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SHOW NOTES
*SPECIAL GUEST EPISODE*
Ads Manager Vanessa is bringing you strategy that’s new (even to me!).
If you’re curious about how to use the data Facebook collects, this episode will provide all the clarity you need. Vanessa details some incredibly specific reports that Team Hirsh runs for our top-notch clients.
And the best part? She walks you through step-by-step so you can begin using Facebook Attributions to your advantage, too.
Please note, this episode gets a little tech-y – but if you listen to the end, Vanessa shares a number of tools that will help you DIY!
Listen in, and then share a screenshot on your IG Stories (tag @emilyhirsh for a shoutout).
NOTE – listen to episode 57, “Huge Facebook Change: Campaign Base Optimization with Roger,” for more information about the upcoming changes to Facebook ads.
Key Points:
[1:49] What are ‘Facebook attributions’?
[3:14] How to take advantage of the data
[4:18] How you can do this yourself (i.e. what kinds of data to track)
[7:10] Where people often get stuck
[10:30] What this means with CBO…
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[social_warfare]
Episode Transcripts:
Emily Hirsh: I’m Emily Hirsh, and this is the Hirsh Marketing Underground Podcast. Attention, innovators, influencers, creators, and game changing entrepreneurs, your internet domination begins right here.
Emily Hirsh: We are the powerhouse marketers that you’ve been looking for. You’re already making waves in your industry, and we’re here to help amplify those waves of change by creating a connection that cuts through the noise. We take everything you’ve built inside your zone of genius and find its audience.
Emily Hirsh: With killer strategy and laser eye for impact, we launch multi-million dollar campaigns and skyrocket your reach online. And now, we are doing the unheard of. We’re unveiling everything we’ve learned, taking you behind the scenes with the Hirsh Marketing Team, and giving away the secrets to our clients’ success.
Emily Hirsh: Stay tuned for top converting strategy, ROI reports, and insider knowledge that you won’t find anywhere else. You’re changing the world, and we’re the team to help.
Emily Hirsh: Hello, everybody. Welcome to the podcast. I have a special guest here, ads manager on Team Hirsh, Vanessa, who is here to talk with you guys about using Facebook attributions to help you with your audience insights in Ads Manager.
Emily Hirsh: I’m so excited, because I reached out to my team and was like, “Does anybody want to be on the podcast and have any suggestions?” Vanessa literally gave me like, 12 amazing ideas, and so I was like, “You’ve got to come on and talk about one and pick your favorite.”
Emily Hirsh: I don’t actually know everything she’s going to say. She’s bringing some strategy that I don’t know here. Let’s dive in. Welcome, Vanessa. Thank you for this.
Vanessa: Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.
Emily Hirsh: Yeah. Let’s talk about it. Share what you have to share about Facebook attributions.
Vanessa: Attribution in general is when things are applied, actions are applied specifically to an ad. On Facebook, what that looks like is, they have two different windows where they track activities that happen from interaction with the ad all the way through to when somebody converts.
Vanessa: Those two windows are a one day view and a 28 day click. For every 28-day period from the time your ads start delivering, you’ll see data populate continually in Ads Manager. That kind of looks like … you’ll see people viewing your ads, you’ll see them clicking, you’ll see them signing up. You can see when somebody likes your page, engages with your posts, shares it, all sorts of fun stuff.
Vanessa: The cool part about that is often you might not see a conversion come through right away, but sometimes if you look back over the 28 day period, you’ll see all the conversions kind of fall into place. That usually leaves people wondering where the heck all this data came from.
Emily Hirsh: Yeah.
Vanessa: It’s really fun to track it day-to-day to see all the numbers change. For some of my clients, especially [those] who are using purchases, those take a little longer to show up in Facebook, because people are a little bit slower to make a purchase.
Vanessa: What I do is I track their purchases day-to-day, and then I look back over every day that’s already happened within the last 28 day window, and I keep track of it and make basically like, a scatter plot so that you can see where all those purchases are coming in.
Vanessa: What that helps me do is understand how people are behaving on Facebook. For one client, he has a fitness product, and they wind up having basically two groups of people: the people who see the ad and jump on it right away, and those are my one day viewers; and then the other people who hem and haw over it for a little while, and those are my 28 day clickers.
Vanessa: What that tells us is that those two camps of people … we can actually create content, or create ads, that appeal to those people to try and speed up the slow guys and to really take advantage of those guys that are acting a little bit faster.
