It's hard these days to find a digital marketer who hasn't used Facebook ads even just a little. If you're one of those who tried it a few years back then recently returned, you probably noticed it's quite a bit different. iOS 14, CAPI, Triple Whale. There's a whole new language to learn.
A couple of times a year, our Facebook ad whisper, Andrew Foxwell joins us on the podcast to decrypt it all. Nobody is better in the industry than Andrew. He is a veteran Facebook advertising pro with more than a decade's experience with the platform. His expertise is highly sought after.
I've been in his membership group, Foxwell Founders, since the start of it and it's well worth checking out.
- The Impact of Creative
- The One Ad to Rule Them All
- Has Machine Learning Gone Too Far?
- The Biggest Mistakes Being Made
- What Is CAPI?
- How to Get Help with CAPI, etc.
- What's to Come
- The Foxwell Founders Membership Group
- Are Things Looking Up?
Andrew Foxwell: Certainly, the big change of the iOS changes happening with tracking transparency getting changed both in the website world and in the app world, removing cookies being a huge part of the game. Thus pushing measurements to be very different and creating more inaccurate numbers, not having really an idea in a lot of cases of how to know what's working or not, and the attribution game changing significantly. That's just one tip of the iceberg that changed, and moving into 2022, of now we're in 2022, we're we're thinking about, what do we do with this?
I think that a lot of it has to do with thinking about creative as a bedrock of what we're doing. Thinking about how we're simplifying our structures of our campaigns as a Facebook advertiser. What things we're thinking about in our reference to the landing pages that we have, so the offers and how those things match. Then of course, the tracking, how are we going to make decisions as buyers to turn things up or down on a daily, weekly, and monthly and quarterly basis? That's the suite that we look at in terms of a moving into 2022, what do we need to make those decisions?
The Impact of Creative
Tod: You mentioned creative. Do you feel that– like we took our eye off the ball when it came to all of the iOS issues and the multitude of Facebook bugs. I feel like 2022, we almost as an industry need to return to the basics of landing page design, conversion rate optimization. I feel like we were just distracted by all the data problems and not focused enough on. What makes a compelling video that makes someone want to buy something?
Andrew: I think that distracted is one part of it. Yes. I do think that there's a fair amount of discussion that happens about creative and the power of creative within the industry. I think more than anything, what happened was, Todd, we got spoiled in my opinion, it was too easy to do Facebook ads in a lot of cases in let's say the 2018, 2019, 2017 world where you could spend a dollar, make a dollar and you knew immediately what it was returning.
Creative in landing page and the way that those matched, you could almost be lackadaisical about your approach to that, because Facebook ads were so good at converting people, especially if you even had some mild, full funnel setup happening that it made it much easier on people. Now, you're in this world where you have to think about the creative, you have to think about not only the differentiation and types of creative, but styles, I would say, but the types, like are you using video and static and carousel? What are the things that you're doing in terms of the full suite of creative offerings that we have? Then matching into the landing page, I think for a long time the solution was, send them to the homepage, send them to a collections page, and that can still be a fine strategy, but it's also testing, not just sending them to that page and forgetting about it, but testing alongside and understanding, “Okay, this is what we're seeing with traffic coming from Facebook as a channel. This is what we see with TikTok coming with traffic as a channel.” Whatever channels you're pumping in there, and knowing the differences between them and designing landing pages that are more appropriately matched to that.
I think that distraction, yes. I also think that laziness from the earlier part of– really when a lot of people in this industry learned the game in that 2017, 2018 world, certainly I'm not immune at this. I've had to really go back and get back to those fundamentals, as you said. That was certainly evident in 2021 and it'll be evident moving into this year as well.
The One Ad to Rule Them All
Tod: There used to be a time and I think back in the days, when you were mentioning where you could jam, like of all sorts of different creative, not just imagery, but as you rightly point out the format types and so on. We would run these ad sets with like 40 different ads in them. We would run campaigns with like 20 ad sets, each one with 40 ads in them. I feel like– and correct me if I'm wrong here so this is more question than anything, but am I right in saying that Facebook's machine learning has gotten smarter and that there's not a need anymore for us to do that level of testing? I'm seeing a lot of stacked groups these days.
Instead of splitting out a different ad set for every possible custom audience that we can create, the going wisdom seems to be jam them all together into a single ad set or jam all your ads together into a single ad set and let Facebook sort that out. Am I wrong there?
