Add 30% ROI when Scaling Facebook Campaigns with the “Sneak Attack Method”

Let’s learn about the “Sneak Attack Method”. Facebook’s automatic bidding algorithm makes it too easy of a choice when you’re juggling creatives, ad copy, tracking set-ups, caps, and budgets especially if you’re going at it solo. But what if we told you there was a manual bidding method that can dramatically drop your customer acquisition cost and hit CPA targets with margin to spare?

Tim Burd’s exclusive “Sneak Attack Method” enables FB ad buyers to drop costs within the range of 25%-35% to enable you to claw back profits for you or your clients. Without giving you the juice right away, join Tim Burd on stage at Affiliate World Asia as he shows you how he squeezes margin back into your bottom line.

Speech by Tim Burd | Co-founder, Agency Y

Tim Burd Speech Transcript

How’s it going everyone? Woohoo! Get some noise in here. Come on you guys, it’s not lunch yet.

I’m gonna be showing you guys today a really cool method that will guarantee, bring down all of your costs, no matter what you’re running.

We’re going to jump right in here.

My Journey

I’ll give you guys just a little bit of background on myself, I started as an affiliate about 12 years ago.

I was an affiliate for 3 days. Then the affiliate program owner called me and said, “Hey, you’re doing very well. Can you teach other people how to do this?”

And I said, “Okay, no problem”.

He said, “We’ll give you $5 a sale for every sale when someone comes through your link.”

I had no idea this was being like an affiliate manager, I didn’t even know the term.

Cash University

So then I started my own. It was CashUniversity.com.

How many people here have been in the industry for 2 years? Raise your hands.

How about 5 years? And, how about 10 years? Wow. Okay, a lot of people.

So you guys might remember Cash University, it was quite a while ago.

Ploose

Then, I started an affiliate network called Ploose. It was an affiliate network, it was different though in that I had about 50 advertisers. All direct. I did not broker offers from anyone.

And we had a $2,000 minimum per month for affiliates. So we were very, very stringent on who we let in.

But after running a network for about a year and a half, I realised that it was a low-margin, high-risk. You have affiliates sometimes trying to screw you. Advertisers trying not to pay.

So, I said, I’d rather be an advertiser.

I transitioned, started my own offer, I started my own lead gen offer. Selling leads to lawyers.

We set up our own landing pages, set up a Ping Tree, etc. Drove all our own traffic. No affiliates, nothing like that.

It was at that time that I was running the traffic for my company. And I’d never run Facebook ads before. It’s about 6, 7 years ago, something like this.

I go on Facebook and Google and I’m looking for a group of Facebook advertisers so I can get some hints and tricks because I’m brand new to it. Literally, just started.

I had no idea what I was doing. And there wasn’t anything out there.

So, I started my own group. I said, “Why not  ?”

Facebook Ad Buyers

Called it Facebook Ad Buyers. And it’s been 5 or 6 years now. We’re up to 76,000 members.

How many you guys are members of the group right now? Out of curiosity. A good percentage of you. Cool.

Well then you guys know we try to maintain a very high-quality. And I’ve been helping in the group for, now, 6 years. I was literally just answering every single question.

A lot of people have a lot of hobbies, a lot of my hobbies is helping people actually, been doing it for many years and I love it.

So I had, throughout the years, people say, “Hey can you jump on a call with me? I want to do some consulting.”

And I said, “You want to pay me to talk to me? Okay, sure I’ll help you. I usually help for free but you want to – you know, I’ll help you.”

So I started doing some consulting. And I realised though that I kept getting the same questions over and over and over again.

I thought there has to be a better way that I can make more money per hour and they can pay less per hour right.

Mastermind Workshops

So, I started doing masterminds, where we get 20 people in a room. And I go over a 2-days of content, everything from policy to landing page optimisation, scaling, bidding strategies, yada yada yada, right.

All the good stuff. People started to really, really like it.

So, I really had a lot of fun with that.

Amphora

And, I like to show this because a lot of entrepreneurs do not talk about their failures. Like many of you, I don’t have a 100% success rate, okay.

I started a maybe 4 years ago now, somewhere in there, Amphora. It was a bottled water company. I had my own manufacturing plant, fulfillment. That was kind of when I started getting into ecomm.

