Today in Digital Marketing - SPECIAL: How to Audit a Meta Ads Account

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Starting point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected, be Zen. It is Monday, August 7th, and it is a holiday here in Canada. So instead of our usual newscast, we present this special deep dive episode. There's an old saying in marketing that goes like this. Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don't know which half. But one of the ways that we figure out which half is through auditing the ad accounts we have. But how do you audit? What do you look for? And how deep do you need to go? Today in this special episode, a deep dive into auditing your meta ad account. And with me to chat about it is Alex Afterman. Alex has been managing meta ads for almost a decade now for a wide range

Starting point is 00:01:05 of e-commerce clients. His website is 1111digital.com. Alex, welcome. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. Should I say 1111digital? How do you prefer? Yes, 1111digital. Yeah, yeah. Fair enough. I wasn't sure. Yeah, totally. I want to get into the weeds of it all in a moment, but can you give us the landscape on these? Are there different types of audits or is everyone more or less doing the same sort of template?

Starting point is 00:01:32 There are definitely different types of audits. So the one that I've most commonly done over the course of my career is a live audit. So we'll do a Zoom and a screen share and we'll go through the ad account together. Oftentimes, if a client will show me their Shopify analytics or any third party analytics, we'll go through the ad account together. Oftentimes, if a client will show me their Shopify analytics or any third party analytics, we'll look at those to look at other factors that affect the ad account outside of it, like AOV and conversion rate and things like that. But it's live, right? And we look together and they usually will have some questions and I'll kind of point out stuff. Sometimes I'll take control of the screen through Zoom and kind

Starting point is 00:02:04 of poke around the account myself and ask some questions about things. But I used to do a lot of those. I was in a few different Facebook groups where I'd have office hours. And people would sign up. And I'd put two hours I'll be available. And I'd try to get through as many of them as I could and help as many people as possible. I don't do those as part of a group anymore. But I do do those by

Starting point is 00:02:25 appointment. Then there's what I do now for Andrew Foxwell's Foxwell Founders Group is these, they're kind of bite-sized audits. So the Founders Group is a great organization, right, run by Andrew Foxwell, who's an amazing digital marketer. And one of the membership perks is a monthly free audit where the client the client or the the member will send in a five minute loom video of their ad account and some questions and then i'll reply back with an email i'm the in-house auditor so i reply back with an email and some thoughts on how to help them and it's kind of cool because like you know the next month they'll send a like a response it's like oh that really worked or that didn't work so much and so it's nice to have kind of an ongoing dialogue with some of these people.

Starting point is 00:03:07 But that is definitely more of the bite-size audit. But the kind of more involved one would include interaction and, like you said, sources outside of meta as well. So just getting a fuller picture of what's going on. Right. We definitely vote for Andrew's Foxville Founders Group. We've been in it since the start. We pay for vote for Andrew's Foxville Founders Group. We've been in it since the start. We pay for it. It's not comped or anything. We do have an affiliate link, which is b.link slash founders. So Alex, tell me about like the most common issues you see when you're auditing a meta ad account. Sure. So I would say the biggest one by far

Starting point is 00:03:41 is overly complex campaign structures. So, you know, I've been doing this a long time. And like back in 2017, you actually really needed these like very elaborate Byzantine campaign structures. You're doing a bunch of different campaigns and ad sets. And I'm doing this bit here and that bit there. Like retargeting ladders where I'm going to the people that visited in the last one day get this. The last three days get that um and that just doesn't work that much that well anymore especially post iOS excuse me iOS 14 but just meta has gotten kind of better and better at figuring things out and the you know I I don't want I don't want to say you leave everything to meta I know they would

Starting point is 00:04:21 like that um but I have learned to leave more and more of the some this decision making to them um it's kind of a bummer actually because i you know i thought i was actually really good at making these very complex structures like it was one of the things that i felt kind of set me apart back in 2017 and i was like hey i'm good at this cool um but it just doesn't help anymore and it actually hurts uh you know more than it helps so i was gonna ask if it hurt yeah i remember those where where there's sort of one campaign and then you had 10 ad sets for every age range and they were all, and there were even, you know, like if someone viewed something from one to three days ago, they'd move into a different ad set

