All right, guys, so welcome to office hours, April 14th, 2017, where we're gonna go into the Intro to Facebook Advertising. Totally stoked you guys are here. I think we're on our eight or ninth webinar now it feels like and I feel like we're starting to get the hang of it a little bit. We're getting more and more of you guys to attend which is awesome, but we're really stoked to see you here because this is one of the benefits of being on Art Storefronts. It's way more than software. You've got this. You can come use things, get marketing advice any time you like, ask any question you want and we'll do our measured best to answer it and we really do believe that this continuing education is oftentimes the difference between success and failure, especially when you're getting started or you're just picking up steam, so really thrilled that you guys are here. Let's get into the outline for today. We're gonna do announcements like we always do and we're gonna go ahead and talk about getting set up. We're gonna talk about how we at ART Storefront run our ads and why, and I'm gonna give you some ideas for getting started, and we're gonna finish up as always with your Q and A.
So, let's get into the announcements as always, what's going up and what's going down. To start out with, we're finally practicing what we preach and we're finally firing up the Art Storefronts Instagram account, so really hope you guys will follow us over there and we've already run some ads and so we're actually looking pretty strong on follower count which I think is cool. We got 706 followers already, boom, and we've only had one, two, three, four, five, six, seven posts, which speaks to the power of ads, so if you do want to follow us it's art_storefronts. Someone had our other name so it's art_storefronts on Instagram. Why would you want to follow us on there? 'Cause we're gonna be hitting it pretty hard, but I think you'll get some great creative ideas and also why now? Why are we gonna start hitting it up?
Yeah, there's the practice we preach but it's just attention. All the eyeballs that are Instagram, Instagram continues to just grow at an alarming rate, and so we believe it's important that we as ASF as a brand are there, but we also believe it's equally important for you guys, too, so we want you on there. We want you publishing on there on a regular basis, and we want to share your art on there, so we're gonna start throwing everything. We're gonna start sharing customer's art. We'll @ mention you, link to your site. You can't link to your site, but we'll @ mention you. We're gonna throw some motivational stuff, see how it all goes, but I think you'll enjoy following it and I think you'll get some good creative ideas out of it and by all means, leave us a comment. We love to interact with you in there and then we'll know it's you and so we'll go ahead and follow you back, too. Webinar replays, as always, we always get asked these questions. Where are they? After the fact, you can go to officehours.artstorefront.com. This site never changes. You can see we've got all six that we're up to are up here already.
As always, you can click into one. We've got the video table of contents and so you can jump around and see the portions of the webinar that just you want to see. We'll always have links to whatever is mentioned and then a transcribe, too, in case you want to print it, read it, and as always, you can ask a question. So, I think this last one got up a week after the fact but we're gonna try a little bit more on it and get you these replays by Monday or Tuesday at the latest. What else do we have in terms of updates? We've got ask a tech running now and we're getting great feedback that you guys are loving the webinars so we're doubling down on them, so we're doing live webinars every Thursday. That's 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. central standard time. It's hosted by the customer support team. It's your go-to place for technical assistance, the questions that aren't allowed on the forum or during office hours, true customer support type of questions and registration links are emailed to customers weekly. Watch your inbox. You can register at any point at time, jump in to one at any point in time and get your support questions answered, so highly encourage you to do that. On that note, let's get set up and let's switch to Facebook.
I absolutely love this part of the webinar and I think if anyone has a kid you'll totally understand. I have a kid and you realize once you have a kid you find yourself constantly bragging about your child and thinking he can do no wrong and he's the best thing ever and all of that is awesome. Well, this particular set up thing is my little baby at Art Storefronts and I had the dev team follow my bidding on this and I absolutely love it, 'cause it makes this process, which is normally so doggone complicated so flippin' easy it's not even fair. I don't think there's another platform out there that does this as well as we do, and so I'm really stoked on it. So, I want to walk everyone through this, even for some that have done it, I think I've seen some of you screw it up and we have detailed blog posts on this, too, that I can show you, but it's so fast I'm just gonna go through it. So, let's get set up. I'm gonna walk through this whole thing step by step and I've got an Ads Manager account here and I'm actually gonna go straight to pixels. Hopefully, you guys can see this. It's probably a little bit small. Let me jump up the size. So, I'm in the ads manager account here. This obviously assumes that you set up your ads manager account with Facebook.
