Ep 206: How To Scale Up To 6 Figures Per Month Ad Spend With Facebook Ads with Andrew Hubbard

Do you want to scale up your business? However, you can’t seem to figure out how to run successful ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram.

I understand your sentiments. Creating different ad sets, having a captivating copy, preparing ad creatives, and so on are just too much to think about. For small business owners, this process might take much of their time and make them overlook other aspects of their businesses. 

I have invited Andrew Hubbard on the show to give some clarity about Facebook and Instagram Ads, so you can attract your target customers and unleash the full potential of your business.

Andrew is the founder of a social media ad agency that specializes in helping online education companies and coaches scale using paid traffic. With tens of millions of dollars spent across Facebook and Instagram, he’s able to share unique insights and learnings that come from being in the trenches testing, iterating, and innovating at scale.

We have discussed how he bought his first online business from Flippa and what his goals are with it. How do you develop a FB Ad strategy to get cold, and warm traffic and sales? What are the types of remarketing and when should you start remarketing?

We also talked about FB ad creative tweaks from video, images, headlines, offers, and CTA’s. What are the most effective tactics for low-cost leads to get a better ROI with FB ads?

Last but not least, Andrew shared setting up the FB account the right way so it doesn’t get shut down.

If you’re struggling with creating your ads, this is the perfect opportunity to learn the winning strategies from the marketing genius Andrew Hubbard. 

Tune in now!

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Episode Highlights

02:16 Andrew’s experience in purchasing a BLOG from Flippa

06:40 Know your goals first before buying a website

08:34 Hear Andrew’s standout case study on Ads

11:27 Stop wasting leads by doing your email remarketing campaigns

15:00 An overall good strategy on FB Ads 

24:04 Video, Copy, and Offer – Important tips for creating Ads

32:42 Where to put the ‘Call to Action’?

36:31 What are the common reasons why Ad accounts are being shut down?

42:24 Where can you find Andrew?

Courses & Training

Courses & Training

Key Takeaways

➥ Before buying a site, know your goal first. For instance, if your goal is to buy an online business that makes them money, so you can replace your income. Then buying a $1,500 domain, or small website is not a good choice because chances are that it’s still at that 90% failure rate. And your goal is to make money.

➥ Doing remarketing campaign through email is another way to convert your leads.

➥ For Andrew, the best way to do FB Ads is to start with a remarketing strategy, because it’s the low-hanging fruit,  you can spend, a few $100 a month in a lot of cases and generate good returns from that, because all you’re doing is the people who are regularly visiting your website are the people who are regularly consuming your content, just using those ads to bring them onto your email list. 



About The Guest

Andrew Hubbard is a social media ad agency founder that specializes in helping online education companies and coaches scale using paid traffic. With tens of millions of dollars spent across Facebook & Instagram, he’s able to share unique insights and learnings that come from being in the trenches testing, iterating and innovating at scale.

Connect with Andrew Hubbard

Transcription:

Jaryd Krause (0:00)

This is the blueprint on how to run Facebook ads and scale to six figure months and beyond. Hi, I'm Jaryd Krause. I'm the host of the buying online businesses podcast and today I'm speaking with Andrew Hubbard, who is a social media agency founder who specializes in helping online education companies and coaches scaling using paid traffic with 10s of millions of dollars spent across Facebook and Instagram, he's able to share unique insights and learnings that come from being in the trenches testing iterating and innovating at scale.

In this podcast episode, Andrew and I specifically talk about how he bought his first online business from Flippa, which is a total curveball, I did not expect him to be buying a business from Flippa, we talk about his experience and what his actual goal with it was. And compare that to what maybe your goal is when you're looking at buying a business and what you should and shouldn't be doing. We also talk about Facebook ads strategy, how to get cold traffic, how to get warm traffic, how to get opt ins, and how to get sales, how to actually make an ROI from your ads. We also talk about different types of remarketing. And when should you actually start remarketing in your strategy and your process of running paid ads.

Then we move on to talk about Facebook ad creative tweaks from video images, headlines offers and call to actions also talking about the mindset of not getting an ROI from your ads right away and why you should be focusing on data and the mindset around that. And then we also talk about how to set your Facebook account up so doesn't get shut down because it comes in waves. And a lot of people do have the ad accounts shut down. So, you want to make sure you're up to their policies as well.

There's so much value in this podcast episode, we also talk about buying an online business, Andrew actually went away and did his own DD when buying all my business but did say he probably missed a lot of things and should have done DD probably a bit better.

So, if you are looking to buy a business, make sure you get our due diligence framework is what I and all my clients use to go away and buy great online businesses, you can get that by going to buyingonlinebusinesses.com/freeresources, check out that framework.

And there's awesome other resources on that page too. And there'll be links to that in the show notes. Let's dive into the episode. Andrew, welcome to the buying online businesses podcast.

Andrew Hubbard (2:19)

Thanks for having me, Jaryd, excited to be here.