Starting point is 00:04:57 and it was all very complicated. But I'm surprised actually to hear you say, I mean, certainly it makes sense that there's missed opportunities if the AI is that strong. But I'm surprised to hear you say that splitting them up or being so detailed could hurt. I think especially with the data loss that Meta has gotten from privacy, like, you know, iOS 14 and privacy concerns, I just feel like it needs a certain amount of data to learn and optimize correctly. And the more you fragment that, the harder it becomes for it. It's also, you know, attribution is such a thorny subject, but, you know, ultimately, the success or failure of your ad account is expressed in the revenue and the business ROAS, right? And especially like right after iOS 14, it was very hard to see what ads or ad sets were working in meta. Now there's some great third party tools and meta is better, but it's still like, ultimately, like, you know,

Starting point is 00:05:52 if you have a very complex structure, it's very hard to tell what's actually moving the needle. If you can't trust the in platform reporting, you're like, well, I turned this out off. Do I see any result in the revenue? Hard to tell because it's one of 50 ads. If you have four main ads running and you turn one off, you should see an effect in the revenue. You get a better feel for, oh, that was a good idea or that was a mistake. So keeping that flatter structure is, I think, better for meta in that it actually operates better. And it's better for us to figure out what's working and what isn't. So that's structurally what what you look for and some mistakes that you've seen along the way. Let's talk a bit about creative. What are you

Starting point is 00:06:33 noticing that people are doing that may not be quite as effective on the creative side of things? Yeah, so well, so first of all, not doing enough creative at all is a big one. So a big red flag I see, and I see this a lot in these audits, is no creative testing. You know, somebody has an ad that works pretty well and they're just running with it or they're just like kind of they're taking an ad. And if it doesn't work to this audience, they're going to try to that audience and that audience. And creative is the single biggest driver of success on on Facebook ads. So, you know, having testing creative is so crucial. And I want to see, you know, a regular creative testing process. There's different ways to do it. But but having a some process, I think, is very important. So so not enough creative testing at all is a big one and then another big one is creative different differentiation um so you know there's the phrase creative is your targeting um so facebook will kind of pick segments of audience like if you're if you're only running still images there's a segment of audience that facebook knows or thinks response to still images and there's another segment that they maybe think responds better to videos, you're just not going to get in front of those people. So having a mix of video

Starting point is 00:07:48 and static and UGC kind of more rough style video and more polished kind of brand focus video, founder stories, you know, having a wide variety of different creative, I think is more important. It's kind of taken the place of these very elaborate campaign structures that are no longer, you know, very effective. So that, that's what I see is not enough testing at all. And then, you know, even if they are testing, it's all the same kind of thing. It's like, oh, I have, I, UGC works in my account. So I'm running all UGC and all of my new creative is all UGC and I'm never trying anything else. UGC is what I'm doing. Or like still images, still images. I hear this, I hear this kind of thing a lot. Like,

Starting point is 00:08:30 oh, in my account, images work and videos don't. Like, well, you know, you may be right, but I would like to see that consistently tested and proven. So just back to the structure for a minute to combine these two thoughts. So would your recommendation be, and I know obviously it changes for brands, blah, blah, blah. But that we're looking at sort of like one campaign, one ad set and then 30 different ads. And inside each ad unit is a single creative. I want to get into the weeds of structurally how you put all of that creative in without complicating the structure? So there's a lot of different ways to do it. So actually, one of my main mantras on Facebook ads

Starting point is 00:09:09 is there's no one absolute right way to do it. But I guess my preferred way is have maybe one to three prospecting campaigns, have ad sets under that, have ideally three to four live ads in each of those ad sets. And then a creative testing campaign where I'm testing all of my different variety of creative, and then I'm putting the stuff that works up into the prospecting campaigns. So typically, like, I think, in a in a very healthy account, I'll have, you know, whatever my three prospecting campaigns, I'll have some ad sets under that. And in each ad set, there'll have, you know, whatever my three prospecting campaigns, I'll have some ad sets under that. And in each ad set, there'll be like a video and a still image and a UGC. That's sort of like, you know, kind of the platonic ideal of a structure, like if everything's