I believe we have a blog post on that, too. We'll link to it in the show notes. You come in here to pixels and you go actions, view pixel code. Here's the pixel code. I'm gonna go ahead and copy that to the clipboard. Here I am on my dummy Art Storefronts install. I've copied the pixel code out of Facebook. I'm gonna go ahead and come to the info settings, scripts section, sitewide, head, boom. I'm gonna go ahead and paste that. So, now you have the Facebook pixel code popped right into the head of your site and you're good. Now, it's time to do key conversion events and let me just talk briefly about this. This might be confusing to some of you. Some of you might already get it. You don't need to get confused. It's totally awesome. Let me give you the context and then I'm gonna show you. You can come in here and you can see it says create conversion. What this basically is is you have these various different pages on your website that track conversions, anything from getting an email address to even just viewing a specific page or adding something to cart, and Facebook does this tracking with standard events and they have, well, we can see them now. They have view content, add to cart, add to wishlist, initiate checkout, add payment info, purchase lead, all this, complete registration.
So, you're wondering what is this? This looks complicated. This is annoying. What do I do? I'll tell you what you do. You don't even have to think because we've already solved it for you. So, key conversion events for Art Storefronts customers, for their installs what I want you to do, order completed, what do I do about this? Look at how awesome this is. This is just amazing. I can't even begin to tell you how complicated this is for a normal human being. You mouse over this. You go right here. You copy this baby. Copy, paste, and so what we've done is we just put in a purchase conversion, so if somebody comes to your website, makes a purchase, Facebook's gonna track it. They're gonna know. Let's go down to contact created. So, if you're running the lead capture software that Art Storefronts provides, even if you're not running it just put this thing in here 'cause you're gonna end up running it at some point. Again, you might as well have it done, but you're gonna come right in here. You're gonna grab this line of code here. You're gonna copy it. You're gonna paste it. You're done. You're done, that's it.
Oh, oh, item added to shopping cart. I'd love to do that, sounds really complicated. It's not. Here I am copying this. Copy, paste, done. Done, and for people that haven't tried to do this somewhere else, you can't appreciate how difficult this is to do one someone else's website or someone else's software. You're putting in weird places and trying to get it in the head and you're writing code and everything else. I have made this so simple, stupid it's unbelievable. So, you have now a key conversion event, just a conversion event set up in Facebook for if somebody purchases on your site, if somebody becomes a contact in your contact manager, so they become a lead, and for somebody that puts an item in the shopping cart in add to cart, so you've got those three things tracking right out of the gate. So, I literally want everybody to do this. If you're even thinking about running Facebook ads, go start a Facebook ads account. They ask for your credit card but it's free, and throw this code in there.
What this allows is that, I don't want to get too complicated, but once enough of these conversions start happening it allows you to create lookalike audiences which we'll get into at a point. So, it's super simple to set that all up, stupid simple to set that all up. Everybody needs to do it. You can watch this thing again. You can watch the detailed blog post, but definitely, definitely do it. So, what that allows you to do is get the Facebook pixel live on the site and in addition to everything else, there's this thing called the Facebook Pixel Helper. Now, you need to have the Chrome website browser to do this. I know a lot of you guys are on Macs but you can download Chrome. I don't know if it works for Safari. I don't think it does. But, here we are on the site and I saved everything, so it's saved. Here's this dummy site. I'm just gonna go head and refresh it, but what this thing does is, and you can see here this is the little extension and it tells you that you have the Facebook pixel installed correctly on your site, so this is a foolproof way to know whether or not you've done things correctly, and if it tells you exactly what it's saying here, Facebook pixel, it give you the pixel ID and page view, then you know you've got things set up correctly.
So, I recommend and you can go anywhere on your site once you've done this previous step and saved anything and it'll tell you that you've got the pixel running so you're in great shape right out of the gate, so boom, there you go. So, we've got the Facebook conversions installed, talked about how you check, and yeah, again, so these are steps that you should just take no matter what. If you haven't taken them, go ahead and take them it doesn't matter where you get started. Just make sure that that is all set up and just know that it is an insane, huge pain in the you-know-what for most people to get that done and it's easy for you. Why? Because we love you, that's why. We went to the Facebook pixel inspector. That's thing's awesome, and by the way, just a nice little aside, as you're potentially checking out your competition, bouncing around checking out your competition, it's kind of cool to have this thing in a browser because you can instantaneously see whether or not someone's marketing chops are up to speed, as it were, because you can see whether or not they have the Facebook pixel running on their site, so it's kind of a cool little competitive analysis thing, but that's just a bonus tip. Anyway, and so the last set up step is you gotta upload your entire email list to Facebook.
Now, we have a post on this. If you just go to the blog, you click Facebook here, I recommend you read pretty much all of these except one to be honest with you, if you're really serious, but we've got one down here. There's some sort of bison, something, buffalo. I don't know why I did a buffalo for the image but why should I import my email list into Facebook? I give you some compelling reasons. It's really critical that you do that. I don't know why that guy's laughing. I know why he's laughing. So, do this. It's simple. I give you step by step directions and you need to do that on a regular basis but we mention all of that. So, once you do that you're set up. You're ready to roll and you're way, way ahead of most people that get into Facebook advertising just by having all those conversions in there and being ready to rock, so great place to get started. Highly encourage you do all that. You saw me do all that. That took a minute and a half, so you had, not doing it 10 times like me, maybe it takes you like 20 minutes, but man, is that a 20 minutes that's gonna pay later on down the line, so highly recommend you do that. So, let's talk about how we do it and why, and here's where we get into the interesting situation because you're all set up. Okay, now what? Where do I get started?