Emily Hirsh: Yeah. That is so valuable and also just goes into playing that big picture and making sure that you … You can make decisions fast when you’re optimizing ads. There’s definitely parts that you make fas,t but then there’s also making sure that you look at a zoomed out version of your data.
Emily Hirsh: Obviously we don’t have screen-share video, but can you describe how you would see this in Ads Manager, for those listening so they could do it themselves? How are you viewing it? What are you pulling up when you look at this in your campaigns?
Vanessa: Totally. To track all the data I basically take a column on the X axis and one on the Y, and I put the dates for the whole month. Then on the first day, say March 1st, I line up my March 1st on my X and my March 1st on the Y, and I’ll put in how many purchases came in that day, or whatever we’re converting for.
Vanessa: The next day I’ll do the same thing. I’ll line up my two dates, March 2nd to March 2nd. I’ll put in the days number for there. Then I’ll look backwards at March 1st and see if that number has changed, and just keep filling in the data that way.
Emily Hirsh: Got it. You’re making your own spreadsheet, and then you’re going into Facebook and just changing … Wow. Do you guys see how much work Team Hirsh does? Holy cow. I didn’t even know this.
Vanessa: It’s really cool to see.
Emily Hirsh: Yeah. You’re creating a spreadsheet, then you’re going day by day in Ads Manager, and then you’ve got the purchase column selected so that you can see if that pixel fired? Or is this a direct purchase campaign you’re looking at?
Vanessa: For this particular client, they run only direct purchases. We do some nurturing as well, but I’m really concerned with those purchase conversions and really understanding how those people are behaving.
Emily Hirsh: Yeah. This could apply for both, though, because you could also look, if you have a webinar campaign and then if purchases would be attributed back, you could go back day by day to see. You could do this for anything. Wow.
Emily Hirsh: Then are you also … What type of takeaways do you pull from that? Are you able to see what audiences and ads are actually attributed to purchases? I think this is also important if you’re looking at a lead to purchase. You might have a lead that’s getting really cheap, but then you look back over the month and you’re like, “Oh, this is getting a bunch of sales, and I’m paying maybe a couple dollars more cost per lead, but I really care about the sales – so don’t turn that ad off, because I want to look at the sales too.”
Emily Hirsh: When you build your chart, what do you take away from that? How do you optimize with that information from there?
Vanessa: When I’m building that up, I look at everything. I get really nerdy into the data. I look at how many shares, all the little actions that we don’t really pay attention to usually. Like in another account, we’re running a lead campaign, so I’m paying attention to those leads backwards and forwards, but I’m also looking at the social proof, because even though we’re not getting a large volume of leads …
Vanessa: This one client that I work with only has maybe 400 or 500 leads a month, but the social proof on those ads is up to like 600 shares a month and 600 comments and 1000 reactions, which is crazy. That word of mouth is so powerful. We can see how those audiences are helping that specific client.
Vanessa: With another client we run lead generation into purchase. I can tell that on Facebook the lead campaign brought in so many leads, and then usually what we’d expect to see is that, we would see purchases coming through the sales ads. But the fun part about attribution data is, Facebook goes, “Okay, I recognize that this one person came in through this lead ad, and then they had a whole bunch of other reactions.”
Vanessa: They might have visited the website. Maybe they did click on that sales ad. But to prevent duplicate data, Facebook goes, “Okay, within this 28 day period that one person came in through the lead ad. Within that same set of dates they also made a purchase.” It’ll actually take that purchase and attribute it back to the lead campaign, which confuses the heck out of people because they would expect to see it in the sales.
Emily Hirsh: Right. Yeah. People make that mistake where they don’t go back and look at the whole month to see how many purchases maybe that initial lead campaign could have brought in, and you’re only looking at maybe just your retargeted ad. Then that would give you so much audience insight, because you want to see big picture, not only your cost per lead but then also what’s happening after with that lead, and that’s what this allows you to see is, what is the lead doing after they opt-in? Also, that’s why it’s important to have those specific event pixels, right?
Vanessa: Yeah.
Emily Hirsh: That’s something we do is, we go through each step of the funnel, and we’ve got initiate checkout, and purchase, and viewed the content on the webinar … because then you can pull those columns to see that information. If you don’t have that it’s like just the same page view pixel on all those pages in your funnel, so that’s a super crucial step in being able to pull this data.
