retargeting though, right? Because what I found is that when you start running Facebook ads, someone sees you in their newsfeed, then they go to Google you just to see if they can find more or figure out more about you. So you want to make sure you're present there. Also retargeting on Google display network and then same thing. YouTube's a perfect place for retargeting. I know there are a lot of people getting great results from cold traffic from YouTube and Google. I just haven't. And.

I've been focusing on what I'm good at.

Have you noticed with Instagram.

Obviously everybody should test both, but have you seen one to be more effective than others? Between stories and newsfeed.

There'S definitely more volume, more real estate in the stories, and they're more cheaper in terms of what's more effective. I haven't really seen one over the other. I'll go back and look when we're done with this launch and compare stories to Instagram feed, because that would be really interesting. But I definitely know that there's more volume in the stories because.

Think about how many more times people click through stories. They're consuming so many more stories than necessarily they are in the feed. Right, Right. And a lot of advertisers don't know how to use that yet. They're like, stories. What's that? Yeah.

Do you have some best practices for ads in the stories?

Yeah, I mean, best practices to make sure you're understanding the medium. Right. So it might be wise to create a campaign where you're just targeting the stories because the creative is going to be very different. Right. So Facebook's getting better to where? Like these last ads I launched, honestly, I was too lazy to do that. And they still looked good in the stories. Right. So Facebook's making it so they can take your ad and make it look nice in the stories. But there's a lot of creative things that you can do in the stories that just because it's different. Right. It's a completely different medium. You're trying to get people to swipe up. Right.

So just think about where you're showing up and what that means for the end user. Also, multiple stories back to back. That's an ad that Ezra's running that's really smart. He's got three stories back to back as an ad that sort of tell a story, you know, as you click through. So I think that's wise. Also, I didn't even know you can.

Do that with Stories. So you can make three videos and as the ad, they run like you're watching somebody's story feed.

Exactly.

I've seen Frank Kern do a little bit of that recently.

Yeah, I didn't even know that that was possible. I thought you kind of had 15 seconds and that was your ad.

Right. It's interesting. And what you can do is like, you know, Ezra has a screenshot in one and then when you click again, he's like circling the part that he wants them to look at. Right. And then they click again and then there's like an arrow to swipe up.

So, yeah, very interesting.

I love it.

And just to answer your question, I'm looking at these ads we're running right now, and Facebook is still very much dominating in terms of this. One campaign has 2000 leads and 1100 of them came from Facebook News Feed mobile, 362 came from Facebook desktop, 315 came from Instagram feed, and 13 came from stories. Now, again, I told you that.

I didn't really optimize these for stories, so I'm not surprised. But Facebook is still very much dominant from what I'm seeing in a lot of instances from the ad standpoint.

Yeah, yeah. I've noticed on Facebook, if you just let Facebook kind of pick the placements for you and you do like an image ad, it does not look the best in stories where it's just like an image and then the text. And the text is cut off and.

You have to click more. Just make sure you're not saying, hey, click here. It's like, no, no, no, no, or whatever.

Exactly.

So something that I know you're good at and you talk about and you teach is how to train other folks to become an amazing media buyer. So what are some cool steps to do that if someone just wants to hire someone or train someone?

Yeah. I mean, number one, if you're hiring someone that's not experienced, you obviously need to give them time to learn. Right. And the best education they're gonna get is experience. Right. So just running ads, so making sure that you have a budget for them that you know you're probably not going to make your money back from, but this is where they're going to learn. Especially applying certain teachings to your market and your specific business, that takes some fine tuning. But this person needs to be a sponge for information. I still am. I'm considered an expert at this, but I'm always listening and reading what other People are doing because the more information that I gather, the more knowledgeable I am and the more data points that I have when making decisions here. So, you know, shameless plug. I do have a course just for people that are wanting to become media buyers or to become better media buyers. And it's a 14 week membership, so lots of hands on there. So that's trainmytrafficperson.com but just give them resources. Give them resources, point them in the right direction of who they should learn from. Give them a test budget and give them time. Right. But also realize that they need information from you. Right. Like a media buyer can't just make magic happen in your business. Right. Like they have to have good offers to work with. Right. They need to understand who your avatars are and why they're interested in your product or service. So making sure the more context you give them. And you got to remember, media buying is marketing too. Right. A lot of people think it's day trading and it's like, no, none of this is going to work if you don't have a good offer.

