Watch This Before You Run Your First Facebook Ads

Video transcript: Facebook ads. Do I scare you? If so, you're not alone. A labyrinth of expensive ad sets, audience insights, and re-targeting options has crushed the dreams of countless entrepreneurs for years. Yet, for those bold enough to enter the labyrinth and solve the puzzles, there lie the keys to business success. If you are determined to solve the puzzle of Facebook ads, but you just need a little guidance, then watch on.

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No One Way To Succeed at Facebook Ads

This video is a little different because I'm not going to give you a blueprint. Do not click away, do not click away. Instead, I'm going to give you the fundamentals of Facebook ad success. Now, why would you watch a video about fundamentals when there are other YouTubers that will tell you exactly what to do? 

Well, there's no one way to succeed at Facebook ads. 

And here's the thing, I've interviewed dozens of six-figure entrepreneurs, and the one thing they have in common is that they don't do what the crowd does. Instead, they master the fundamentals, they think long and hard about what their product brings in terms of value and what their audience needs, and they put the two together in a creative Facebook ad strategy. 

But you can't be creative until you know the basics. That's what this video is all about. By the way, you might have noticed that things look a little different around here. We are going to offer some really cool content in the weeks ahead. You're not gonna wanna miss it, so watch that little flaming arrow you see in the corner right now, and hit the subscribe button.

All right, the first thing you need to know before you start running Facebook ads is you're gonna see a lot of information out there, you're gonna see a lot of step-by-step guides to Facebook ads. In fact, even on this channel, you can see videos from Beast of Ecom and Ecom King explaining their Facebook ad strategies. 

Here's the important thing to know: There are multiple ways to be successful with Facebook ads. However, if you're flitting around from one method to another every time you're creating a Facebook ad campaign, you're not gonna be successful with any of them. 

What you need to do is pick a strategy and stick with it at least for a couple of weeks, if not a couple of months. 

Through sticking with that strategy, you'll get a better and better understanding of your product’s values, your ad creative success, your audience preferences, and that will let you tweak the strategy later on.

But if you keep switching around your strategies, you introduce a lot more variables into the mix. So if after a month you're not getting as many sales as you'd like, you can't tell if that's because your video ad isn’t good or because this new Facebook strategy isn't right. Do you see where I'm going here? You want to explore different Facebook ad strategies, yes, but once you decide on one, give yourself enough time to really learn from it. 

Get Your Hands Dirty

The next thing you need to know before you run any Facebook ads is that you can't master Facebook ads just by reading about them. The same goes for watching YouTube videos, and I'm sorry to hear that news as you are. 

I know it's super scary to put your own money on the line for Facebook ads and it can be really tempting to read and watch and listen to podcasts and try to cram your head with as much Facebook ad information as possible before you get started. I think people who do this really want to minimize their losses and they're imagining that if they just become academic experts or PhDs in Facebook ads, they can save money. 

The unfortunate truth is, you really have to learn through a little bit of failure. 

You don't have to get reckless, you don't have to waste thousands of dollars on Facebook ads, but you do have to put some money in there to see how Facebook responds to your product, your ideas, and your marketing insights.

I'll give you a little example. I studied two languages in my life, French and German. French I studied in high school. It was a lot of book learning, I did a lot of reading and a lot of writing, and I didn't do a lot of talking to actual French people. German was the opposite. I moved to Germany and I was just thrown into the German language. I didn't do any reading or writing beforehand, I had to learn by doing. But as a result, I can tell you that I'm a much better German speaker despite not having studied it for the years that I studied French. That's because I learned German by doing it and making a fool of myself in the process. 

Be prepared to look like a little bit of a fool in the beginning. With Facebook ads and, heck, with any subject, if you want to be an expert in a few years. You gotta pay those dues if you wanna end up a mentor, a coach, someone people regard as a pro at anything. Why is that? Well, nobody is born a Facebook ads expert. Although I do love the idea of a delivery room scene where someone's like, “It's a girl and she’s so good at targeting ads!” 

Replicate Success by Replicating Failure

Oh my gosh, okay, I'm going to admit to you one of my least favorite videos on YouTube. It’s the people who say they made $10,000 in one day with dropshipping. You know why I hate those videos? It's not because it's a lie. I look at these dashboards, plenty of people are generating $10,000 revenue with dropshipping and Facebook ads in a single day. 

The reason I really don't like these YouTube videos is that they give the impression that anyone who's just starting out can achieve these exact same numbers. Please don't bet your house on that. The reason that these pros are able to do that is that they have years of experience behind them, in which they experimented and they were making a whopping $10 a day at first. It's only by continuing to learn and fail with Facebook ads that they've been able to scale up to making that much money in a day. 

You can absolutely do that too. 

But remember, if you want to replicate their success, you have to replicate all the hard work that comes before it, and these guys aren't necessarily showing you that hard work part on their YouTube videos. There are exceptions to this rule, and in fact, on our channel, we tend to handpick the entrepreneurs with great numbers who are happy to share how they got there realistically. 

Spending Money on Data

Wait, what do I hear? Is that you saying you're afraid of wasting money on Facebook ads? Nothing makes me angrier. It is impossible. I said, it is impossible, impossible to waste money on Facebook ads if you do the work of understanding what Facebook ad analytics is telling you. 

One of the things that makes Facebook amazing is it is loaded with data. 

