Warrior Podcast: Dennis Yu @ BlitzMetrics on Mastering Facebook Ads (2024)

Download the Warrior Forum + BlitzMetrics.com Social Amplification Engine Cheatsheet now: https://goo.gl/9Huf8S

Marcus: Hey Warriors! Welcome to the first episode of Warrior Podcast. My name is Marcus W.K. Wong, I’m the head of Partnerships and Marketing over at the Warrior Forum and I’m very, very excited to start a new podcast series with you today and introduce you to one a good friend of mine, Dennis Yu, who’s the Chief Technology Officer at Blitzmetrics, and regular writer at AdWeek. So welcome Dennis, how are you?

Dennis: Good, Marcus. Good to hang out again.

Marcus: Yeah, definitely! It’s been awhile since you’ve been in Sydney so I’m very excited to have a chat with you again today and I’m sure a lot of us can learn a lot of information from you regarding Facebook advertising. Hey Dennis, could you give us a quick insight about yourself and where you at these days?

Dennis: I’m a long time ads analytics guy used to run analytics Yahoo and over the course of spending over billion dollars of ads, I’ve learned that there are patterns and how the auction works. On Search Engines there’s a certain way the auction works and for Facebook there’s an auction as well and we’ve been teaching young adults how to use Facebook to drive sales and we’ve produced courses.

You probably know that we speak all over the place, we were just at Facebook all day yesterday at their headquarters meeting with their team about what their doing in the auction and how do you organize your ads the right way and we exist to share that because when we do we create standards around how you should build your ad campaign so that Facebook does the work for you and we publish guides.

Our entire company’s mission is creating jobs for young adults so that they can be certified and implement packages on behalf of customers so you probably know we do it for the other Warriors like the Golden State Warriors, Rosetta Stone or other companies .

We want nothing more than to share what we know, we believe information should be free, not the kind of thing where we got to pay all of these money because these are secrets, I think it should be public and we’re willing to share that information however time is not free and so if you sell your time and when we're equipping small business owners and corporate clients and students to learn, right?

They’ve got to be able to charge for their time and we’re there to support them and that’s been our mission, I sold all my stock when I left Yahoo and put a couple million dollars into starting this company because this is something I believe in.

Marcus: That’s awesome, man. I think the whole concept of Blitzmetrics is extremely inspiration especially for people coming straight out of college or coming straight out of highschool looking for that’s going to be effective for the next 10-20 years, I definitely feel that Blitzmetrics really hit that on the head for them.

With the whole inspiration of Blitzmetrics, how did you actually get started in the world of advertising?

Dennis: Oh the world of advertising was 20 years ago, I was buying ads on AOL and before there was even Google and doing America Online that was back in 1997 believe it or not.

It wasn’t because I was good but I remember for example my buddy owned a Karate Studio in Arlington, Texas - I could buy Karate and Jiu Jitsu and other sorts of keywords that would bring people to his studio and I can rank nationally for those and I could buy it nationally and rank nationally because there are hardly and anyone can tell their back in the day stories how they dominated Google but I realized holy moly!

This digital thing there’s so much data, there’s so much misinformation and ironically the more sophisticated the platforms become and easier they are to use and measure, the more fog there is out there and that to this day surprises me even in our meetings from the last few months there are some well known advertisers that they don’t know what they’re doing.

Right, even though the data is very easy to tell what’s going on and to troubleshoot campaigns and the same way you fix a car and how do you troubleshoot a car that is broken, I think the same things apply to tuning ad campaigns and Facebook is the ultimate because it's the ultimate targeting platform. There’s more data so there’s more to optimize.

Marcus: Yeah, I definitely think the way you mentioned ads from 20 years ago and I guess it was quite trivial because people could do a lot of blackhat things like keyword stuffing on pages and still to this day a lot of those pages still exist unfortunately but Google’s tackled that down and it seems a lot of the search engines have as well.

Like you mentioned all the changes that are coming through with the technology in the recent times at what point did you realize that Facebook ads was a key to a solid foundation to business and marketers?

Dennis: Oh man, probably like 2009. You guys might know at a Techcrunch article and we were running almost a 100 million impressions a day just on Facebook’s platform and a lot of that stuff you guys probably know because it's Warrior Forum like who has a crush on you or what’s your IQ a lot of those stuff was running through our system.

A lot of the spammy stuff that we knew converted really well and the way we were able to make all these money and it was up to $83,000 a day and almost half of that was profit was because those ads that you saw while you were playing games on Facebook and could be like Farmville or whatever, it was based on your information, we were running ads.

