Trent:                  Everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the bright ideas podcast. As always, I am your host Trent deer Smith and I’m here to help you discover what is working in e-commerce by shining a light on the tools, the tactics and the strategies in use by today’s leading entrepreneurs and on the show with me today is Amanda Bond, owner of the ad strategist and creator of the strategy system. Entrepreneur magazine calls Amanda a Facebook advertising genius. She’s a fiery personality and she mixes education and entertainment in a straight shooting way to help people turn attention into revenue. And of course we all want more revenue and even better. She tells her, helps her people to put it on autopilot using Facebook ads, much like myself, she is a Canadian only she lives at the the wrong end of Canada. I’m all, I don’t even live in Canada anymore. She’s from Toronto, Ontario, Canada or Toronto is what we used to say. Welcome to the show.

Amanda:            Thank you so much for having me here and let’s just agree to disagree on the wrong side of Canada.

Trent:                  Yeah, sure we won’t. We won’t get bogged down in the bait on that. Okay,

Amanda:            Perfect.

Trent:                  So you are a Facebook advertising diva, but in your, let’s hear it from you in your own words, your own words rather.

Amanda:            All right, well now I am a speaker and educator in the Facebook advertising world, but I got to this place, not by just claiming that I was a self proclaimed guru and knew all the things about Facebook ads, but I’ve probably failed with Facebook ads, uh, with a lot more dollars than some people have spent to this point. Which no, it gives you the lessons that gives you the wisdom. It gives you the insight. Not to say that I haven’t wildly succeeded when we used to do ads for clients and began building an agency. So I’ve, I’ve been in the trenches, I’ve seen it all. Um, we do a lot of consulting for six, seven, eight figure different brands. We have an eight figure Korean skincare company who deploys the strategy system methods. And I just, I love Facebook ads. Why? Cause they’re, they’re just math. They’re not magic. Right.

Trent:                  [inaudible] so how much do you think you’ve spent?

Amanda:            I mean personally, I probably spent 1.5 of my fingers hitting the like keyboard to manage the ads myself. But by now I mean one of the people that we consult with, I’ve overseen and strategize and talk through there. There are 11 million in ad spend, just that one company alone. So I mean I only have tracked again what my fingers have personally hit publish on. So it would probably be at least at least eight figures, maybe multi eight figures by this point.

Trent:                  All right, so you, uh, say on your website and you said to me in our pre-interview that Facebook ads are debt are so like, what’s the deal with that?

Amanda:            So I go polarizing as you can tell. Um, it’s obviously sad facetiously because people are still getting results with Facebook ads just in a different way these days. And in 2019, I mean the CPMs have risen over the years. They’ve doubled and then they, you know, our link click costs are just going through the roof. Our CPAs are just like climbing sky-high. It’s crazy hard to be profitable, especially in the, the ramping from like seven figures to eight figures in e-com. If you are reliant specifically on Facebook ads as your main channel. I’ve watched some pretty fast growth come to a screeching halt at a certain point because they haven’t diversified their paid traffic or their media or their organic traffic strategies outside of this really small Facebook bubble. Um, which I mean we’re getting, we’re getting into the height of costs and it’s only going to continue to get more expensive as we move intoQ four of the year.

Amanda:            Facebook ads like they were in 2014 where you could just throw an add on and the like laugh all the way to the row as bank don’t work the same way as they do or as they did back then. Not to say that retargeting is an amazing, not to say that if you have amazing copy and creative and you’re just putting really great content out into the world, that you can’t be successful with them. They just require a different level of optimization, iteration and level of creativity than they did four years ago.

Trent:                  So I want to dive into that, but I want to ask you a question. First of all. Um, I had heard or read somewhere and I don’t remember where it was in the last maybe three months or so, that Facebook is basically just running out of inventory placement to put ads. There’s just not enough places to put the ads, which obviously isn’t then driving the costs up. Is there, is that true?