And when you first set up your Shopify store to run Facebook ads to it, you'll install something called a Facebook Pixel in that store. 

A Facebook Pixel is like a little shopkeeper’s assistant who just sits in the corner looking at everyone who comes in and taking notes on who they are and what actions they took in the store. The really powerful thing about this shop assistant is that it gives you data about who your target audience actually is and how they behave, and you can use that data to make little changes. 

For example, maybe you notice that a lot of people come to your store, but they don't click “buy.” Well, how is your product description looking? Maybe you don't have a lot of people clicking your ad, but once they get to your store, they don't click “add to cart.” Well, maybe you could work on your ad creatives a little bit more. 

The point that I'm making here is the money that you spend on Facebook ads is really money that you're spending on data.

And as you begin to spend this money in the beginning, you gotta give your Pixel a little bit of time to collect this data, and you've got to give yourself a little bit of time to understand what this data is telling you. 

Again, I'm getting down to that word that YouTube influencers hate, but that I personally love: Patience. I'm sorry, it's just, you gotta be able to sit and wait it out. The good thing is, most of your competition, you know the ones that are selling the product that you think is saturated, I can tell you for sure they're quitting in two weeks, two months, no problem. 

To set yourself apart and succeed, you don't stress out so much about which product you're selling. You literally just need to persevere longer than they are, which is a matter of days, in some cases. This persistence is key because the next thing you need to know before you start spending money on Facebook ads is that testing is the key to success.

Test, Test, and Test Again

When you run Facebook ads, you run something called an ad set. An ad set is an individual ad that's shown to a unique audience. So for example, I might run the same ad, but in three different ad sets. One of them would be to people in the United States, the other would be to people in Canada, the other would be to people in New Zealand. I can vary that by location, I can also vary it by the interest of the audience. 

Pro Facebook ads marketers will run a lot of ad sets and they won't expect them all to work. 

In fact, the whole point is that not all of those ad sets work. They want to find the one that works the best and you can only determine that if you've got other assets to compare it to. So for example, it's not uncommon for a pro Facebook ads expert to run 20 different ad sets and find 17 of them are failures. The goal there is to find three ad sets that are winners and then reinvest back into those. 

Does that sound confusing? Yeah, it is. That's why your competition is quitting right about now. Be patient with yourself, be patient with this process. Consider taking the courses that we've got on getting started with Facebook ads, and you will be on your way to mastering this content quicker than you think. 

Time ends up being a magic ingredient in Facebook ads success in more ways than one. One thing that I often hear is beginners who say, “Can I run a successful Facebook marketing campaign spending only $5 a day?” 

And the answer is: absolutely. But that campaign is not gonna be successful in two or three days. 

If you do the $5-a-day strategy, your Facebook Pixel is not gonna have a whole lot of data to collect each day. That means you're gonna have to wait longer for the Facebook Pixel to have the same amount of data as it would get if you spent, say, $20 a day. 

This is a really personal choice. You might decide, “Hey, I wanna learn fast, I have some capital here, I'm gonna go ahead and spend $500 on Facebook ads in two weeks and see what I learn, rather than spending $500 on Facebook ads in a couple of months and seeing what I learned."

It's really personal to you, but you don't lose out on anything with your strategy as long as you're paying close attention to the data Facebook is giving you along the way. No matter whether you decide to spend $5 a day or $50 a day on Facebook ads when you're just getting started, there's still one last crucial lesson for you to keep in mind and that is this: Patience is key. 

The Story of the Beast of Ecom

I'm gonna end this was a very compelling story from an entrepreneur named Harry Coleman, otherwise known as Beast of Ecom. I flew Harry to Berlin last year so I could interview him 'cause I really wanted to hear his story. And what was fascinating was he told the story of his first Facebook sale. Guess how much Harry spent to get one sale on Facebook. £800. That's a lot of money, that's a discouraging amount of money for most beginners. 

But Harry's mindset was a little different. Harry me, once he spent that money and got that first sale, he knew Facebook ads worked. Fundamentally, they worked. He did get a sale from Facebook ads and he saw it as his responsibility, his job, to then master Facebook ads so it would work for him on a more cost-efficient basis. 

I can safely tell you, Harry has mastered Facebook ads. Now, he’s growing seven-figure ecommerce brands, he's got his own YouTube channel and in a lot of ways, he’s the entrepreneur that you might aspire to be. 

To achieve that kind of success, just apply the fundamentals that we talked about in this video. 

In fact, save this video and re-watch it when you need a little tough love and you're about to quit because if you don't quit, you have just as much a chance as Harry of being interviewed on our channel. That's what I want for you.

Now before you click on whatever video is on the sidebar here about making $10,000 overnight with Facebook ads, do me a favor and just leave a comment below letting me know what your experience with Facebook ads is. 

Better yet, help each other out if you have good tips for other entrepreneurs, share them. Ultimately, I want to be able to look in this comment section in a couple of years, pick one out, and say, “You belong on our channel because you stuck with it and you're a true DIY CEO.”

Want to Learn More?

• I Spent $10 a Day on Facebook Ads for a Month, Here’s What Happened
• I Spent $191,480.74 on Facebook Ads. Here’s What I Learned.
• 20 Facebook Ad Examples To Use as Inspiration
• How To Spy on Your Competitors’ Facebook and Instagram Ads