The Business of Digital Podcast

Get Tips on Getting Started with Facebook Ads with the guys and lots of help from Akvile DeFazio of AKvertise.

Tips on Getting Started with Facebook Ads

Organic traffic from Facebook continues to be small if you get any at all. The typical percent of fans that will see an Organic post is still in the 1-2% if you are lucky.

What is the best ad type to start a campaign with?

There are questions you need to ask yourself first - many questions. Below is a sample of the questions we covered in the episode and that you need to ask yourself prior to even worrying about your first ad.

What are your goals?

Who is your target audience?

What is your budget?

What should people expect to get (ish)?

What number of conversions do you need for AI optimization of campaigns?

And more if you listen to the episode.

What Facebook Ad Types are Available?

We could do an entire show on all the different types of Facebook ads & platforms available (and maybe we will) so the list below does not cover them all. That said we did talk about a number of features, settings and types of ads that you can use for your business.

Lookalike

Sponsored Posts

Boosting Posts

Website Traffic Campaign

And many more

For a deeper dive check out Beginner’s Guide to Facebook Ad Types.

What are the best tools for Facebook Ads?

Akvile doesn't use many tools and Facebook doesn't actually provide many either at this time. There is no offline editor like you get with Google and Bing and really most of what you need to do and can do is all in the online platform itself.

Platform - no offline editor :(

Adespresso

What are the best resources for news on Facebook Ads?

Marketing Land

Instagram business posts

Facebook business posts

Twitter - #fbadschat and #ppcchat

Getting started with Facebook there are any number of platforms and ads so where do you start?

Tips on Getting Started with Facebook Ads Mentioned Tools & Resources

Facebook makes a play for creators with new tools, features for monetizing content

Marketing Funnels have changed in some ways but have they really? Dig in with the guys as they walk through some examples of updated Marketing Funnels that you should look into.

What Marketing Funnel Do You Need?

The guys dig into a number different marketing funnels - traditional, new, and in-between. They however start off with one by Duct Tape Marketing that finally spurred them to dig into this topic.

Top of Funnel

Know

Like

Trust

Bottom of Funnel

Try

Buy

Repeat

Refer

Again for a deeper dive into the Marketing Hourglass by Duct Tape Marketing visit their site.

Next up was what a Traditional Funnel looks like and how it relates to the Hourglass, digital marketing and just things in 2019.

Traditional Marketing Funnel

Awareness

Opinion

Consideration

Preference

Purchase

Referral Funnels

The guys dig into some of what makes the funnel and start with referrals and how much they make.

CEO averages 7.2 years with a company (2019, WSJ)

CMOs average 3.6 years with a company (2019, WSJ)

Traditional categories, like financial services and travel, average longer CMO tenure at 48 months, or 17% above the median.

Customer Funnels

Often people forget about customers and keeping them engaged. Or they go the other way and totally neglect their customers and only focus on content and funnels for a certain type of prospect.

Episode 109 Mentioned Tools & Resources

The Traditional Marketing Funnel

WHY IT’S TIME TO MOVE BEYOND THE TRADITIONAL MARKETING FUNNEL – HERE’S WHY

Should you blog? Should you blog on your site or another site? Maybe you need a microsite? What the heck is the difference? Read/Listen to find out.

What is a Microsite in 2019?

There are so many names that we have heard people call things that we tried to list them out in the episode and will do so here too:

Cornerstone Content

Skyscraper Content

Knowledge Centers

Resource Centers

Topic Center

Microsite 2.0

Guides

Learning Centers

So what do these Microsites, Resource Centers or Learning Centers often look like? Here are a few examples that we gave but you can likely find many others in the Search industry or in your own:

SEO Guide

SEO Learning Guide

Google Tag Manager Guide

So in the end it comes down to where should you post your content? On your site? As a blog post/article? As part of a guide? As part of an internal or external microsite? On Instagram? On LinkedIn? Should you make long threads on Twitter or some other social site? What about Medium and similar sites?

The answer in the end is "it depends". You need to look at your goals, your budget, your available time, your resources, your overall marketing strategy and think through where your audience is and how you are reaching them (or can reach them).

Blog - if you have limited time, resource and budget. This is a great way to just get things started.

Topic Centers - start with a blog and then once you have enough move to Topic Centers. Or if you have the budget and resources start with a Topic Center and go big(ger).

Dave and Matt walk through how and what Matt's options are for his growing Photography hobby. Does he need a site? Does he need a microsite? What options does he have and what makes sense?

In the end it always comes back to budget, resources, goals, overall strategy and where your audience is. That should dictate where you host your content and what that content looks like.

Episode 108 Mentioned Tools & Resources

Microsites 2.0

Is the Influencer Bubble Bursting? Maybe for some influencers and campaigns it is but see how you can avoid making mistakes when using influencer marketing.