Yeah, that can make or break a whole thing there. Now, have you ever tried working with interns or apprentices for this kind of role?

I mean, that's where I came from.

That's you? Yeah, for sure.

In a nutshell, yeah, that is me. So I had that experience. But I have seen it work again in many ways. And that's really the model, like making sure that they have the resources, that they have the context into your business. They have a test budget and they have time to learn. You can't just give these people a course and be like, go figure it out. I was lucky to have Ryan there explaining to me why people wanted what I was running ads to. And so that's very important.

Yeah, it was kind of the reason I asked because I knew that was like what sprouted you in this whole kind of area and that is something we're heavy on, is bringing apprentices in. But the key factor is to support those people, not to just assume they get it. Usually they're a fairly blank slate. Which do you find it's better to have someone like that with a cleaner slate? You know, maybe not as much background in media buying, rather.

Yeah, definitely. Because media buying is a lot about your mental state too, which is interesting. I've seen people fail at media buying because they have issues with money. Right. Which is kind of deep. But it's definitely something to interview for. Because what can happen is.

If someone does have issues with money and they're spending someone else's money, they're going to be much less likely to scale budgets. Right. Like, that's going to be very scary for them. So there are some certain aspects you want to make sure this person is, like, very curious because they're not just going to have to learn this once, but they're going to have to keep learning this and staying up to date. You know, this isn't like knitting, where you learn to do it once.

That's a good point.

This is ongoing, so that person has to be curious and just like, love to learn stuff.

Yeah. You mentioned scaling, and I wanted to ask you about that real quick. Do you have a certain methodology behind scaling? Because earlier you mentioned you generated 4,000 leads off of for $4 a lead. Right. Do the math. That's $16,000. A lot of people are thinking, wow, that's a lot of money to get into advertising with. And obviously when you get into advertising, you're probably not spending those kinds of budgets that quickly. But what's your sort of methodology for scaling? Because from my experience with Facebook ads, If I'm putting $1 in and getting $2 out and I just double my investment in that, it usually doesn't scale linearly.

How do you focus on scaling?

Yeah, good question.

Campaign budget optimization has made this a lot easier that I talked about earlier. Because, for example, what I just said about the 4,000 leads for this launch, all I've had to do is just increase the daily budget at the campaign level there to scale. Right. But a huge mistake people make is say you're spending $200 and it's working. They go in and they'll increase it to 400. Right. And that's way Facebook can't handle that. Right. Like, that really throws the optimization off, because then they're forced to show your ad to a ton of people that aren't qualified. Right. So if you ramp up the budget more in a slower pace. Right. So we started at 2,000, then I went to 2,500, then I went to 3,000, then I went to 3,500, then I went to 4,500 just to see what would happen here on the last day. But you got to make sure you're aware of that when you're increasing your budget. So I call that vertical scaling. But people also forget about horizontal scaling. What that means is, for this webinar with Ezra, say, this was an evergreen thing that I wanted to keep running until it quit working. Well, what I would be doing now is Looking at the interests I'm targeting and trying to find more interests, most like those. So it's, like, cool. This ad is resonating with this audience. I not only want to increase the budget to show this ad to more people in this audience I'm already targeting, but I want to create new campaigns or ad sets now so that I can make this audience bigger. Right. So I call that more. So horizontal scaling, and that's something a lot of people forget about.

Yeah, you have a couple points there. And obviously, so many different types of ads he can do from that point on in the ad set line.

Absolutely.

That's super cool. Let's transition to the podcast really fast because we always like to touch on that since we love podcasting and all that. You're co hosting with Ralph. He's been on the podcast here. Super cool, dude. Perpetual traffic. Yeah, I guess. What's your favorite part about running that podcast? And how does that kind of feed everything else you're doing in business, in life?

