00:00 - Introduction: Meet Pip & Rina
00:07 - Exploring Interest-Based Targeting
01:04 - Google vs. Facebook: Targeting Techniques
02:25 - Strategies and Real-World Applications
03:07 - Performance Impact and Comparison
04:00 - Audience Questions and Optimization Tips
05:00 - Conclusion and Key Takeaways

[00:00:00] Speaker: We are here today with a Geek Speak like usual, so I'm Pip, Seymour Digital Media.

[00:00:04] Speaker 2: I'm Rina, Littleworks Indie Media.

[00:00:07] Speaker: And today we are talking about what targeting based on interests look like, looks like on Facebook versus what it looks like on Google.

[00:00:15] Speaker: And just getting into that discussion because I think this confuses a lot of people and we both are experts in our area. So why not help people, right?

[00:00:26] Speaker 2: Yeah. So I guess, and that's pretty interesting because I had [00:00:30] gotten an organized, the original title for this live. And I chose the wrong title just because I didn't really get, have a good grasp on how it works on what it's, what things are called

[00:00:41] Speaker: on Google.

[00:00:42] Speaker: You're not the only one though. And I get confused too, right? Because I don't, Do the Facebook ads. And there's so many options in Google and there's like people use phrasing like programmatic advertising, just off the cuff. So what was [00:01:00] the you, what was the word? It's, um, interest based advertising.

[00:01:04] Speaker: Yes, that's right. And interest based advertising can be like, so what you're interested in, and you can do that on Google in several different ways. Like you can, and on Facebook, I think that's a natural category of audience. Is it not?

[00:01:19] Speaker 2: Yes, that's correct. So it's, so doing it by interests is how we talk about it on Facebook.

[00:01:26] Speaker 2: And and what that does is it actually organizes people's [00:01:30] People, you could call it keywords, but interests are the keywords that people are interested in. So it's not it's not only interests. It also includes things like job titles and whether or not you're parents and how what the ages are of your kids.

[00:01:45] Speaker 2: You can segment. Based on those things. But that is the intersection, which is different than if you're targeting according to look alike audiences or a website traffic. And that's the thing that I'm trying to distinguish from [00:02:00] because website traffic is really excellent to utilize.

[00:02:03] Speaker 2: When you're retargeting, when somebody is already familiar with your company or has you've had that first contact with them. And but how do you get that top level, that top funnel how do you get those people to your site? In the first verse. Yeah. Because you can organize according to organic SEO but we both know that's a fairly long game.

[00:02:25] Speaker: Yeah. That can be

[00:02:25] Speaker 2: a long game. So it is a long game. Yeah, it can, yeah. Yeah. And it

[00:02:29] Speaker: can start [00:02:30] quickly, but it, you have to like, there's so much that goes into it, including competition and what they're doing. So yeah, we're always playing that game, but with. With Google ads, there's a bunch of different things you can do for audience targeting.

[00:02:43] Speaker: Like with search ads, you can just do keywords, right? But you can also do targeting based on some interests. Like you could section out the parents too. You could do it for search. You could do it for display, right? So there's two networks on Google or [00:03:00] Google. There's a search and display. Yes. So the display network is like CNN and every other website on the planet, right?

[00:03:07] Speaker: It could actually be YouTube and Facebook and that's where you can retarget too, in the display. And it's so interesting because they are quite similar when we start really breaking it down.

[00:03:19] Speaker 2: But they actually function quite differently in my mind. Like they actually you don't get the same results from using each the same way.

[00:03:26] Speaker 2: That's what I'm trying to say. Yeah. For example for [00:03:30] example, Facebook will find you through interests on Facebook mostly, and Google will find you through interests on Google mostly. So how does that affect the kind of traffic and the results that we get? Because I find when I run interest based campaigns on Facebook and interest based campaigns on Google, they won't.

[00:03:51] Speaker 2: And it doesn't mean that one is better than the other. I used to actually think that one was better than the other. I always used to say Facebook is way better when it comes [00:04:00] to interest because they collect so much more data. They have so many more things that you can choose for interest. Yeah, exactly.