Starting point is 00:09:58 working great, and you have all this great creative and all these different styles, that I think is most effective in reality you know again not a lot of people do all this creative differentiation differentiation it is true in some accounts like you know you you know UGC just doesn't seem to work for them or brand videos don't seem to work so you don't have to keep banging your head on the wall and like I need I need these four different types because Cause I, you know, they're creative differentiation, but you know, ideally you have at least a few different creative types in each of your ad sets or at least most of your ad sets. Um, and then, you know, just a few ad sets creative underneath that different types, again, like three to four, maybe five in each. Um, I mean, this gets a little in the weeds, but advantage plus is a little bit different in each. Maybe this gets a little in the weeds, but Advantage Plus is a little bit different in that you can have more creative sitting under there. So there it's not uncommon to have like six, eight, 10 creative sitting in an Advantage Plus campaign. But in a kind of

Starting point is 00:10:56 traditional conversion campaign, I like three to four. But ideally, it's a mix of different creative types. And Advantage Plus, just to back up a little bit, is this sort of the more AI generated, not generated, but AI based machine learning based, you know. So, again, moving towards sort of a simplification, I guess the closest comparison on the Google side might be performance max, maybe. Yeah, for sure. For sure. It's really, you know, it's it's ceding a lot of control to Facebook. And in my experience with Advantage Plus, when it works, it works really, really well. It doesn't always work. I have clients where I'm running a lot of Advantage Plus. I have, I think, one client where I'm only running Advantage Plus.

Starting point is 00:11:38 But in a few places, Advantage Plus just never took. And I consistently retried every five, six weeks. I'm like, I'm going to run an Advantage Plus. I just want to see. And it just doesn't take. So at least in my experience, it's great when it works. Always worth trying. Doesn't always work.

Starting point is 00:11:56 We share a friend in Barry Haught, who's also in the Foxwell Founders Group and a well-known senior direct marketer. Barry is fond of the saying of ugly ads. ads that are just they look atrocious. Like, I mean, they're just big, ugly, you know, I almost want to say Comic Sans font, you know, kind of just horrific looking ads. But, you know, he claims and there's some truth here that sometimes the ugly ads that stand out actually do perform. Has that been your experience when you've been auditing a meta ad account? Yeah, 100%. Absolutely. I am in complete agreement with Barry on that. Why do you think that is? You know, what you want to do with a meta ad is you want to grab

Starting point is 00:12:34 somebody's attention, and then get them to your website, or your meta shop or wherever it is that you're going to make the sale. But the biggest thing is getting somebody's attention, right? You're scrolling through your meta feed, you're not there to shop, right? You're there to like, you know, to put pictures of your family or do whatever. Um, and just getting somebody to stop that scroll has always been the most important thing you can do. Um, and so I think ugly ads really accomplish that people, I think two things. One is, um, sometimes they're just so over the top crazy you just stop because you're just like i can't believe that's on there right um and then the

Starting point is 00:13:09 other thing is you know the more that ads look like content um the better they tend to perform and this goes way you know my originally i worked in display ads way way way back when and you know the kind of the rise of sponsored content on publisher websites people realize that if you had an ad unit that looked like an article, it did really well because people want to interact with content. So I think these ugly ads, they're so ugly that you think that they can't be an ad, right? It's got to be a piece of content. And that will stop you. And really, all the ad needs to do is stop you and get you intrigued enough to move you on to someplace where we can talk to you more and convert you. Makes sense.

Starting point is 00:13:48 All right. So we've talked about the structure. We've talked about the creative. Let's talk a bit about the sort of the more the back end of things, product catalogs, pixels, conversion tracking, Cappy, all of that kind of stuff, connecting to Shopify and so on. When you are in these meta ad accounts for your audits, how well would you say the average brand is in using those more deeper hooked entities? It's much better now because a lot of it is automated, especially Shopify. You know, it's very turnkey now on Shopify. People on other platforms, it's a little bit trickier.