This was before the ads system, this was before the API, this is us using inventory of people who have built apps and monetize, right? We built an ad server before there was an ads platform, right? At the same time Facebook launched Facebook flyers, right? The 5 dollars CPM targeting college things if you remember that 10 years ago but we found that you could run ads that injected people’s picture so imagine you saw an ad that said, “Hey Marcus, one of these 3 friends thinks that you’re an idiot” and it shows their images and it’s using Facebook’s styling and font.

Marcus: Oh, that’s brilliant!

Dennis: Made ads, you can’t do this today and Zuckerberg got mad at me and we’ve had a couple of conversations, I kind of want to go back to those days that we learned, to your question, we learned that Facebook allows us and still does allows us to personalize ads with information to make it look like its message and so messages 10 years ago were deceptive, you have 3 new messages from these women who want to have a chat with you.

You’d be inside the platform, where people are playing the games and the apps and that kind of stuff, right? Do you remember that?

Marcus: Yeah, definitely! I was a big chess fan.

Dennis: Yeah and so we ran ads there and we made money as a network basically aggregating the publisher demand which are all these app developers, they were just one person two person shows not like actual companies and then we were putting their inventory and tying it with the various affiliate networks so we were pretty big on Affiliate.com and Commission Junction and all these affiliate places.

Marcus: So, I think for a lot of people around the world, marketers that are just starting out, obviously experienced marketers as well, not a lot of us have the access to a hundred million dollar ad spend budget I think for us that would be pretty amazing to have on an annual basis even so how do you recommend marketers make the most out of their budget?

I mean there’s bidding wars happening on Facebook Ads basically every second of the day. How do you take your community and take your members, teach them how to amplify the results from a very limited budget. What are the keys to unlocking the secrets behind the Facebook algorithm itself?

Dennis: Yeah, there’s like 5 questions in there. Facebook told us yesterday that there are 25 trillion actions that occur on their platform every day. And bidding, these are bidding evaluation auctions as part and an auction by the way is whenever you log in your phone, you open up Facebook and that slot for example there that’s serving you an app, that’s an auction and that single impression is an auction.

So you're not competing against other hamburger places, whatever your business is it's not that you’re competing against them you’re competing against everyone else who’s bidding for that single impression. Every single impression you see, every single item on the news feed is an auction so when you realize that you think, holy moly that’s some crazy crazy calculation that has to occur every single time.

Even crazier than the stuff Google has to do, every time you do a search on Google you see the search results but at the same time the ad option has to run so to your question on how do you do this if you are an entrepreneur or a startup or you’re an affiliate, you’re just hustling you only have a little bit of money and you got a bootstrap tied, you got to take you 10 dollars a day profit and then turn it to 50 and then to a 100, you know that whole story, how do you do that and a lot of people say, “well you guys spent so much money, I can’t compete”.

That is one of the most inane things that I’ve ever seen, the bigger the companies are and for anyone in the agency’s based you know this is true, the bigger they are the more wasteful they are and the more dumb they are about how they spend their money. I’ve seen the smartest advertisers that follow our dollar-a-day strategy and they absolutely kill it, not because there is some kind of magic secret formula let me tell you what it is, well there’s many factors but the main one if relevance score and relevance score just like Google’s quality score, right?

Facebook’s relevance score is based on the same thing, the number 1 factor is engagement rate so if you can get that engagement rate, 20-30-40% then they’re going to give you a discount. Chidi the guy who’s in charge of, there’s a group you should join by the way that’s called “FB Auction Live” and it talks about this and they have weekly webinars there’s not that many people in the group surprisingly you think more people want to join this thing.

If they want to get traffic for the cheapest amount and get more conversions and use the system the way it was intended but he talks about this discount factor that’s based on relevance score and it’s not magic, it’s not Blackhat, it’s not some kind of “oh make sure your videos is exactly 52 seconds long” it's nothing like that. In hindsight, for example if we know that the engagement rate is the number 1 thing then we need to have the right targeting and not just hitting the entire universe and we need to have content that people are going to click on, not being clickbaity but the content that’s working the best is video and it’s so important that Facebook has changed their UI to accommodate the publishing of video and the consumption of video, you guys probably know this right?

You know that’s the case then 1 minute video boosted for 1 dollar a day is key right now to driving sales especially if you tie them with your remarketing audiences especially if you choose different kinds of lookalike audiences that are based on your custom audiences if you make videos that are able to get a 15 second average watch time then you know that the system is saying, “yeah this relevancy is pretty good and people are staying around and watching” You know Facebook is using that as a signal average watch time.

Here’s a couple of things that we learned from yesterday, I wrote these things down because I thought maybe I’d forget. Let me just tell you, for example you need to get 25 conversions per ad set for the system to be able to do conversion optimization anything less than that you just can’t do anything.