[00:04:08] Speaker 2: So it has the data for interest that works very well. And I've always, that's been my default. We did some tests when when with interest. Based ads on Google. Kevin did them for me and we tested all of our clients and some most of the accounts didn't do [00:04:30] very well with interest based targeting and

[00:04:33] Speaker: yeah, and that makes me ask want to ask so many questions because I'm like because for If Kevin and I got in a discussion, it would be like, okay

[00:04:42] Speaker 2: Oh, yeah.

[00:04:43] Speaker 2: I want to finish. I want to finish that one sentence and then let's open that up. I think that's super good. So we had almost all the campaigns. Didn't do very well with interest based except for one and we have this one random campaign That's generating [00:05:00] more Leads for us or more traffic on the website Then the keyword based ads interesting and the Facebook is based ads So it's so odd.

[00:05:12] Speaker 2: So this to me oldest it always tells me that you have to know where people are in the funnel And when people are in the top funnel scrolling on Facebook, you're more likely to interrupt them and get their attention with something that they're interested in versus when people are [00:05:30] on Google, they're usually on a mission.

[00:05:32] Speaker 2: They're usually searching something in particular, they've already got something in mind. And You sometimes those interest based ads won't catch them at that level, but the retargeting will catch them at that level, but wait, okay. And now you tell me what I know. I could feel you bursting

[00:05:51] Speaker: I'm like, okay, so interest based ads, like if Kevin did so with Google ads, because it's like WordPress.[00:06:00]

[00:06:00] Speaker: They give you a lot of options, and with interest based ads. So I am betting donuts to dollars. So I might have to buy you some donuts that Kevin did a P max. So what Google's done is they've created a performance max campaign that they're retargeting potentially. And. Performance max would be interest based because of how it works in the Google ad system, or Kevin could have also done display advertising [00:06:30] and he could actually, we could actually catch people with display advertising.

[00:06:36] Speaker: At top of funnel when their interest based ads on Google would be like targeting if I'm a connoisseur of restaurants and I like restaurants, I might see like when I'm reading a blog about restaurants I might see an ad, a display ad. And so that's how Google would hit you at the top of the funnel that way with interest based ads.

[00:06:57] Speaker: So there's kind of two options that I [00:07:00] think the video or the display ads. would be more specifically targeted for interest based ads because you could have to go specifically after specific interests, right? Which is always interesting. You can also do advertising like going after specific websites like CNN or, something, so I find that really interesting. There's, but, and there's that kind of ready. And Google is trying to compete, I think a little bit with Facebook, with their lookalike audiences with their customer match [00:07:30] lists, which is you get your client to give you a list and clients are all nervous about this.

[00:07:35] Speaker: Cause they're like, we're, we don't want to share information. But you're not, we don't actually touch it. It just, we upload it into the system and then Google does match it. Finds you.

[00:07:44] Speaker 2: Yeah. And the interesting thing is that the so does that work? So the email list for Google, does that only work with Gmail and Google workspace email, or is it all email?

[00:07:55] Speaker 2: How does Google have everyone's email? That's what all they

[00:07:59] Speaker: they don't [00:08:00] you give it to you give them the email list and the computer does the rest Yeah, how does the

[00:08:07] Speaker 2: computer find the person though? Do you see what I'm gonna look alike the other person?

[00:08:11] Speaker: It probably matches some criteria That is a very good question though.

[00:08:16] Speaker: Yeah. But yeah, don't tell you's

[00:08:19] Speaker 2: I don't. Yeah. But there's no way, like in Facebook, I know that they match the Facebook accounts to the email account. So if you've added that email account to your profile at any [00:08:30] part, in any way on, on your profile, then Google. Sorry, Facebook will match, will, it will look for that and see if it matches any profiles and then it will target that profile.

[00:08:40] Speaker 2: But that's what I'm asking for Google because, okay, because they would match it to

[00:08:45] Speaker: a profile because you have your review profile from your Google business profile. You have your, I, you have one, we all have our own profiles on Google too. It's not, it's Google me or something, but it's not Google me. It's like about no, I don't think I knew that.[00:09:00]

[00:09:00] Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. And you attach all your. And then you also need to add your assets to that, what if you have no assets then?

[00:09:06] Speaker 2: You, most people

[00:09:07] Speaker: have a website unless they're like younger than, not allowed, or people have, people now have more than, How many people do you know with more than one website?