Andrew: No, I don't think that you're wrong. I think that that certainly one approach, I think what's important to bring up in that sense of how you think about utilizing the AI from Facebook. I think that there are camps that the camp is completely on one side of that, where everything is automated, you put it all in a campaign budget optimization campaign. You're remarketing your mid funnel, your top funnel, and you put in dynamic creative testing and you put in all your own elements and copy, and you just say, “Let it run for a month and see what happens.”
I think that there can be instances where that's effective. I don't think you want to be in the other way either, which is when I started teaching after– well, when I was running Facebook ads like I still in, when I really was actively running, let's say hundreds of thousands of dollars a day, in some cases of Facebook ads, when I was really learning the fundamentals of that, breaking things out was a big part of it.
I think that now we live somewhere in the middle. I think that you have to utilize the AI in a proper way. Dynamic creative testing is a great way to think about that, but putting in 20 variants with a budget of $5 a day or $50 a day, or even $100 a day, it's just not enough and you're going to have Facebook choose things very quickly, and it may give you a result, but is it a statistically significant result or is it one that Facebook is just choosing at that time, then that's what they're running and like, that's what you're stuck with?
I think that you have to balance that. You could bring that same conversation to audiences in the way that you start to stack out audiences. I think that you think about a broad audience of 25 to 45-year-old men. That might be a big part of what you're running in your funnel. From an incrementality standpoint, you also need to be running niche interests or niche interest clusters, look like aren't as effective as they were, but running those with hard copy that matches that niche with landing pages that match those niches. That's really how you're going to grow, because having multiple pitches, to multiple hooks, to multiple people, it's not as broken out as it once was, but it's still relevant. It can run in parallel to this thinking of let Facebook decide. I think that's really where you find wins moving forward. I think that can help add that extra 10% to 20% to your campaigns. It's certainly, when I redid the scaling course that we have this year, I went and interviewed like 50 advertisers, which I always do now with my courses, because it's such a diverse set of opinions in this and buying industry of like what actually worked though in terms of growing.
That was really the answer, to be honest, was, it's not all or nothing. It's not one way entirely, it's that you have to build these things and they can live and parallel to one another to make sure that you're not just depending on Facebook to decide, “Oh, this ads shown to women that are 35 to 55 and that's it. That's who we're going to show it to.” This is where your creative lives, it's that your product probably has other niches and has a good product market fit in other places outside of where Facebook determines within the first 30 days of running ads or in the first 30 days of scaling, that it wants to show those ads. I think it's both, which is complicated, but that's really how you're going to continue to grow into 2022, in my opinion.
Has Machine Learning Gone Too Far?
Tod: Some of the other platforms out there, Google notably is, are moving more toward an increased reliance on automation machine learning to the point actually, where they're taking away your ability to do audience targeting at all. Jill's asking Gales, who used to work at Google, is one of our experts on the podcast, tells me that app campaigns, you can't specify an audience, you can't target by audience because Google just believes that daddy knows best. At some point, do you think this is an extreme example for argumentative sake? We're basically the only option on Facebook is going to be run a campaign, here's the budget, here's some words that are related to my product, or maybe even just the URL of my product page and go, and we won't have any control over the audience because daddy knows best. We won't have any control over where they put the language or what the language is, or even what image it picks. Clearly, I think you'd agree, Facebook is moving gently in that direction, but do you think we're going to end up with the same level of control we have today and that'll stop, or are we moving more toward that area where marketers get less and less control at the expense of what the tech industry believes is a better way of using machine learning to deliver results?
Andrew: I certainly hope that we're in a potential, that we're in a place where there will be things that are default checked. Expansions is an example of that on Facebook advertising, audience expansion where it says–
Tod: Hang on, do you check those? Do you check that box?
Andrew: Well, they're moving into those being auto checked in a lot of cases
Tod: They are.
Andrew: That's an example of what you're talking about of them saying, “You know what, we're just going to turn this on for you.” Placements has been that way for a long time. I think that you probably will see that coming along, but I do think that you will have hopefully those controls will continue to some degree. Now, they may say, “Look we're going to show this. I know you're saying you want this, but we're going to show this to some other people because we think it's probably going to be relevant.”
I think that that's something that's going to be there, and I don't think we're going to lose all the control. I think that Facebook knows, Meta knows that full funnel builds in campaigns is helpful and they know that CBO's not the answer the whole time. They know that to do things properly in Facebook advertising from a direct response standpoint, there's a lot of people that live in the brand awareness world, CBO works well and it delivers clicks and impressions very efficiently.