Another thing is that if you have a negative feedback on your post so someone exes out on your ad that can count for up to 100 times the impact of someone clicking like, commenting or sharing because they’re so infrequent because it’s multiple steps to be able to ex out on an ad and you’re really saying that, “Oh man this is stuff that’s not very good” and even if it’s just like politics or sports where you know you’re going to get a lot of hate and people disagreeing, they take some of that into account but you still want to be careful about your targeting.

Here’s one that threw me for a bit of a loop, 41% of conversions occurs across device meaning that their first touch is through Facebook and it actually converts on Desktop or iPad or they look at your product again when they're at work so there’s multiple touches and most of the click based tracking or cookie based tracking like using UTM parameters or like Google Analytics which is based on the cookie actually drops most of these conversions that come from Facebook.

It’s not just a Facebook PR thin saying, “Oh yeah we ran a study and we found that Google Analytics actually deserves more credit” It’s actually true and we’ve ran some tests and we’ve been using some of their new tools which are going to release on 2018, it’s called advanced measurement and you’re going to get that inside power editor and ads manager.

In 2018, they’re going to show you how people are moving through different devices and different funnels because with Google Analytics a lot of these aren’t visible to Google especially if there’s an impression that occurs Facebook can see that but Google Analytics can’t see that or Omniture can’t see that.

Here’s another one I sort of suspected but I know now that’s true, did you notice, Marcus? That when you target really small audiences that CPM and CPC’s are just insanely high?

Like the last few weeks, last couple of months we were running ads and there other people were like, “Yeah man,it’s crazy! I used to do all your micro targeting, Dennis! Just like you said but man you know my Cost per Clicks upped like 3 bucks even my relevance score is high and all this” but they said was when you over target several things happen: One is that you’re paying more because Facebook knows that you are trying to target down to and it’s more weight on the auction to be able to calculate.

Let’s say you create a targeting which is the ad set level, you want to target all the small business owners that like Warrior Forum and live in the Sydney area and also like who’ve gone to Bondi beach and are female and like whatever, you add all these things together until your audience is like 20 people.

They know that and it’s more pressure on the system to calculate so the prices go way up so that’s one thing but that’s not the main thing. The main thing is that and this is why you’re seeing the prices go up and it’s not just demand is that when you open up your targeting you’re giving their algorithm which is in this case based on OCPL, right? More room to be able to analyze and optimize so the people that are familiar with Adwords, they just love to multiply out different Ad groups they just like to make complex campaigns and that actually works as a disadvantage on Facebook.

And with Facebook, you actually want to have broader audiences because you want to quickly get to that 25 conversions and once you get there, the system is like “Oh okay, now I see” and that’s just a minimum, that’s not like once you’re 25 you’re there you want hundreds if you can because you’re giving Facebook a cleaner and cleaner signal on who these conversions are and the conversion could be at the cart or a lead that eventually turns into a sale or an Ebook.

I mean whatever different, a phone call that eventually results in appointment, there’s always these different conversions of course but if you have these different conversions at different points and you feed them with a limited number of audiences you actually are able to send a stronger signal, your lookalike audiences are better, you have less overlap between different audiences because we made 20 audiences now all of a sudden any one audience can overlap with the other audience and then you have frequency that you can’t control because people maybe in 3 or 4 different ad sets and so the frequency looks low at the ad set level.

But it’s actually high at the user level because you’re over targeting and there’s overlaps between the different groups that you have but then you think you’re being sophisticated because you have so many campaigns going, right?

Dumb things like that and I thought, “Wow!” I was sort of Blackhat about this thing with the dollar they’re targeting because I target with people who worked with Facebook and lived in Menlo Park. Target the press, you guys know about the dollar a day thing, I can target the people who worked in certain places and that still works I would still do that but if your goal is conversions in addition you should actually have an audience that’s pretty big I guess it depends on the verdict on your budget and all that kind of stuff but maybe you start with audiences that are a couple hundred thousand like a hundred thousand or 200 hundred thousand people just because you want to get that conversion firing like actual conversions that are firing and you run against the lookalike make a little bit bigger but it's based on the signal that you’re providing Facebook and then this is one I tried 5 or 6 years ago and it sort of worked but now it’s working then you take that ad set you duplicate it and you run it against the universe, you run it against the entire country.

It will work provided that you have enough conversions once the system has learned then you can take the training wheels off and let the system do the work for you. In the last years, Facebook became really smart and made it easier so that you don’t have to do all these crazy stuff like try to bid low, I’ll give you an example a trick that we used a few years ago, we knew the auction would reset every 60 seconds in terms of bidding so we would bid at $5 CPM which back then was high and then 30 seconds later we would bid down to 5 cents and then we would bid back up to $5 then we bid down to 5 cents, every time the auction would come we would prioritize this in the auction like “Oh yeah these guys are bidding $5” so they would put us at the top of the auction and then when it came time to charge us it would say, “Oh wait we actually are supposed to charge these guys 5 cents we’ll give them an accrue each time”

So Facebook got mad at me for doing that because I thought that you could do that so you used to resort to things like that to try to get ahead of Facebook but now you can imagine their engineering is smarter and smarter and they’re closing the loopholes but that’s a good thing because that means you don’t have to try to do all these weird stuff to try to get the results that you want.