We did all the fulfillment shipping, everything in-house. No, we weren’t drop shipping or anything. I wish we were.

The Business Didn’t Work Out

I realised that if any of you guys are going to start a business, don’t get glass bottles, and don’t ship water. It’s very expensive.

We had waters breaking, customers complaining. They’re getting like wet boxes in the mail.

So that business didn’t work out. But I learned a lesson and that’s important.

Any of you guys that might be going through a failure right now, just remember there will be more. And do what you can but ultimately you’ve got to know when to cut your losses also and move on.

So then meanwhile, the legal lead gen was going very well. We had sold it to a law firm. Then we had another law firm ask us, “Hey can you do leads for class-action lawsuits?”

You know those commercials and whatnot you see that say “Have you taken such-and-such a medicine and had a heart attack?”

You may be entitled to money. So, we were doing those leads for lawyers for a couple of years and ended up selling that company.

And then, I had like a year off. I just took a year off, made a bunch of money.

It was like, what do I really want to do? Where do I want to take the brand? Meanwhile, the Ad Buyer group is growing. You know, year by year by year.

Facebook Advertising For Business

So I started an agency. People had been asking me for years from the group, “Hey, can you run my ads for me?”

And I was saying, “No, that’s not my business model. I can get on a call with you and help you with your ads like that. Or you can come to a mastermind and learn how yourself, but I don’t really do it for you”.

So finally, I will actually do it for you. I started an agency about 2 years ago now. Yeah, about 2 years ago now. And it’s called Agency Y.

The group, the Facebook Group is getting so large that there was so much amazing gold nuggets or knowledge bombs, whatever you like to call it, posted it in the group that we’re not getting seen because there was so many posts every day.

So I decided, I want people to see these posts. These are valuable posts, valuable information people are sharing.

AdLeaks

I started to AdLeaks, which at the time, it was just a news site. We just turned the best post in the group into articles.

So one, it would be indexed by Google. And two, the information would be easier to find for people so they could just find information better.

And then I ended up transitioning AdLeaks now into a paid community.

We have, as you can see, I got a Chrome plug-in now. This is actually a look in Facebook, where there’s a member map, where you can go and you can see where other members are.

So that you can see maybe there’s someone that lives right by you in the industry. Go meet up have a drink. Get dinner or something. Yeah, be able to talk shop.

I learned from this alone that there was a guy that lived 5 minutes away from me that I had no idea he lived there. So we got together and had a drink, it was good.

My belief though is bringing the community together. That’s been my goal for 6 years now with the groups and everything, and I believe that community is super, super important, alright.

The Bully Method, The Shotgun Method, The Surfing Strategy

So, let’s get right into it. So you guys might know me from the Bully Method. Maybe the Shotgun Method you’ve heard of before.

How many guys have heard of the Shotgun Method before? Not that many. Wow, okay.

Well, you guys should Google it or check it out. It’s a great way to scale and a great way to spend a $100,000 a day, consistently. So check that out if you haven’t already.

The Surfing Strategy.

The Sneak Attack

So the Sneak Attack. You can add 30% ROI or decrease your cost by 30%, however, you’d like to look at it. It works all the time.

So as most of you may know, most of my methods are for high budgets. But the problem is that not everyone has high budgets or it’s a new advertiser.

And you don’t want to spend a ton coming right out of the gate. You don’t want to spend $10,000 a day on day one.

So I wanted to come up with something that you could use even at low budget and get a lot of benefit out of it. No matter if you’re spending $100 a day or $20,000 a day, this will work and lower your costs.

I developed it about a year ago in my agency. It’s literally never been shown to anyone before. And so I’m excited to show it to you guys for the first time.

It literally does allow you to spend thousands of dollars a day, while lowering your cost per acquisition, which is always really nice.

What Is It Used For

And what does it work on though? It works on e-commerce, affiliate offers, lead gen, mobile app installs, lead ads. Literally, no matter what you’re running on Facebook, it will work.

And it’s good for testing, optimising, or scaling.

So you can actually use it at any step of the process, which is very nice and versatile.

I do want to give a warning though. If you are not used to manual bidding on Facebook, don’t use this method. It is dangerous. And it can lose you a lot of money very quickly if you don’t do it right, which you’ll see why in a minute.

