Interview: Facebook Marketing with Dennis Yu and Logan Young of BlitzMetrics - Part 2

Logan

Facebook is running thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of experiments, every single day. Every one of them could affect advertisers in some way. So rather than be concerned that doom is impending, consider that Facebook has always wanted a balanced ecosystem.

In other words, they are first protecting the user experience and secondly, creating systems that encourage advertisers to do non-spammy things.

So the advertisers who should be worried are those who are trying to "trick" the system (like most SEOs) or don't have a long-term plan to engage users through an AEC (awareness, engagement, conversion) funnel that provides value at every step of the way.

Facebook makes money on advertising, no question-- since they're never switching to a Netflix-style, monthly membership site. So they're not doing to do anything drastic that would damage their advertisers' performance, which would then hurt the stock price.

Logan

We talk to Facebook about this every week.

For example, we all would love there to be an "easy" button. You put a coin in the machine, press the button for what you want, and then that items drops out the bottom, like in your favorite vending machine.

To accomplish this goal, Facebook has to make it super easy to collect the GCT (goals, content, targeting) from us. They've mostly automated goals and targeting, so content collection is the remaining hurdle.

Expect in 2018 and beyond for Facebook to push harder into reviews, encouraging customers to leave feedback about your business, verify specific details, and to submit more information about your experience (what did you eat, what did you buy, who did you work with, etc).

They will enable this through apps and integrations that reduce communication friction. For example, messenger bots let consumers chat with a business without having to go to another website, pick up their phone, or enter their phone number. Integrated apps let us directly summon an Uber to take us to the restaurant we're looking at with a press of a button-- no need to specify the address. Then lead ads, instant articles, canvas, collection ads, and other integrations make it so that you don't even need a website anymore.

Facebook will increasingly provide such a frictionless experience that consumers will not want to leave. And then advertisers will have more users and more data on these users to drive richer communication experiences at each stage of the funnel.

Logan

Maybe you're a beginner at Facebook ads, but you're not a beginner to business or to the channel-specific expertise you have.

For example, you might be a great manufacturer of horse care products, but don't know much about how Facebook calculates EdgeRank. Yet, you feel the need to jump into Facebook ads, since you can't NOT do it.

Or perhaps you've cut your teeth on doing SEO and now want to dabble in Facebook ads.

So my advice is to determine what is working well for you and use Facebook as an amplifier of this. If you're driving great results by going to trade shows in person and meeting people, then let Facebook extend this for you. Target fans of those trade shows on Facebook and make one minute videos saying what you're already saying over and over, anyway.

If you're killing it in Google, then set up Facebook remarketing audiences so you can harvest additional conversions from people who abandoned the cart of didn't fill out your form.

Over the hundreds of accounts we've looked at, 99% of the time, it's a strategic problem of not understanding that Facebook amplifies what's already working for you.

Dennis

The geek inside of me has a Christmas list of things I'd like to see in the ads system-- more like gripes that have bothered me for years.

For example, I'd love to see Facebook tell us what are the top interests that align with each stage of the funnel, point out who our top customers are we should be thanking, allow us to spend $1 a day on any business objective (not just boosting), more partner category targeting (which we had 3 years ago), no country limitations on insights data, a smarter recommendation engine, a willingness to cooperate with Google to share analytics data, and so forth.

Ironically, these are all improvements that should be done automatically, invisible to the marketer. Do you as a business owner really want to spend a lot of time getting under the hood of your car or would you rather just drive your Tesla to your destination?

I don't think it's necessary for all but a handful of engineers like me to turn wrenches on the weekends, to allow the general public to have reliable "transportation" to wherever they want to go. The customer need only specify their goals, content, and targeting to us.

Dennis

I'd sell a course on how to achieve amazing growth in record time.

The course would cost $100.

And I'd use Facebook ads to promote it shamelessly.

Then anyone who bought the "course" would get my lesson on how to sell the course for $100 to anyone else who wants to achieve growth in record time.

But eventually, the government regulatory agencies would catch on to the Ponzi scheme and shut it down.

So I'd not even embark on such a fool's errand.

We don't start new businesses because they are so risky and so hard.

I'd rather optimize 50 healthy businesses than try to grow one that is brand new and doesn't have any data for us to play with.