Ooh. I mean, the podcast is. I just love it because it helps so many people. Right. And when I go to events or open my Facebook messenger inbox, there are people telling me, hey, I tripled my business because of what you've taught me on this podcast. Or I was able to send my kid to college, and that's really why we do this. So that is first and foremost. But I also love teaching, especially on a weekly basis, because it helps me learn and it keeps me up to date on all of this. And this is what I love talking about. So, you know, that's another facet. But I just think podcasting is a cool medium. I love, like, the relationship I've built with Ralph, you know, is a lifetime relationship, you know, and the people, the guests we've been able to bring on, what that's done, you know, for me, relationally, that's just been so awesome. So, I mean, there's so many benefits of it, But. But I just love that we're able to record together for an hour every week that goes out to hundreds of thousands of people that are then going to become better advertisers and better people because of the information we shared.

So cool. Now, this is going to sound like a really selfish question, but we do that a lot on this podcast.

Has there been any sort of marketing tactic or maybe like a Facebook ad ad strategy or anything like that that's actually really helped grow the podcast?

Not really. Honestly, we haven't done much in terms of advertising, which is very interesting because it is a podcast about advertising.

In the beginning, we did do some Facebook ads. Those worked pretty well. But honestly, the podcast has grown purely from word of mouth, and a lot of that is because, you know, it's digital marketers podcast. Ralph and I are the hosts. So there's some, like, intricacies of, like, where does the traffic go? Or, you know, it would be a bit different, I think, if it was owned, you know, by one person. But, yeah, it's just grown from word of mouth. But we are this year, you know, our awesome editor Darren, really cares about getting the podcast out more. So we are going to do some more stuff, you know, in terms of getting more people to subscribe. And. And I do go on a lot of podcasts like this to promote perpetual traffic. But, yeah, it's mainly been word of mouth. So looking to learn from you guys.

That's why Darren reached out to us, and he's like, hold on. Because we shared a big list of our little levers that we do with Roland because he was on the show last week. And Roland, I think, quickly forwarded that to Darren. He's like, you need to talk.

So we're actually in the process of putting together a course around podcasting and marketing strategies and how to get guests and all the technical aspects of podcasting. So that's something that we're in the works of. So anytime we have somebody come on the show that has a podcast, we always love to kind of pick their brain a little bit about it.

Sure.

For sure.

Yeah. Of course. Podcasting is such a cool medium, and there's still so much opportunity there.

Yeah. I know you had the webinar tonight, so thank you for being on.

No problem.

Like you're saying it was warm and warm up. What are some other cool stuff that you'd like to share with everyone here that you're working on? Maybe some future projects, places that you want them to dig deeper into.

So what I'm really pumped about, you know, this. This live course mentorship that I was telling you guys about. We taught it for the first time last year, and it went really well. And so I'm really excited to teach that coming up here at the beginning of February. So that's trained my track trafficperson.com, and then something else that we've created. Just really out of need. We wanted this that will be launching in a few weeks, maybe by the time this comes out, is a monthly membership for ongoing education for media buyers. Right. Because what I found is that we can teach this all day long. But I think a lot of what you learn in media buying is reacting to what happens. Everything from Molly. How do I scale when I'm talking to someone one on one? I usually say, well, what are the numbers right now? What's happening? Or it's like, what do I do when my Facebook account gets shut down? So Ezra and I are creating something called Team Traffic. You can check it out@teamtraffic.com and this is going to be a really close group of people where the goal is more of ongoing education. So we've got really cool deliverables. Like one of the deliverables that you get every month is a screen recording of what Ezra and I are doing and all of the ad accounts that we run. Right. Because I think some of the best learning that you can get is over the shoulder. Right. But we're going to be doing that. We're going to have a live event in May, May 21st through the 24th. And that's going to be if you want to take the 14 week course, but you would rather do it in three or four days. Right. So that's going to be more of a workshop where you build out your Facebook campaigns with us. But no specific link on that yet, but just look out for that to come. But yeah, just lots of resources for media buyers. And then I've got a book coming out this year about digital marketing and how huge this is of an opportunity to get to live the life you want. How do you get into this industry? Because I don't know if you guys experience this, but I have people reach out to me all the time, like people that I grew up with that are like, what do you do?

I live your life. You're always at home and like, what are you doing? And I think that we're in this space so we know what you do, we know who you should listen to, you know, but most people don't like this. This digital marketing space is still such a black box to people and I want to open it up and show people how to be a part of it.