When I speak about efficiency, we're really talking about conversion efficiency in the direct response, direct to the consumer world, which is a very different world than a lot of other people lives in. It's always one of things that you have to make sure that you're looking at your sources and what kind of information that you're getting. As I'm talking about this, it's also important you mentioned apps. The app world itself just as a caveat in here, has infiltrated and continues to infiltrate information that direct response advertisers who are notoriously diggers of information get, and then it confuses the hell out of everybody.
Somebody like Eric from Mobile Dev Demo, he talks a lot about things and he never differentiates between app campaigns or conversion campaigns and everybody says, “Wait, this is all a farce or whatever.” You never know, so you have to read what he's talking about. It's important that you understand that app campaigns, the reason controls being taken away is because the inventory for mobile app ads is like nil. It was big, it was huge, and now nobody does it, everybody says, “Get the hell out of here. I don't want to install campaign.” They're very ineffective, to be honest.
I've heard reports of people on Google and on the Apple App Store that are paying to get downloads on suggested searches, that are paying $75 to get an install off of an app. These are big players in the industry, but my point is that the inventory there is very little. When you're talking about removing control, Google probably has to remove the control because otherwise, their support people are going to be on the phone all day, supporting this. In terms of your or answering questions like, “Why am I not getting any impressions?” In terms of removing control, I do think that they, from a direct response standpoint, are going to have a lot of things default checked. I do think that they're going to suggest a lot of consolidation. I do think that they're going to suggest automated tools, automated learnings, because they show more efficiency over time. I don't think that it's going to be all one way. I don't think that all that control's going to be removed. I don't think that we're to have engage or remarketing audiences gone, that thing kind of.
Facebook knows that in order to be effective in direct response advertising, there has to be aligned with giving more control. What really comes down to is, what are they going to do there in terms of pre-check and in terms of not giving us options? Then in parallel, what are the other things they're going to give us as options?
An example of this would be, we talk about Facebook Shops. That's a whole world that we don't know about. Facebook has put a lot of money into that, they put a lot of resources into that, and that has automation as a part of it, it's built on catalog, but there are going to be options of the ad units targeting types that they're not going to take that away because they want adoption of shops. It's a complicated answer, hope they didn't ramble too much, but I don't think they're ever going to fully pull it away from us, because if they do, they know it's not going to lead to effective campaigns for us as direct response DTOC advertisers.
The Biggest Mistakes Being Made
Tod: A lot of people who listen to the podcast are not in direct response, they own their own businesses, small, medium-sized, and so on. When you think about that group as a whole, what would you say are the top two or three biggest mistakes that they're making when they're running their own Facebook and campaigns?
Andrew: The number one thing for small businesses, honestly, that are running campaigns on Facebook is that the house is not an order, so there's an issue with pixel, there's an issue with permissions, there's business manager problems, and this has not been made easier by Facebook. I think that a lot of it is, if you intend to continue to run on the platform, making sure that that's in order, making sure that your people are connected properly, making sure that when an employee leaves, you take them out of business manager, and reviewing honestly, these basic help articles from Facebook to make sure that things are installed the right way. If you can, if you have a Shopify store, even if you're a small business, ensuring that CAPI is installed, the Facebook conversions API, that's going to help with measurement, making sure that there aren't any errors in your product catalog.
These are the things that are everywhere in every business, but I do think that they disproportionately affect smaller businesses. The other one is now with small businesses I see mistake-wise is, always not understanding when you make the transition from organic, a lot of people have an organic presence, specifically an Instagram, that's very helpful for small businesses. They want to test something, and so they'll just boost it through Instagram.
As we've talked about before, that's a easy button I see that has continues to get pushed by people. I understand why you're busy doing other stuff, but if you want to try to make that more effective, you can still use that post, but utilize the Facebook ads manager to get in there, to make the targeting a little bit better, to try it with some geotargeting, so it's not 50 miles. Refine it a little bit and learn, that's another part that I see that I still see people selecting.
The third mistake that I see often is, not having a plan for measurement when they begin. You're beginning, you're like, “I'm going to advertise.” And you hit promote, but that's okay. Maybe you do that once or twice, but if you're starting to do that and you're spending 100, 200, 300 X number dollars a month, how do you start to measure that? What are you putting into place? Are you saying something in the post that says, “Hey, mention this to get 10% off.”? You need to have some plan, even if it's not on your site for attribution, because otherwise, you're going to continue to give them money, you're going to be a dissatisfied customer and you have no idea if it worked or not. Having a plan for that is the big one. Those are my top three that I always mentioned to smaller businesses of smaller sizes.
