Video Transcript:
Jason Drohn:
It looks like we are life.
Welcome to Sales System Experts, episode 13? Yeah, this is episode 13.
Aaron Parkinson:
Lucky number 13.
Jason Drohn:
I know. It was supposed to be yesterday and my wife was like, "What are you doing? You didn't do a podcast with Aaron." I was like, "We were on, we just ended up bullshitting the entire time."
Aaron Parkinson:
We got sidetracked by one of our sales guys say it. Number one, sales always first. The sale always gets priority. Amongst all the bullshit that we talk about on here, sales get priority first. Rule number one. But hey, it's still the week. We're still in the week. We did not skip a week.
Jason Drohn:
We didn't. No, we're good.
Aaron Parkinson:
But this is going to be a shortened one because I've got to go have a doctor work on my spine in 20 minutes.
Jason Drohn:
It's Saturday so nobody ... I don't think anybody actually gives a shit what we say today.
Aaron Parkinson:
Maybe they will. Maybe they won't. I want them to appreciate our commitment to the once a week process.
Jason Drohn:
Absolutely.
Aaron Parkinson:
Today we're going to talk about scaling Facebook ads to $20,000 a day ad spend, which will be miraculous if we can cover that in such a short period of time. We're just going to touch on the finer notes because this is really what our agency has focused on and specialized in the last three years. That's what we're known for.
The first thing that I think needs to be addressed is the Scale Ad campaign structure. Every time somebody comes in, and they're a new client, and they're like, "Look, I've got up to 500 to a thousand dollars a day in ad spend profitably, but every time I try to scale it, it goes to shit. Figure it out." That's the majority of our clients that come to us.
The very first thing we look at the Scale Ad campaign structures. The real beautiful thing about Facebook and Instagram is that you've got unbelievable retargeting capabilities. Somebody watches your video if they click on your landing page if they like your page if they like ... if they share something, if they add to cart, whatever, there are so many different events that you can retarget off of. Almost every single client that comes to us has no or very limited retargeting built into their Scale Ad Campaigns.
Jason Drohn:
Which is a shame because it's the easiest money you will ever make.
Aaron Parkinson:
Yeah. If somebody has already seen your stuff, engaged with your stuff, knows you, likes you, you've gone from the shotgun approach into the focused audience approach. It takes a little bit different creative to make it work because you've already shown them the main thing and they've said, "No," so now you have to think, "Well, why did they say, 'No,' to the main thing?" And then you've got to overcome those objectives. You've got objections, you've got to build credibility. You've got to move them from interest to commit. It's a different messaging medium that you have to use, but if you test it and implement it well enough, then we want to see about 20% of our budget allocated to retargeting.
It depends on the industry, but typically we see somewhere around double to triple our return on Scale Ad Campaigns spends in retargeting. You can reverse that and be like, well, you'd see a one-third cost per acquisition customer. When you're at scale, that's so important because the more you scale, the lower your margins get. If you go from the U.S. to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, UK, other English speaking countries, start translating to other languages, spending more, spending more, spending more, eventually you're getting into the brand game now because you've just hit everybody so hard that it gets difficult. So your retargeting's got to be about 20%.
Then the next thing we look at is our cold targeting. We put about 70% of our budget into look-a-like audiences. Look-a-like audiences are where you basically take an action, like a landing page view or an add to cart or a video view or a page engagement or whatever, and you say to Facebook, "Please look at your data and leverage your algorithm to create me audiences that are like these people." You're leveraging the machine, which is what you should be doing because they certainly are better at targeting people than we are, and we'll put about 70% of our budget into those look-a-like audiences.
We definitely find that the look-a-like audience that's the most profitable is look-a-likes of people who have bought stuff-
Jason Drohn:
Totally.
Aaron Parkinson:
...purchase alike. You can spread that out from 1%, which is the closest, zoned in amount, to 2%, 3%, all the way up to 10%. Sometimes, because the audience gets bigger and bigger and bigger, you can actually find sweet spots where the audience is big enough and the targeting is good enough that you can really scale that. look-a-like audiences off purchases, add to carts, landing page views, likes on the page, video views. Everything.
Jason Drohn:
The most graduated data that you can reliably get. If you have 10,000 buyers, then, by all means, create look-a-like audiences of 10,000 buyers.
Aaron Parkinson:
Absolutely. That's the first thing that we ask customers, "Do you have a leads list? An email leads list?" "Yes." "Okay, great. Give us that." And then we'll make audiences off the lead list. "Do you have a buyer list? Great, give us that." And then we'll start to put them, the other ones in place as the traffic is happening so that we can leverage those.
Then the last spot we really look at is our cold interest stats. We're looking at DFY as an example, we're going to look at ... if we're going to market funnels, we're going to look at software first because that's the most synchronistic, right?
Jason Drohn:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Aaron Parkinson:
So we're going to look at your click funnels, your drop funnels, your lead pages, your Ontraports.
Jason Drohn:
Infusionsoft. Marketo. HubSpot.
Aaron Parkinson:
Once we've got all of those, then we're going to expand one level out and say, "Well, who are all the gurus that are around that space?" And then we're going to target them, your Russell Brunson's, your ... whoever. Then from there, we're going to expand out into more general knowledge like internet marketing, online marketing-
Jason Drohn:
Coaching certifications. Any certification programs. All that stuff.
Aaron Parkinson:
Exactly. You can get pretty good at guessing interests. You're never going to beat Facebook's look-a-like audiences, leverage all of their data, and you're certainly never going to be remarketing to the people that you've already seen in the past. You already know they're interested in your stuff. So we only have 10% of our budget allocated to those interest-based audiences.
