[0:45] Jon’s journey to become a Facebook Marketing Authority
[3:32] Jon’s process to discovering the latest Facebook strategies
[6:27] Interest Data
[8:30] Where to start as a new business
[9:16] Demographic Data
[11:14] Audience Network
[15:05] Lead Ads
[20:00] Favorite Brewers player
BRIAN: Today on the podcast we have Jon Loomer, who is the author, entrepreneur, operator, of JonLoomer.com. A fantastic resource for Facebook ad operations, strategy, insight, as well as just a very good daily read on the life of an entrepreneur. Jon, welcome to the podcast.
JON: Really happy to be here.
BRIAN: Awesome man. So starting off today, can you tell us a little about yourself and your journey to becoming a Facebook marketing guru.
JON: Oh man, it’s a long story, but I’ll try to shorten it up.
BRIAN: Sure, the cliff notes would be great.
JON: So essentially, I did a lot of crap I hated for a long time, I worked in insurance for several years, and in the meantime I did some stuff I liked, which was fantasy sports. And that hooked me up eventually to getting a dream gig of all gigs overseeing fantasy games for the NBA for three seasons.
And while I was there I was exposed to Facebook for the first time and we partnered with Facebook to create an app before you could create your own apps. I was the first admin of the first NBA Facebook group before there were pages. And so that was my initial exposure.
In order to take that job, I had to move my family to New Jersey so we did that for three years, left, and it ended up being bad timing to leave any job, I ended up being laid off twice in two and a half years. But getting laid off was the greatest thing to ever happen to me because I was kind of forced to start something.
And I didn’t want to move my family again, I was really spoiled with that NBA job, and I had a really good American Cancer Society job after that. I didn’t want something I wasn’t passionate about. I just started my website and started writing and didn’t know what would become of it. Didn’t know how to start a business or anything and started promoting it with Facebook ads.
And I was comfortable with Facebook dating back to 2007 so nine plus years at this point. And I started writing about what I knew and started writing about Facebook and eventually got traction pretty quickly writing about Facebook marketing and slowly morphed into focusing only on Facebook ads and then advanced Facebook ads.
It’s been a crazy ride, but you ask me 5 – 10 years ago would I be this Facebook ads guy. I didn’t have my own business; I’d never think that would be possible. So it’s pretty crazy the journey led me here.
BRIAN: Well I think you mentioned a lot to the journey and the process and the changes on Facebook during that process. It really always amazes me looking back, I only got into Facebook a year early because I had an alumni .edu email address. I remember logging in the first time. The previous business I was at they became a Facebook partner because they saw pages, and when they saw pages for the first time, they told someone at Facebook, this is going to be more important than a company website. And they became one of the first outside developers to have access to the Facebook API.
So it’s been pretty amazing and obviously the Facebook platform changes on a daily basis. What are some of the things you’re excited about that have changed recently? And what is your process for discovering these changes that are coming almost on a daily basis now?
JON: It’s pretty awesome. First of all, my process is I have a feed.ly, it’s kind of old school I guess where I just follow all the latest blog posts and it’s Techcrunch, socialtimes, but also all the official Facebook blogs, like Facebook for business and Facebook for media, and Facebook code. So if anything has happened it’s going to go to there.
Another source that’s been really helpful for me is my private community because there are a lot of people in there who are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars who have a really deep relationship with Facebook and ad reps. So regardless of whether I’m getting inside info personally, which sometimes I do, I’m going to get info from somebody. It’s really very rare that I’m not one of the first groups of people to know about something because of all those connections.
But right now, I’m just so excited about anything that leads to better targeting. So, the latest thing with the website custom audiences being able to target people by frequency and by time on site and by amount of money they’ve spent and things like that. As opposed to before where I loved website custom audience before, but there was a weakness in that not all website visitors are created equal.
You have one website visitor who bounced after 2 seconds and they’re not even going to remember being on your site, compared to someone who’s been there twenty times over the past thirty days. I want that person who’s been there twenty times.
So it’s changed my targeting, it’s changed my costs and success rate. And also kind of my net isn’t as wide as it used to be. There’s less waste involved that way as well. That’s been pretty awesome, everything that’s video related, even though I still hate being on video.
BRIAN: Well good thing we’re on audio today.
JON: But like the live video stuff, the engagement on Facebook custom audiences that are both video and now lead ads but it’s called engagement on Facebook so you’ve got to think it’s going to lead to canvass engagement custom audiences. Could be simple things like comments, likes, shares and creating custom audiences out of that. Just speculating. But pretty awesome and there’s a lot to be excited about right now.