Some of you have already gotten started, some of you haven't, some of you had some success, everything in between. So, now what? Where would you get started? Where would I advise you get started? I think Facebook ads is such a big complicated one in an awesome way, because then it gets way effective but this is a big topic. There's no way we've gonna cover it in one webinar, even 10 webinars, and so we've been coming at it from a bunch of different angles. If you haven't listened to the podcast I really, really want you to listen. I don't even care if you subscribe, just before you start advertising on Facebook or pause your campaigns, go and listen to the two that we have here which is why most artists fail at Facebook ads, and number three, not all traffic is created equal, an intro to Facebook traffic. I think these two already will save you a bunch of money. I honestly mean that. It has been money that I have pissed down the drain that I don't want you to piss down the drain and so check those podcasts out. They're quick.
You can listen to them. You'll be in a way better place. Go back and listen. I've already gone through it. Yeah, great. To quickly summarize those podcasts because I think the concepts are so important the reason most people fail at Facebook ads is because not all traffic is created equally. I'm gonna get on this in a second. Most come onto Facebook and immediately just go for the jugular and fail and most people are just not set up to win with their Facebook ads, and so let me address each one of these with slides. So, not all traffic is created equal Nope, it's not. Traffic can be cold, warm, or hot and here's where the relationship analogy comes in. When I say traffic, this is a way of targeting people on Facebook. So, you can target people cold and the relationship example would mean these are people that have never met you before. They're in the bar. You walk up to them. Hey, my name's Patrick, nice to meet you. I'm Steve. Great, that's cold traffic. Warm is they know you, they've met you, anywhere from knows you and met you to interacted a number of different times, so that's considered warm traffic, and then you have hot traffic.
Hot traffic is considered people that know you, have met you, know you well, and are really, really close to buying and we can get into how we measure that in a second, but the biggest mistake that people make is showing the same message to these different groups. The easiest way I could explain it is people love, just with their ads, let's stick with the bar analogy, walking up to that gal, which is cold traffic, and saying, "Hey, you know what would look great on you? "Me," like some pick up line like that where that's what your ad looks like to these people. They don't know who you are. You don't just come right up and say, "Buy now. "Here's my 15% off coupon that expires in 48 hours." That just doesn't work. It's never gonna work, and if it did work one time, even a broken clock can be right twice a day but it's not sustainable and you are not gonna see an ROI on it, so not all traffic is created equal. So, number two, most go for the jugular and this is essentially what I was just talking about and then complain afterwards. Don't do this.
Story goes, "Oh, yeah, Patrick, I tried Facebook ads, "spent a few hundred bucks, nothing happened, "the traffic that came to my website was terrible," and then they give up. They throw their hands in the air and they say Facebook ads don't work. I don't know what everybody's talking about. Again, the problem here is they were asking for a sale with a discount, sending a hot message to all traffic. They probably weren't romance marketing and they probably had their targeting screwed up, too. All of the above is often screwed up, so if you could reset your expectations and understand that that is a huge reason why people fail you're way better off, way, way better off, and the last one is you're not set up to win, and this one is really difficult for people to wrap their heads around but it's one of those things that you just learn after spending a bunch of money on Facebook ads. You can't just be running ads without a proper set up to take advantage of the traffic. What do I mean? You need to be running lead captures so that you have the ability to capture email addresses, to continue the relationship with these people. You need to be emailing your list often. You need to be doing some romance content. You hopefully have an autoresponder going. You're hopefully doing some romance marketing on social media.
We could talk about lead capture. You start to see a pattern here building, but you need to have some of this other things in place in order to properly get the ROI out of your investment. It's not as straightforward as everybody thinks. It's not I spent five dollars on Facebook, I got $10 in business, two dollars is coming back for every dollar I spend. This is a huge win. I wish it was that straightforward, but it's not. In my experience, it's just not. So, I think if you understand those three things and you're intentional about it you're gonna be in a way, way better place. So, Facebook ads are like anything else in life. It's gonna take work and effort. You are gonna fail at first, but you need to learn and you need to be committed. So, if your idea is you're just gonna give it a shot with $150 and see how it goes, then save your money. Don't do it. Save your money. Don't do it. Don't do it. You need to commit to investing in your business and being in it for the long term and I can remember Art Storefronts was in business I think for a year and half when I came in and took over marketing. I think for the first year we spent $10 a day on Facebook, $10 a day, every day on Facebook, learning, getting better.