And I think except in rare cases you don’t need to use Power Editor, there are people out there who have made their business trying to sell courses on how to use Power Editor on Facebook because some people thought that there was magic in there.

No, that’s just like bulk ad duplication and there’s a couple features in there that you can’t get as manager and even I wrote articles 4-5 years ago, saying don’t boost posts! Because that’s garbage and they don’t work, remember the whole boosting posting but now I spend most of my time boosting posts all day long like 80-90% of the ads that we run were boosting posts.

We're boosting against saved audiences that we’ve made that are lookalikes and custom audiences and media targets and were boosting video too. We find that there’s more power in creating videos with customers, creating videos around interesting things that you’ve seen, creating videos like if you’re an entrepreneur or a founder about you or what you’ve done that have nothing to do with your product but just getting people to know you because they’d buy to see if you’re a person and that you’re real, right?

And then just boosting these videos.Creating remarketing audiences against people who have seen a certain video, we’d like to use a 10 second audience and not a 25% not the default 3 second. If you’re selling things like softdrinks and potato chips then probably you can do that but if you have something that’s a complex sale they better understand what you do and a 3 second view is not enough.

Facebook disagreed with us on this but we believe in the 10 second remarketing audience so if you boost a post that creates, well you can create a remarketing audience against that particular video or against people who’ve liked or commented or whatever then you may market them.

So people who sees Marcus’ amazing ribs on Bondi Beach, you see that’s your business, right? They see this thing, “Oh yeah! Marcus’ ribs are so good” and Marcus here’s a video, “Hey Marcus! Show us your secret sauce and how you make the ribs and show me as you grill these ribs and your whole process on making delicious ribs” You do this, it’s a 1 minute video, we boost it. then we make an audience - a custom audience --- people that watch at least 10 seconds, making his ribs, about how we started making these ribs.. And I'm making up this business okay, I thought about it when we were in Sydney last month.

Marcus: (laughs) Well i think this sort of ties in with the whole Salt Bae meme happening this year actually. It's a very similar story that you’re suggesting.

Dennis: So now u built an audience. It's the first step. Most people, they don't even know about your business. And a lot of people, even the bigger brands, they think everyone knows what they do. That's not necessarily even the case. So you’ve got to create that first touch.

The cheapest remarketing audience, is the video for your audience. If you have the video. That’s usually where people get hung up, you just need an iPhone, you don’t need a professional video crew, you can hire students.And then you remarket. And then you say that anyone who’s watching video A, then send them to the landing page, to buy Marcus’ rib sauce.

Or, here’s a special, buy 1 get 1 free ribs if you bring you and your girlfriend, or something like that. Well something that’s a second touch is based on the fact that they watch that video for 10seconds. And we have done this all over the place. The difficulty is overcoming that mental barrier: “Oh I don’t want to be on video” “Oh, costs too much” “Oh, I don’t have time” “Oh, I’ll do it next week” “Oh, I’m redoing my website, I don’t want to do this now” Come oonnn… Right? You make your 1 minute videos, so literally you make that list 10 topics that you’d like to talk about. Or if you don’t want to be on camera because you don’t like how your hair looks or whatever. I don’t want to be on camera. I’m 70 lbs overweight. I don’t wanna be on camera. Right?

Marcus: (laughing)

Dennis: But I do. And you can interview other people. If you don’t wanna be the one on camera, and you get 10 minutes and you ask that person or someone asks you 10 questions, 1 minute each. You’ve got 10 videos. And then you put them on your page all at once. And you boost ‘em to the audiences that you know are gonna work, you build remarketing audiences then you drive that remarketing audience to a sale. And then you have the 3 parts of the funnel, right? Awareness, engagement and conversion. Awareness with a 1 minute video about who you are, and something interesting, and you want to get this up to 15 seconds, and if they’re not 15 seconds then something’s wrong. And you don’t have to be, a basketball team or you know, a musician, to get 15 seconds.

Any vertical b2b, doesn’t matter you can get 15 seconds. We’ve seen other b2b folks, like Jason Miller of LinkedIn, he’ll get up to 55 seconds on some of his videos because we target the right audience, they want to see what he’s got to say. Right? That’s awareness. Then you drive people to the website. Or you drive them to a lead ad, collect an email address, that’s engagement. And then the people you have from there, you drive to the sale. On the thing that you have to sell, and you run a dark post air, or you run the kind of ads that you typically run.