Jaryd Krause (2:21)

I'm excited for our chat as well. It's not very often that reach out to Aziz on podcasts these days, nothing against anybody else because I love who I get the breadth of people that I get to speak to. And the first question I asked you, even before I hit the record buttons, and ask this to most guests just about is Have you ever bought or sold any businesses? And funnily enough, you had an answer that sort of enlightened me a bit. Tell me. Yeah, have you ever bought or sold businesses before?

Andrew Hubbard (2:50)

Yeah, so I bought my first one this year. So, my wife and I, thank you, it was it was an interesting experience. So, my wife and I have a business in the parenting space like parenting and newborn development and stuff like that. And so, we started a brand-new blog, and one of the things I wanted to do is accelerate that process.

So, I actually bought a small blog from Flippa 99%. The reason I bought it was for the backlinks. So, it costs us about 1500 US dollars, okay. For that one, it was generating no revenue or anything but had a bit of traffic had some reasonable backlinks had a lot of junk in there too. And I probably butchered the due diligence process. But we ended up buying it and in doing that King.

Jaryd Krause (3:32)

Congrats, so $1,500 got you some backlinks, sometimes you can buy one backlink for $1,500. Obviously, it depends on the backlink. Right? So, your goal was to buy one for the backlinks, but tell me about your experience in the purchasing of it. How was it what was like to go through a Flippa? What was it like to do due diligence? And what do you think? I don't know, like, I'm open to do this. Do you have any questions for me as well? Like, I'm happy to help if I can, because I'm sure people?

Andrew Hubbard (4:02)

Yeah, so I mean, I was going in pretty blind, like I'd read a little bit here and there and I'd started different websites in the past and build them up in terms of traffic, but I never bought anything. So, it was interested in going to Flippa and like it was kind of a bit of a black box man. I'd heard things about Flippa too, like I was looking everywhere like micro acquire and lots of different places, but I found this one on Flippa very cheap was kind of a no brainer to do.

And you had heard about Flippa in particular as being one we've got to be really careful with due diligence. And to be honest, at that price point, I kind of just looked through the backlinks check to make sure it wasn't full of spam. You know, there was a couple of a couples of DRA DS I think to do ad plus and then you know, like, probably 1040 to 50 plus on a bunch of others. And so, I just went oh well like worst case, I lose 1500 bucks. Let's do it and we'll see how we go. So probably not the best fit Just following that process, if it was a 510, you know, $10,000 plus purchase definitely would have done.

Jaryd Krause (5:08)

Definitely. Yeah, definitely, definitely. And so, is it generating any traffic?

Andrew Hubbard (5:12)

We're just starting to get traffic now overall. So, I redirected all of that recreated rebuilt a few pages that were relevant and directed those links directly. But the others just generic 301 redirects to either we've taken over this site page or directly to the homepage. It was really, I don't know, it's been really it's been weird. We got good traffic to start with like a built pretty quickly, and then it kind of just dropped off a cliff.

And I thought, have we been penalized? What's going on? And then it picked up again, massive spike dropped again, and now it's picked up again. So, I know manual penalties, nothing like that. I don't know what's going on. But it's, it's growing quickly. Definitely quicker than if we started an hour a new domain for our site. Yeah. It's brand new. So, are the existing website that we bought? It was like five to six years old.

Jaryd Krause (6:00)

Around for a while. Cool. Cool. And what does sort of what? Did the domain have you on the site that you bought?

Andrew Hubbard (6:07)

It was 30. Something 36? Is. That's great. It's too bad.

Jaryd Krause (6:12)

It's kind of like buying an expired domain, though. It's not expired.

Andrew Hubbard (6:16)

Exactly. That's kind of how I was looking at it. I was like, it's kind of like buying an expired domain. It. Yeah, the content was pretty rubbish. I wasn't really interested in that. So literally, it was the domain and the links.

Jaryd Krause (6:27)

So you bought you bought a domain. And I'm glad that we sort of clarify that because people are listening in and they're new to the space and like, I could buy a site for $1,500. Right? For people listening, please, please, please understand what your goal is.

And I get this regularly, in just conversations with people in our community, people forget what their goal is. And then I hear something and go, I could do this, or I could do that. And it's not actually that strategy or vehicles not going to help them get to their goal. For example, if their goal is to buy an online business that makes them money, so they can replace their income. If you're going to buy a $1,500 domain, or small website, chances are that it's still at that 90% failure rate. And your goal is to make money.

Your goal through this domain or site that you bought was not actually to make money. So, you understood your goal. But most people may misinterpret what they should be doing towards hitting their goal. And I'm a big believer of buying something for 5 to 10k plus, or save, at least until people can get to that range, because then you have some more meat on the bone. And you've got a proof of concept because 90% of the stat stats are that 90% of all starts fail.

So, and people that do this, I mean, you you're in the space, right? You've been in all my business for a while, people that do this, most people that do this are brand new, and to buy something that's a startup and its brand new, that you've got a lot of a lot of work to learn around like.

Andrew Hubbard (7:51)

100% if I bought this site with the goal of like, making money with it, and just building it out and making money, I think it would have been a terrible purchase. But when you look at it through the lens of, I was only buying it as an accelerant. Like, I was just going to get this thing, and it was a shortcut instead of building links. And waiting to kind of know if the Google Sandbox is really a thing or not.

