Facebook Video Ads

Hey, Ezra here in my little mock recording studio on the North Shore of Oahu, Hawaii, which is where I grew up. Got a house here on the beach. Hanging out here with my wife Carrie. And I want to show you this little video ad campaign that we’re running.

I think that video for direct response advertising is going to be a big trend in 2016. It’s something that we’re going to see a lot more of as people start consuming more video on Facebook, and YouTube ads become easier to leverage.

We’re running a test campaign, and we started this yesterday. It’s only been running less that 24 hours. I wanted to show you some of the results.

The first thing we can see is that the video has been viewed 40,000 times. We’ve had 20 sales at $32 a piece, which is actually fairly high for some of the stuff we’re able to do, so we’re still optimizing it. Take that number with a grain of salt. Different markets are going to perform differently, and I think we’ll be able to get that number down.

But that is still profitable for us. If we can pay $32 and generate a sale, that works for our business. And that doesn’t count retargeting, which I’m going to show you in a moment.

Now, what’s interesting about this is that Facebook tells me that I’m paying two cents per video view. If I go to video engagement on this campaign, you can see that it’s been running for today… Video engagement breakdown gives me a little more data on the video.

Everyone is saying that Facebook is competing with YouTube. Now, that’s not actually true. There’s a lot of people consuming video on Facebook, but, Facebook counts video views as people watching 3 seconds or more.

YouTube is a lot more strict on what they count as a view. Someone has to consume 15-20 seconds for it to be counted as a view. So I don’t actually believe these numbers. This isn’t a real number. I did not get 40,000 views on my video. But Facebook does give us this breakdown.

I can see 10 second views, half or a little less made it to 10 seconds… Then as we continue to go over, we can see that 25%, 50%, 75%, even 95%.

I’m going to show you what the ad looks like and how I break it down, but what’s interesting here is that 3,700 people viewed to 95%. That means that 3,700 people viewed all or most of my video, and that cost me $600.

This video is 4 minutes long, and it’s a straight up direct response style video. It’s story based and introduces people to my brand, my products, my philosophy… It’s a really great video. And I’m getting 4 minutes of story based, video content consumption. Face time with my community.

Let’s see how much I payed for someone to consume the entire message. I have my calculator here, so let’s figure this out: So the final number is 16 cents! For someone to consume 4 minutes of content! So that ended up with 20 sales, not including retargeting.

Now let’s look at the ad and how I’ve set it up.

I’m in my power editor here, and I’m taking a look at our video ad test campaign. What I want to mention about the campaign is that the objective is Video Views. The objective is that I want people to view my video… That’s what I’m telling Facebook. And that affects my bid.

I have many different ad sets in this campaign. I’ll go ahead and dig into one of them so you can see it. This ad set is set for $100 a day, it’s a look-alike audience, and I’ll show you what that is. It’s a look-alike audience of a group that’s purchased my product. United States is the location I’m running in. 50-65 years old. And women.

So that’s the targeting group, and in this particular case I’m running on the desktop News Feed. And if we scroll up, the name of my ad set reflects this.

Now as I scroll down, I can see that the optimization is for video views, and I’m letting Facebook automatically bid for me. If we look at the ad that is in this ad set which I’ll pull up for you now, what we can see is that it’s running from my fan page. I’ve got a little bit of copy here that explains what the video is about. It also has a call to action that leads people to a pre-sell article page.

I’m having people consume this video, then dropping them on a pre-sell article that leads to my store. I could probably have people consume the video and then have them directed right to my store. I plan on testing that, but we haven’t tested it yet.

As we scroll down, we can see we have the video uploaded. What’s interesting about the video is this… See that call to action option that says Learn More? And then the website URL of where you’re sending people, and then the display URL.

So when that comes into play is after your video is done. Also notice I’ve put a little tagline here so that when people look at the thumbnail of the video, they see a second headline over the video that tells them what it’s about.

Now, when I scroll, what we can see is that when the video ends this URL pops up. Learn More. So whatever you’ve selected under Call to Action. It pops up after the video ends and it directs to the URL we’ve chosen.

So that’s what the ad looks like. And of course, we’re using conversion tracking, and tracking how many people purchase from us.

We’re also using a retargeting ad to retarget people who completed the video, and we’re sending people directly to our website to purchase or to a pre-sell page.

So that’s just a little about this video ad campaign because I thought it was fun, and I think video ad will be a big thing we’re talking about this year. Of course, along with the other types of advertising we use—Instagram, Pinterest, Google, Facebook regular ads—but it’s sort of an exciting new thing. We’re going to be investing heavily into optimizing and making video ads work.

Ezra here from new.smartmarketer.com. I hope you’ve enjoyed this post.

Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one.