What Is CAPI?
Tod: You mentioned CAPI, the conversions API, and going back to people who advertise products more than anything, can you give us a primer on that? I'm thinking about the people who like me know almost nothing about it, but we came from the world of the pixel. Our expertise was we understand that there's a Facebook pixel. We get it at a business manager or events manager or wherever they're jamming it this week. We pulled the code, we put it up on our website, and then we're good to go. Then iOS 14.5 came along, messed everything up, and now there's this thing called CAPI. Can you explain what CAPI is and who needs it?
Andrew: Yes. CAPI is a solution from Facebook that essentially helps and aids in the ability to track conversions on your website, that assists alongside the pixel. It doesn't replace the pixel, the pixel still lives there for those that haven't opted out. What CAPI essentially does is, it's easily rolled out in Shopify, there's other solutions that it's rolling out into like WooCommerce and others, makes it pretty easy.
At a baseline, what it does is if somebody comes to your site and they put in their information, you have a popup and they put in their information and then they add something to their cart, for example, what that does is it matches that unique event that that person put in their email address and it added that to cart. It allows an event to fire based on that unique identifier that they have given you, not on the pixel. If somebody goes through then and starts to fill out the checkout form, it allows you to say, “Oh, okay, I have that email address.” That will allow me to basically create custom audiences from that, and I can remarket to them. They get entered into that another way matches on the pixel. You don't see the email address, but Facebook would match that anonymously with their profile.
Tod: Oh, I guess that is how they get around the iOS 14.5 issues.
Andrew: That's essentially what CAPI does, and it's all in the end encrypted, you don't have any idea of this, but basically it increases the match rate from those people that are coming from the site. That's why the conversions API is helpful. Then the conversions API moving forward, 2.0 version is a continued understanding of the actions that are being taken on your site. More events being built out. If they've clicked a button, or they've interacted, that can inform a whole bunch of other things in your campaign. That's sent with conversions APIs, why it's important.
How to Get Help with CAPI, etc.
Tod: Where does a marketer brand manager go to get that work done? I'm thinking about, maybe they run a small jewelry shop with their spouse, and they have Shopify, and they figured out the pixel, but this is starting to get more complicated. Are there services or companies or freelancers out there that specialize in this all? I almost feel like I should start a company called All the Facebook Shit Incorporated. That's what we do. We just do all the Facebook shit that Facebook is making marketers do these days.
Andrew: First of all, if there are solutions for CAPI installation, that makes it easy. You're able to utilize a lot of those now, Shopify, it's really like an ID number. That side of it's not confusing. Well, it's not that confusing part, elements of it are still confusing. The help articles there are pretty good. This is actually, we're launching a technical services division of Foxwell Digital this year. Well, already this year, and that is going to be led by my colleague, Shane Cicero, because this is something that we all need. There's rrors that pop up. We don't know like, where is this? It's a common thing. You don't know of the events, there's the events manager like, what's that? What's the match rate? What are all these things? What have you identified? How can we fix them?
That's something that we're launching. There's plenty of other great companies that do it. There's a company named SCOPO Marketing from a colleague named Brett Fish, that he does a lot of these implementations as well. We're partnering with him on a lot of that stuff, too. They're out there. If you just search CAPI implementation company, you can find these people, but it's not a commonly known service because it changes a lot as well. There's a lot of people that do it for very inexpensive, but you're giving them a lot of the keys, which imakes me nervous, and wouldn't make any brand it no, or nervous. That's why we're trying to create a little bit different solution for that for people.
Tod: I wonder if your service will also include troubleshooting business manager issues.
Andrew: It certainly could. I think it's going to evolve as time goes on, but it certainly could. Business manager issues is a wholle other kind of worms that's all part of this. I think that that's really one of the challenges that Meta has been faced with, honestly, is how do we manage permissions and brand assets and pixels and all this stuff for these businesses? And how do we make it easy enough in a way that people can understand it? It's almost like so impossible to understand it all at once, even if you are steeped in this as we are. Be reasonable and kind to yourself and reach out if there are questions as you continue to go through this, but hopefully [crossttalk] easier.
Tod: It feels to me like sometimes there are multiple groups on Facebook that are competing with each other in terms of where this functionality lives. I still, to this day, I run a digital agency. If someone made me tell them the difference between business suite, creative hub, and creative studio, I don't know that I could put any money knowing that stuff, for sure. It just seems to be such a bizarre quagmire. That was more errand than a question.