But you know, yeah, it is we had a brand-new domain. So, like, instead of waiting six to 12 months to kind of get out of that Google Sandbox, and then paying to build links, essentially, whether through my time or purchasing them through a service, I just 1500 bucks, buy this thing, plug it in, and it's an accelerant for that, you know, other website versus expecting to build out this thing and make money for sure.

Jaryd Krause (8:33)

Yeah. Cool. Congrats, man. That's great. So, you bought a site, and you're building your blog as well as in its helping with that. But I got you on for a completely different reason. To talk about paid ads, people would have heard already in the intro about your career and what you actually do. And I've got a lot of questions around paid ads. You're mostly helping people with Facebook ads, or do you do Google as well?

Andrew Hubbard (9:03)

Primarily Facebook, or Facebook and Instagram?

Jaryd Krause (9:05)

Okay, cool. And so, I wanted to ask you what's, I wouldn't say typical, but what's one of your standout sorts of case studies of or client on the results of what where they were when they came to you and the results you got? Because I'd love to break that down. And typically, when we do this in a podcast, going through the steps helps people go wow, like, these are the things that I could go this. They're the steps that I could take to help my business improve. And we're talking about mostly ecommerce businesses, right.

Andrew Hubbard (9:34)

So for me, I mostly do courses, coaching consultants, all of that kind of stuff. Digital products, digital products. Exactly. Cool. Cool. All right. So, let's get into a case study. So probably one of my favorites was we started working with a company who was selling a selling a digital product online course for 97. In the business space, When I started working with them, they were spending probably like two to $3,000 a month.

And they were doing okay, like they were profitable on that they'll probably about two to one on their ad spend. So, a few $1,000 a month in profit on that ad spend in terms of core sales. That's good. Yeah, not bad. Like they were quite happy with that. But every time they tried to scale; they were really struggling. So, I came in, we started working with them. And within three months, we really started to scale pretty quickly. And we can break down, I'll give you a high-level overview of kind of what happened. And then we can break down like you said, into how we actually did it.

Within three months, we're spending around $20,000 a month on those ads, and we're well above two to one. So, we're about $50,000 a month in, in profit on that. Awesome. Within eight months, we'd grown that one, we're spending six figures. So, we're spending $100,000 A month plus at better than two to one. So, we're hitting like three to one return on ad spend. on that on that one. And there are there are multiple things we did across the board with that.

So, something else that I focus on is we look at the Facebook ads, obviously in great detail, but also like working with businesses to help them look at well, how do we how do we actually increase our revenue per email subscriber that we're bringing in? How are we how do we increase our overall profitability, so that we can spend more on ads without chewing into margins, and really squeezing, squeezing the net profit.

Jaryd Krause (11:27)

A lot of people get this don't do this very well, I believe I'm lucky now most of the people that join my membership, or our membership is through email, because I love email marketing, whereas most people are like, just spend money on ads and try and get people in with retargeting ads and stuff like that, rather than putting some emphasis on like, Hey, do some remarketing via your email campaigns? Is that what you're talking about that?

Andrew Hubbard (11:50)

Exactly And looking at, like what's happening when people are coming in to your email list, like, what's the, you just sending them five emails and saying, buy my thing, buy my thing by my thing, and then never talking to them again. Because that's not really, that's not really an effective way to do that, right, you're spending, let's say you're spending $8 a lead, if you email them five times over the course of a week, try to sell them your thing, and then you never, never touch that lead again.

And you go out then just continually buying leads, there is so much money left on the table, because you could be spending time, it doesn't cost you anywhere. It's the cost is marginal to keep in touch with these people through your email list and email them on a weekly basis or whatever, and nurture those people and eventually get them a decent percentage of them to become customers. Yeah, versus just continually buying new leads with this very short, short sighted approach to sales in mind.

Jaryd Krause (12:40)

Yeah, and even that five-part email sequence as soon as somebody gets on your list is very short sighted as well. I just don't feel any. It's a lot of people in society, but also a lot of people in businesses just don't know how to play the long game and feel like they need the instant gratification.

Yes, spend, you know, 10s of 1000s of dollars, in this case, 100 also K a month on ads, but waits for months, and have them be on your email list. And like, hey, let's just be mates and hang out on the email list. And let me share some cool things with you until you realize like, I'm a good dude. Like, to work with me sort of thing.

Andrew Hubbard (13:20)

Exactly. Like, I actually know what I'm talking about. I'm not just here for like one and done by my thing. And then I'm never going to talk to you again. Or, I'm actually here to provide a helpful information regardless of whether you give me money or not. Right, like, it's crazy the way people do it. So, it goes back to that saying, they always say it's much cheaper to sell to an existing customer than it is to acquire a brand-new customer. Certainly.

Jaryd Krause (13:44)

certainly. I will see. So, we run sometimes YouTube ads. And with that, we'll have people to stay on all this for you know, listen to my podcasts for a year. And then I'll go off just been listening and watching for a whole year. And it's like, it's my time now to go.

