Interview: Facebook Marketing with Dennis Yu and Logan Young of BlitzMetrics - Part 1

Dennis

20 years ago, I bought banner ads on AOL for American Airlines. DoubleClick had not yet been born, so the concepts of ad serving, frequency capping, or any of the targeting we know today didn't yet exist. Most of the folks on the internet were on dial-up via Prodigy, CompuServe, and other services that don't exist today.

Yahoo! had a PPC system so rudimentary that I bought the keyword "karate" for my buddy that ran a martial arts studio. I paid 3 cents a click on a 5 cent bid for nationwide targeting, even though he had just one location in Dallas. But the traffic was so cheap, that it didn't matter that 99% of the traffic was not from Dallas. It wasn't until geo-targeting a few years later that local businesses could even compete.

And it was at point that I joined Yahoo! to build analytics, especially to help advertisers optimize their paid search spend. Yahoo! had bought Overture, which was the PPC network. And Overture had bought Key Lime Software, which had the conversion optimization software. To be able to watch this unfold in front of me and be part of these teams was a lot of fun for a systems geek like me.

I wish I could go back in time to spend more time building campaigns, since every keyword was only pennies-- there was almost no competition. It was the wild west for anyone willing to jump in, much like Facebook even as recently as 3 years ago.

Logan

In my first few days with Dennis, I was already working on the Golden State Warriors and a drug rehab clinic, all while traveling to Las Vegas and New York City to speak at a university and assist at a conference. It was an immersive experience.

In my first year, I traveled 250,000 miles to speak at conferences on Facebook ads. While at the same time, I was working on the Facebook ads for mattress companies, sports teams, retailers, personal brands, and you-name it. In one three week stretch, we hit 5 continents and 10 countries.

This was exhausting. Imagine stepping off the plane to go straight into a venue to speak, then back to the hotel to work on campaigns. In- between flights and client meetings, you have conference calls with team members and clients that are in North America, Europe, and Australia. So it could be 2 am where you are, but 10 am where they are. And then you have to be at the airport in 4 hours.

This includes multiple meetings with Facebook at their offices all over this planet to test new products they were rolling out, build case studies on client campaigns, and eat their amazing food.

The current state of Facebook ads is such that you can't learn it from a professor in college, guiding students through a textbook. And because of my hands-on experience, I'd like to see other young adults build their careers in digital marketing to have a successful transition from college and to support their families.

Logan

They don't have a strategy, meaning that they don't have the necessary inputs before even starting Facebook marketing. In other words, they lack GCT-- Goals, Content, and Targeting.

Most people just jump into Facebook by posting random stuff and boosting posts in a random way. Not a surprise when they have a bad experience, then declare "it doesn't work" and walk away frustrated.

The solution is as mundane as having a simple process to follow, no different than having a cookbook of recipes telling you exactly what to do if you want to make a particular dish. We know that if we follow the directions for chocolate cake precisely, we'll get something close to the picture of the chocolate cake on the recipe.

Yet there are so many self-proclaimed gurus peddling shortcuts and get-rich schemes. They drown out the legitimate voices who are teaching from experience, since the charlatans can make more attractive claims and yell louder. Most business owners are unable tell who is real, leading to a confusing experience.

The quickest way to tell whether that source is legitimate is to see if they are transparently sharing a checklist of specific steps that you can validate. If they are talking about how much money they made and how easy it was, run.

Facebook has some excellent training, called Facebook Blueprint, that is free and helpful on Facebook marketing. I'd recommend most people start at facebook.com/business and go from there. Plus, they've been simplifying their system to literally guide you through inputting your goals, content, and targeting as part of posting and boosting.

Logan

My friend, Mark Lack, went to Tai Lopez's house and interviewed him. He took that video and boosted it on Facebook to Tai's fan base, generating a whopping 87% view through rate (30% is average on Facebook) and 57 second average watch time (6 seconds is average on Facebook).

This generated 300,000 views, a bunch of leads, and $30,000 in new business for him.

These results are not typical, since rarely will even the pros produce content that takes off in the newsfeed. We expect that even folks like us, who do this for a living, will get one hit for every twenty attempts-- perhaps less, depending on the vertical.

Mark was able to position himself as a leader in personal branding, since he continues to create and boost interviews with high profile leaders-- billionaires, entrepreneurs, and celebrities. He has been using the "dollar a day" technique to layer boost upon boost.

His first few dozen attempts over the first few months yielded awful results. He didn't know what combination of topics and targets would work.

For example, he tried targeting Daymond John fans to his interviews with Daymond John. But these posts all flopped. In hindsight, he learned that Daymond of Shark Tank has primarily a TV audience, which doesn't translate to online leads on Facebook.

He learned that super polished videos don't work, since people automatically believe they are commercials. So he's been making one minute videos where he's walking outside, perhaps having a casual conversation with one of his guests.

I'm impressed more with Mark's wherewithal to continue testing than the fact that he's got a series of evergreen boosted posts that are continuing to build his traffic and leads, even if now several years old.

Dennis

If you asked me this two years ago, I would have told you to create multiple, super specific target audiences. And that would have been correct back then, based on how the Facebook algorithm behaved back then. This was before oCPM got smart about weighing positive and negative feedback scores and imposing penalties for targeting super small audiences.

Today, we create video view custom audiences for deep remarketing sequences-- chains of many videos and posts linked together by video audiences mixed in with web and email remarketing audiences. If you're not driving your funnel mainly via combinations of remarketing audiences, you're not doing things the way Facebook wants you to. And you'll get penalized with low Relevance Scores and high conversion costs.

If you don't have a robust set of video, email, and web custom audiences, then start by creating 1% lookalikes against your best customers. In other words, don't create custom audiences off 180 day site-wide visitors or your fan page. Do it against a group of your actual buying customers, ideally at least 200 emails in that group.