We had committed that budget to Facebook. We knew where we were supposed to be and we learned. We took our licks. We got better at it. We got better, and better, and better, and we've since scaled that up to a great place, and so why do I say that? I say that to understand the level of commitment that I want you guys to make in your mind. This is an investment in your business and many cases, the ROI is not gonna be there 'til way down the line. The sooner you can wrap your head around that, the sooner you can take massive, massive advantage of it. So, how we do it, how we've done it as Art Storefronts as a business. We show content, we ask for email addresses, we have the setup in place for you to get more content and more emails after we have your email. You come to know, like, and trust us, and if you decide we're a fit, only then do you sign up. Then you sign up for the service. That sounds pretty easy, right? It's a really hard thing to process for most people.
It's like, "Patrick, are you tell me "that I'm gonna be spending money "to try and get people on my email list "and I might not see an ROI in that spend for months?" Yup, I am. It's one of the most effective ways to truly kill it on Facebook and with Facebook ads. So, I'm highly opinionated on this matter and you don't necessarily need to take what I'm saying as gospel. You can use it to inform your own decisions but this is how I advertise on Facebook. I've been insanely successful at it for years and years now with a number of different brands going back and I think it really, really works, and so I'm just kind of giving you how I would roll as a proxy, and like I said it should just inform your decisions. I believe that art sold today, and you guys have probably seen me go over this pitch in a number of different times you've been on the other webinars, it's just not an impulse buy. It's not normally an impulse buy. You're not going through your daily routine, browsing on Facebook or an Instagram, boom, you see some piece of art that all of a sudden you're just mad about.
You feel like you can't live without it and then you just pull out your credit card and you buy it. I just don't think art is bought that way. It might in certain circumstances in certain situations but that is not sustainably how art is bought in today's day and age. It's just not, so how is it bought? You see that Facebook ad, you go to their website, you're like, "Oh, this stuff is cool." You give them your email address. You get to know them. You learn more about that artist. You study their work, and then when the time is right you potentially pull the trigger and you buy that art, and that's how I personally would approach it, not going for the jugular right out of the gates, being in it for the long term. That's my two cents, anyway. It won't be the case every time, but I do think it's relevant most of the time. I'm not even sure why that was there below it. I think one thing I would say as a disclaimer is some businesses can get away with going for the jugular every time, only some though, not most, and even the ones that can get away with it, they would be getting way better results if they followed the way that I did it, in my opinion, but we do have one print studio and he's a friend of mine.
I'm not gonna tell you where it is. I don't want to spoil the secret, but this guy, it's different than most artists. He offers printing services and that's it. That's his whole business and printing services, he targets photographers and he goes for the jugular right away because he just wants to get their print business and he does a hot message to cold traffic and gets away with it. I don't want you listening to what I say today and saying, "Well, what about this example? "What about this example?" Of course, there's examples where you get away with it but it's the norm and it's not sustainable for most people. So, two cents. In terms of an idea for getting started, I think a great place to get started, especially if you're listening to this, and again, there's so many different place we could start but I really, really like this one. I just released an in-depth podcast episode on this actually, so I figured I already talked about it on the podcast, I might as well do another podcast episode on it. I might as well think it would dovetail nicely with this webinar, and then I've got Kimberly, who's our copywriting editor, she's gonna help out with some copywriting examples that you guys can use. So, you gotta get started somewhere and there's a number of different reasons I like this tactic.
This tactic is you're going to send an email and as some setup, this assumes that you have been sending romance content to your list or to your social sites, not always going for the jugular and you have something coming up, whether it's a sale, whether it's a show, whether you're teaching a class. I don't care what it is but you're going for a sale. You send an email in conjunction with sending Facebook ads at the exact same time as the email and it's a one, two punch. Very, very simple to do. So, you send an email. You upload your email audience to Facebook. You're now able to show that audience ads. You send the email. You create the Facebook ad. They're running at the same time, Facebook and Instagram by extension, of course, and then you also send an email to those that did not open. Now we're talking about a Facebook technique that is part email marketing and part Facebook ads which is why I really like it. This is something that can be done. It's an extremely small and cheap way to limp into Facebook ads, which I like it. You could get away with $10 a day for this.
Some of you will probably get away with five dollars a day. It's easy to do. I like it because it's to warm traffic. It works amazing well. It works every time it's tried, and it forces you to be doing some other things right, i.e. gathering emails and emailing them and sending to non-opens. So, the fact that you're bolting it on to another marketing technique is gonna drastically increase your rates of success. It can and should be done in a targeted manner. I just really like it as a great place to get your feet wet, and even if you've already gotten your feet wet you can add this to the repertoire and it's just a killer. It makes so much sense for e-commerce businesses. Why do you do it? You do it because more people are gonna end up opening your email, which should lead to a better shot at sales every single solitary time. It's just a lovely win and depending on your email list size, you can literally get this done sometimes for as little as five to 10 to 20 dollars. It'll cost more if you have a big email list.