It could be, steal some of your google ads, and you try them on Facebook, you try to copy whatever you know is working. And Facebook also said yesterday, that… I can’t give away anything that’s secret, but, I don’t think any of these stuff is all that secret. But they said, ads that work on Facebook are just fundamentally good ads. Right? I mean, if it’s not a good ad, it’s not gonna work on Facebook. And if it’s a good ad, and it works on Facebook, by definition it’s gonna be a good ad.

Marcus: It’s gonna be a good ad, yeah.

Dennis: The problem is not that Facebook is hard, the problem is that people have crappy ads. Anyway, don’t get me started. No funnel.

Marcus: I think, look. I’ll be honest with you, I have to agree. I think that sort of separates the winners from the losers as far as ads are concerned is. It’s just the quality of ads and how much effort someone actually put some effort to it.

By effort, obviously I’m talking about testing, changing copy, changing format whether it’s video, text, or even an Adword. There’s a whole bunch of different things that you can target with specific keywords or how you convey the message and I think the one thing that a lot of people aren’t relying on so much these days but they really should be is relying on current current trends. So the whole covfefe thing going on Twitter at the moment, that’s sort of blown up and you know a lot of people are starting to get trashy with that. Fire festival was really, look I won’t lie like it kind of fell on itself and people really took advantage of that as far as marketing was concerned.

I’ve got in front of me right now he Blitzmetrics Cheat Sheet of Social Amplification Engine and I have to say that it's really thorough. I’ve had this for about a month on me since you first sent it to me and I’m really impressed by the brevity of everything because it’s literally just a checklist of everything you need to get done in the simplest form, we did run through a fair bit of it but I was wondering if you could just give us a brief overview in the Dennis Yu way of the Social Amplification Engine.

Dennis: So a lot of people are looking for tips, they’re looking for one off little secrets and we like to have strategies. In other words, the difference between a strategy and a tactic is a strategy is something that you will continue to produce and it's not based on a trick that’s going to go away. So the Social Amplification Engine the reason that we called it this is there are 6 phases that we believe everyone should go through and it happens to work for Google Email and Direct Mail and any kind of marketing where there is a sale involved where you have to somehow make some money. It works like this, the first phase is Plumbing.

Plumbing is all the tracking and the pixels, we’d like to put Google Tag Manager in there. You know there are 4 universal pixels now that you can run and stick inside a container inside Tag Manager.

You’ve got Google, Facebook, Twitter and then a month ago, Linkedin launched a universal pixel. So universal pixel gives you analytics and remarketing, right? These 4 networks give you the remarketing and you can upload email addresses. On Linkedin, you got a 75% match rate now on company email addresses. You’d imagine on Google you’d might get 15 and Facebook you get 10% as a match rate. So when you’re able to capture all of these audiences and you have your plumbing rate, you’re sending signal back to the engine of what’s converting and not. Of course, they’re looking at the bounce rate of your website whether or not it came from an ad. Of course they’re going to use that to help you optimize, any signal that they can.

The offline conversion API which is brand new, there’s mobile devices where they see you where you are, they can see offer redemption whether people using GPS are in your area if you’re a local merchant, let’s say Marcus’ Rib Place. All of these data, you have got to be able to feedback the engine for proper analytics and so that they can optimize for you and do the work for you with all their AI, optimize CPM lookalike audiences, collaborate filtering, like this and like that.

All that kind of logic you want Facebook to do the work for you so the first step is the plumbing and most people they get hung up because they don’t like Javascript or they're using some crappy WordPress plugin. It's not that hard and we've trained up young adults and you can pay them $75 to $150 and they'll do the whole thing for you, right? So that's plumbing.

Second is goals. So, if we have awareness, engagement and conversion, as the funnel. Then we need to have goals. How big does our video view audience need to be? So we can collect these number of leads, and if we have these number of leads, how many sales can we drive? Whatever your funnel looks like, you've gotta determine a cost per at each of these. And those happened to a line, with Facebook's business objective. So you know when you do a post on a page, I don't mean the profile. But when you have a Facebook business page, where a public figure page for you as a person, not a profile, nor something that people can become a fan,not become a friend which is the use of profile.

Marcus: Basically like a Facebook authority page.

Dennis: Yeah. So when you have a public figure page, that's actually a type of business page. And you've a page for your business, when you do a post on that page you can say "hey, I wanna drive calls, I have an offer, here's this video, or here's a product I have to sell"

All these you can actually get messages, there's now Messenger bots. You can get phone calls they can call your phone number. Write directly right from the ad. When you make that kind of post, that by definition is a business objective, right? So you're saying "hey Facebook I want calls. Here's my number blah blah blah" Like if you configure your page properly and put in your phone number and you say you want calls, then Facebook is gonna use that phone number. Right? If you say you want leads, you run a lead ad. And you say a lead is worth $3 or whatever it is that you calculate about what a lead is worth, they're gonna do that for you so they're splitting this and making it easier.