So if you haven’t manual bid a lot, do a little research, start testing manual bidding a little bit just so you kind of get the hang of it before you do this method.

This is an advanced method. So I really wanted you to preface that because I’ve made the mistake of losing a lot of money with this by not setting up rules properly, which we’ll go over.

But I want to make sure you don’t make that same mistake.

The Sneak Attack Method

So you guys ready? I’m going to show you how to do this in 10 easy steps.

Step 1: Create A New Campaign And Set It To Optimize For Conversions

Step 1, create a new campaign and set it to optimise for conversions.

And you can optionally enable campaign budget optimisation if you want. You don’t need to.

It’s up to you.

Step 2: Create 5 + Ad Sets

Step 2, you’re going to want to create 5 ad sets minimum. You can create more, again that’s the minimum. And you’re going to want to do with just a good mix of stuff.

Some lookalikes, some interest targeting, some broad ad sets, meaning just age and gender. That’s it. Just wide open.

So just try a bunch of different stuff.

Again, 5 minimum, okay.

Step 3: Set Your Manual Bid

Step 3, you’re going to be setting a manual bid.

You’re gonna set it on the lowest costs with a bid cap. That’s what it looks like in there. I have a screenshot on the next slide for you.

And whatever your cost per sale is, you’re going to bid half of that.

If you guys know my Bully Method, usually I tell you to bid 3 to 5 times higher, but this is a much different method here.

So with this let’s say that your cost per sale on your ad account is usually $40. You’re gonna bid $20 to start. Again, half.

And here’s what it looks like. So you can do the lowest cost with a bid cap, there it is, 20 bucks.

Notice this little guy down here, accelerated. I normally don’t recommend to do accelerated, but this is one situation where I do.

Step 4: You Will Set The Pacing To “Accelerated” Instead Of Standard

So, you’re gonna set the pacing to accelerated there just like I just pointed out, instead of standard.

This is the equivalent of putting your foot down on the gas pedal and get it going quick.

On normal campaigns, this would waste money, but you’ll see in a second why for this, it works great.

I like my little name on the race car there.

Step 5: Put 4 Or 5 Creatives In Each Ad Set

Then in each ad set, you’re gonna want to put 4 or 5 creatives in there.

Don’t put 30 and don’t put 1.

You’re gonna want to do basically all different types of creatives. That would be 1 or 2 link ads, a video ad, a carousel ad, a canvas ad.

Basically, kind of, one of each.

The reason that you want to do one of each is that Facebook breaks down their auction inventory roughly like this.

This is not from Facebook directly. This is from the data that I’ve gathered from my agency. What I’ve seen personally, etc.

So what I’ve seen is that basically, over half of the inventory on Facebook ads is for video. If you’re not running video ads right now, by the way, you need to.

If you’re running only like link post, that 22% right there, you’re only getting 22% or 25% or so of the auction.

That’s why your costs are going up and unstable because you’re just getting a small piece of the auction.

So make sure you do video ads. They don’t have to be super high-quality either.

You can do a slideshow, you can do a video with your phone. Doesn’t have to be anything crazy.

Why All The Different Creative Types?

Why all the different creative types? It’s important. When you’re bidding on Facebook, it’s an auction, right?

Facebook is delivering you conversions or whatever you’re bidding on at the lowest cost they can.

But they’re looking at all sorts of factors. They’re looking at what ad type a user has converted. If they’re on desktop or mobile if they’re on Wi-Fi or not.

So by putting all different ad types in your ad set, it’s allowing Facebook to win you the impression no matter what device they’re on, no matter what type of creative the user is used to clicking.

Maybe that user likes carousel, maybe they like vertical video, etc. So you really need to have all of them so you have a better chance of hitting everybody in the auction and not just one segment.

If you only do a video ad, you’re only going to be able to hit a segment of your audience, not the whole thing.

Step 6: Set The Budgets

Step 6, you set the budget.

Now, your budget should be between $500 to $5,000 per ad set. You’re not gonna actually spend this much. Don’t worry.

Aim to spend about 10-20% of your budget per ad set daily.

And if you are doing a campaign budget optimisation, set your overall budget 5 times higher than what you actually want to spend.

Step 7: Launch Your Campaign

Now it’s time to launch your campaign. It’s time to Sneak Attack.