Amanda:            Uh, I mean, yeah, just from the economics of it. If they don’t have any other places to go and demand keeps crawling up, the only thing to do is like, essentially whenever we put an ad live, we’re entering ourselves into the auction, right? The cost to the starting bid back in 2014, 2015 was very low, but now Facebook has proven its value. It knows that it can get a certain level of return on, on the attention that they have out there. So even the starting bid is higher. But then when large corporations, when when big advertising money then comes to the platform, which a lot of it has in the last little while, what they can do is outspend all of the little guys and so when you have people really into outspend, I mean it is an auction so it’s just going to drive the price up and you know at the end of the day that means that there’s going to be a certain portion of the advertisers who ultimately become priced out of the market because they don’t have the strength in their sales process because their conversion rates aren’t as strong or because their marketing budgets aren’t even as big as these big guys out there that you know, could spend $1 million on a TV ad and not even technically track the ROI of that.

Trent:                  Yeah. You mentioned earlier in your intro there’s a big cloud, there’s, you mentioned one client in particular. Do you have an eye? I just interviewed a guy by the name of Mike Rhodes and episode two 83 of my show. And we were talking about Google, Google shopping. And so he’s a Google guy and you’re a Facebook person. Um, does this advertiser that you mentioned in the intro, do they, are they on all the channels that are on Google as well? Do you know?

Amanda:            They’re on all the channels they’re doing, uh, ad roll. What’s now? I’m trying to think of the, um, Oh my gosh, why can’t I think of the company? What’s ad role? There’s another that does just placements in different articles. They’re everywhere.

Trent:                  Yeah. I’m not the expert tasks, Chris.

Amanda:            They’re experimenting on different platforms. So yeah, they are pretty diversified everywhere. However, um, the, the management definitely came from a strong performance marketing background, which meant that they had a really strong reliance on Facebook.

Trent:                  Do you know how into, like, in September of 2019, do you know how Roaz compares on Facebook versus Google for the same thing?

Amanda:            Mm, that’s that. I don’t have the specifics on that.

Trent:                  Okay. Alright. So the goal here in this interview is to make people by the time they get to the end of it, smarter about advertising on Facebook than they were when they started it. So we need to make good on that promise. And I want to do that by basically using an example and then kind of let’s talk about the results of them. Let’s unpack it in reverse so that people can avoid making stupid mistakes and paying a dumb tax. So let’s talk about, um, I’d asked you to be prepared to answer a question about an incredible results that you had achieved. So what is that result?

Amanda:            Mmm, my, my, like one of my proud moments is I, it’s not in the e-com space, unfortunately. Actually, no, it is in the e-com space. It’s the same client. But we did, we had a $700,000 day and watching that all roll out as a result of growing their e-com side of the business, their information side of the business, seeing them be in business for 10 years to then create this level of momentum was really amazing. Um, but I guess I’ll use that exact same client that I’m really proud of. Their planner sales for 20, it would’ve been the 2019 planner. So last year, starting in a prelaunch of July, um, we absolutely crushed it with one planner did approximately one point $5 million in sales for that one product.

Trent:                  What can you, are you at Liberty to say what company this was?

Amanda:            Uh, I’m just not going to disclose on here just cause I didn’t ask specifically for the purpose.

Trent:                  Fair enough. Okay. So they sold a million and a half bucks worth of a planner. Um, let’s start unpacking it. What did it look like? How did you do it? How did Facebook play a role?

Amanda:            Yeah. Well, first of all, I always like to remember like remind people that getting to that result took time, right? There’s so much, there’s so much, um, not adding context in our industry and just touting these big astronomical numbers without sharing the journey that it took to get to that point. So this client of ours, I mean they had worked tirelessly for years to get their brand to the point where their email list was almost a million people across different verticals of that company, right? So yes, we had a physical product, but it wasn’t a physical product that was just launched, I believe it was their fourth year launching it. And they launched a brand new design, right? So there was a lot of hype beforehand. They created a prelaunch wait list of past customers who had success with this planner. And if you know anything about like planner aficionados, they’re very specific. Like once you find one, you use it over and over again. Is that you Trent?

Trent:                  It was back in the back in the day before smart phones and electronic calendars and all that kind of stuff. There was this company and I, and it was a date, it was called daytimer and I don’t even remember the brand name. You get the leather thing and you’d buy the inserts every, I mean, I, I’m dude, I was like, I was, every year I bought the same thing.