There used to be 37 different ad types. Four years ago. I've written so many articles, now there's 17 ad types. Now there's 28 ad types. So many ad types. And so people are trying to keep up like "oh man, how many ad types are there this month? I need to look at Dennis' article on how many ad types there are" And those are the ones that got the most traffic too I couldn't believe 'em, like oh my goodness. Do people really wanna see this? We could talk about the new ad types that Facebook's released the last couple of months and people would love to hear that but I've just don't think that's strategically important.

I think what's important is your business objectives. And Facebook made it easier to select those. And against the business objective, you need content. So the content could be common to my store, "I've got amazing ribs" or could be something based on the fact that they've already seen your first video. What are you gonna tell 'em now?

Well now that you know what my rib shop is, I'm right next to the beach, let me tell you the specials that I have. Right? And then the conversion video or article or link or landing page or whatever, assuming that you've already had a couple of touches and they're already aware of what you're doing. They've engaged, right? We've said awareness, engagement and conversion. Right? Content for each of those business objectives instead of trying to cold convert everyone on the first touch which is what like 90% of people who come in and try to do Facebook ads do and then they wonder why it doesn't work. Right? Put in that work to setup those three parts of the funnel that the content in each stage, then you have targeting. And targeting is custom audiences, the look-alike audiences based on the custom audiences, it's media targeting, trying to get influence and be cited in another magazine. And you know, tv and stuff like that. And people that you think are your customers, targeting competitors', all that kind of targeting is probably the number 1 thing that people jump in to when they wanna do Facebook ads. They go "aahh, I can target these people. I can target that. I can target their income. I can target their POS data" which is available now in Australia right? You have the supermarkets and their credit card companies all put in this data that has nothing to do with someone being on Facebook liking something but they're actual transactional data. POS data, cube level data, being matched back into Facebook right? Voter registration, product warranty cards, DMV you know car registration data, all those stuff's being matched back to Facebook. Of course it is, right. Most people they come in and they get overwhelmed at all targeting, and they end up overtargeting like we talked about.

Instead of having a few simple targets. A few custom audiences that go all the way back for your plumbing. They go back to who you know is actually... most clients, businesses we worked with, they don't even know who their customers are. They think they know who the customers. And they're flat out wrong, right? A few audience insight, and start the profile who's actually buying, you might find that especially if you hire a social media consultant on with this. And they start posting pictures of cats or whatever it is. And they're just posting it, or they're not even doing that and no one's seeing it.

That might not even intersect with who your actual audience is so you're just wasting money. And you say Facebook doesn't work, well 'cause it's you don't know what you're doing. Right? That's the targeting and now there's 2 more stages: amplification, which is creating the ads that's combinations of content and targeting and you're trying different combinations; and optimization is scaling it to be able to spend more money once you have this thing converting.

Usually you start with custom audience to prove that there's ROI. And once you've proven that this thing's starting to make money and this Facebook thing is worthwhile, and is good. Then you can start to expand and there's different things that you do to expand so you go from plumbing, to goals, content and targeting like we said, right? Goal, content and targeting strategy that's something used by business owners or marketer or what have you an agency or whatever it is you have to provide that because that is strategy that is no one else can provide, the heart of what you're, whatever you're selling. You know some product.

Only you can provide that. Goals, content and targeting right? We talked about that. Then amplification and optimization is how do I take the thing that's working and dragging sales? And get more of it? And I don't mean driving sales in Facebook, I just mean in general, like people they're buying your stuff, people are walking into your store, they're going. You have this thing on Shopify and people are buying whatever it is you're selling. You have to have something that's working. And then use Facebook to scale it.

I know a lot of people they say "yeah, you can just start your business and all of a sudden in Facebook you can take off" and yes there are stories of that, but we find by and large that people that are succeeding on Facebook they already have a business that selling. And now they wanna scale it. Now they wanna make more content. They've already got customers that love them. So it's easy for them to get reviews. Just like we talked about at the start of content right?

Marcus: Yup.

Dennis: We need people who will talk about you. So if you're collecting that kind of content, 3 stages of the funnel and you're boosting it. You're not boosting your content. I mean, initially maybe you are because you're the founder and it's your story or whatever but eventually you're boosting other people's content so we have content that's made that Facebook said about us. It's on Facebook's blog, on how we're doing things the right way. So they hold us up as an example.

