How does meta ads manager work?

0:00 Meta Ads Manager: the biggest tool in marketing

How does Meta Ads Manager work? I want to preface this by saying Meta Ads Manager is the business of Facebook, a trillion-dollar-a-year business or something completely insane. This is a behemoth of a program, this is the pro tools of marketing, the most powerful marketing tool in the history of mankind, incredibly powerful. So we've got to understand that we're working with something massive.

0:38 Campaign, ad set, and ad structure

This is the basic structure of how our campaigns are going to work. At the top level there's a campaign. Inside each campaign there are different ad sets, and each ad set you can think of as having a different audience, for example maybe a US, UK, Canada audience versus a European or South American audience. Then we're going to have different ad options for each ad set, the different videos you might want to try as your ads, so each audience gets shown a few different options to figure out which one performs best. That's why this tool is so amazing, you can give it 20 ads to compare and it'll just pick the best one and run with it. The more you use, the more expensive it is to find out which one's the best, because it has to test them all.

1:35 What a campaign objective actually is

A campaign is a series of ad sets and ads that aim to accomplish a single objective. For example, my album is Strange Angels, and I'm trying to get people to go to Spotify, so this is a Spotify conversion campaign, that's the type of campaign I'm running. Whereas this other campaign is a catalog sales campaign where I'm selling merchandise, a very different type of campaign, it's a sales conversion campaign, whatever, that's confusing, but you get the idea. The campaign is the top level.

2:08 Ad sets, audiences, and running tests

Then we have our ad sets. Here's an example of different audiences I'm trying for different ad sets. Ad sets are groups of ads that share settings for how, when, and where to run, for example targeting different audiences. Here I've got tier three, which is cheaper audiences, versus tier one, which is more like US audiences, versus tier two, so you might want to try these different things, testing how it works with specific audiences versus a general audience and comparing the results. The secret to running effective ad campaigns is that you need to be running tests, and you're just going to optimize for whichever ones work best. It's like a science experiment, fun, or you can be lazy about it, but then you just get worse results.

The ads are the media you show your audience, here's an example of a couple different ads running to a single ad set, different videos, your content. Here's the structure of Meta business settings, this stuff is confusing, it takes time to figure out and get set up, use Google. There's a prerequisite for this course to have your account set up, so at least these first three pieces are supposed to be set up before you're here, go follow those links and get those things set up right. The reason we don't do it inside this course is because the situation is unique for everybody, some people's accounts get suspended for different reasons, or nefarious reasons, or because somebody hacked your account, whatever, it happens way more than any of us would like, so that's just stuff you've got to figure out.

3:53 Setting up your business account structure

This is the basic structure of how all this works. Your Facebook account needs rights to your artist business portfolio, which is separate from your personal account, which needs rights to your artist ad account, which has pixels, aka data sets, that's how we track actions that collect data for your ad campaigns. Here's my meta account, my Facebook account, Zack Fischmann, that's me, that's my personal Facebook. It's also important to note you're going to need your Instagram as a business or creator account, it can't be personal, it just isn't going to give you the data you need in the way you want. You'll also need a Facebook page for your artist. So you're going to have your meta account, which is your Facebook, and then I have a business portfolio, I actually have two, one for Magic Nothing and one for Marmalade Mountain, Magic Nothing is this business and Marmalade Mountain is my music. Within my business portfolio, I'm going to have an ad account, a Facebook page, an Instagram, and my data sets, aka my pixels. In my ad account, I'm going to have my ad campaigns.

5:29 Defining your why and your cost per result

The goal is to define your result as a step you want somebody to take towards accomplishing your why, which is up to you. Are you just trying to get the most streams? Are you trying to get specific traction in specific cities for an upcoming tour? It depends on your reasons, so you're going to be using your who, what, where, why, and when that we figured out earlier in this class to define your ads and your campaigns. Once you have those things, the goal is to define your result for your campaign as a step somebody can take towards accomplishing your why, and then you want to get the cost per result as low as possible. The cost per result is how much it costs to get somebody to do the thing you want them to do.

6:19 Reading cost per result: a student's story

Notice how much it can vary, these numbers go from 65 cents all the way down to 19 cents, and it can be way more or way less, it totally depends on a million different things. Over here, this is an old student of mine, he ran his and was getting results around a dollar a result the first week, which sounds bad, then it dropped to 70 cents, which still sounds bad in some cases, but it was actually crushing, and his ad was doing great because he was accomplishing his why, he was triggering the algorithm and getting placed on Discover Weekly, and his song blew up. So it's not just about the cost per result, it's about the actual intended outcome, that's what you're optimizing for, this is good information, but it's not your actual goal.

7:20 Why cost per result depends on everything

I also want to say cost per result varies a lot, people always want to ask what's a good cost per result, it depends on your why, depends on your audience, your niche, your content, your music, your ad set, depends on meta, depends on competition because these are auctions for placements, and it depends on the zeitgeist. If your music is more generally acceptable to a larger audience where there's little competition, it's going to be cheaper to get results. So it just depends, and it doesn't matter, it's all about accomplishing what you want to accomplish. Focus on your actual desired result over meta's cost per result, monitor your listenership, if you're trying to build Spotify, focus on that data over the cost per result data you're seeing on Ads Manager.

8:09 Set expectations: you're learning a skill first

I also want to set a reminder before we do this: this is the first time you're doing this, the goal is to learn the skill rather than get a specific outcome. There's a bit of you trying to optimize for the outcome, but we're also learning, so don't be afraid to try some things. That's why we say there's a $10 a day prerequisite budget for this course, you're going to need money to experiment and gather data. So the goal here is to learn a new skill by experimenting to get you information so you can make more informed decisions as you progress. The amount you invest in your learning will pay dividends down the road.