[00:09:14] Speaker: I

[00:09:14] Speaker 2: know what you, I see what you mean. Yeah. Okay. So it is going through Google accounts. It's only, it can only go through Google accounts. It's not going to find an Outlook email or a website. Or a hotmail email or, I don't know

[00:09:28] Speaker: what other kind of emails. [00:09:30] Yeah. There's something don't search about me.

[00:09:32] Speaker: It's something different. I'll find that actually the thing. It's like your Google business profile, but for yourself and you can choose what shows up your age, name, your business. I don't think

[00:09:43] Speaker 2: I know about that. Okay. That's good to know. Okay. So that's good. So then And your business has one.

[00:09:49] Speaker 2: So then in your campaigns, when you do interest campaigns, based campaigns on Google, how do you, when you start with a new client, do you start with all of the [00:10:00] campaigns or a certain campaign and then add to that later? Or how does it work?

[00:10:05] Speaker: That's a great question. So it depends what the client wants.

[00:10:08] Speaker: A lot of the times we often start with a search. It depends on the strategy too. Actually we're going to be talking about strategy in our bootcamp. That's one of our classes, but yeah, one of the strategies you have, you're faced with, determining when you do Google Ads is what you're gonna do.

[00:10:22] Speaker: Yeah. And we like mostly searches the, like the search ads are the fundamental [00:10:30] beginner, the thing that started Google Ads, we're all still using those. I would very simply, as strange as this sounds, and maybe five years ago I wouldn't have said this, I'd start with a brand campaign probably right outta the gate.

[00:10:43] Speaker: And then that would help me create retargeting, right? Because you have to build your audience. I think you need a thousand people to your website before it can activate. So you want to get that set up right away. We turn on that. That's called signals in Google analytics.

[00:10:59] Speaker 2: Right.

[00:10:59] Speaker: And then [00:11:00] we would determine like if, so if they want to do interest based targeting, like I would first do a search campaign and then we would probably try a performance max or a display comes third display with would be the interest based or the performance max and Google pushes you to do P max.

[00:11:16] Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. Because it's also shopping if you're e commerce. If you go through

[00:11:18] Speaker 2: those, if you go through those automated set up wizard things, isn't that what it

[00:11:24] Speaker: usually puts in here? Yeah. And there's so much coming in there. I think, how does Facebook help you create [00:11:30] ads for your interest audiences?

[00:11:33] Speaker: Yeah. So

[00:11:34] Speaker 2: it actually, you actually have to make an effort to do an interest based ad now. You have to go in at the very bottom and click that you want in that interest based thing. It's really small spot. It's like they've actually, they're deterring us away from doing that. And it's really quite interesting.

[00:11:57] Speaker 2: I'm not really sure how I feel about it because I [00:12:00] don't know enough about the AI part of it, but or what they're doing. And they don't really like they, the Facebook Facebook has really gone away from being narrow targeting to very open targeting and doing a lot of lookalikes. I like lookalikes, as long as the first as long as what they're looking at is narrow and good.

[00:12:20] Speaker 2: But what I found in the last I did a campaign early spring and I found that the quality of the leads, We're way [00:12:30] down low. So I went in and narrowed up, like I went with Facebook's default. And then I went in and narrowed it up. So we went with the default and it was way too broad. It the calls that we were getting were low quality, lower quality, or at least that was what the client was saying.

[00:12:49] Speaker 2: So then I went back in. Yeah. What? Yeah. You have to ask your clients how the leads are. You can't just send them. And it's your

[00:12:57] Speaker: job to get them leads, but it's also, it's our [00:13:00] job to get good leads in the end by communicating with our clients about what's happening. And that's how you do.

[00:13:05] Speaker: Great ads, right? You need a relationship.

[00:13:08] Speaker 2: So it feels like what they're trying to build on Facebook is something that anybody could use. Like it's become infinitely more complicated in some ways. And then really default settings everywhere. Google and Facebook

[00:13:23] Speaker: are trying to compete for I think Phelan always says, Google looked over at Facebook and was like, Oh, I [00:13:30] wish it could be you and not give anybody anything.

[00:13:34] Speaker: Any options? Yeah, Google has a lot, but they're taking them away.