Emily Hirsh: Yeah. You make your chart … You do this for all the clients, and every day you go in and do this?
Vanessa: I do it for select clients where we really have to try and really nail down that persona. With other clients I track it in a different way but the same idea, because their funnels are a little bit more complicated.
Emily Hirsh: Yeah. Does this help you go back and also know what to scale based on what’s working in there … if you can pull up an ad set specifically … I know the client you’re talking about in the fitness industry, and that one is like, “unlimited budget, scale as long as it’s working.” Does this help you with the decision on what to scale?
Vanessa: Absolutely. With there I have to … It’s kind of like a fun game of roulette with this specific person, because there’s one day where I’m like, “Well, that ad ran for four or five days. It’s spent … We didn’t get anything. Turn it off.” [And] almost always as soon as I turn the ad set off, we get sales coming in.
Emily Hirsh: Yeah.
Vanessa: I like to look back and see what it was about those specific ads and the audiences. Sometimes I’ll try the audiences again, or I’ll try and replicate the success of a specific ad with other audiences and try and find that really cool mix that converts really well.
Emily Hirsh: That’s awesome. Yeah. I think the biggest takeaway … I didn’t even know Vanessa was doing this much work in the account. What’s funny is, I actually talked to that client yesterday in the fitness space, and he said that he used to run his own ads, and he said, literally I quote, “Vanessa is doing 10 times the amount of work that I was doing in my account.” I don’t even know if he knows that you have that spreadsheet. He’s just going off of what he’s seeing you do in the account. That’s so awesome.
Emily Hirsh: I think my biggest takeaway here from what you’ve shared is that you want to look at things so holistically. People will focus in on just, “Okay, I’m running a lead gen campaign. I’m just going to focus on the cost per lead, and that’s what I focus on.”
Emily Hirsh: Really, you want to zoom out and look at, maybe what you’re talking about, the social proof on the ad or the purchases that came with the ad, and then not only look at what’s happened in the last two days and make decisions, but in the last 28 days, and be able to make decisions on that because, especially as we go more and more as you know, and I did a previous podcast on this, on the CBO campaigns [episode 57]…
Emily Hirsh: That’s actually, you start making a little bit slower decisions, and you give Facebook a little bit more time to optimize, and so you have to look at everything holistically and from a zoomed-out view so that you don’t actually sabotage your own ads, which I’ve seen people do that. They turn it off too fast or give up on this or they’re only looking at one piece of data, and so they are confused what to do.
Emily Hirsh: Those are my takeaways from that. This is so awesome. Is there any last things you want to share about using Facebook attributions?
Vanessa: I think just pay attention to how people are behaving. Everybody’s audience is different, and it’s really cool to see how you can carve out little personas of how people are behaving and then make adjustments to your content to really cater to those people, and the success from there is just astronomical. It’s awesome.
Emily Hirsh: Yeah. Yes. That’s so important from everything to just remember, your ads are being shown to people, just regular people in the newsfeed. You can pull out of the data how those people are behaving and then [that can] help you with future marketing or the decisions you make with your ads and build, like you said, that persona from the messaging to how they behave, how long they’re taking to go through funnels and make decisions.
Emily Hirsh: You probably have multiple … Like you’re saying, you have those quick decision people, and then you have the people that are taking longer. How do you appeal to both of them? Because there’s money there for both of them. That’s so awesome.
Emily Hirsh: Cool. Well, thank you so much for sharing this. I am super impressed. Vanessa is getting shouted out on my huddle tomorrow, in who is being awesome for being awesome! Thank you so much, Vanessa, for coming on and sharing this with everybody. It was so great to hear about this.
Vanessa: Thanks for having me.
Emily Hirsh: Yeah. As you know, if you want to work with Team Hirsh, you want to work with someone amazing like Vanessa, you can go to HelpMyStrategy.com and apply to work with us. See you guys later.
Emily Hirsh: Thanks for listening to the Hirsh Marketing Underground Podcast. Go behind the scenes of multi-million dollar ad campaigns and strategies, dive deep into The Hirsh Process, and listen to our most popular episodes over at HirshMarketingUnderground.com.
Emily Hirsh: If you loved this episode of the podcast, do me a favor and head over to iTunes to subscribe and leave a review so we can reach more people and change more lives with this content. That’s all for now and I’ll catch you next time.