Sometimes that when people opt in to a free thing from a Facebook ad as well as like they want it but they might not actually be ready to purchase the course or in the right time period, because like they just had a baby or they're about to get married in two months, or something like that, but you're not running emails, and they're not on your email list. It's you've just wasted that money spent on acquiring that lead, right?

Andrew Hubbard (14:25)

100%. And you think of what percentage are actually going to be ready, like when you're talking about at scale, the number of leads you're trying to acquire, it might be like 5% are actually ready.

And then of that, how many are actually going to trust you enough to buy from you within five days, you know that the percentage drops even more and then people go well, I want my Facebook ads aren't profitable, like we need to change, tweak this tweak that and it's like well, it might be overall strategy versus just tweaking something. You know, in the ads you got strategy and tactics.

Jaryd Krause (14:58)

So, talking about tactics or changing things in the ad and tweaking things on the landing page, which I'll get to probably want to ask a few questions around that during our chat today, but strategy, one big part of the strategy is having some remarketing obviously, remarketing ads set up and obviously, email marketing set up. Is there any parts of a good strategy or pieces that you would put together to have a good overall strategy when you're going into running a campaign other than those two things?

Andrew Hubbard (15:29)

So, as you said, like the way I kind of build it out, I would always start with remarketing.

So, I'd start there by assuming your audience here are buying a website, buying a business, and they're starting to build that out in terms of getting more traffic to it, and you're really growing that side of things. Always start with a remarketing strategy, because it's the low hanging fruit, like in terms of what we were just talking about, but people kind of need to get to know you, they need to trust you, they need to feel like, oh, yeah, Jaryd is a good dude, I'm going to think about, you know, maybe buying from him one day.

So remarketing is that low hanging fruit, you can spend, a few $100 a month in a lot of cases and generate good returns from that, because all you're doing is the people who are regularly visiting your website are the people who are regularly consuming your content, just using those ads to bring them onto your email list. And eventually pitching them on something can be really, really profitable.

It's the most basic strategy, it's easy, low hanging fruit, that's their problem is it's not scalable, but it's a great place to start, then in terms of strategy, what I like to do is I always like to have a piece and a very small portion of the budget purely goes to promoting content, especially video content. So, if you're producing any type of content, whether it's audio, whether it's blog, whether it's ideally, video, just spending a few dollars a day, and like I would say maybe five $10 A Day promoting that out using Facebook and Instagram ads, or whatever platform you like, like you said, Use YouTube, that's great, too.

But we focus on Facebook and Instagram. So that's the channel that we go with. And it's purely just to bring new people in, like I said before, I like to accelerate the process wherever I can. And so, if you're out there building this business trying to get Google traffic, a quick way to get eyeballs on that business, in a short period of time, is just promoting content.

So, like, if you've got videos, promoting them via Facebook ads, I cut them up into short videos, one-to-two-minute videos, little snippets of content and then promoting them. You can pay one to two cents for a 15 second view on that video with a Facebook ad. And then that's going to feed remarketing as well. So that's kind of the second step that I would look at in terms of strategy.

And then, the next piece of that strategy will be okay, let's talk about how are we going to bring cold people in, get them on the email list and start to turn them into customers that way.

Jaryd Krause (17:50)

So, you're saying with remarketing, that's repurposed contents, short videos and whatnot. So, with cold that this is where the largest scalability comes into it, right? It's the top of the top of the funnel type thing? Are you doing content marketing to that? Or how are you trying to get people on an email list? Fast? What sort of work are you doing to get cold.

Andrew Hubbard (18:14)

to get cold? So that's where we would look at, okay, what kind of free thing can we offer, whether it's a checklist, a cheat sheet, some people do webinars, whatever that may be, and it comes down to what's best for your audience.

People say what's the best free thing to offer really depends on the audience, what they prefer, what stage they're at, along that sort of buying journey, as well. But we figure out what's the best thing we can offer them, and then we go out and start promoting that and having some kind of sequence on the back of that. So that's, where we'd move into that sort of area. Cool.

Jaryd Krause (18:45)

cool. Okay, we've got an overall strategy, get people in cold onto the email list, with promoting something for free. And then once they're in the sort of atmosphere in your area, then you can remarket to them with more content. And then if they haven't got on the email list, they can start to get on the email list.

And then you make a bunch of sales through email, and then eventually do you have like a sales campaign as well like a remarketing sales campaign further down the line? Or do you are you just running, running it mostly to get email.

Andrew Hubbard (19:16)

we do. So, it depends on what the sales funnel or sales sequence looks like for any business. But most businesses will have some kind of sales funnel in place, whether it's an email series, whether it's a video series or a challenge, or whatever that may be. And so, we definitely do that. So, we bring them in with our free offer free lead magnet, and then depending on timing, we do have retargeting set up there and we want to show it at the right time to promote whatever our offer is.

So, if we're selling if we're selling into a course and we're offering a discount for a limited time, then we would have ads time specifically targeting just those people who are in the in the funnel that period of time. Yeah, to promote that offer. Say hey, this is open or hey, you know, 50% off He's available for this time. The problem with it is since iOS 14.5 came out, please back, tracking sucks.