Right for the Golden State Warriors, the basketball team. And so we're boosting content that Facebook made. We're boosting content, not just testimonials but other people that are sharing our techniques. Other people that are saying good things so when you boost someone else's content, that's when word of mouth actually works at scale on Facebook. But if you don't have that kind of word of mouth, well why is that? Is it 'cause you're brand new? Well you haven't figured out your goals, content and targeting. Is it because you actually suck? And you really don't have that much, you don't have a clear value proposition, well it's not a Facebook issue it's a strategy issue. Goes back to goals, content and targeting. Or maybe you're just not collecting it. Maybe it's there and you just need to hire a VA or what have you just to collect all the stuff for you and then you've got you're content already made and then you could run your funnel.

That's usually one of those things. And if you follow these six phases, blitzmatrix.com/tips I think might be the latest. We update these things every couple of weeks. So if you got them a few weeks ago, you might want to get it again just to make sure. This is the sum of 21 years of us testing ads and we've condensed it down to this one page. And, you can spend lots of money from all these other people. Or you can get this thing for free. Of course we sell courses to get into the more detail but you don't have to do that and Facebook has Facebook blueprint. Which is free courses, Google has free courses too which I would argue are better in some ways.

Marcus: (laughing) ooohh, that's a big call Dennis...

Dennis: (laughing) well depends on what area right? I mean, there's many different groups that produce many different kinds of content. Like I told you, FB auction live I think that's some pretty good stuff. It shows you how the auction works and it shows you how do you get the traffic for cheaper and how do you optimize.

One of the dumb things that people do when they're advertising is Facebook's producing it and they've got good Q and A, and you know, like any good thing that we see from Facebook, it'll only be good for a few months and whoever's in charge of it will go work at another group and then that thing will die and so just, you know use it while you can.

Marcus: Use it while you can. Yeah. I think what I'll do as well is I'll tidy up all the links and attach them to the podcast as well so people can access it quite easily. But you know it's really good to hear about the social amplification engine, like I said I'm blown away by the brevity of it. It's a really really simple checklist. I'll definitely be sending this through to our listeners today.

I'm assuming that this process is also how it puts metrics up and running into developing its high growth environment. With content, specifically where you go through providing that viable content online. Being able to on a daily, weekly, hourly basis. Did you just work on this by yourself? Or did you pull someone in to help you with that as well?

Dennis: Oh my goodness, I used to...I've written articles about how I hustle and all and only sleep a few hours at night. And the forty thousand rule, I think I'm up at 40 thousand hours of online marketing practice and all those. But you know there's no one person that can do alone. And we've scaled this. I don't come in and I'll try something. Maybe Facebook gives us access to something new and we'll try it. And try it a few times and document it to the point where we feel like there's a checklist that's working. Like the social amplification engine. But then the proof of whether your content is any good, is if you give it to someone else and they can get the same result just like any kind of hypothesis or experiment.

Someone asked to complete what you're doing and get the same result, and fine Gary or Chuck or if you're Coca Cola, you know it's gonna be hard for other people to repeat your results. Right? So we've been giving these checklist to very smart enterprising, hardworking young adults to run on businesses only with a little bit of support. Sometimes a lot of support. Just to make sure that we can, as these young adults are going through these checklists and implementing this is not a consultant. This is why you should always be implementing first. Even if you wanna hire someone else to do it 'cause you're too busy and you don't wanna do it. Screw it WordPress or whatever. You should always do it first yourself, just to see. And then have someone else execute the checklist. And we're a learning company.

We're a software education company. We have a few people that are always trying new stuff. And you know the thing with experiments, you kinda fail like 95% of the time. I don't care how good you are, you're gonna fail most of the time. Eventually, you're gonna discover patterns, put 'em in a checklist, and then you allow the common masses to follow you and then you're going to feel pretty secure about what's going to work.

And our guy who's in charge of operation, his name is Logan Young. And he's doing it for only 15 months, not for long at all, just over a year. He graduated college with a degree in Advertising from BYU which is in Salt Lake city, that area. He's then been training up all their people, to do the same thing. And those people have been training other people and he's an example as someone who's very smart at being able to follow directions, to get the result. Just like, you ever cooked Marcus?

Marcus: uhh...yeah. (laughs) yes, I do.

Dennis: It means I'm going to eat now. But you know there's recipes right. Think of your favorite recipe and if it's something like baking, "you know what I'm just gonna double the chocolate chips. Or, you know I don't need any yeast, what the heck's this anyway, I don't need that to make my bread." If you skip the recipe, and some things you can tweak like if you're barbecuing and you use extra sauce you used too much or like you've changed the mix of too much soy sauce.