Amanda:            It becomes like a little ritual, right? So I mean, when you’re doing e-comm and you pick a product that has that like annual ritualistic like behavior, then what happens is your repeat customers just skyrocket. So I think out of the gate, um, on the first day our repeat purchasers was almost 50% of people that had purchased in, in prior years. So I mean, I see averages and please share any averages that you see. I’ll see repeat customers around or returning customer rates around like 20 to like 35 on average. And out of the gate they had a strong uptick from past customers.

Trent:                  So let me interrupt with this because we’re talking about Facebook and the ad campaign and they had all these other assets. Was that one and a half million attributed to the Facebook campaign or was that one and a half million attributed from everything?

Amanda:            Uh, both. So the, if I pulled it up, I think 1.3 came specifically from campaigns, um, and on Facebook and upsells, cross sells like different things like that. And then the actual physical planner itself went on to to do organic as well. We actually like, so out of the gate we are talking about returning customer rate. So they had a strong returning customer rate and I believe the reason that we saw such strength out of the gate was using and targeting our warm custom audiences. I call them the six buckets, which if you run ads, you can target your website traffic, you can target your email subscribers, you target your Facebook page engagers. So anyone who’s liked, commented, shared, uh, click the link, right? That’s why we find it so important to build [inaudible] assets like social media assets and not necessarily just to drive traffic to your product, but to create an engaging, thriving community to then to then drive to the product, right? So like getting that audience size up. You can target your video viewers on Facebook and then the same engagement and video viewers on Instagram. The combined size of that audience going into the initial first month launch, um, was over, I believe it was like 3 million warm audience size, which again, it’s because they’ve been in business for so long, it’s because they’ve been doing all of the right things years or like year over year.

Trent:                  But even just what you said there is, is, is actionable knowledge for the listener because I’m listening to that and I’m going, yeah, I don’t really do my six markets.

Amanda:            And I mean honestly in Facebook ad success across any industry, your lowest CPAs will come from those six buckets. Like we did an ad spend study of $48,000 where we split out each of those different buckets and then we compared it to cold audiences going into a launch for a digital program. And the cost per lead for the warm buckets collectively against the cold traffic was 50 to a hundred percent cheaper, right? So costs two times more to get cold traffic and that cold traffic is less likely to purchase even after going through that launch sequence. Right. So like if the biggest thing that you take away from this conversation today is go focus on growing those six warm buckets, it will lower your CPAs drastically over the long run. Right? Yup. And again, everyone, like as I’m saying it out loud, I’m hearing myself almost self criticized being like, Oh yeah, it’s really easy to get results when your client was in business for so long and had such low like large audiences. But then my response to that is like, yeah, that’s the kind of clients that I want to work with. Like I don’t want to work with clients and who just expect results immediately who aren’t willing to play the game of long obedience in the same direction. Who you know are, are, are like flash in the pan. People like I, that’s not the type of people that are to get the success in the long term.

Trent:                  And I think it’s important that are people who are listening to this interview recognize that fact that there’s not like this magic super formula to suddenly succeeding using Facebook ad pimp campaigns. Is is it’s part of a whole bunch of other works that you’ve been doing for a long period of time.

Amanda:            Yeah, I should I share something real quick before we flip onto the next question. I just jumped off our, our members live stream where I answer questions and this this week somebody shared their results of implementing these automated sequences, right? These Facebook sequences that as soon as somebody comes into your world, you follow them around, you retarget them, you educate, you inform them until they make a purchase decision. Right? And so what she had seen for a client of hers was that they immediately started seeing massive results out of the gate and then as they began to scale those results, it started to drop off. So they were spending, you know, 167% more than that first month. But the CPA on this particular product went from $174 up to $450 only three months in. And so what I want to share with people is like once you go start focusing on your warm custom audiences, these six buckets, typically what we see is an initial extraction of um, the what’s like, what’s that analogy when you pick the apples from the tree? Do you know what I’m talking about? Oh my gosh,