So, let's talk about an example how this might work for you, and I think the key disclaimer in order for this to work is you do need to have been romancing your list. You have to have some goodwill built up, so if you're just getting started and you haven't been publishing any romance content on any of your websites, or been emailing your list without asking for a sale, you've got some other homework to do. You're not ready. But, if you have been romancing and you do have a sale coming up or a show or whatever else, then you're ready to pull the trigger on this thing. So, on the podcast I recorded, and I think it drops tomorrow so you guys will be the first ones to know when it does drop and you can give it a listen, really go into depth and reinforce it, but the examples that I used on the podcast was a photographer selling a class he teaches, a mixed media artist having a local art show and a painter releasing a new series and offering a discount. You can insert whatever your particular, unique situation is. I tried to use a wide swatch of examples to kind of reinforce it and go through it. Let me give you an example, though, and I used my buddy Mike Taylor here.
He's a photographer. He's got two parts to his business which is he does these classes where he takes people out into national parks and teaches them to take these amazing nighttime photography things. So, you can see he's got one at Acadia National Park. It's a four day workshop, July 19th to the 22nd and you can see he's got one spot remaining for this one. How would this look? How would this work? Again, I think why this is so awesome, for this technique, we're gonna give you a podcast, we gonna give you this webinar, I've got Kimberly working up a post with concrete examples in terms of the subject line and how to marry these two things together, and we're gonna come up with one more blog post. So, I'm gonna hit you with this thing from four different angles so you should have great ammo. Let me give you something that's visual. Let's use the case of Mike. We're trying to sell this class, one spot remaining, but again, could be selling anything. So, the subject line to the email would be six spots left for my special Acadia National Park, June 21 to 24th four day workshop. So, you start out.
You blast your list with that email. Step one. Then, you go and create the Facebook ad. Not to scale, created this simple, but I want to show you an example of how this could go and the fact that you could get really creative and so here's a picture of this park and here's what my Facebook ad copy would say. You know what this is? This is gonna be your photo from your camera in four months time. I'm gonna teach you. Join us in Acadia, July 22nd to 26th, only eight spots left or whatever the case may be. So, what exactly happens here when you do this? You emailed your list and they largely ignore you because we're all getting way too much email. We're way too busy. I saw a subject line flashed in my email. It said six spots left for Acadia National Park and then I went ahead and probably ignored it. I got busy, the dog was scratching at my door, my wife was yelling at me, whatever the case may be. So, you've whacked your list, but then you whack your list with that exact same message on Facebook or Instagram, i.e. they see this, and then next think you know, you're like, "Oh, that's right, I ignored that email. "I should go check it out. "That's actually pretty cool."
They go back and open the email, they sign up for the class, boom. That's how effective this thing works and it really is effective, so they might click the link in the ad, too, but the bottom line about it is that you've got this whole other venue where they're spending time, which is Facebook or Instagram which is pretty much the entire world, and you now have an opportunity to remind them again of something that you just sent, so it allows you to kind of stack up these wins. So again, podcast drops tomorrow. The blog post is gonna come out. We'll detail examples of subject lines, examples of creative ways in which you can mix the social, a creative way to mix the social with the email, but you can see here. You know what this is? I thought this was pretty creative way to go about it while also talking about the subject line in the email. So, the blog post next week will have subject line ideas and it will have some images in there and examples of the text that you can use in the social, but it really doesn't matter to me what you're doing.
If you're having a show, I wanted to use these three examples because it covers everything. What if you're a photographer and you're selling something else on the side. It could just has easily been in your photography or you could be painter and you could be doing a new series or you could be doing a local gallery show. The key takeaway is that when you're asking for the sale, when you have your big event, when you have your big whatever, that's when you want to pull the guns out and hit Facebook and hit Insta in conjunction with it, and man, it's just powerful. It just works. It just works insanely well. So, at that point let's get into Q and A. I know some have been fired in so let's just handle them quickly. Daniel says I'm interested in learning about the best ways to select an audience. Is there a best or recommended appropriate size to start with? Are there the tricks that you should have for manipulating their selection? So yeah, you're asking what audience size to start out with, and today I gave you an example and I'm always going to respond with cold, warm, or hot in these situations, and so how I would start out if I was literally just getting started, I would not bother with cold traffic right out of the gates.