So now, what right? Like what do you do? What do you do next?

This is where I find that a lot of speakers that I have seen at masterminds or stuff I’ve gone to. They tell you what to do until you launch.

And then you’re on your own.

I’m gonna tell you what to do.

Step 8: Watch Closely And Slowly Raise Bid

Step 8, you’re gonna need to watch the campaign closely and slowly raise your bid.

Again, remember you’re starting out a $20 bid. You’re gonna slowly raise it. And you’re going to need to wait a few hours and slowly increase it if you’re getting no traffic.

If you do it right and you’re bidding half, you are gonna get no traffic to start, that’s a good thing. It means you’re doing it right.

If you start getting traffic right away, it means you’re bidding too high.

So in our example again, we started our bid at $20. Now we’re gonna raise it up to $22. A 10% raise.

Then you’re gonna wait a few more hours, minimum, you could wait a full day if you want to be safer.

And basically, you’re going to keep increasing your bid until you start getting a little bit of traffic.

You see the impression start coming in but maybe you haven’t got a click yet. That kind of traffic.

It’s still nothing or the traffic’s trickling in really, really slow. Raise the bid another 10% up to $24. Then hold and wait. And this is important.

The auction takes a good 15 to 30 minutes once you actually change your bid or budget to actually send it out to the servers. So that your ad starts showing.

This is why you need to wait a few hours.

If you just wait half an hour and you say, “Oh, I’m not getting any traffic up it again.”

You could lose a lot of money very quickly.

Wait A Bit Longer

Now, wait a bit longer. I can’t really stress this enough. The waiting part is very important.

By now traffic should be trickling in very slowly. And again, we’re aiming to spend 10% to 20% of the budget.

Let’s say your budget’s at $500. We’re trying to spend a hundred bucks a day.

If you have it and you’re only spending like $1 an hour, then you obviously know you need to up your bid more because that’s not gonna spend a full $100, right?

Again, so raise it another couple bucks. And then wait and see what happens.

You’re gonna keep repeating this process until you start seeing impressions and spend. And then watch it very carefully.

Again, cannot stress this enough.

I don’t want you guys to go home do this and then lose a lot of money and get mad at me.

Not Too Little And Not Too Much

Your goal is to be like right on the edge where you’re getting just the right amount of traffic, like the Goldilocks.

Not too little. Not too much.

You want to be like on the balance beam, you want to make sure you’re getting just the right amount.

And, you got to be very careful with this otherwise you can burn through thousands of dollars in an hour if you aren’t paying attention.

I’ll tell you why.

Say you have your 5 ad sets say you put $500 or $5,000 per ad set. And let’s say, you’re like, I’m getting no traffic, I’m gonna raise my bid $5.

Well, you might get like flooded with traffic, which is why you need to go slowly, slowly, slowly.

You’re basically putting your bid up to the point where you’re just getting like the cheapest wins in the auction. And you’re getting just that remnant inventory if you will.

You’re getting those random little users. As a wise man once said, “Always use protection!”

Step 9: Set Up A Few Automated Rules

Step 9, you’re gonna set up a few automated rules. This is important unless you want to sit at your computer 24 hours a day, which no one wants to do.

So if it’s smaller budgets, which would be around the $500 ad set budget. Again, where you’re aiming to spend $100.

You can use Facebook’s native rules that are just built right into Ads Manager. It’s totally fine. You don’t need to buy any third-party software.

The reason is that the rules run every 30 minutes. And the traffic won’t come in too fast where that’s an issue. 30 minutes will be fine.

Now if you are doing a higher budget and you want to spend, actually spend $5,000 dollars a day, $10,000 a day, $25,000 a day with this method, you totally can.

But you need to get a little bit heavier software here, a little something better, which would be RevealBot is the one I like.

There are other ones as well because these rules run every 15 minutes and when spend is coming in really fast, you want to make sure that it is going every 15 minutes.

Because imagine an advertiser pause, let’s say it’s a huge brand, like Amazon is advertising and they pause for the night.

Maybe their landing page is down or something, so they pause. You could get flooded with traffic at say 10:00 at night.

And if your budgets haven’t been fully filled, Facebook is going to try to spend all your budget in 2 hours.

I’ve had this happen to me on accident and for those of you guys who something similar happened on accident also. You know that it will burn through a lot of your budget at a terrible cost.