[00:13:39] Speaker 2: Yeah, and I don't really like that because then my value is diminished because what my superpower was getting that targeting right. And That's what I, that's what I really love doing. And now it's a lot harder. It's especially harder because they've taken away so many categories that we're not allowed to actually target anymore.[00:14:00]

[00:14:00] Speaker 2: Look, I'm putting this over

[00:14:00] Speaker: your head, cause you're here and I think that looks good. So Steven, okay. So first let's say hi to Greg. Hi, Greg. And yes, I'm talking about, I'll send you the link. It's called What is it called? It's called myaccount. google. com forward slash profile. We all have one. We have one for our business.

[00:14:16] Speaker: We can have one personally. Steven is saying and yeah Greg's really helpful with this. And then Steven, ooh, what budgets were you looking at for these? Ooh, good question. Steven does Facebook ads. Yeah,

[00:14:27] Speaker 2: and this is what I want to talk about. So I have a question, I'm going to [00:14:30] answer. That question in a minute.

[00:14:32] Speaker 2: I want to ask pip a question that's been bugging me first and then we can go back to how we actually do it because I do have a secret system that I use for budget. So Pip, when a client says to you, we have a target of 15 15 calls or 15 leads a week that's what we want you to get. How do you respond to that in terms of expectation, setting expectations and having them understand the process?

[00:14:59] Speaker 2: [00:15:00] Because I could use some tips. Okay.

[00:15:02] Speaker: Oh, I love this. Okay. And then we'll answer Stephen's question and we'll come back to that. So you, yes. Okay. So how would I answer that for Google ads? I want 15 leads. I would say, how many leads are you getting now? And then I would figure out what the percentage, so you want me to get this percentage of leads by what time?

[00:15:20] Speaker: What's the, make it that smart goal. Every week? Okay, every week. And and how are you doing that? On Facebook? Or? We have a combination of [00:15:30] Facebook ads running and Google ads. Okay. And the outcome is filling in a form? And what were they doing last year? No, the outcome is booking a call on Calendly.

[00:15:38] Speaker: Okay. And are we tracking the Calendly? Yeah, yes, we are. Okay. I would say first I would say, okay, for sure. And for myself, for Google, I would say, okay, let me go. I'm going to go and find out how, what the cost per click is, right? Cost per click. Average cost per click. I'm going to find the average cost per click and then I'm going to multiply it.

[00:15:59] Speaker: [00:16:00] So if we do the right math equation, it is what you were aiming for is one lead, which is. One lead per 10, right? If everything is golden. And so if people come to your landing page and it doesn't work then you have to fix your landing page. So it could take longer. So how much budget are you going to give me to hit this number?

[00:16:23] Speaker: That's so I can't, I can definitely a hundred percent do it, but I need to know the cost per click and [00:16:30] because how many clicks do you need to get a lead? And then how many leads do you want? You want the five leads? So they need 50 clicks at how much? Right.

[00:16:39] Speaker 2: Here's the thing, and this is, I work at it a little bit differently.

[00:16:42] Speaker 2: I like the way you think though. So I worked it a little bit differently. What I like to do is I set up my ads, I test my ads, I get the two parts working together. So we use Top Funnel Interest moving over to the website and then we retarget we retarget with Calendly Link because they've already educated themselves.

[00:16:59] Speaker 2: [00:17:00] Or they've already looked at the website. Because we were finding when we went directly to Calendly, we got a ton of clicks and not as many bookings. And then of those bookings, the bookings were, asking what is it that you do? And we want them to already know that by then.

[00:17:16] Speaker 2: So we flipped the switch, got them to the website first and then put them to the Calendly. And that's our strategy. And what I like about it is that it has an actual, even Steven. Number of [00:17:30] leads that it provides every week. It's pretty consistent over the last six months, but we had a drop sometime around November.

[00:17:38] Speaker 2: We had a drop November, December. I forgot when a few months ago anyways, we had, or maybe it's a little later than that actually. It's a cyclical business. Yeah. No, I don't, I I don't, it's not a cyclical business in terms that it actually organizes itself every month. There's new cohort. However, I think that people think about education at particular times of [00:18:00] the year.

[00:18:00] Speaker 2: So they look into it. And also we found out that there's a half drop, like half a 50 percent drop right after the American long weekends every week. Like consistently. Which was interesting. But what I know is I like to get them at an even Steven number of whatever it is that they want based on the budget that we have.