Jason Drohn:
The flyers. The flyers and the Hail Marys. One of them might pay off, one of them won't.
Aaron Parkinson:
And they all feed in. They feed in because Facebook's constantly updating your look-a-like audiences off what you're getting from your interest-based audiences, so those audiences just get bigger and bigger. Oh my god, look, you have a wind storm happening.
Jason Drohn:
Yeah. It's really raining outside. I have every light in my office right now-
Aaron Parkinson:
So dark and I see the trees flying around. So Scale Ad Campaigns structure is definitely first when we talk about scaling into those bigger budgets.
Number two is creative. I just had this conversation ... We did, yesterday, with the guy that ... he hired somebody to do their ads and they literally threw up ...
Jason Drohn:
Couple images...
Aaron Parkinson:
A couple of images, a couple of Scale Ad Campaigns, and they're like, "It's good. We should be good here." That can work for-
Jason Drohn:
If you're spending 50 bucks a day.
Aaron Parkinson:
Yeah. A hundred bucks a day, that'll work. But he was doing 400K a month in revenue. When you're doing that kind of scale, your ads fatigue. They get burnt out. They get cold. When you're doing in that 500,000 to a million dollar a month range in revenue, your ads are going to fatigue at about the 60 to the 90-day mark, at most. We want to be testing inside about 10% of our budget as many permutations of image, video, text, and audiences as we can, just in that small percentage that we don't affect the overall performance of the account. But we want to find something that actually is going to be equal to or better than the current control ad winning so that when we start to see the Scale Ad Campaigns performance tail off, we can start to take the winning and creative that we found and insert it so that there's not this big drop.
That's what I see a lot of people do, are they run the same thing for so long and then it starts to tail off and then they're like, "Why isn't it working?" And then they start doing all these different things. Well, the reality is, is your creation is just burnt out. You need to be testing that before it happens, not after it happens, because it could take weeks-
Jason Drohn:
To find something.
Aaron Parkinson:
And then you got...
Jason Drohn:
The reality is when you're spending a hundred dollars a day, that doesn't matter. When you're spending a thousand dollars a day and it takes you two weeks to find new creative, your 15, 20, 25Gs in the hole.
Aaron Parkinson:
Right, because you've built teams and staff and-
Jason Drohn:
You can't pause ad sets. You can't let the algorithm pause and then relearn.
Aaron Parkinson:
That's the other thing. If all of a sudden it tanks and you're like, "Man, I got to find new stuff. I got to turn everything off because it's upside down," well, then you reset the algorithm and now you've set yourself back even more. That's a whole other scenario that you don't want to run into.
You have to always be testing. A lot of people are like, "Well, you don't need to be testing if you're hitting. You don't want to affect the budget." You're wrong. You do. And you need to be doing it in just a small enough percentage of your overall budget, we say 10% max, to get ahead of things and always be looking to beat your control.
Then one of the things that we've really seen work well scaling into the 10,000-plus range is starting to translate your stuff to native languages of other countries. I wouldn't call it lazy, I would call it standard. The standard way is that you just choose English-speaking people in every country and you let it rip. But if you actually translate to their language, if you want to target people in, say, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Spain, and you translate to Spanish from ad to site to fulfillment, the return on ad spend is ridiculous because nobody takes the time to translate to their native language. And there aren't really any agencies natively there that are proficient that are running ads. It's new to them. They're like, "Ooh. What is this? I've never seen an e-comm funnel," or an application funnel or a webinar. They're like, "Wow." It's new.
We have a client right now in Hong Kong where all they do is target Chinese-speaking people in Hong Kong and the surrounding countries, and all it is is a basic application funnel. They spend about 100,000 a month and they do about 2 million a month in revenue. You don't see those types of ROAS numbers on a basic application funnel in America anymore. You saw that in 2008. That's the thing, is these countries are all in the marketing knowledge base, or, it's not even knowledge. It's like what they-
Jason Drohn:
Awareness.
Aaron Parkinson:
Awareness. Seeing those types of things that are still new to them. So your conversions are considerably higher in ... when you do it in their native tongue. We have a client right now that is an education client for children. They've had so many requests for it to be translated into French and in Spanish, so they're translating everything into French and Spanish and they're blowing the doors off.
It's one of those things where you don't want to do it in the beginning because it's a lot of work and you're not ... it's not proven, but when you get up to that bigger ad spend levels, you can pick up a pocket of people, "Oh, I got Germany." Maybe I'm not spending $10,000 a day in Germany, but I might be spending a thousand and getting six ROAS.
Jason Drohn:
And it's cheaper traffic.
Aaron Parkinson:
Right. It's like these little honey holes all over the world that just crush.
There's probably the three of the biggest things that we look to do when we talk about scaling into those bigger budgets. One and two are what I would consider being best practices for any account.
Jason Drohn:
Yep. 70% look-a-like, 10% cold, and 20% retargeting.
Aaron Parkinson:
Yep. Absolutely. And then creative testing.
Jason Drohn:
That has to be done regardless.
Aaron Parkinson:
It becomes imperative at the bigger budgets. It's not even up for debate.
Jason Drohn:
Totally.
Aaron Parkinson:
There's a 20-minute crash course on how to effectively spend 10 to $20,000 a day on Facebook and Instagram.
Jason Drohn:
Absolutely. If you would like more customized information, go to doneforyou.com/start to fill out the form, and we're going to shove Aaron off to his doctor's appointment.
Talk to you guys soon.
Aaron Parkinson:
Onto the next week.
Jason Drohn:
Bye.