The Rules Are Crucial

It’ll cost you 5 or 10 times more per click. So, that’s why these rules are crucial. It keeps you from getting burned.

So worst case you get flooded with traffic and you can stop it and make sure you’re okay.

Here is what the rule looks like. It’s exactly what you need to set in, okay?

You’re gonna have it run into all your active ad sets. You can choose which campaign.

I just had it set to one campaign at the moment, but however many campaigns you’re running it on, up to you.

The action is going to be to turn off the ad set. And if purchases are less than one, meaning you have zero purchases, and you’ve spent at least $60 today, then pause it.

This is just in case, and again, we’re trying to get sales for 20 bucks. That’s what we want. We want a $20 sale.

So we’re gonna give it 3 times that $60 before we shut it off.

And again, if your sales cost $50, then triple that and set it to $150. So just kind of make these rules apply to you.

This is an important one too. So that one makes it so let me go back real quick.

Stop-Loss Rule

This one makes it so if you get no purchases, it cuts it off at a $60 spend. This is what I would call the “Stop-Loss Rule”.

It’s similar to a stock trading, where you set a certain amount of money you’re willing to lose. And then you kill it for the day. So that’s what that rule is, this rule.

Trim The Fat

This next one, I call Trim The Fat. This one is, if it is spending, you are getting purchases but the cost per purchase is too high.

You’re not profitable.

So this one would be if your purchase is greater than zero, so you have some purchases, but your cost per purchase is greater than $40.

Remember, we want them for $20. We would love it to get a sale for $20. But as long as they’re below $40, we’re happy.

So if the cost goes over $40, we want to turn off that ad set.

If you get blown up with spending over the 15 or 30 minutes, this will save you. This will turn it off if it’s not profitable.

Now if it is profitable, it’s going to keep running, you’re gonna make a boatload of money.

In RevealBot, this is exactly what the rule looks like.

The action up there. Pause the ad set. If the spend today is greater than $60, and the purchases today is equal to zero, cut the ad set.

And then again, the next one, “Trim The Fat”, if the purchases today is greater than zero and a cost per purchase today is greater than $40. Again, we’ve got some purchases but we’re not profitable, pause the ad set.

Bid Bumper

Here’s an advance rule you can do for the Sneak Attack Method, this is something you can do in Revealbot. You cannot do this in Facebook, it doesn’t have the capability yet.

Increase the bid for your ad set by 10% every hour, if the spend today is less than $100.

Does that make sense?

So let’s say you’re trying to spend $100. You’re trying to spend, let’s say maybe $1,000. This is gonna check and say, “Okay, every hour, we haven’t spent that $100 yet or we haven’t spent that $1,000 yet, increase the bid 10%.”

This is gonna do that work for you, where you don’t have to wait and sit there for 3 hours. This is gonna do the work for you, which is great.

I’m all about automation.

If you can automate your life, you can actually go out and enjoy.

Bid Bumper 2

Here’s an even more advanced one I call “The Bid Bumper 2”.

You can increase the bid for your ad set by 10% every hour if the spend for the last 2 hours is less than $100.

So then you’re not looking at the overall daily spend, you’re looking at how much you spent just the last 2 hours.

Step 10: Optimize And Profit

Step 10, optimise and profit. Do what you would do normally. And after a few days, pause your bad ads. Pause any of the ads that spent too much, had not a good CPA.

Then give it a couple more days of data, then pause your bad ad sets. And I want to repeat that. Pause your bad ads first.

A lot of people forget to go into the ad set and pause bad ads. They’ll just pause the ad set when you could have just had one ad in there that ate up all your money.

And you could have had a really, really great ad in there that just didn’t get a whole lot of spend.

So just make sure you go in on the ads level first and pause them. Then wait a couple of days and pause bad ad sets.

Once you get down to less than 5 ad sets, because maybe they’re bad whatever, after you know 3, 4, or 5 days of running. They don’t do too hot.

Make some new ad sets. Try some new targeting, some new lookalikes, new goes, and new placements, whatever.

Cut Your Cost By About 30% On Average

Alright, and if you do this right, you should be able to cut your cost by about 30% on average.

We do this on a lot of our clients and I’ve seen anywhere from a 25% decrease minimum, all the way down to 50%.