I would have the pixel on my site so that anybody that comes to my website and leaves, Facebook knows who they are. I can show them ads. I would also show ads to my email list, so there you have warm traffic. That's where I would start. I would start getting some momentum there. That's how I always have started, actually. You start getting some momentum there and then you can go after cold traffic. In terms of the audience size, it just comes down to how much you want to spend, Daniel, on your ads and how much you want to go after. There's so much conventional wisdom there and the short answer is you just gotta test and see what your results are. Another question from Daniel, can the emails come from the Apple contacts program? How do you upload the email list to Facebook? You've got to just check out the blog post. We go pretty in depth on it.
Angela says it took me four years to buy an $800 lamp from a fellow artist. I know, I know. You listen to that Kim Virgil podcast and Kim talks about how she sold this other woman multiple thousands of dollars worth of art and the woman had been on her list for nine years and that's the game. That's the way the business works today, unfortunately. All right, so let's get into the questions that were submitted earlier. Booker asks can you break down the differences between Facebook and Twitter as it pertains to art? Yeah, absolutely I can, and permit me if you will not to sugarcoat anything. I think Twitter sucks. I think Twitter is dying. I think Twitter is effective as a news source and for a very small amount of people to disseminate their content on, but I don't there's much. There's not all that much traffic. There's not all that many eyeballs on Twitter and there's not all that many people spending a tremendous amount of time. I think if it's easy you can go ahead and post to Twitter, but I would certainly make Facebook and Instagram my primary focus.
Is it OK to post the same romance style newsletter on both and save some time? Absolutely, you can do that. Everybody thinks that once you post a message, everybody everywhere is gonna see it. Oh, I saw his message on Twitter, I saw it on Facebook, I saw it on Instagram. No, they don't. People are busy. They didn't see it. No one's on Twitter all the time, so absolutely, and that's part and parcel of the Facebook tactic we just talked about, so yeah, absolutely whack the same message on both of them. See if it works. If it's driving you traffic, then maybe it's a worthwhile investment to make the message a little bit more platform specific. So, Kevin asks what is considered a good click through rate for Facebook ads for printing companies? So, in your case Kevin, and again, because I've seen intimately this other guy who I can't mention, I know it's lame, but I can't, how well his ads are doing. For you, it should be you don't give a damn about click through rate. The only thing you care about are conversions into sales and so if you did the conversions like I showed you, you should be always measuring and seeing how many people converted.
If people are not converting, then your message is wrong and you need to retool your message. You need a better way to convince these people to try a first time printing order with you. So, I wouldn't worry about click through rate. I wouldn't worry about cost per click. I would worry about out of 100, how many people added something to their cart, and you'll be able to measure that because you have your conversions in. Out of 100, how many people checked out? Where did they go from there? So, that's how I would recommend it. I always look at click through rate and it's a great way to differentiate between ads how one's doing better than the other, but I would marry myself to it. Christina Culverhouse, what are some recommended strategies for getting people to engage on Facebook? I love that. There's a number of different ways you can approach it and get people to engage. You can ask questions. You can make some controversial statements. You can ask for the feedback. You can ask people to share this with a friend. There's a bunch of different ways you can go about it and you can do it, and I think one of the greatest ways that people almost never talk about is do not let a comment sit on your Facebook page.
This will be a little bit of a tangent but I think it's worthwhile going on. So, there's this thing called a relevancy score that Facebook attributes to your ads. This is case in point. I could do an entire office hours on just relevancy score and how critical it is, but they basically give a quality score to your ad based on a whole bunch of different signals and one of those signals is engagement, how many people have liked the post, how many people have reacted to the post, how many people have commented on the post, and so one great way to keep the engagement going is be really responsive. I'll tell you guys, every single solitary morning, pretty much seven days a week, I log on to the Art Storefronts Facebook page and respond to all the comments. Sometimes I do it twice a day. Every day I do it. No comments sit unattended, and lots of times one comment turns into five or six or seven or eight or nine or 10, and guess what's happening in that?
In that situation, Facebook is giving you a higher relevancy score, and as such, charging you less for those ads, so important thing to do. I hope that answers your question, Christina. Jamie Anderson, what do you think about Facebook contests similar to the fishbowl technique, but online? I absolutely love 'em. I've run a couple. I don't know why we don't have a blog post because we did one of these with Mike Taylor not too long ago, but I've got a blog post for you, Jamie. Way back in the day I ran a Facebook ad and made a blog post about it. I highly recommend you read this. It's case study 03, one email pop-up, one month, 824 email opt-ins later, which was basically all done with Facebook ads, and 824 emails is awesome for an artist. That number is probably a couple hundred dollar Facebook spend on top of that, but it's mega powerful and I love them. It's one of those things you just have to get in there and start tweaking and playing around with, and once you do, you're gonna be left with a metric which I think is the deciding factor which is cost per email address.