Trent:                  Thanks for that. Thanks for the good setup to that,

Amanda:            Pick the apples from the tree, right? So what happens is like when you start targeting these audiences, especially if, let’s say your business has been running for a year and maybe you’ve been focused on growing an Instagram profile for the brand, you might have people that organically have engaged with you but never clicked a link on your like organic social media. So what you’ll see is maybe there’s 100,000 people or even 10,000 people in these audiences. Once you start running ads to your warm buckets, they’re going to cherry pick like the lowest hanging fruit. You’re going to see an initial surge of sales. And then typically what happens is it drops off cold, meaning like you’re results tank because people aren’t then refueling or like pouring, pouring more people into the top of the bucket to replenish those that you have shared your message and they weren’t a fit for or shared your a message and they did become customers, right?

Amanda:            Like there needs to be this beautiful cycle of finding new attention, nurturing, set and attention. Indoctrinating them into who you are, showing your value, showing the testimonials that you have or the use cases, and then having them make a purchase decision and then that have that cycle constantly in motion. That’s where I see a lot of people like failing with Facebook ads is because they learn how to sell and then they forget all about the audience growth needs, which then puts them into this Facebook ad crunch when costs go up, they’re priced out of the market.

Trent:                  Yeah. Yeah. And that’s something we would like to avoid. Okay. So I want to get deeper into the weeds if we can into the tactics. So when someone, let’s just say, Hey, I’m going to sell a planner, so I’m going to put up a landing page, uh, and it’s gonna be for sale. Or maybe I’m going to do a prelaunch and sure, I got an email list, I got some other stuff. So we’ll assume, we’ll assume that I’ve got six buckets or maybe I’ve got three buckets or three buckets. Um, what am I going to do? Where do I start?

Amanda:            Yeah. So, uh, what we did is we set up a landing page, treated it just like a sales page that you would see for a long form sales page that you would see for any product included social proof. We included testimonials. We showed the product in 3D, right? Cause again, planners are very specific or planner users are very specific, so they want to know what the pages look like, showed us so many great quality photos. Um, and then had on that landing page a link that took them straight to adding it to cart in the Shopify store. Okay. So on that page was the sales page. We drove every single person to that sales page. Uh, and then from that sales page over to the Shopify store,

Trent:                  Hang on. Before you turned on the paid traffic, had you split tested that sales page with their email list? No?

Amanda:            Not in this case, no. Great question. Um, we did not.

Trent:                  Get a million subscribers.

Amanda:            Correct? I’m in agreeance, I was not on the email team for this. So, um, yeah, there was, we didn’t split test anything in this whole process, which was one of my recommendations. So please know that I am on the side of split testing, especially when you have that much volume going. Like, you know, a 3% lift could be massive to the business.

Trent:                  Yeah. All right. So no split testing.

Amanda:            You do what I say, not what I did in that example. Correct. Um, so no sweat testing on go day, they sent emails to the list. We then started the Facebook ad traffic to both. Nope. On day one we started it just to the wait list. Okay. So they sent wait lists ads.

Trent:                  So you’d pixeled, you’d pixeled people who went to the wait list page and you started running ads to those folks?

Amanda:            Yeah, well, no, we took, we downloaded the email subscribers on the wait list and then, yeah, and then used a Weber on email, custom audience. So the first day was just wait lists. The second day we opened it up to our warm audiences. So in your case it might be three buckets. This case it was six buckets. And then on day three we opened it up to cold audiences. And then from there, uh, we just continued to scale up budget day after day. And that the height of it, I think we were at about 7,500 to $8,000 a day closer to the end of August. Now there was a time, uh, not a time, there was a discount for the pre-order because these products weren’t going to be shipped until September 1st so if you purchased from July all the way to the end of August, there was a price discount. And we saw, of course as we got closer to the end of the discount period, when that countdown timer kicked in, that’s when our CPA dropped even lower and we actually started putting more retargeting ads that focused on the fact that this sale is going to be expiring soon. So we started running some urgency ads. Um, $54?

Trent:                  54 bucks.

Amanda:            Yeah, $54 and then throughout the year I believe it’s like, I think it’s like 38 throughout the year. So we did see an uptick in them also, uh, purchasing other products as well.