Starting point is 00:14:20 So I would say that the uptake on a lot of this stuff is much, much better than it used to be. In many cases, people actually don't know they're doing these things. But it's been, you know, it's, it's kind of automated in the back end. So they're pretty well connected. I don't, I don't typically see a lot of like, Cappy is not in place, this is not in place, that's not in place as much as I did even like a year or two ago. I just like, so that I would say, at least in my experience, and perhaps this is also the people I'm auditing, right? A lot of people in the Foxworld group. So they're already kind of involved

Starting point is 00:14:52 in digital marketing in some way. So, but I don't see that as a huge issue as much as kind of the other stuff I've mentioned. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters.

Starting point is 00:15:16 Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Alex, what tools do you use to do this work? Is it just you, a checklist and a Word document? Definitely Zoom. Right. So I'm talking less about the sort of the live back and forth and more like if you were, you know, even if you were doing it offline. I mean, are there tools that you use to go through this or is it more simple? Yeah, no, it's, it's actually, you know, when I started, I had a big checklist that I used and a kind of a, an order of things that I ran through. Um, but I've done so many of these at this point. I, it's just, it's very routine for me. Um, you

Starting point is 00:15:58 know, I have a certain way I do it. I go in, I start by looking at the audiences tab and as matter to see what audiences people are using and what they're not. I look at the pixel to see if the pixel is healthy and if events are firing and things like that. And then into Ads Manager. So now I'm just looking at the campaign structure and different ads. And one thing I like to do, especially if somebody's sending me an audit because things aren't working very well, I like to find a time when things were working really well and see what was happening. And sometimes if I can't find that on my own, I'll shoot an email like, hey, when was your best like month or a few weeks? I want to look at what

Starting point is 00:16:32 that looks like. But yeah, a lot of it, it's just it's basically second nature for me now. I don't want to ask you to give away your confidential pricing information, but can you tell me your confidential pricing information? How much does it cost to hire you to do this? Sure. So I do one hour audits via Zoom for $400. And I'll do like if a client wants to have a continuing relationship, like they want to do these once a month or once every couple of weeks, I'll do bulk pricing. But for a one off, it's $400. And that's and the way it would work then is you is there's no prep work at your end,

Starting point is 00:17:10 right? It's just essentially the first time you're seeing it is during that live call, or are you collecting some information before and then going into the zoom? Optional. I tell people if you want to send me as much information as you want, if you want to add me to the ad account, I'll go in and look before we talk. But I'm also comfortable just getting on the phone or getting on the Zoom and starting. Yeah, I used to really like that when I did these office hours. I felt like it kept me really sharp, you know, that you can't hide from it. You know, somebody, you're going to get into somebody's ad account, they're going to have questions, you better have answers. Well, and there's something to be said as well, security wise, from keeping the number of people

Starting point is 00:17:43 in your business manager down to as low as possible, given how easy exploits seem to be these days, cookie theft. And, you know, I even found out a way that they are scraping your two factor authentication backup codes, which I will not reveal how that happens, but it is shockingly easy for them to do. Alex, other than the ad products and the ad placements being different, some of the service names different, is auditing a meta account really much different than auditing, say, a Google account or any other ad platform account? I can't really speak to that too much because my area of expertise is really meta. I've done some Google, I've done a little bit of TikTok and a little bit of Snapchat, but my knowledge on those platforms is nowhere close to my knowledge of meta. But I believe, I believe that's likely I can tell you that. So I've, you know, just recently learned how to do TikTok ads, because I'm starting to offer TikTok ads as well. And just, you know,

Starting point is 00:18:40 understanding meta and understanding the interface, it was very easy to pick up TikTok. So I imagine that the audit process would be similar as well. You know, there's probably nuances that are different. I don't know, for example, that on TikTok, you want, you know, the amount of ads you want in ad set. I'm actually working with a rep. So I'll ask him things like, so how many ads do I want in this ad set? How many campaigns do I want to run? Things like that. These are things that I kind of intuitively know about meta. So those may be different platform to platform, but the ultimate, like the approach and what you're looking for, I think will be similar. Given how much of meta's ad product you see, are you generally bullish on meta's future? Like, you know, when we talk about platforms like TikTok and Pinterest and they're maturing,

Starting point is 00:19:21 I mean, you're right. I think that TikTok, especially their ad account interface looks sort of always about three years behind where Meta was. Yeah. Yeah. That's not a that's not a diss. That's just sort of, you know, where they are in their evolution. But, you know, where do you place Meta in terms of opportunities for the future and where marketers should be spending their money? Is it still a good place? Will it still be a good place in 24 months? Yeah. So I'm very bullish on meta for sure. I, you know, a few years ago, I thought, oh, the meta likes, you know, there were rumors of these privacy issues. And I thought, oh, maybe meta is going to become less effective. Maybe it's not a place to be.