Let's say you ran a contest and you had to give somebody a free $75 print or just let's keep the numbers even, $100 print. So, you're $100 in there. You're $300 into your adds or $200 into your ads, so we're $300 all in. How many email address did you get? Okay, what is the cost per email address? That's how I would look at it. There's always some downstream benefits, too, when you're running Facebook ads because some people like you Facebook page, some people visit your website so now they're in your remarketing audience and you gotta show them ads, and then again your email address, and you might even potentially get some orders out of it, too, but I absolutely love the contest, and we're gonna be coming with content on that without question and we'll definitely run some more tests. Jamie, we might even consider running one with you, so love it, stay on it. Ddot5555, when I pay to boost a post and get likes on it, is it a good idea or a bad idea to send an invite to the people who like the post to then like my page or is that annoying and self-defeating?
So, it sounds like you probably have a personal page and not a business page. You can actually send an invite. No, I don't think anything's annoying or self-defeating. You give it a shot and you see how it works. If somebody tells you this is annoying and self-defeating then don't do it, but you can certainly try that. I think a lot of times, hopefully a lot of times they'll do it anyway if they're really interested, but some people, when they like it doesn't even really mean that much, but anyway, Victoria says I'd like to learn how to read the Facebook ad metrics versus ad goals, and I'm assuming those are the reports. For instance, if I ran a page post engagement ad, is success equal the number of post engagements or the number of link clicks? Also, is a page view pixel same as a view content pixel? Let's start at the end 'cause that one's easiest. So, page view is what the default pixel from Facebook takes a look at and measures, and so anybody that comes to your site registers a page view. So, that's the standard conversion that everybody goes through.
View content would be an additional line of code that you would have to put on the site and let's just say I'm gonna put this on the about me page, and so everybody that hit your about me page you could then show ads to, so that's how those two work. For instance, if I ran page post engagement ads, success equals the number of post engagements. There's not really a straightforward answer to this. It just has to do with your strategy and how you look towards doing thing. When Victoria says PPE here, when you're in Facebook and you're running ads, there's campaign objectives, and one of which is page post engagement, and so page post engagement means Facebook is going to optimize for people that have engaged with your ad. That could mean clicking the photo. That could mean clicking the read more button to read the text. That could mean clicking the link if there's a link. That could mean liking it, reacting to it, commenting it, and so Facebook is going to optimize your ad continually for those reactions.
So, in contrast to link clicks, link clicks, website clicks, is another campaign objective in Facebook and so you can optimize your ad for people that wanna just click that link and come to your website. There's no right answer here, really just kind of depends on what you're doing. There's cases where both can be effective. You just really have to decide at the end of the day what you want people to do. I've run tests where I run page post engagement ads and really my goal was just to get people to click back to my website and I've run website clicks ads, forgetting what the name of it is now, but I've run the two of them in concert and page post engagement actually does better because it looks less like an ad. So, it's one of those things that you have to test and in terms of Facebook ad metrics versus ad goals, if you've got the conversions in there, like I advocate that you do, you're gonna be set up, they're gonna be measured. You're gonna have the data on them, so just look in Facebook, see what it's telling you. Look in Google analytics, see what it's telling you in terms of Facebook ads and you'll be able to go from there. Bryn, I'm looking for Google analytics help.
Aside from the link tagging and the add to cart and checkout goals, what else should I set up in GA? I know there's so much to know. Love that, love that, love Google Analytics, love playing around in there. I think as a short aside I would say knowing where most people are at, I want you to waste very little time in Google Analytics, very little time, and the analogy that I love is that you're a restaurateur and you've this amazing restaurant with a great chef and great tablecloths and everything's ready to go and what happens is that three or four people get in the restaurant and you dive in and you're watching them eat and you're asking them questions after the fact and you're saying, "How did it go?" You don't have enough people in the restaurant. Point of my analogy is I would rather you 99% focus on getting more people into the restaurant and one percent focus on measuring it in GA, especially when you're getting starting. You gotta just hammer down on traffic generation, traffic generation, traffic generation.
If you have the simple goals set up in Google Analytics like we do and you're looking at that and you're looking at your traffic sources, that would be enough for me in the short term, but we can certainly work on some more content on that. There are some other things you can look at, but I'll think on that, Bryn. I'll have it inform some of our future content decisions. Christina, I love this question. I've been with Art Storefronts for about four months. I'm following all the guidelines and suggestions and even have over 200 people on my email list. I love it. But, I'm not getting any traffic or any new signs up on lead capture. Will you take a look at my site? This is my favorite thing ever because I go right back to the slideshow. I'm on this slideshow so much I can't even begin to tell you because it's just so fantastic. All right, this is what people think success looks like. I get started, I get rolling, boom, success.