At scale, we have one client where we spend $25,000 a day, using the Sneak Attack at a 50% deduction on the “normal bidding methods” if you will, which is massive.

It was the only way we could actually get that client profitable because they were very, very strict.

Questions or comments? And if you want to see any more from me, just @timburdofficial on Facebook or Instagram. Or join the Ad Buyers group. It’s a great group, lots of good content in there.

Q&A

Eric:

Okay, so we have some questions here for Tim Burd and the Sneak Attack Method. I think we are gonna get those questions up from Slido. Again, if you have any questions, make sure you get them to Slido.com. Get that first one out of there because we’re not answering that one. We don’t know anything about that one. Why do you choose to set a larger budget and spending only 10% instead of spending smaller budgets from the start?

Tim:

That’s a good question. So the reason is that Facebook, you want it to spend and because you have that budget or sorry, the bid because you have the bid so low, you’re going after like the cheapest traffic in the auction. So you want big audiences, you want multiple ad types so that you get that cheapest traffic that Facebook has to offer and only the cheapest traffic. When you’re bidding normally and running a normal budget, if you will, you’re gonna get the normal traffic, which is not the cheapest traffic only. So by doing this, by putting the budget really high, the bid really low, and putting it on accelerated, you’re telling Facebook as soon as there’s a good guy in there, spend it, and spend it. And then it’ll stop spending for a little bit. Then there are some more people in there you want to get, boom, spend it. Grab it. So it’s important that you do a high budget like that, otherwise, it just won’t work. It won’t be fast enough. It’ll spend like $1 in 15 minutes, when you want to spend maybe $100 or like that.

How Can We Protect Our Accounts

Eric:

Got yah. So Facebook is disabling ad accounts, so how can we protect our accounts promoting weight loss and following the policies?

Tim:

That’s a tough one, honestly. Weight loss has been abused so much that even if you are running it completely clean, you are gonna run into accidental flags. Having a rep would be something that I would recommend. Otherwise, I would not probably run weight loss on Facebook if you don’t have a rep. Or you could hire an agency that has a good relationship with Facebook because you are going to deal with accidental bans. The quick things you can do though, are don’t make any claims that you cannot substantiate. Any claims you may make, whether it’s on your ad or your landing page, have a PDF a link at the bottom of your landing page that says “claim substantiation”. So that they can get proof from a third-party, a doctor, a laboratory, whatever it might be that it actually is true.

How To Scale Traffic For Viral Media Websites

Eric:

So this question, it’s the top one with 6 votes here. How to scale traffic for viral media websites?

Tim:

You could actually use a variation of this and just on traffic instead of conversions. And again, just set the bid real low. Set it to a penny. And I don’t know if you can set up below a penny, you might be able to. Another good way actually for viral media websites, it does require an investment upfront but you buy page likes, Run a Page Like campaign. Once you have you know 100,000-page likes, a million page likes, even though the organic reach is not that great, every time you post, and you’re gonna need to post like 20 to 50 posts a day, you will get that 3-8% of your likes. And you will get essentially free traffic that will click ads on your site etc. So there is an investment up front, but you make money, in the end, that way.

How To Get A Facebook Rep

Eric:

This is a tough one, I know. It’s the top one there. How to get a Facebook ad rep?

Tim:

Pray.

Eric:

Yeah.

Tim:

No, it’s a combination of spending, quality, and time. My ad agency, where we’re doing legal lead gen for lawyers, which is not something that people love in their news feed. It took $5 million of spent over 6 months before I got a rep. Now, that water company I showed you guys because it’s like a cool looking brand, a cool looking bottle, unique, I got a rep after spending only $10,000 over the course of one month. So, you need to make your brand look more legitimate. If you have just a landing page, you need to make sure you have an About Us page, a Contact Us page. And they don’t really like just landing pages. They like it to be a full site and then your landing page is like a part of that site and not the other way around. That will really, really help you get are. But quality is the most important thing. If you have a lot of negative feedback, a low feedback score, etc, it’s gonna be very difficult to get a rep. Make sure you have good customer service, good quality product etc. and you’ll get you will get a rep, eventually.

Testing Phase, Scale Phase

Eric:

Nice. Does this method work on testing phase or the scale phase? Or both?