I love that. Yeah. I literally had a childhood friend from elementary school reach out to me last week. He was like, it looks like you have a pretty cool business going on online.

Right?

I have some ideas. You want to meet up for coffee? And I'm like, yeah, why not?

There you go.

Yeah, it's so cool. And we take it for granted most of the time, but yeah, when you reflect, you're like, holy crap, I got something really cool. And like you said with digital marketing, you can do it quick.

And you know, I come at it from a different place too, to where most of the courses out there are teaching you how to start a business. But I don't think most people should be business owners. Right. Like, it's a big reason I partnered with Ezra. Like, he's an adult, he has a team, he knows how to do all of this. You know, like, I can just hop in and be like, tell me what to do and to teach people. If I can teach more people to be media buyers and then pair them with business owners, they still get like, I wanna work for Ezra. Completely remote company, super chill. So that's really my goal. Produce more employees almost.

Yeah. And people who are passionate about this stuff. I think that's key too. If you're an employee, be fricking fired up with this shit. I mean, like, go all in and live it. I'm curious, with you and Ezra, how's the dynamic for, like, personality? Is he more analytical? Does he hold down the fort and some of those kind of things?

Kind of maybe a little more analytical. But I think Ezra and I are really on the same wavelength and we know how to work off one another, if that makes sense. So whenever we present or teach together, there's just this special energy. I think we both just care. I mean, his thing is serve the world unselfishly and profit. And I remember when I first met Ezra, that's what I loved about him and that's what I care about too. So our values completely align. And when we teach and we're helping people, people can feel that. Right? I mean, they can go learn this stuff from a ton of people, but they can feel how much we care. And so that is the biggest reason. And we partnered up.

I love it. Yeah. And we get the same feedback with some of these episodes. We'll be super vulnerable if it's just Matt and I, like, here's all the crap that happened throughout 2018 and that's where we got the most feedback. You guys are. You're not BSing us. Okay, cool. I trust you a lot more.

If you're a tnc, come to my presentation because I'm actually going to bring Ezra up and roast his Facebook ad strategy from last year. So going to be like a TV show.

That's awesome.

Put it on the calendar for us.

I do have one last question before we ask our. We have a few little wrap up questions, but when it comes to. You mentioned you're trying to train people to be good employees. And good media buyers for other companies. What should people sort of expect to pay for a media buyer in their company?

Ooh, good question. I mean, you're starting someone as an intern, you should still pay them, you know, like, 18, 20 bucks an hour. And then after that, it's really hard to say. They should probably make 60k or more a year. And if you can throw in some incentivized bonuses, that's always great, too.

Yeah, that's what I was gonna. I was wondering if there was some sort of, like, commission structure based on ad spend or anything like that.

Yeah, the commission structure, you know, if you can base it off of the results they're generating. Holy crap. Like, that's a surefire way to incentivize them.

That's awesome.

Sweet. Love it. So where would you want to send people after listening to this episode?

Yeah, any of the trainings I mentioned earlier. Look me up on Facebook. Like my fan page, Instagram. I'm always posting stuff on there, so. Perpetual traffic podcast. So nice to be on here with you guys.

Awesome. We'll link all that stuff up in the show notes. And thank you so much for spending the time with us.

All right, awesome. Thanks for listening. Bye, guys.

Bye. All right, thank you. And I hope you just enjoyed this episode you just listened to now. Right now. Now, before we sign off, I have a few things I would love for you to do. So the very first thing is to go find our guest on Facebook and tell them that you loved their episode with us. That's going to help them just feel good about themselves, but also it's going to spread the word a little bit more for us. Go find them on Facebook. Everybody's on Facebook. And go say that you love their episode. And maybe one cool thing that you learn there. The second thing is to. To go to itunes and subscribe to our podcast. Just look up Hustle and Flowchart and hit the subscribe button. And the very last thing, the third thing, is to leave us a review on itunes or wherever you're listening to this podcast and help us spread the word more. That's how more people are going to get this awesome knowledge, this. This cool podcast training and a whole bunch of other cool, free training that we give out at Evergreen.

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You're awesome.