And so, it's really, unless you've got volume, like unless you've got hundreds of people seeing that offer at that time, it's really hard to get those ads in front of people. Now it's like, you've got to have a decent sized audience. So, at smaller scales, like if you're just dipping your toe in the water with this and just starting to get into cold traffic and, and starting to get that up and running. Often, we don't go with that remarketing purely because the audience will be too small. We'll try it. But often we just want to get delivery.

Jaryd Krause (20:37)

Cool. I've got a client who has turned off Facebook ads, or turned off Facebook ads, and like just with an agency they were using and really didn't see that much difference in the sales because they the tracking just wasn't reporting well or correctly.

Yeah, even with even with an outside software that they were using, I think it's like $1,000 A month or using a software to for better tracking. And that software still couldn't really do it.

Andrew Hubbard (21:07)

Wow. Like Heroes or something like that. I assume.

Jaryd Krause (21:11)

Alex Becker thing? I'm not sure if it was, Alex Becker's?

Andrew Hubbard (21:15)

I think so? I think that's his one. There's a few around that all do essentially the same thing.

Jaryd Krause (21:20)

Cool. So overall strategy? Awesome. I think maybe we should put an emphasis on this. Yeah, that? I don't know.

Do you agree that strategy is more important than the tactics of just like these little tweaks in your copy and your ad stuff? Because we will get to this? But like, what do you? What do you have to say about that?

Andrew Hubbard (21:41)

100% strategies, like it's the most important thing. And I think prepping your business for Facebook ads before you start running them is also part of this strategy question. So, it's like, one of the reasons why I say always go for warm traffic first, is because what you want to do is build out a sales funnel, like a sales system, so that you know, okay, somebody's going to join my email list, they're going to get this series of emails or see this series of content, then they're going to get a pitch from me, you want to get a feel for those numbers.

So, you want to set that all up, get some people to go through that and get a feel for okay, what's my conversion rate on this? Like, what are my email open rates, what are my click through rates, but most importantly, what percentage of the people that go through this sequence however long it is actually buy from me, because without knowing that, you can't improve it, and you really want to get traffic through it, improve it to the point where you know, it's 80/20, like you have done 80% of the work to improve that.

And now you're just doing small tweaks before you go out to cold traffic. And that's why I say start with the warm traffic first meaning retargeting your existing website, visitors, maybe that's just retargeting that the organic traffic getting from Google to start with, because that's the cheap, they're the cheapest leads you're going to get, it's the lowest hanging fruit, they're the most likely to convert.

So you can push those people through that funnel, get those baseline numbers, improve the sales funnel, and then when you go to cold traffic, you're not going to get absolutely hung out to dry, because you figure out all this, you know, point zero 2% of people who go through this funnel actually convert therefore I would need to be buying 50 cent leads, which is unheard of now in order to be profitable, and then you're back to square one. So that's why this strategy is so important, you kind of build a funnel, get the cheapest traffic possible through that first to kind of work out what the key points are, you need to focus on fixing.

And then once you've improved that, then you go Okay, the next step in my strategy is to go out and do these things like promote content, bring in cold traffic and all the rest of it.

Jaryd Krause (23:28)

I really liked that. And I kind of feel that when you are targeting traffic, that's warm traffic that already is in your atmosphere. And in your circle there, they already know who you are, they already have a little bit more trust. So, I feel like you can make more, you've got more room for error in your sales copy in your ads and your offer and stuff like that.

And you can use them to sort of nail it down without having to having it to be absolutely perfect to get a conversion, you can have a bit more room for error. So that brings us to nailing down your ads and your copy. What are some, I don't know some ad 20 tips that you would give to somebody that's looking to you know, start creating Facebook ads in terms of video copy.

Andrew Hubbard (24:15)

Offer good question. So yes, you're 100% right. When you say it's more forgiving when you go to warm traffic because now the most important thing now with Facebook ads is the creative like the image or the video and the copy that you put in your ad we used to live in a world where Facebook ads was so good because of the granular targeting you could do like you could target so specifically and you could get in front of the exact right person at the exact right time.

It was yeah, it was great different world now we kind of go broader with our targeting we go much, much broader often we don't even target anyone we just say open audience you know; I just want to target males aged 30 Plus in Australia. And so, most of the targeting and everything happens with our image or video and our copy in the ad.

So super important that we that we get that right a few things I think like based on that. And then the reason I sort of set that up like that was because kind of just so I can show how important that is. Because your targeting is done with the ad itself, right, which means you need to one be specific.

And to be uniquely appealing to your particular target audience, the last thing you want to be so that's the first thing I say is don't be too broad, like you want to, you want to create things. So, tip with the creative use visuals that appeal specifically to your target audience, meaning things that only your target audience will recognize. So, what's an example?

Jaryd Krause (25:37) So okay, let's say it's having Bitcoin in your image, or it's like.

Andrew Hubbard (25:41)

100%, or let's say, you're targeting people who are interested in growing online businesses or buying online businesses. Maybe you've got a Google Analytics screenshot with a chart, the charts, flatlining, and then it spikes all of a sudden in the middle, and you've got a little circle on it, and you go change made here, you know, whatever.