Trent:                  Yeah. As the $54, was that the price of the planner or was there upsells on the back end that drove up AOV?

Amanda:            Yeah, there was some upsells at the price was 39 for this price period. Um, and then, and then at the regular price I believe was 49.

Trent:                  Okay.

Amanda:            So just to clarify, the ads that we ran during that period though, we tested every single placement. We tested so many different creatives. Like we were constantly trying to refresh the ads, especially because we had such a long quote unquote like sale period that it can be hard, especially for warm audiences if they don’t purchase right away, what the heck is the incentive to purchase until it’s about to expire? Right. So we were just churning through probably probably 25 different versions, 25 to like 40 different versions of like placement creatives, just heading them in all different places. And our retargeting, um, was just again the same things. I think we had 11 different stories ads just for people who hit the sales page in the retargeting sequence. So what drove a lot of traffic? Go ahead.

Trent:                  What tool did you use to load all that up in the Facebook? Did you use that espresso or something like that?

Amanda:            Not as just a big believer in just using Facebook.

Trent:                  You do? Okay. So you’ve got multiple cause you get ad fatigue really, really quickly, especially if you’re retargeting people like crazy.

Amanda:            Right? So here’s, here’s actually my thoughts on fatigue versus frequency. Um, frequency. Actually let’s start with fatigue. Fatigue means an ad isn’t working anymore, right? Like, it’s not giving you the Roaz as that you’re looking for. However.

Trent:                  I’m just thinking about it from the user’s perspective. You get like better blindness when you see the same thing over and over again. You stop looking at it.

Amanda:            Right? But it doesn’t mean that your row as still isn’t positive enough on the cohort of people in that interest. Right? So it’s like you could have a frequency of 12 but if your row as is still showing that it’s a valuable ad set to have, it might not be one that you turn off. Right. So that’s, that’s why we did have, you know, the 40 different creative and once you hit certain pages, you started seeing all other creative so that you would get a large combination based on your behaviors to really try and not have, not had the fatigue happen. But our frequencies did get up there. And again, we were okay with that because the Roaz proved that there was still certain people in our audience that we’re purchasing after that many exposures or new people in the audience that hadn’t seen it before, seen it enough to justify the realize of it.

Trent:                  So if I was a user and I had been to the waitlist and I’d signed up for the wait list, I could see that ad or an an ad up to 12 times, is that what you’re saying?

Amanda:            Yeah, and again, already variation. So you could see that one 12 times. You could see another one four times like,

Trent:                  And these are all showing up in my feed on my phone because predominantly that’s where people are seeing Facebook ads.

Amanda:            Yeah. So we did find placement stories, pay placement. We did right hand column placement, we did messenger placement. Essentially the way that we look at it is, especially in launch periods, like when you have a finite cart and closing open. Yeah. You just want to show up in all of these ads, targeted different birds, like different creative angles that all had the same underlying message. So out of those 40 things, those were 40 different add experiences, right? So yes, you might have seen that one, you know, we’ll just continue with the 12 times as an example. But you also are seeing different angles, different options. Um, just different creatives, different videos, different images in a way. Like we, we create ads, they’re like very fun and conversational. Um, and sometimes don’t feel like ads, right? Like one of my favorite things to do in a launch is, is not include an image or a video in your ad. I call it stealth ads because

Trent:                  Yeah, cause then it just looks like a post

Amanda:            Just looks like a post from your friends or family. So we told like jokes in those ads. We asked questions of our audience. Remember it’s not about like bombarding them to go to the sales page. It’s about engaging them in a dialogue along the way too. When people interact with your ads, it actually serves up to more people organically.

Trent:                  Well that was my next question. If you get a whole bunch of comments on one of your ad that Facebook’s going to show it to more people and your, your cost per impression is going to go down, is it not?

Amanda:            Yeah. Target after they purchase like a thank you for a purchase, what did you think of it? They would interact, leave their responses and what happens is now their friends and family are going to start seeing their responses.

Trent:                  It’s like a testimonial.

Amanda:            Yeah. Those ad impressions will keep serving up organically.