[00:18:21] Speaker 2: And then I like to go to the client and say, okay, so this ad spend creates this. Results if you want to scale that up [00:18:30] to 15, we need to add, we need to scale up the ad spin because we've got the ads performing at a good click through rate and the quality of calls are good. So now this is the time to scale up.

[00:18:42] Speaker 2: So that's what I'm thinking.

[00:18:44] Speaker: I get to track it like. What, when you ask what budget do you want to spend? They're like I don't know. I'm like, oh, okay. Just tell me a budget. We just need

[00:18:52] Speaker 2: to

[00:18:52] Speaker: start. Yeah. We just

[00:18:54] Speaker 2: need to start and then we can figure out what we can do from there. So let's go back to this.

[00:18:58] Speaker 2: Yeah. Let's go back to this question. [00:19:00] How long, okay. Did it, okay. So wait, no, we have to,

[00:19:03] Speaker: let's tell everybody what budget are you looking for at these and how long did it take before you. They were poor quality great question.

[00:19:13] Speaker 2: Okay, so how I like to work My ads is I actually test them for the first month.

[00:19:19] Speaker 2: So I don't put a huge ad spend out I put a very small ad spend on things I'm talking Facebook ads here not Google ads But we only [00:19:30] start with the minimum amount of Google spend we start with is 500 anyways most people that's where they're starting with Facebook. I usually start with 20 a day and that's it.

[00:19:40] Speaker 2: And then I test my ads and my landing page to make sure that's that's converting first. So once I have, around. I don't know, it could be 5 percent click through rate. When I've got 5 percent click through rate on my ad, then I figure, okay, the ad's running. In this particular case, we had a 10%, over a 10 percent click through rate, [00:20:00] so the ad was performing well.

[00:20:02] Speaker 2: That, that means that you're targeting the right people, everyone's going over to the reach. Messaging is right.

[00:20:06] Speaker: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:20:07] Speaker 2: Yeah. But then we had a huge drop off immediately on the landing page, like two second drop offs. And and we've spent a long time. Yeah. No it's core vital issues.

[00:20:18] Speaker 2: There are lots of core. Yeah. Yeah. Really slow to load. Yeah. Confusing navigation not clear messaging. So we've gone and revamped those those [00:20:30] pages and the and then the the calls went back up. We're now sitting at that. So I feel if you really want to do something good with Facebook, you want a minimum 500 to a thousand dollar ad spend.

[00:20:43] Speaker 2: per month commitment, but don't start out with that. Start out slow and get your click through rate on your ad performing first. Figure out the best image, the best content. Title, the best call to action, which usually is learn more no matter what. And [00:21:00] and the best messaging description or whatever the messaging is.

[00:21:03] Speaker 2: And then once you've got that at a good click through rate. So I think they say that the average click through rate on Facebook is 0. 04 was the last time I had heard, but that's super low. And we have to consider that we have a lot of people on Facebook running ads that hit that boost post.

[00:21:21] Speaker 2: Function and that's probably in that data too. So we want to aim for, I don't know, anything between three to 5 percent I think is decent. [00:21:30] Anything above that is great. That's what I, that's how I would answer that.

[00:21:33] Speaker: I think we had two very interesting answers that did a lot of the same thing.

[00:21:37] Speaker: I will tell you that actually we've started offering search engine marketing services instead of, which is some people confuse that with just Google ads. But search engine marketing is SEO and Google ads. Yeah. Okay. Or that's how we learned it back in the day. Because it's all marketing in the end, And do you

[00:21:59] Speaker 2: consider [00:22:00] search engine, do you consider shopping ads as part of that mix

[00:22:04] Speaker: too?

[00:22:04] Speaker: Okay. Search engine marketing. So SEM and it encompasses SEO and Google ads. And the reason we are doing that is because Somebody will buy Google ads from us and we'll set up the campaigns, we'll get them going. And then we'll look at the, we'll get great click through rate and everything will be great, but we'll have this landing page problem.

[00:22:23] Speaker: And if we're not creating just a landing page out of the box to get them going over on lead pages or something, we're going to, [00:22:30] do the speed test. And then we're going to recommend, Hey, Let's stop doing Google ads for now until we can get your your ship a little bit to convert your page needs to convert your pages and converting, then we fix the page and we try, and that's where you have to spend the time and see what people are doing.