The average person doesn't know what Google Analytics looks like, they got no idea, but somebody who's really in that world looks at that and goes, amen. Like, what did they change, right? Instant interest in that particular ad. So that's the first thing like try to think of visuals. Whether you're using images or video, try to think of things that are visually appealing to your specific audience and not to the entire world. That's the first thing.

So, because that's going to help with your targeting only, only people who are interested in that are going to engage and therefore Facebook is going to show your ad to more people like those who are engaging, and it's kind of a snowball effect. Other things you can do with visuals, when you're looking at either video or images is you need to make it look native.

So everybody has this tendency, and initial kind of, they get on this path of I want to create these beautiful looking at images, and I'll get them designed by a designer and they'll look stunning, and they'll have all these different things like design things going on in them. But it's easiest way to stand out as an ad. Like if you scroll through your Facebook feed, you can pick most ads subconsciously without even kind of having to think about it.

Yeah, because they look like ads. They're just they stand out. So the best ads that we've got running at the moment are all like selfies or really casual type of photos.

Jaryd Krause (27:15)

Or this is opposite to what it used to be five years ago, right?

Andrew Hubbard (27:18)

Total opposite. Yep. So, like I said, those screenshots that I just showed they work really well. So, because they're so hyper specific.

Jaryd Krause (27:24)

many people just post organic post about screenshots of like, yeah, right.

Andrew Hubbard (27:30)

Exactly. Like literally what I just said, you could get your phone and hold it in front of Google Analytics and take a photo, and then use that as your ad, you know, stuff like that. Because people know, they call it sorry, people don't want to be sold to don't want to be sold to and it's like banner blindness.

So, half the time people skip past those ads that look a lot like ads. Without they're not thinking about it consciously. It just happens because their brain has been trained to like filter out the bother with them. Yeah, exactly. And so, you get around that by actually just using visuals that don't that look like what their friends are posting, basically not. No other stuff.

So that's the other tip, I'll give you on creative copy. So, with the copy, there's a few things you can do. So again, you can call people out specifically like calling out that audience. You know, hey, I don't know if you're a plumber in Canberra. Hyper specific, right? Kind of, again, know that. That's what people's gut reaction is when I say be very specific in calling out your audience. But the problem with that again, is screams ad like anything that says calling all you know x in y or x.

Jaryd Krause (28:41)

This type of person is like prime sales copy. He exactly right. And so, saying all my, my mate who's a plumber did this. Yeah, in Canberra, which is more organic.

Andrew Hubbard (28:54)

Exactly. Or stories. Yes, stories are great. Like you said, my maid who did this, or I did you know, I did this. And this is what happened to like, you know, that was like, you want to get fit in 2023 Sure, that could be a good headline for an ad. But it screams like, I'm about to sell you my fitness program. You know, or if you just say something like, I tried this training schedule that helped me improve my max by 50% in 60 days, that's something where it's like, ah, that's cool.

Like, you know, I might, you know, what's he talking about? So, try to try to call people out. But do it in a way that's more like story based or a bit more. A bit more of a creative approach to it that makes it interesting versus very clearly sales copy.

Now that's, that's for things like headlines when we're talking copy, one of the things I really like to do is open. So, let's just for anyone listening who's not familiar with the Facebook ad, you've basically got the main body copy at the top of the ad. This is on desktop or mobile. You've got an image or video below that and you Got the headline below that so your main body copy is the long part can be as long as you want by headline below that.

So, your main body copy is the long part can be as long as you want basically, image or video. And the headline is just a short one liner. So, we just talked about the headline, we talked about the main body copy and an ad, when you first see an ad, you can only see like two or three lines to start with. And you've got to click a little read more button. To see the rest on Instagram, you get to see like, two lines, if that's like a sentence, before you click it.

So that's if your ad 20 In your ad copy. That's where I like to really spend a lot of my time because my goal is I need to get people to click that read more buttons. So, I've got those first three lines in an ad to get them to click that read more. If they don't click it, then the rest of what I write if I write 2000 words underneath, that doesn't matter, right? So really heavily focusing on that.

And the best way I've found to do it at the moment is say something that's a little bit, try and think of something that's specific to your industry, that's a little bit of a contrarian viewpoint or a little bit of an alternate view to what most people have. So, if you can say something that kind of pushes back against the status quo, or the norm, or the kind of ingrained patterns of thinking, then that really builds curiosity and gets people going.

Hang on a minute, like, you know, what's this guy talking about? I'm going to click read more. So, like you can't do that. Don't buy an online business with a low multiple. Exactly.

Jaryd Krause (31:29)

things like that. A perfect like, because people like hang on low multiple means cheaper business, I want to get a good business cheap. Yeah, exactly. You know, don't buy an online business. That's got 80% profit margins.