Tim:

It works on all of them, actually. I typically go with the Bully Method to start. I use my 388 Method, for you guys who have maybe seen that speech. And then, that’s my go-to because it is faster and easier to scale very, very high. But if that doesn’t work so hot, then I go to the Sneak Attack. And I do that because you can still scale with that, it’s just a little bit harder and a little more inconsistent to scale because you are getting kind of like the remnant inventory, I’ll call it. It’s a little more inconsistent day-to-day. One day you might spend $700. The next day you might spend $2,000, the next day $5,000, the next day $500. So it is a little inconsistent but you do get a great cost. So if the scale is not, or if you don’t have a client that requires a certain number of sales per day, then it’s perfect.

How To Come Up With New Strategies

Eric:

Nice, I like this one. I feel like the Joker talking about Batman. Where do you get these wonderful toys? How do you come up with these new strategies? Experimentation?

Tim:

Yeah, really. I did a speech at one of my, I believe it was at iStack, about the algorithm. And it’s understanding the way that the algorithm works. So if you understand that it’s an auction and you’re bidding, and you understand that Facebook’s trying to pace your budget out through the day. By doing a really high budget and a low bid, you’re gonna get that cheap traffic that’s kind of at the bottom of the barrel. It’s still good traffic, it’s just like the remnant inventory.

Tim:

Yeah.

Eric:

So it’s really just understanding how the algorithm works. And, I’m working on a new method right now that we’ve been running on all our clients and we’re getting a 50% cost reduction again. It’s called The Cloud.

Eric:

Where you gonna be talking about that?

Tim:

Dropping that in Vegas at the iStack.

Placement Optimisation

Eric:

Oh, very nice. Okay. What about ad placement? Should we run the placement optimisation with this method or should we choose them manually?

Tim:

That’s a great question. I would run basically all the placements. I would probably, ixnay on the audience network though, but I would leave everything else on. As long as they historically do well for you. So if Instagram and what not, historically does well, then leave it on. If it doesn’t and take it out. But pretty much everything but audience network.

Buying CPM Ads From Facebook

Eric:

And what about buying CPM ads from Facebook? Actually, that’s just bidding straight CPM?

Tim:

I’m guessing they mean the fixed CPM. That’s good if you’re doing brand buying and the brand has a specific CPM they want. But typically, I found, for performance, they are giving you kind of a branding traffic and not the traffic that’s likely to convert, which is the conversions objective. Facebook has all these segments of traffic. If you have a 2 million size audience and you’re bidding on purchasers, Facebook is picking out maybe 20,000 or so purchasers they think will purchase. So then people are getting those. And there are the people they think will Add to Cart. People they think will click and so on. So when you’re doing the CPM buy, typically, you’re getting like whatever is left over, like the scraps.

Eric:

So avoid it, generally.

Tim:

Yeah. Unless it’s for a brand and they want a $15 CPM, so you put, you know, you set it up at $10, you make your margin as an agency. When you use a good use case for.

How To Avoid Ads Poor Performance

Eric:

Gotcha. How to avoid ads poor performance or poor experience with advertorials? I guess that’s a poor customer experience or?

Tim:

Yeah, generally, with advertorials, Facebook doesn’t love them. But what you can do is just put the advertorial on your actual site in a folder, whatever your domain is slash lander or slash advertorial. Whatever you want to call it. And then make sure it has the same brand as your main site on the advertorial. So that it’s a consistent brand experience. And then Facebook doesn’t think you’re trying to dupe the user. If you have an advertorial on some CNN-looking domain or Women’s Health or something and then you send them to your site, Facebook thinks, “Hey, they’re trying to confuse the user or trying to trick the user”. So when it’s a consistent branding on your site, it’ll do a lot better. And one thing to try also is to completely ditch the advertorial and just put it into a Canvas ad. If you guys haven’t tried Canvas ads, they’re really awesome. You can literally put your full advertorial right in there with a button, and then you can bypass the entire thing.

Eric:

Nice. Okay, time is up. We’ve got a bunch more questions which Tim will be answering in the lounge over there, which we’ll put that content online. Great presentation, I think if you go by the number of photos taken per slide, it’s a very successful presentation. Thanks so much.

Tim:

Thank you. Cheers everyone. Enjoy!