Trent:                  Do you think Facebook, so as I’m listening to you talk about this, so this was a $54 AOV. I have a product that I sell where the order value is like 2,600 bucks a it’s a, it’s a collection of standard operating procedures for people who sell on Amazon and I sell quite a bit of it every year, but not, I’ve never used Facebook ads for any of it. It’s generally affiliates and my own lists, and I can’t help but wonder whether this would work for something at that price point. Because Facebook is, my impression of Facebook and I have no Facebook expert is I’m scrolling, I’m scrolling. Oh, impulse purchase. Yeah. Nobody makes $2,600 impulse purchases.

Amanda:            Well, I mean it’s not an impulse purchase because of the ability to target people at very specific points of the buyer’s journey. Right? So like if you have people visiting certain web properties of yours, certain pages on your website, like what you can do is create a website, custom audience of that specific page for a finite amount of time that serves them up relevant, nurturing content. So let’s say like for a week you’re going to serve them up content. That’s just value add. And then on day eight you’re going to start talking about this, this product collection that you have here. What you would do is then have those people go through, create an audience of people on day. This is going to be confusing. So let me, let me say it differently. If anyone lands on that blog post, you’re gonna create two audiences. Let’s say for a week you nurture them and then the next week you’re going to sell something or at least like, you know, put, put it out there and get them over to the sales page.

Amanda:            You’re going to create two audiences from people that visited that page, people who visited in the last 14 days and people who visited in the last seven days and then create an ad of include people who visited that page in the last 14 days, exclude the seven days. So that means from day eight to day 14, you can now start talking or them over to the sales page. And then as soon as they click on the sales page again, that’s another trigger to then start serving up a different set of ads that are pertinent or, uh, related to that product itself, right? So it’s like you just, you wait for people’s triggers, you wait for people’s clues of what they’re looking for. And then it’s about, for us it’s about using ads to stabilize that sales process by using those trade triggers in an automated way, right?

Amanda:            It actually amplifies the, the return on our investment by just mirroring things that people are already doing organically, naturally on your email list. We’re just taking those steps and then reminding them that about whatever it is, wherever they found it from in the first place. Cause they could have clicked to your blog posts from Google, right? They could have got there from SEO and then that means they had a different mindset when they came to your page because they were actively searching for it and now they’re paying more attention on Facebook. And if you have a sales process that works $54 AOB, $2,600 EOB doesn’t matter. It’s still the same process of, of selling with Facebook.

Trent:                  So tell me in your bio you talked about putting all of this on autopilot. Do you mean to say that you could have evergreen funnels that are essentially in addition to email, which is obviously a big part of an evergreen funnel and maybe you’re using messenger, but you’ve also evergreened your ads. How the hell is that work?

Amanda:            Yeah. I literally, I just explained it in the last thing. It’s about understanding.

Trent:                  The dates and the times and the eight days and the 14 days and they’ve done this. Okay.

Amanda:            Exactly. Okay.

Trent:                  Without any visual AIDS, we’re not going to be able to go any further down.

Amanda:            Well, no, really to draw out your sales process and then figure out where you can layer in ads using custom audiences with timers and I mean my own ads, I was in there today just to show some examples to our members, but the last time that I’ve actively created an ad was probably two and a half months ago. It takes me less than 15 minutes a week to manage our ads because of course we spent time setting them up. We spent time iterating and optimizing. What I love to do is focus on generating a lot of organic attention and then using ads to amplify their experience as they’re going through our sales process. Right? Like the emails that they’re getting, the ads are on top of that. When they interact on Insta, the ads are on top of it.

Trent:                  So a great example of maybe the way that I could do that is get myself on a whole bunch of different podcasts, talk about a particular page on my site. People are going to go there. Maybe there’s an opt in form, presumably there’d be, but not everybody’s going to opt in. But then I’m creating an audience and some of those people might go, if there’s ways to follow me on Instagram, they might get in some of my other buckets and I can build an ad funnel basically around a, everyone’s visiting that page and start to maybe promote a webinar where I sell the product or maybe promote the sales page directly. There’s all sorts of new make.

Amanda:            Exactly. Exactly. Literally, whatever your heart can conceive of, you can create with ad sequences.