BRIAN: You just wrote a blog post talking about the weakness with interest targeting, can you talk about that a little bit?
JON: Yeah, I mean, I see interest targeting as being 2012 kind of targeting.
BRIAN: Kind of feels like boost post at this point.
JON: Yeah, look, Facebook is powerful, and I get it. People are like, wow, Facebook has all this data on people. So you can target people really precisely based on things that they like and they do. Yeah, you can kind of get carried away looking at how powerful that is.
But I think people really lose sight of the fact that, what’s going to be better targeting, targeting because Facebook says they like certain things or because they’ve interacted with you in some way. They’ve been on your website, they’ve done x, y, z on your site, they’ve opted in to something for you, all these different things. So I’ve seen a lot of even big advertisers who have good website traffic, ignoring all those good targeting methods and focusing on interest.
And it’s funny because Facebook is really transparent about this. You can go in and look at your ad targeting preferences and see how other advertisers can target you. I can’t even remember how many I had, something like 700-800 different preferences originally. But remember I’ve been on Facebook from 2007 so a lot of these preferences are a blast from the past that I’m sure I haven’t update my profile in years.
So like TV shows that I’ve watched long ago, movies and such that I haven’t seen in forever that if you target me on these things now, it’s kind of ridiculous and you’re wasting your time. But not only that, some completely random things. You can target me on the interest grass. I don’t know why. I guess it’s because I talked about mowing my lawn before? But it’s kind of random stuff like that. So I went through and cleaned it up.
I’d say roughly half of the interests in there were somewhat relevant, there’s some grey in there where there is another third that you can make an argument for. But then there was that other group like grass, like dude, you’re wasting your money. Lisa Simpson was an interest for some reason.
BRIAN: I found actually a bunch of old clients in mine. I was like oh, well they’re not paying me anymore and they’re now paying money to reach me, you don’t need to be doing this.
JON: Right, so it’s fascinating. And I can actually help Facebook and advertisers by cleaning that up and I did. You can add some interests in there if you want. But truth is that 99.9 percent of users aren’t going to clean that up. And that leads to a lot of bad targeting.
BRIAN: sure.
JON: Look if you’re looking at top of the funnel stuff, you don’t have many website visitors yet, or very few. You have a very small audience on Facebook and you don’t have many on the email list. You have to start somewhere. That doesn’t mean selling to interests, but it means ok, we’ll take this big group of some relevant people and send them into the funnel and give them something they’ll engage with. Like this article of something they like that separates them from everybody else, or video or whatever. Send them into a new audience so ok I’m not going to keep wasting my time with this interest, but these people have engaged with me and I’ll focus on them going forward.
BRIAN: Breaking that out a little bit further, how do you feel about the demographic data and how it differs from interest data?
JON: Which demographic data are you talking about?
BRIAN: Typically, I look at buying behavior?
JON: Yeah behavior data. To me it’s the same kind of thing as interest data because in my experience at least, where I target people based on buying behavior because this is essentially the stuff that is the partner category, the data mining stuff, the third party Axiom, Datalogix, Epsilon, that gets sent to Facebook that kind of creeps people out more than anything. It’s like, how do they know how much money I make and this kind of car and all this stuff.
It sounds kind of awesome and when it came out it blew everybody’s mind that you could do it. I think that in general the results I’ve see and I’ve heard other people have, isn’t all that impressive especially when you compare it to targeting people who you are connected to. And I think I question sometimes the accuracy of that data, in particular when people target based on salaries, they end up getting a lot of response that they’re not expecting.
BRIAN: Interesting.
JON: It doesn’t reflect that. But again, when you are talking top of the funnel and you’re looking for somewhere to start, going by buying behavior is a good place to start. Facebook doesn’t have that information on everybody so a lot of times if you use audience insights, you can break down these audiences, it will usually show you, of this audience in the US, or wherever, there’s like 40% of the audience have this data match for salaries or house they own or whatever.
So it is kind of incomplete as well, but like interests, like lookalike audiences, it’s a place to start. And I won’t say don’t use it. I’ll just say, make your goal to be not having to use it in 6 months to a year. Because you should be moving down the funnel.
BRIAN: One of the things I have not had a lot of success with has been the audience network so far, what’s been your impression?
JON: That’s funny, because I was doing an interview I think just yesterday and we talked about it. Sorry, if you hear my dog, my apologies, my dog is crazy.