What's to Come
Tod: 2022 is here. What do you think we're going to be– let's start with the good. What are you looking forward to in the next year, in the world of Facebook advertising?
Andrew: I think that the options that we will have, from a creative standpoint, continue to expand. I think that that's a good thing. I think that tracking continues to expand and tracking/attribution continues to improve, it'sa better word than expand. It will do that as well. Things will become clear, modeled conversions because there's more data become more accurate, and the machine learning that comes from not being dependent upon the pixel becomes better.
I'm looking forward to that. I'm looking forward to as well, getting back to the fundamentals, honestly, of ensuring that you as a marketer have to stop and think about, “All right, what the learning pages? What are the offers? How am I going through this? How am I building the audiences.” And having not being overly dependent upon one thing, but also having a full suite of channels running into your funnel. Tha's exciting because it pushes us and helps us evolve and be more innovative as time goes on. I'm looking forward to that, and I'm looking forward as well to seeing what I always look forward in this industry, to seeing what changes and emerges that I never would've imagined.
It's always a rollercoaster to some degree of, “Oh my gosh, I never would've known that before.” That's happened certainly with post-purchase surveys, I would say this year, alongside a lot of the iOS stuff. I got involved early in 2020 with a post-purchase survey company. To see the evolution of that now, has been so much fun because it actually was brought into a temporary solution in some cases for people. Now people are asking really complex survey questions in their checkout flows and in things like that and Shopify, and you're learning a ton, like, “Oh, I never knew that before.”
I think that out of the frustration comes innovation to some degree as well. I look forward to continuing to see what pops up. Companies like Triple Whale, they make me excited. They're a tracking company because they allow you to see everything in one place and make it easier. That was the service that was born from a lot of the confusion. That's going to come more from Facebook's going to come. The buying standards will become more difficult, but I think that the tracking and knowing what's working is going to become easier, which is exciting, because it allows us to grow a lot faster.
The Foxwell Founders Membership Group
Tod: Speaking of growing and faster, your founders group has been ballooning so fast. I'm so happy to see the success that you're having with it. Can you talk a bit about what it is, and what value people get from that?
Andrew: The Foxwell Founders Group is essentially a group of people that are brand owners or Facebook advertisers or agency owners, people that are spending some money in Facebook and Instagram advertising. We talk as well about TikTok and Snap and Google. Primarily, we got started because we're Facebook advertisers. It's a resource for people that has walkthroughs of accounts, what we're optimizing. It has 10 to 15 questions a day, probably on average from advertisers around the world of account structure, questions to creative, questions to, how do you start to think about this iOS stuff? Types questions.
Certainly, if you were a beginner, and you enjoy drinking from a fire hose, I think it could be effective, but if you've spent money on Facebook and you want to go deeper with, really, I would say it's arguably the greatest group of advertisers in the world, come from something like 23 countries and there's 270 of us at this point. That's who you're going to learn from. It holds space for all types of questions, including questions not even related to Facebook ads as I said, it can go as far as questions about emotional vulnerability like, I'm worried about X in my business. That's not a weird question. That's a totally normal question.
I think that a lot of us live on our own island or in your case, you literally live on an island, and you feel alone. If you're an agency owner or a brand owner, it's a great place to be connected into a lot of people. That's really what it is. It lives in Podium, and then it also lives in Slack, and the Slack conversations are where most of the meat takes place.
Tod: I have to say, I'm in a lot of Slack groups, but there are very few, in fact, I can't think of another single one where people are as generous with the information that they share. Maybe it's my Canadian upbringing. I'm pretty conservative when it comes to what I'll share about our clients and what's working. In the Founders Group, I find people in there, again, you say who are spending considerable amounts of money, spending time with people and saying, “No, listen. This is the way that we did it and so on.” It's certainly great to see.
Are Things Looking Up?
TOD: Andrew, when I was growing up in journalism, I was always told to end an interview on a high note. Are you generally optimistic about the year ahead?
Andrew: I am generally optimistic. I think there's never been a greater time to be an advertiser. Honestly, I think as a Facebook advertiser, it's more challenging, but it allows us space to try new things, while relying on what we already know, to be true as consumers and marketers. It does both of those things and it always is interesting, and it's changing, and you can learn and if you're in some more thing, like the founders, you learn along with these people. It's exciting and I think that there's a lot of hope and I think that you could absolutely have your biggest year yet this year, because more dollars continue to move online. I just read something from UBS Bank the other day about how it's going to be another 5% points projected into E-commerce into 2022. That's exciting. You should be excited because I definitely am.