Trent:                  And are you able to also target, uh, I actually, I know you are. I can target somebody else’s audience as well

Amanda:            If they’re an interest within Facebook. Absolutely you can target them. You can use lookalike audiences of your purchasers to put in there. And I mean we also do an ad warming up process. There’s three phases we call it connect, commit close or audience growth, bucket growth, lead generation and sales retargeting. And so those ads that create bucket growth are targeting cold audiences. And then based on those people watching a video, we warm them up and indoctrinate them by sharing valuable content, by sharing open ended questions, by engaging them with the brand. And this works for physical products, it works for digital products that works for services or experiences. It’s just about cultivating a fanatical audience along the way. So we have that connect commit and close process that we run ads for, which you know, you can do podcasts and you could also be warming up people via ads, which I believe like we focus on four very specific things. We focus on the ad version of that connect warming phase. We focus on the podcast version, we focus on guest posting for other people’s platforms. And then Pinterest is the fourth one that we have recently added, right? So all of those things work together to drive us traffic, which then starts the lead generation process. If you’re collecting leads for whatever it is. Um, and then anyone who comes into our ecosystem from any of those four channels then also begins this retargeting journey of potentially becoming a customer.

Trent:                  Got it. Alright. Along we been 45 minutes I think so far. I don’t even remember when we started, so I’m just looking at the questions that we were agreed we were going to talk about. Now we haven’t, we did make a question here to tell me about the systems that you’ve developed to make this a repeatable process. Um, what do you, cause I know we talked a little bit off camera before I hit record. Now you’re like, Oh, I’m not really sure.

Amanda:            Are you calling me out right now? Busted. Yeah. Actually I do have a great, a great hack creating a system within ads manager. The beauty is once you’ve set up these automated sequences for a particular pathway, right? Like let’s go back to the blog post example, which then you start this pathway. What you can do is create campaigns in ads manager that just act as template campaigns, meaning name them with your naming convention, but in the proper buckets, the audiences you like set it all up. So all you need to do is maybe change the date, maybe change the ad creative, but you have these template campaigns. For example, if you’ve launched, often you can create like let’s say there’s six campaigns that you do when launching you then just duplicate those campaigns and you’re ready to set up your launch. And so if you’re, if you’re finding yourself doing ads over and over again, it’s beneficial to create a template campaign so that you can just duplicate that and not have to like set up the bones, but don’t do it like me where I then forget that it’s a template and then start using the template and then I’m like, Oh, I’ve got to create another template.

Trent:                  All right. Let us talk about the biggest couple of mistakes. So you sell a a, I guess it’s a training course or a community of some kind to help people get better at this. So you get to see people making mistakes, presumably, or even just out in the world, not necessarily folks that are buying your stuff, cause your stuff would be so good that no one would ever make a mistake, of course. But what are some of the biggest mistakes that you see people making? That what I want when they’re paying the dumb tax.

Amanda:            Yeah. Uh, the biggest mistake right now in our industry is there’s this fallacy going around that you just haven’t spent enough on ads for them to work. I want to, I want to throw punch people when I hear that.

Trent:                  Yeah. If they’re not working right, you tell me. My opinion is if they’re not working right away, they’re not gonna work.

Amanda:            Accurate. Accurate. There is no more accurate thing than that. But there is a fallacy in this industry and people are getting away with it. I’ve had conversations where people have been recommended to spend up to $20,000 because they just need more leads. Like if it’s not working out of the Gates, fix your sales process. Look data or data will tell you absolutely every single that thing. Look at your conversion rate, look at your, um, like sales conversion rate, look at your sales page to checkout conversion rate. Like look, look at every single number and the numbers will tell you what’s not working. It is never a game of just go spend more on ads because you’re just flushing that money down the toilet.

Trent:                  So very important thing that you just mentioned to look at all of this data. Are you having your clients, you know, use Google tag manager so they can track every single thing. And then are they using visual studio and building dashboards? Because I, the reason I ask this is I was doing a bunch of advertising on YouTube not too terribly long ago and it was really working great for a while and then it just stopped, never figured out why or so I hired someone to do a, and he was on my podcast, actually two, um, you implement tags across it because, cause when you start jumping from one URL to another, when you’re landing pages on one URL and then there’s something on another URL and your checkouts, you’re shopping cards on another, you will URL, all sorts of data becomes invisible or enact. So how do you solve that problem? Google tag manager.