Is the Influencer Bubble Bursting?

Thanks to Jack Appleby and a Twitter thread that he started and really researched. The thread from start to finish is great and full of additional articles, facts and examples that we simply don't have time to cover.

Influencers Can Sell Stuff

Mat has a great micro influencer example of a young High School/College student with a small and local following that constantly moves all the product available in her town. She does this despite only having a few thousand followers, not a few million.

And yes we talked about Logan Paul. Despite losing a number of revenue streams he still was selling a ton of his own merchandise. Notice how he built his own brand and sold it whereas the story that spurred this idea was more of a weak partnership. This comes down to developing more of a partnership and finding the right influencers and give a listen to our past episode where we covered Tools for Influencer Marketing.

Jake Paul ‘doesn’t see a problem’ with how he markets merch to kids

YouTube Has Turned Into a Merch-Plugging Factory, and the Pauls Are Leading the Way

Logan Paul May Have Been Dropped By YouTube, But He'll Still Make Millions

Businesses Tired of Influencers?

Not covered in the episode but relevant and an interesting story is the CVTSoftserve Food Truck out of LA that is tired of Influencers. The business owner is tired of people asking for free icecream and instead made a "joke" (or maybe he is really serious) about charging "Influencers" double. If you read his story in Vice you can quickly understand why he is beyond tired of influencers.

What do you think? Are you already tired of influencers? Do you leverage them for your business? Let us know in the comments.

In 2018 Dave unknowingly created a mess for one of his personal sites. This is the "case study" that resulted along with some observations and some tips for you to avoid such a mess.

Botched SEO Migration Case Study

This migration was accidently messed up prior to this test/case study/experiment. It all started with a personal site project of Dave's having an old WP theme that needed updating, it going sideways and there being more issues than a tired and sane person not making $$ directly off of it cares to spend at 11:30PM on a weeknight. So Dave reverted it back to an older but not mobile or remotely updated WP Theme.

That is when the real fun and issues started! Dave also failed to realize that in doing so he flipped URLs from post name to full date then post name. Months went by and in looking at GSC he realized his mistake. So then the plan came together for this whole experiment as the site was such a mess at that point Dave didn't care about the site and just wanted to fix it.

The "Test"

In this episode we use "test" lightly as it was not very scientific and has more holes than swiss cheese. The goal however was simply to take a site that had been accidently messed up and make some type of learning out of it as best as we (Dave) could.

So what was "tested"?

What gets pages out of the index faster? 404 or 410 statuses?

Does it matter if you use 302 or 301 status/redirects?

What redirect type (301 or 302) gets URLs updated faster in the SERPs?

In general the goal was to poke around at watching URLs fall out of the index.

Anything else "tested"?

Yes. Much. The number of moving pieces was super high thus destroying any sort of real test. That said it was an opportunity to try and monitor and fix a pretty dated and messed up site.

Moved from Non-WWW to WWW

Moved to a new Theme/CMS

Moved to a new URL Structure

Moved from HTTP to HTTPS

GSC Coverage Data

Below you can see the total number of pages, errors and valid pages. The site had been on HTTP so what you are seeing here is all the HTTPS data that was or is available at the time of this podcast episode.

GSC Coverage Errors

Note the months of little to no change and then overnight the number of errors in GSC jumped from a handful to almost 30 and then started approaching 40 within a month. This is for a site that had maybe 120 real pages.

GSC Coverage Valid Pages

The migration's impact shows up quicker for Valid Pages as by 4/4 almost 40 pages (30%) were suddenly gone. Then a month later at the time when the Errors spiked finally the valid pages just started to drop and drop and drop. In reality the site went from 120 or so valid pages to 10 or so now.

Page Level Test Data

Below is the click and impression chart (via GSC) for a few keywords and some pages. Three of the pages are different URLs that over the past 6 months have been live (again, part of the problem for this site). The thing to note is that how long it took for the switch over but once it did it is clear that Google favored the page/site much more than it had in the past.

Months Later Old Pages Still Ranking

This screenshot was taken the last week of June 2019. It is Page 2 of the search engine results but it is clear that Google still thinks there are 45 pages and that despite most of these in the image 301 redirecting, 404/410ing some 3+ months later they are still in the index.

Botched SEO Migration Case Study Learnings

So the results and things that happened to this site are really all over the place. So many things were broken, fixed, and done weirdly to try and test things.

Do QA. Much of the issues this site had were due to Dave not doing QA last year.

Test SEO and crawl your site BEFORE you launch a site/theme/migration.

Download and use Xenu Link Sleuth and/or Screaming Frog as they are both free for small sites.

Set a reminder for 2-3 days out to look at Google Analytics & Google Search Console to check on your changes.

Look at log files 2-5 days after to see if Google/Bing is crawling.

If you use a freelancer, design firm, developer or anyone - always QA any changes they make.