BRIAN: What’s your dogs name?
JON: Rosita.
BRIAN: Hi Rosita.
JON: Yeah she barks at everybody.
BRIAN: Welcome to the Pod.
JON: It’s funny, because we were talking about this yesterday, and I personally had not had great success with audience network, and I think it’s clear why, so far. Because for the most part up until recently audience network has primarily been within partner mobile apps. And trivia crack is an example of where my ads have been and I’ve even seen my ads and it’s kind of crazy when I see them.
But the experience when using trivia crack if anyone has played that game. You’re tapping your thumbs and all of a sudden this app pops up unexpectedly and you click it. So even if you’re targeting well, I didn’t want to see that ad and click on it at this moment. So there’s a lot of accidental clicks. So what I have seen is I get really good cost per website click on audience network, but they’re low quality clicks. Again not necessarily meaning it is being shown to the wrong people.
BRIAN: It feels like a lot of accidental clicks.
JON: I think it’s a lot of accidental. I’m really careful though to make it clear that that’s just my experience, I’ve seen some reports, usually from Facebook, but that not only that the click rate is good overall but there’s good conversion rate. Again I’m not seeing that.
To me none of that really matters because of the future of audience network. I think we know why, again I may have see low quality clicks, but a big part of Facebook recently going forward will be instant articles. And how people monetize instant articles will largely be with audience network. You can use your own ads as well, but audience network will be in there as well. And in that case, it will be a much better experience, it won’t be an ad that pops up out of nowhere that you’re not expecting.
And I think those will work similarly to how a typical ad will work on Facebook. But not only that, but you can monetize mobile websites as well, which I don’t think many are doing this yet. I tried to do it months ago, just to experiment with it. I could never get it to work, but that’s the future though. It’s going to be on websites too.
Look, long term, I see audience network being Facebook’s strategy. It’s going to be their big ad network. To the point where potentially, I’m going to be careful of this, but potentially, it could dwarf the advertising revenue they get from Facebook itself. Because the internet at large is enormous. And we talk about the internet, you talk about mobile apps. All of a sudden, if Facebook become the network of choice over google, lots of opportunity there.
Not to mention we can start targeting people now who don’t even have a Facebook account through audience network. I guess for me audience network is about what has been and what can be and I’m not all that excited about audience network and how it’s been so far and those results. But I think there’s actually a lot of potential down the road.
BRIAN: Talking about things loading within Facebook and instant articles, that immediately brings to mind canvas ads and lead ads within Facebook. If you haven’t taken Jon’s Facebook quiz on his website, I highly recommend everyone do it and we’ll grade you on your level of Facebook ads guru.
You talk a lot about lead ads in that quiz, so I’m going to go ahead and assume you’re a big fan.
JON: Yeah, so, lead ads is one of those things as well that I think that other advertisers have seen mixed results on, but it’s a matter of using it the right way to get the optimal result. So anyone not familiar with lead ads and canvass and instant articles, they all work in very similar ways in that, the goal is to improve the user experience. So one of the problems has been, you click on a link ad and it drives to a landing page and it takes on average 8 seconds of load. People abandon it.
Not to mention that landing page or that blog post, may not be mobile responsive, there are lots of issues that can happen.
BRIAN: Might be on a 2g network at the time.
JON: Absolutely, so now what Facebook is doing, and marketers are quick to cry afoul on this stuff because they think Facebook is only thinking of their own interests because you’re keeping people on Facebook and not sending people to my website. Some brands are fighting this, but the reality is it is a better user experience to keep them on Facebook.
BRIAN: And you can’t fight the beast, you’ve got to go with it.
JON: But when we sit down and think of it as a user and if you’ve used canvas, clicked on a canvas ad, clicked on an instant article, you’ve clicked on a lead ad as opposed to going to a landing page, it is incredibly…
BRIAN: It almost feels magical.
JON: Yeah, it’s magical, the difference between that and clicking on a link ad, it’s not even close. I mean as a user you don’t want to click on the link ad that takes forever to load, and the instant articles are amazing.
So, lead ads, it makes it almost too easy. Now actually to a point it can be actually too easy to collect a lead because what happens is instead of going to a landing page, it flips over a form. And immediately within Facebook, now on both mobile and desktop, it pre-fills the information that the advertisers are asking for if it can from the profile. So it could be first name, last name, email address, is pretty common pulled from the profile. They can change it if they want, but otherwise that’s it, they just hit submit and boom you’re added to the list.