Amanda:            As the systems guy, like you’re gonna want to punch, throw a punch me for saying this. I make them manually do it at first. And there’s a reason because I want them to intimately understand because there’s so many people in our industry that say terms, but they don’t quite understand the implications of what those terms actually mean in the sales process. Right? Like, cause you’re only one funnel away, right? So I want them to go through and manually map things out. I want them to understand each and every thing and so they just collect it manually. I want them to know their email open rates. I want them to know their link, click through rates in each of those emails. For each of the links that you have in there, I want them to look in their ads manager and get their um, their click through rate from the ad.

Amanda:            I want to know the cost per click. I want to know the landing page views. I want to know the opt-ins for any of your lead magnets. From there, I want to know any of your like tripwire sales, if that’s something that you use. Like basically make them go in and intimately like get to know each of the numbers and then create a system that works for them. Because once you’ve proven that something does work, you can essentially get to a certain level of scale without having to track things on the daily, right? So like I don’t want them creating systems for themselves that take a hundred hours to set up. If it’s something that they’re just going to check once a month. Right? So again, for somebody who creates processes of things, I’m definitely the person that you’re like, damn it. Bomb. Just create something.

Trent:                  Pretty much.

Amanda:            Use Google, Google, uh, conversion goals, Facebook ads manager, and then your sales data, your CRM, and then just put it all in a Google spreadsheet and you’re fine. You’re fine.

Trent:                  Totally fine. That is one way of doing it though. Let’s not make light of it. I mean, you can do it that way and, and initially, you know, because why wouldn’t you do it that way until you know that you have a sales process that’s actually working reasonably well. Okay, now I’m going to scale it up like crazy and maybe now I want a fancy dashboard and I’ll hire somebody to make me that fancy dashboard. Um, but initially, you know, unless you just like spending money for the hell and spending money, I don’t know that you would necessarily want to do that. I was able to do a, a Contra deal with this guy where I traded him some stuff and he gave me some stuff. So I’m not spending money.

Amanda:            That’s so good. There’s a tool that’s coming to my mind. The name is escaping me. So how would I send it to you? And you can add it to the show notes. It’s not for Facebook ads, but I know it will serve your audience. It’s for um, FBA sellers. It’ll, it’ll track all of that. I cannot think of where it is off the top of my head, but it is beautiful the way that they visualize the data.

Trent:                  Okay. And there’s lots of tools that track FBA sales. So I, I’ve used many of them in there. Most of them do a pretty good job of giving you pretty pictures and big numbers and all sorts of things.

Amanda:            You know what, that’s actually something that’s lacking in the Facebook world. I believe. Something that, that communicates the data in an effective way. Um, I’ve said that for a few years now. So that’s the problem that’s never really been solved.

Trent:                  And then go get yourself a developer, go get yourself a developer and solve that problem. I’ll tell you a building software is no small undertaking and had it not been for my having a CTO, there is no way I’d be the co founder of a software company at this point in time. Cause I look at, you know, all the turnover in the developers and the communication and the frameworks and the bug hunting and the QA and wow, it’s a lot of work. So big shout out to my partner came for for making all that happen. Cause you have a yeah, we have a thriving software applications. I was looking at it yesterday and we’re up over 2000 users now. We’re just pretty darn cool. Yeah. Only that and then that’s only a drop in the bucket of where we really need to get to. Anyway, I digress. So, um, for people who’ve been listening to this and they’re thinking, Hey, I might want to, you know, learn more about bond and what she does and what she offers and so forth.

Amanda:            You can come on over to our website. You can find that@theadstrategist.com where you can read the rest of my thoughts on why I think Facebook ads aren’t working. Going into 2020 next year, or come hang it on our facebookPage@facebook.com forward slash the ad strategist where we build tons of community and just have nonsense over there. It’s fun.

Trent:                  All right, well, thanks so much, Matt, for being on the show.

Amanda:            Thank you so much for having me.