Starting point is 00:19:58 It is less effective than it was in 2017. I mean, every year it gets a little harder. CPMs go up and, uh, you know, competition is higher and privacy concerns and everything. So it's not, it's not the platform it was in 2017, but I do still think it's the best customer acquisition platform out there. Um, yeah, I work with a lot of Google people. Oftentimes I'll partner with Google people on accounts. And what I hear a lot from them is I need need you to spend more on Facebook, because that will allow me to spend more on Google. So I do, I am very bullish on it. I think that, you know, it's a big company with a lot of smart people. They've made incredible strides on

Starting point is 00:20:36 kind of visibility, post privacy, I know they're working on like, I, I believe facebook it you know we'll never have the visibility we had before ios but it's much better than it used to be i think it's trending in the positive direction who knows what's gonna happen with threads but that could open up more more ad inventory um just like you know a few years ago right when there was a huge inventory crunch they came out with stories and suddenly there was a whole new set of inventory um So I am still very bullish on Meta. I think it is the best customer acquisition platform out there. I, you know, I have started to run TikTok ads. I think there's something really interesting there, but you know, I think most TikTok advertisers will tell you that you can't get the scale on TikTok that you can on, on Meta. I know I keep, I keep replacing Facebook and Meta back and forth. I should pick one and stick to it.

Starting point is 00:21:25 But I do think it's still the platform for customer acquisition. Not the only platform, but the best. We are recording this in mid-July, so it'll be out three weeks from now. It could be that many, many things change in that three-week period. But as we're recording this, Threads from Instagram, from Meta, has been launched. It's early days, of course. Where do you see Threads? I mean, assuming it hasn't been sold by now in the three weeks it's happened.

Starting point is 00:21:54 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where do you see Threads fitting in? Do you think that's going to be a fairly strong performer once they add it as a placement? Yeah, I think the history of ad placements on Facebook is mixed, right? Stories launched and was pretty good out of the gate. Instagram, for as great as Instagram

Starting point is 00:22:15 now is for ads, it was a rocky beginning. So I don't know that when they start putting ads, ad inventory into threads, it's going to immediately be incredible. But I trust them to get there. You know, I guess it's still a little up in the air

Starting point is 00:22:30 how threads is going to go. I know they launched with a ton of active users. I believe that they're pretty, the daily active users are down, I think. I have to admit, I'm not fully up on this, but I, you know, I think it's not quite as, people aren't quite as bullish on it as when it launched but i'm i think that it's a you know i've started using it as much or more than twitter

Starting point is 00:22:54 partly i have to admit because i just found twitter to be a really unpleasant experience recently um so i think if they can if they can just kind of make a few tweaks to it make it a little better of a user experience um i think you know and then put ads ad inventory in it i think that could be really good for advertisers all very interesting alex thank you so much for spending so much time with us and getting this deep into the weeds you know i feel like meta has evolved into a very complicated platform now. And to have someone who can just sort of walk us through the basics is, at least for my dumb ass, very, very helpful. Well, you know, it's funny.

Starting point is 00:23:33 I mean, you're right. It is a very complex platform. But, you know, trying to keep it simple is actually the best way to use it. For sure. Alex, thank you. You got it. Absolutely. Alex Afterman. You can learn more about his work at 1111digital.com,

Starting point is 00:23:47 which is the number one, repeated four times, 1111digital.com. So that'll do it for this special Canadian holiday edition. We'll be back tomorrow with the regular newscast. I'm Todd Mappin. Thanks for listening. See you then. When the days grow long, I'll get the summer time news. Thanks for listening. See you then.

Today in Digital Marketing - SPECIAL: How to Audit a Meta Ads Account

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