Andrew Hubbard (31:45)

Stuff like that really good. And then you know, what that does it, it creates a positive feedback loop with the Facebook ad algorithm as well. So, Facebook are looking at engagement rates on ads, because they want to show ads, like the main goal of Facebook engagement they want, they want engagement longer, engaging. They don't want to annoy their users, they want to show the ads that people actually like, more often they want to like, if an ad is good, and Facebook says, lots of people are engaging with this, they're going to show that ad more often at a lower cost, you'll win more auctions.

So, it's a feedback loop. If you can get lots of people clicking that read more button, then Facebook says, okay, people are interested in this ad, and you'll see your ad costs come down as well. So not only will you see more people clicking More people reading more people clicking your link, but you'll also see your CPMs drop as well, which is cost per 1000 impressions because of that extra engagement. So that's kind of their my kind of big key tips for each element of an ad, I would say.

Jaryd Krause (32:40) That's awesome. There's one thing that I might bring up about call to action. Well, I was on a is went out with a bunch of business owners on a boat to the Christmas party thing the other week. And one of the guys is he runs Facebook ads as well. And they've been testing, you know, they'll do similar to like six to seven figures spend a month for some of the creators, and they were testing different call to actions instead of like Join Now he'd have claimed now because people feel like it's already you know, they've already got something they just need to claim it.

Yeah, rather than like, oh, I need to go over this bigger hurdle, which has joined with the call to actions and doesn't just need to be like the two words like get now or apply here or something like that. That last little bit in the ads, I think is it the headline that you call it the headline?

Andrew Hubbard (33:34)

The headline? Yep. So do you have a call to action in the headline as well, I usually won't put a call to action in the headline, there's a little bit below the headline, they call it the link text description or something. It goes like just below, I'll put it in there. Like it goes underneath the headline, it's a tiny little bit.

So, I'll put like, you know, and it's just something very simple. Like, let's say we're promoting a due diligence checklist for buying online business, I would say, click here to make sure you don't get caught buying, you know, buying a bad online business or something, you know, something like that to kind of reaffirm. So, I'm going to just say click here to download now.

I'll say click here to and then I'll link it in with something that's reaffirming their decision. So as a positive thing and linking the benefit with it.

Jaryd Krause (34:16)

Wow. See, I don't run Facebook ads, or Instagram ads. And it’s interesting to see how much it's changed in the last five years. Like you said, yes, totally opposite, which is why people really need to be across this stuff, right?

Andrew Hubbard (34:31)

there's still a lot of old content around online too. So, a lot of people sort of get down that rabbit hole, read that older stuff, and they're trying to do that and it just doesn't work anymore.

Jaryd Krause (34:38)

And that's why it's valuable to work with somebody that's in the space doing it every day like you is you know, you're testing with a lot of ad budget and I think that's where most people get wrong or what they get wrong as a beginner as well as they go I call I've got like two three grand, I'm going to start running some Facebook ads just to test it out or just to you know, but when they do that they don't realize that two to three grand is there.

I'm hoping to get an ROI on it straightaway. Whereas two to three grand is what I've told a lot of people, two or three grand is basically an experiment to buy data. And the more money you spend, the more data you get. And the more data you get, the better decisions you can make for your business, which helps you get better conversion rates. So, a lot of people think that it's like, oh, I want to see if these ads work for me at the start, and they don't. And then they give up, which is like the worst time to give up, right when they've just bought data. And they don't know what to do with it yet.

Andrew Hubbard (35:30)

Totally, totally, I did a little bit of content on this recently, actually. And that was spot on with, like, pretty much the message, as I was saying, which is, I go into ads with one of two mindsets.

And it's either one, I'm going in to buy data, like I don't expect to make a profit, you know, if it's a brand-new offer, a brand-new sales funnel, a brand-new lead magnet, whatever I go in, and I spend that first couple of grand with the mindset of like, I'm going to put these people through, I'm going to see what the data points tell me and what I can learn from that.

And then we're going to work on improving those things and go again, I have zero expectation of any return. Or the second mindset is if I've got something that's well established, then I'm going in with the mindset of, okay, I know my average revenue per lead is $10; I need to go into Facebook ads now and acquire leads for, you know, if my goal is 200%, return on ad spend, I need to acquire a lead for $5 or less. That's my mindset. I'm going in to do that. And my expectation is profitability. But there are two very, very different things.

Jaryd Krause (36:29)

Definitely. I sort of mentioned before that I don't run Facebook ads or Instagram ads. My account got shut down a couple of years ago, and I just couldn't get it back. And I wanted to talk about that. It's pretty common still, right, that account ad accounts get shut down. Is this due to some landing page? Like, what are some of the reasons that they do get shut down these days? I know mine had just too many disapproved ads. And I changed things too many times.

And I like looking at YouTube. And I'm in the making money online space as well. It's highly scrutinized because, you know, there are a lot of people out there doing some shady stuff. So, it's fair. Is there? Are there some common things that you've seen that are getting people kicked off?

Andrew Hubbard (37:11)

It tends to come in waves? Like I don't know why, What happens at Facebook, whether they make a change to their automated algorithm that flags and shuts down accounts, and then it just kind of goes nuts?

Jaryd Krause (37:22)

Or what I've noticed is that when I find out, either I've been kicked off twice, got back on once, and both times it happened to like, 40% of people running.