[00:22:47] Speaker 2: So we're in the middle of relaunching a brand new site and and then we'll be able to tell from that how soon we can scale up the ad spend.

[00:22:57] Speaker: Yeah. And the other thing to do is use [00:23:00] something like lead pages. I don't know if you use them, but they, they take out that component. Sorry, I missed that.

[00:23:05] Speaker: Oh, use like lead pages or whatever a landing page is, right? Because they, you can pick something that converts. More easily to build. You can, but you do need access to the domain to get that. That's true.

[00:23:20] Speaker 2: So we're talking about setting up separately separate landing pages that function as your website page so that, and they're [00:23:30] dying, they can be dynamic.

[00:23:31] Speaker 2: You can a, B split test them. You can't, they come with, you hide them from Google.

[00:23:36] Speaker: For Google SEO you hide them because you don't want them to downgrade your site Necessarily but you do get to see things in analytics like how a lead jumps, you know Through the sea or the web of the internet to get to you and how many times they visit you So yeah, right to convert so in the end, I think you know [00:24:00] If we're going to jump back to what targeting and interest and lookalike audience and things, it looks oh, wait, Greg's saying something.

[00:24:09] Speaker: Uh, oh yeah. Kenneth Greg what

[00:24:11] Speaker 2: can we do? Yeah, it's true. There is a plugin. He's talking about, there's a plugin WordPress lead pages, I think, or something called something like that. And and you. Yeah. So at the beginning of the new page plugin, it wasn't particularly good, but it's, it is actually quite developed now so that you don't have to have a [00:24:30] third party.

[00:24:30] Speaker 2: You can run it all on your site and your own hosting. You don't need a third party subscription.

[00:24:35] Speaker: Okay. I want to look at Greg that Greg, will you share that below? And we are, we have three minutes to go. So Rena, last thoughts, last question,

[00:24:42] Speaker 2: I thought we were going to add at 10 minutes after I'm like, Oh, this is going to be a lot of time.

[00:24:48] Speaker 2: And then of course it always goes by so

[00:24:50] Speaker: quick. Because it's always an interesting conversation when you're talking about marketing. But Greg, good point. Share that and anything else that. I don't think we mentioned anything [00:25:00] else in this, but if you'd like us to share anything else, let us know. And yeah, last thoughts, Rina on the Facebook versus Google.

[00:25:05] Speaker: Do you still like Facebook more? Yeah. Google more.

[00:25:08] Speaker 2: No, I use I use my proprietary system is a combination of two working together with the same strategy. And I think that's what, what makes ours kick ass quite frankly. And the first thing last thought is before you do any kind of ads, get an audit done on your website.

[00:25:25] Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And not one of those ones where you just plug in your information. They send you stuff. Yeah. They'd [00:25:30] be like, you don't have a Google business profile, but you do.

[00:25:32] Speaker 2: Yeah. If you're, if your site speed is too slow, it's not, you're going to need to fix that before you run ads. That's the ideal scenario.

[00:25:41] Speaker 2: And

[00:25:43] Speaker: this is why we come together because marketing is a group effort. And we, we're search social and websites. Look, we got Greg here. He's, he's the expert. We all do all three, I think, but we have Specialties Rina? Specialist in Facebook ads. Yeah, it's the [00:26:00] favorites, right?

[00:26:00] Speaker: Who could go on and on about Google forever? Anyways, we have to quickly mention before we go, remember that leak? Y'all, I think we might bump some stuff and talk about some stuff in the next week or two about that Google leak. There's lots of opinions. If you want to see a topic, let us know because we're always here every Thursday.

[00:26:18] Speaker: And next week, Rina, do you know what we're talking about?

[00:26:21] Speaker 2: No,

[00:26:23] Speaker: we are talking about security matters with safeguarding your website with LAN and who's that guy? Who's that guy? [00:26:30] I think it's Greg anyway. Oh my gosh. That's a question while I'm having a coffee, but , sorry. Yeah, are you okay? Rena's having allergic reaction, but you look beautiful and we will see you all next time, everybody.

[00:26:43] Speaker: Bye. Have a great day.