Okay that's fine a little too much salt okay whatever, but if you're baking. And you don't follow the directions, you're not gonna get what you want. And we believe that with online marketing because of the way Facebook has set up their system, they need you to follow things on a certain way. And so this social amplification engine, is what we've found to work. And so when we train other people to be guinea pigs or dog food whatever the analogy is to do this, and then they can go through it multiple times and teach other people, that is what our business is founded on.And there are people that have gone thru this enough times, they've already seen it.

So from an operation standpoint, you have folks like Logan that are running what's effectively a mini agency. Right? We are a software company but in order for our software and our training to be in a good, we have to have done it enough times that we know it works and publish it out there. So that anybody can see for themselves which things are working. They don't have to hire us, right? We're not trying to hire 200 people. We just need enough people which we have. Enough people to test out how you create ads. To test out, what kind of videos are working and what are the different components of a video. Test out how do you segment a custom audiences, so that you can do this without...we just put it out there, right?So Facebook says, "yup, this is the way to do it" or Facebook tells us "no, based on what they told us yesterday here's a couple of tweaks you need to make" Okay, we're gonna tweak it and we're gonna test it and see does it work or does it not work. Or only in certain situations does it work.

So, the idea of learn, do, teach is, we'll learn from Facebook and Google whatever the latest things are, and if people wanna hear about that, we're happy to share. But you're gonna find that some of it's true and some of it isn't. You know Google tells us stuff right? And sometimes it's true, and sometimes you can't buy any links and you'll get in trouble. And then you know, last 10 years we find that it still works in certain areas. So you gotta test it out. And when we find certain things that work enough times, then we put 'em into a checklist. And we give them out just like you should just, you don't have to pay us all these money, just download some of our stuff and share get out.

Marcus: Yup, I definitely agree with you. I think, specifically with the social amplification engine, like I said, I had it with me just over a month ago. When I first met you in Sydney and, I implemented a couple of the points specifically with the goals, content, targeting aspect and sort of getting into the daily grind of that.

I have to admit, it's pretty clear as a path for anyone in marketing to, not just marketing even, I'd even stretch it out to businesses to be honest with you. For anyone who's looking into to amplify the reach of their business, and obviously as far as the optimization and plumbing is concerned, pulling someone across to help you and using the entire system. I think that can definitely be applied to a lot of businesses.

Specifically, in the natures of realties for instance, who are looking for clients and not necessarily trying to cold-sell upfront. You know I think it's a great way for a lot of people to build that influence for themselves. With the free valuable content, and obviously if it works as a free, you can imagine people would want to invest in that and put their money into those businesses to amplify their own. So yeah, like I said Dennis, when I met you I'm very very excited to have come across the social amplification engine with you. God that's a really long word! (laughs) Yeah and you know I recall having Logan here in Sydney as well so, I'll definitely have a chat to him and see if we can pull him onboard for a podcast. I'm sure he'd be more than happy to. We'd be very very happy to pick his brains about the operations that's BlitzMetrics as well.

But I really wanna say thank you for your time today Dennis. I really appreciate it. And I'm sure our listeners are gonna get a lot of value out of today's chat. I'll put everything into a document and load it up for everyone to have all the links to the engine itself. Facebook auction live and all the training from Facebook and Google just to make sure everybody's gonna be able to compete on the same page and run through it with you. So again, really appreciate your time today Dennis. And hopefully all the best with BlitzMetrics, I'm sure we'll be hearing more from you in the future as well.

Dennis: Yeah, well see you in Sydney, thanks Marcus! Thanks for putting in your time and I'd love to get any feedback from the listeners on what's working, what's not working for them, you know anything that's difficult. Anything that we can do to improve.

Marcus: Yeah, sure. We'll do, we'll start a thread on the warrior forum. And we'll get everyone to have some input on there, and we'll have you on the Warrior Forum as well. Just so you can get some feedback and obviously have a chat with some of the members, I'm sure they're gonna get great value out of you as well.

Dennis: Yeah, fantastic.

Marcus: Alright, well thanks again for your time today Dennis.

Dennis: Thanks Marcus!

Marcus: So there we have it guys. A very first podcast with our special guest, Dennis Yu. I hope everybody's learned something new and refreshing to help out with their businesses and Facebook ads. I'll make sure to have all the cheat sheets, links listed out for you in the description. If you wanna give us some feedback, or if you'd like to suggest a special guest, or topic at discussion, let me know. You can send me an email to scoop@warriorforum.com .

You can reply to the thread on the warrior forum. Or, you can send us a tweet. @warriorforum If you'd like to hear more from us, make sure to follow us on Twitter and like this podcast. Have a great day everyone! And I look forward to sharing the next podcast with you.

Warrior Podcast: Dennis Yu @ BlitzMetrics on Mastering Facebook Ads (2024)

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