But it could just be email address, it really couldn’t be any easier than that. But as we know, even when you send people to a landing page, if you make something too easy, the quality will be less. So compare it to a landing page. If you go to a landing page and all it asks for is an email address as opposed to asking for first name, last name, email address, ask an open ended question, something to qualify them.
The one where you’re asking for all the questions, the conversion rate is going to be way less. But if someone goes through all those steps, the quality should be much much better than if someone just goes, here’s my email address here you go send me my stuff.
So same thing as is the case with lead ads, and I think even more important. Because they don’t provide anything really, it’s pre-filled and you just hit a button, they don’t have to do any work. So, yes, you get an amazing cost per lead, but yes the potential for having low quality leads is much higher.
But there are ways to fix that.
BRIAN: Yeah, you almost need to run that as the middle of your funnel.
JON: That’s the first thing too yeah, I don’t like doing anything like lead ads, I don’t like selling to people who don’t know me. I like to target people who have been to my site in the first place.
I think you’re less likely to have a low quality lead there too. Like you’re saying the middle of the funnel. Like the other thing you’re saying too, you can ask open ended questions. You can ask multiple choice questions, just a simple thing instead of just first name, email address, doing first name, last name, email address, because that creates a whole second step when you ask the third thing.
Additionally, there is the context card as well. Where you can say, ok you’re about to submit this but just so you know, this is what you’re getting if you hit submit. And so you won’t have any issues.
And the other thing with lead ads I think can lead to problems, is I’ll see people who ruin lead ads and split test it against an ad running to a landing page and it doesn’t work. I’m doing it exactly the same way as the one going to the landing page, same copy same imagery, clearly not as effective.
Well there’s an inherent advantage of a landing page ad when you drive them to a landing page and you’re doing more selling and clarifying what they’re getting in exchange for registering.
You have to use the lead ad image copy as your landing page, because that no longer exists.
So basically what can happen then with the lead ad, oh whatever you’re teasing me with in the copy here sounds interesting, click on the form and you’re not really sure what you’re getting at that point because you don’t have the landing page. So that’s one of the things advertiser’s have to think about as well.
BRIAN: Well we appreciate your time today, but also being a fellow cheesehead and Brewer fan, I need to ask you. Who was your favorite Brewer growing up?
JON: Yeah, so if you were to ask me now compared to then I think it’s tougher back then. I was a big Cecil Cooper fan. So like there are pictures of me about to go to a Brewer game where I’m all decked out in Brewer stuff and I made a custom side out of cardboard that says Coop on it.
So it might’ve been him, and to date myself that was like ’82. And a little later, absolutely, Paul Molitor and that hitting streak, Robin Yount, I mean Rollie Fingers too, I mean in the Rollie Fingers days. I don’t think people remember how much people were obsessed with him and that mustache and everybody wearing their own mustaches to games and stuff. Again you have to be like 40 years old or more to remember that.
And these days, I would say Robin Yount. Because he was a life timer as opposed to those other three guys and as far as we know didn’t do steroids. As opposed to Ryan Braun. And so I’m a Robin Yount guy.
BRIAN: Well I grew up a giant Molitor fan and I definitely shifted to Yount over the years. Mainly due to analytics and data telling us how much of a better player simply by the fact he played shortstop and center his whole career. Which kind of fits into my personality as a marketer and a fan of all things analytics.
JON: Honestly, I think it’ a big part of why I do what I do now. All that fantasy game stuff, I’m a huge baseball stats and strategy nerd. I’m a baseball coach for my kids. All that analytics stuff absolutely crosses over to this Facebook ad stuff too.
BRIAN: Well again, Jon Loomer, thanks for being on today, everyone should visit his website JonLoomer.com. Anything else you want to plug today?
JON: You know, right now? I would say the quiz. I think the quiz is a great way to understand what you know, what you don’t know, and once you take it, I will actually kind of direct you into a free webinar that I think would be a good fit for you. And after that free webinar maybe some other stuff. So if you go to JonLoomer.com/Facebook-ads-quiz-all. That’s a long one, because I wasn’t planning on giving that out.
Otherwise if you just want to go to JonLoomer.com in the top menu there is a link for the quiz and you can just click on that.
BRIAN: Well, I got a 21/30 so all listeners you’re challenged to beat me.
JON: There you go. Not many people have.
BRIAN: Ok, great, it’s been great talking to you today, and I’m sure we’ll be in touch.
Resources:
–intro and outro music from our friends at Sabers: https://sabersmusic.bandcamp.com/releases