Andrew Hubbard (37:37)

Yeah.

That's what I find, like, I'll get, you know, one client who gets an ad account shut down, then I'll get another one or two, you know, within a few days, and it's like, you know, we've had two years of nothing, and then all of a sudden, we've got, you know, three that have gone down.

Jaryd Krause (37:53)

Is that because your emails are affiliated with those AD accounts?

Andrew Hubbard (37:59)

Then the others are fine. I think it's just an algorithmic thing. Or they do a sweep, I don't know. But the most common things are, as you said, like, ad rejections; if you especially so they have a, they've mentioned this before Facebook themselves, they've got some sort of measure of account health. So, they keep track of likes, and this is internal measure, they don't share it. But they do keep track of ad account health, meaning, essentially, how trustworthy is this ad account? How long have they been advertising? How many ads have been rejected? Or how many times are they getting their ads marked as spam, or marked as hide all. People say, don’t show me these ads, again, which is negative feedback on ads.

So how much negative feedback are they getting all of these different factors then play in and it seems to be like once your account health hits a certain threshold, it's bang. So, if you're a new account, for example, and there's no trust there, your account health is basically a neutral kind of position. And then you get a bunch of ads rejected, and it could just be, five, five ads rejected. That can be enough to trigger it sometimes because you're starting at a point of, well, we don't know yet. We're at a neutral kind of position at the moment. You've just had five ads rejected.

Things look a bit shady; you've only been around for a week. Yeah, shut down. It seems to be things like that. And then the other most common one is so before I jumped to the next thing, the most common, the best way to sort of approach that is just start slow. If you're just starting out with a brand-new ad account, start slow. When you first set up your ads, if you're running to a brand-new landing page, I would just start with one ad, or a couple of ads to that landing page, even one, run it for a couple of days.

Make sure it gets approved, and make sure it runs for a couple of days because sometimes things get approved. And then for whatever reason, their algorithm checks it and that gets rejected. So that are on for a day or two. Make sure that that's all good. And then go on to the rest of your ads running to that landing page. Because if you've got a problem with the landing page and you start running 10, brand new ads, then all those ads, go bang, bang, bang, bang, bang rejected in one hit, and that that's not a good look.

So, if you start with one, you just kind of say, okay, this is good proof; let's start the rest of our ads. And you can apply the same approach with ads. If you've got 10 different sets of ad copy that you want to test. I would gradually start with two or three, make sure they're approved and running, start with the next two or three, make sure that because again, if there's a problem, and you get on there, they’re all gone and just cleaning up old ads. So what I've noticed is that Facebook will change their algorithms in terms of their algorithms for checking for compliance, and they'll go back and catch old ads.

So, we've had ads that have been off for 12 months or more in a client account. And then all of a sudden, I get 10 emails with just your ads being rejected, and I think, oh, no, everything's going to be our campaigns are going to be paused, what's going on? And I go in, and I look and I'm like, everything's fine, what's the talking about, and it's the rejected ads from 12 months ago that have been turned off for a long, long time. And for whatever reason, they've just been scanned over again, and policies changed in the last 12 months. Therefore, now they're non-compliant, they get rejected.

So again, just deleting those old ads can avoid a lot of that, too. Okay, so delete any old ads, even though there's sometimes data there. Yeah, I know, I used to say never delete all that. And that's another thing that's changed. Now I kind of go, I'll keep six to 12 months, maybe. But anything that's older, I'll delete it purely because I mean, 12 months, the data, the value of the data at 12 months plus is kind of questionable anyway, because so much changes in that period of time. It's like, well, is that still valid today? So, I would just be kind of thinking about it like that.

That's a really, that's a really, really good point. Because Facebook ads 12 months ago, totally different. And the other thing in terms of ad rejections is, it's your market, as you said, like, if you're in the online business, or any kind of business opportunity, space, difficult, weight loss can be done. But it's difficult.

Andrew Hubbard (38:15)

There’re certain sectors that are just very, very picky. In terms of in terms of ad rejections, Jaryd Krause (42:30)

Andrew, it's been such a great chat, where can we send people to find out more about you and what you're doing for your clients? Because it sounds like you've just you've got a dial? Andrew Hubbard (42:33)

Yes. So best place to find me in terms of content, YouTube. So, if you just go to YouTube, search my name, Andrew Hubbard, you'll find my channel there.That's pumping out most of the content at the moment. And then in order to find the rest of my stuff, like working with me and all that kind of thing - andrewhubbard.co was the best place to find me for that awesome, guys.

Jaryd Krause (42:49)

There'll be links to those in the show notes. Check him out on YouTube, those of you who are listening, thank you so much for that.

Want to have more financial and time freedom?

We help people buy established profit generating online businesses so the can replace their income and spend more time doing what they love with the people they love.

Host:

Jaryd Krause is a serial entrepreneur who helps people buy online businesses so they can spend more time doing what they love with who they love. He’s helped people buy and scale sites all the way up to 8 figures – from eCommerce to content websites. He spends his time surfing and traveling, and his biggest goals are around making a real tangible impact on people’s lives. 

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