Videos

Here's what happened after I published 250 Reels to Instagram in six months... Up until this point, I mostly neglected Instagram. I used it as an ad placement. I still had around 5,000 followers. But I didn't regularly add content. In fact, I had added only 16 videos total up…

Here's what happened once I started publishing to YouTube Shorts every day... I've had a YouTube channel since 2012, but I've used it very inconsistently. While I recently surpassed 15,000 subscribers, much of that growth happened during the first few years. I've mostly neglected the channel for much of the…

Should you be everywhere? I used to agree that you should focus on one or two platforms. My opinion changed with short-form videos. For years, I dedicated almost all of my social media energy to Facebook. I felt like doing otherwise would spread myself too thin. And I also felt…

You can include up to five links on your Instagram profile now. Is this really that big of a deal? Previously, you could only include one. Now, if you edit your profile and click Links, you can include up to five external links. Lots of people are talking about this,…

Audience Fragmentation can hurt your Facebook ad performance. Here's why... If you're like a lot of advertisers, you have multiple -- maybe several -- ad sets within the same campaign. Each ad set represents a different targeting segment. All ad sets optimize for the same action and promote the same…

Auction Overlap can hurt your Facebook ad performance. I've been talking a lot about Auction Overlap lately in response to what some people tell me they're doing related to scaling their campaigns. A common strategy is to duplicate an active campaign, increase the budget with the duplicate, wait until it's…

This is how to troubleshoot if your Meta conversion events are overcounting. Before even having this conversation, where do you think events are overcounting? Ads Manager only reports on conversions from your ads. Events Manager reports on all conversions, regardless of the source. If you think Ads Manager overcounts because…

Here's how to increase your Facebook ads budget without screwing up results... This is one of the biggest challenges for advertisers. You started with a low budget. You're getting great results. You want to increase that budget. But, it's risky. If you restart the learning phase, your results may tank.…

Are you looking at your Facebook ads budget all wrong? Nearly every advertiser does this the same way. We start with a low budget to test. We get great results. And then we want to increase the budget to scale our results. But we also know that doing so is…

This is a crazy example of how ChatGPT sent me business. Someone sent me a screenshot today of what he experienced on ChatGPT. He asked for recommendations to learn Facebook ads best practices. ChatGPT named me immediately after Facebook Blueprint. One important point is that not only did ChatGPT recommend…

Do not touch an ad that's working. If you've been in Facebook advertising for a while, you've likely heard this a million times. You've probably even experienced some valuable lessons. Unfortunately, I found myself in this situation recently. I just couldn't help myself. I was running a Facebook lead ad…

Here is the biggest benefit to publishing a video every day. I just hit my 100th day in a row of publishing a video, and I plan to continue this throughout 2023. I can tell you... I feel this in my bones. You will not see noticeable improvement from day…

Do NOT use URL equals when creating a custom conversion or standard event with a URL rule. Meta actually calls this out within their best practices document. When you use URL equals, no variations of that URL will be counted. Why does that matter? Well, will "www" always appear or…

Do you understand how Detailed Targeting logic works in Facebook Ads Manager? A lot of advertisers don't! If you list multiple interests in Detailed Targeting, it's an "OR" statement by default. So, for someone to be targeted, they must have Interest 1 OR Interest 2. But, you can click the…

I bet you're not using these video metrics in your Facebook Ads Manager... You're likely familiar with the standby metrics of ThruPlay, View to 100%, 95%, 75%, 50%, and 25%. Those are great! They help you better understand the level of engagement. But you can actually take this a step…

If you struggle to maintain a routine, this is for you. This is something I've long struggled with. There have been times when I've had no structure at all. And then I've overcorrected and tried to structure everything. Neither approach is likely to lead to a consistent routine (at least…

You can create a custom event that fires when someone plays a YouTube video that's embedded on your website. To do this, you'll need to use Google Tag Manager to manage your pixel. This is possible because Google owns both GTM and YouTube. Google Tag Manager has a trigger type…

Here's how I create my captions... I use CapCut, which is a free app. You can use either the mobile or desktop apps, but I use desktop because I feel like it's easier to use. CapCut has an auto-captions feature that I find to be super accurate. If you want…

If you don't know what a Facebook ads metric means, do this. This usually happens within the main Ads Manager reporting interface. However over the header row of a column. But you can also do this when hovering over metrics when customizing your columns. First, you'll be given a very…

You've likely heard that the rear-facing camera produces higher-quality video. But can you spot the difference? I record most of my videos with the rear-facing camera. But, it's also kind of a hassle. So while it may be true that the rear-facing camera produces higher-quality videos, is it worth the…

The Cost Per 95% Video Play metric (or any cost per percentage) does not exist in Ads Manager. You can change that. It's weird, actually. There are only three "cost" metrics related to video views: Cost Per 2-Second Continuous Video Play Cost Per 3-Second Video Plays Cost Per ThruPlay But…

Here's how I create a custom Facebook ads metric for Quality Click Rate. First, it's important to understand that Outbound Clicks are the clicks on your ad links that lead away from Facebook (usually to your website). This is the pool we're pulling from. Next, we want to be sure…

If you optimize for ThruPlay, this is a great custom metric to create to measure the quality of video views. By optimizing for ThruPlay, you're going to get a lot of ThruPlays (that's how it works!). But this can be misleading. What percentage of those ThruPlays watched to completion? Obviously,…

Do you understand the difference between the four types of Facebook ads clicks? Most advertisers don't. 1. Clicks (All) is what it sounds like. It includes link clicks to your website, but it also includes all of the clicks on your ads like comments, shares, reactions, and more. You'll get…