In reality, this is what success looks like in marketing. You take two steps forward, you go backwards, you go sideways, you go left, you wanna pull all your hair out, you wanna blow your brains out, then you get to success, but in this case, which is really interesting, this deck is from this guy names Rand Fishkin, really interesting name, I know, and he owns one of the biggest SEO companies in the world called Moz.com and his wife had a travel blog. I guess it's called The Everywhereist. This is his wife's travel blog and his wife's name is Geraldine. So, she started her blog in 2009. Look at this. No traffic, nothing going on, nothing going on. For two years, she never broke 100 visits a day, two years, two years she was at it, then she had a few posts, get some attention. Nice, look at this, little bumps in traffic, but then traffic fell back down soon after and this is my favorite part, and this is where most people give up. Right there is where most people give up and quit and this is so true. It doesn't matter if it's her blog is a travel blog or if it's your art business.
So many people quit right here and you don't understand how many steps you have to go to get there. It just takes a lot of energy and work. You gotta be at it, and these days she gets 100,000 visits a month and obviously she's making a bunch of money from the blog. You're not doing anything wrong, Christina. It does not come simple. It does not come easy. It is about incremental work, day after day, showing up, doing the work, and then it's pressure over time, and it takes time. So, the fact that you're asking the questions and that you're on these webinars and you're doing the work, I have every confidence that if you stay at it it's gonna happen, but it doesn't come overnight for anybody, and it doesn't matter what business it's in. It doesn't matter if it was us at Art Storefronts of you. We got almost no traffic for the first three years of the business and then finally we started getting some traffic. We did a lot of work between now and then to get there, so that would be my answers there, and so let me see what else.
All right, Bryn asked any thought on boosting posts? Today I emailed my newsletter, I run a Facebook ad and posted on my page and boost the post for followers, still trying to figure out if a boosted post are going to be worth it. Yeah, they can be. Boosting posts, and for those that don't know, and again, there's so much to Facebook ads, there's basically three ways you can run Facebook ads. You can run them right from the front of your page by boosting posts, which is the simplest, quickest, easiest way to do it, or you can run them from inside the Facebook's ads manager, or you could run them from the power editor which is maybe the most advanced way to do it, so there's three different ways to do it, but to answer your question, there's a lot of people that have a lot of success with boosting posts and there's whole theories and schools of thought about how to do that, but what I would do in your case is when you do that newsletter, I would put in the boosted post is people that like your page, people that are on your email list and people that have visited your website.
So, I would use that as the targeting and at the very least, just on your email list, but you can get great success with boosted posts. All right, Corey used Facebook advertising to build up a list of Facebook followers for my photography, did not have email addresses for the 3,000 followers that we've been romancing on Facebook. Any suggestions for getting email address for my followers? Note, I haven't been selling anything on Facebook. I've only been sharing content and responding to comments. Love that. Love that, Corey. Yeah, you've gotta get creative. You've gotta get some creative things going on in your head about how to get their email address, because you realize at the end of the day Facebook is awesome, but you have to understand what it is and you have to be in there for your own good and they only way you're in there for your own good is if you are grabbing your fans and you are getting their email addresses because Facebook can yank the rug out from you at any point in time during the game and I've seen people get so pissed for so many years.
I got so many hundreds of followers and now I get no traffic. It's like, yeah, this is Facebook's game, not yours. You don't like it, you can go somewhere else. So, it's a constant, steady, normal game going forward, Corey. Figure out a bunch of different ways that you can ask for the email addresses. You can run contests. You can say I share some of my best stuff on my email newsletter, encourage people to sign up, throw links back, and especially if you've been sharing a bunch of content, those people are gonna be stoked to do something nice for you. It's just a subtle psychology reciprocation, so I would just go for it and I think you'll do great. Don't overthink it, just start taking some shots. Start taking some shots and see how it goes and you'll see right away, especially if you've been sharing that stuff, they'll respond.
Okay, here's one more. Kerry says Pinterest, I get good response sent right to the product page, but it seems like time of site is less than 10 seconds. Compare this to Facebook. That's a loaded question, Kerry. You can't compare one to the other. There's so many other different factors that are involved, traffic sources, this, that and the other. I'm not knocking Pinterest. You could definitely do well with Pinterest. The easiest way to look at it is get the goals set up, get the Google Analytics goals set up, we have a blog post on that, we'll include it in the show notes, so that you know where your email signups are coming from and you know when you potentially have an order that comes through and see how the traffic from Pinterest does versus see how the traffic from Facebook does.
Do I think time on site is a decent metric to measure? But yeah, you can't put time on site in your back pocket and take it out and spend it on the weekend. When you see a cupcake in the window and you're like, "I wanna buy that cupcake, "will you take time on site?" No, they won't take time on site, so you need to see the people that have actually signed up for your email list and better yet, purchased, and that would be a more appropriate way to look at traffic.
All right, guys, on that note I'm gonna close her down. I hope you enjoyed it. We'll try to get the replay up as soon as we can. Thank you so much for attending. Everybody have a absolutely fantastic weekend.