Facebook Ads – How To Scale Safely w/ Eroslav Georgiev & Rohaan Khan – #47

 
Ben Donovan  00:00
Welcome to another episode of the brand builders Show. Today we’re going to be talking about marketing, specifically Facebook ads. It’s a topic we haven’t talked about loads on the podcast, especially in the last 12 months because it hasn’t been a bit crazy out there in Facebook advertising world. So we brought on a couple of great guests to talk about our topic today, Eri and Rohaan, welcome to the show today, guys. Thanks for coming on. Hey, man,
 
Rohaan Khan  00:24
Cheers, man. Thanks for having us.
 
Ben Donovan  00:26
My pleasure. It’s gonna be yeah, like I say, an interesting topic of conversation, because there’s been some changes to say that least in the last year or two in the advertising space. So I’m going to now be very interested to hear what your thoughts are on what success looks like. Right now. Before we dive into the details of advertising on Facebook and your guys expertise, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your expertise? What is your kind of origin story? How did you get started where you’re up to now? Yeah, give it give us a bit of background for everybody listening today?
 
Rohaan Khan  01:01
Sure, I’ll go first. And then Eri can go after origin story sounds a bit like a supervillain, but I promise I. So I’ve been in, you know, entrepreneurship as a whole, probably for close to seven years now. Six, seven years. I started off going down the traditional path college specialized, I had a master in psychology. And I thought I would go down the, you know, like the traditional nine to five route. I soon learned that that is not what I want to do. I don’t like to be told what to do. I don’t like that whole corporate environment. And I needed a way out. So I started Googling frantically looking on YouTube, how to make money online. And eventually, I found a couple of videos about dropshipping. And I was like, Okay, let me try this, fail a few stores until one just takes off. And from there, you know, just started to scale up got enough of a cushion financially to then realize, okay, I don’t need a job ever again, let me just continue with entrepreneurship. So, like, fast, fast forward five years or so I scaled up some brands exited some brands to VCs. And then, you know, just sitting on all this wealth of knowledge, pile of cash, I was like, okay, what can we do next? Mount Airy in Bali? And yeah, we since then tried a few things. But orange trail was just something that we, you know, took off way too. That’s our most recent venture. It’s a year old. But yeah, that’s that’s, that’s my story in a nutshell.
 
Ben Donovan  02:26
Maybe Eri could share or you could share a sec. A bit more about orange trail and what you guys do, just to give us a bit more context, but But yeah, tell us your story as well. But sure,
 
Eroslav Georgiev  02:36
sure. Yeah. So let me quickly tell my my origin story, and then we can share about what it weren’t strollers. So essentially, similar to Rohaan, I first you know, I had like an internship normal nine to five kind of role. After one week of doing it. I just decided what this is not like, this is not for me. I feel like I walked into the office. And before it, I was like, oh, maybe I’ll have like some normal career. But then after one week, I was like, No, I’m not going to live my life like this like people in the office were like zombies like robots, like the life force had been drained out of them and I was like, No, I’m not going to live my life that way. So that really solidified that you know, I’m going to have my own business no matter what. And then my first I would say my first online sale my first online business that actually got a sale was actually an online divorce business. It was a few years ago, so people probably don’t notice where in the UK you can actually get a divorce if it’s uncontested so both parties are in agreement you can actually just sign some forms and you file them to the you know the government and you get a divorce you don’t actually need a lawyer for an uncontested divorce. And I saw like a little niche there. So basically the business would be you know, we would actually get information from you fill out the forms for you because it’s kind of complicated a bit and it will send them to the government for you. So that’s essentially what it was I started running some ads and then I had like some this paralegal that I found on freelancing websites that will fill out the forms so I would like sell it for like 90 pounds I’ll pay this person 40 pounds and there’s my my profit is 50 pounds. And then yeah, I started running some some Google ads I didn’t know what to expect and never really made an online sale before it wasn’t in my reality to make money online. And then after a few hours, I got a notification you know, this person has made a stripe payment and it was amazing feeling I’ve never had such it was just it was you know that you know, dopamine, endorphins? All that was just this insane feeling. That was probably my first ever sale. And then yeah, that was probably my first foray into that after that, you know, had a few more sales but nothing much. After I started more traditional paid ads agency that was it took off a bit more. I started working with seven eight figure e-commerce brands started making a bit more money for my age and traveling around the world. That’s where I met Rohaan in Bali. That’s when our stories into you know into awaken. So we’ve and then we did try a few more a few things but orange trail where we started around a year ago is what really took off. And it’s a really they solving a really, really solid pain point in the market. We have hundreds of clients right now and growing by you know, quite fast, our team and our client base. And then just to quickly summarize what orange trail does is we provide agency out accounts for Facebook Google TikTok Twitter, Snapchat all the biggest platforms and the benefits of somebody using our accounts instead of creating their own account, essentially, our accounts have the highest tier of support that you can get unlimited spending limits, you know, harder to get blocked, easier to get back, if they do get blocked, faster turnaround times of you know, for example, for ads, and essentially any kind of issues. With our accounts, you have the highest level of support. And that’s why people use our accounts rather than use their own.
 
Ben Donovan  05:27
So how does that work in terms of once they take on the account is their account or they’re kind of renting it from you what’s How does it work?
 
Eroslav Georgiev  05:36
So essentially, what happens is the client specifies a business manager where they would like the account shared, and then we share the ad account into the clients VM. So essentially, we share it into the VM. So it’s kind of like a rented however, they own all the pics the data on the pixel. So in case they want to stop using the accounts, you know, they still own the date on the pixel, they can use it for with other accounts.
 
Ben Donovan  05:57
Okay, cool, interesting concepts in it, we could maybe get into a bit more of that if we, if we have time. I know a lot of people listening will be wondering what is the latest goings on with Facebook, you talked about their, you know, the risk of getting banned, which is definitely something that it would be good to talk about. Because I think a lot of people do worry about that, you know, you scale up your business with Facebook ad spend, which is a great way to scale, but you are then quite dependent on that Facebook account. So that solution you’re bringing is to try and mitigate those risks. Right?
 
Rohaan Khan  06:32
Yeah, I mean, what we’re doing is providing stability and advertising. I mean, take it from someone who has spent seven figures, multiple seven figures on ads myself, you know, whether that be from my past in dropshipping, 2017 2018, to the brands that I scaled up in 1920. And then, you know, in last year from just watching the market, you what you see is you may have the most compliant offer, you might have a totally white hat business, you know, for example, selling baby products, you know, what is noncompliant about that? Well, in Facebook’s eyes, obviously, you might have all the checks, you might be hitting the policy, but you can have these random false positive bands, which are very disruptive to any business, if your ad account goes down, you have an internal score, this is not common knowledge. That’s not something most people know, it’s inside info that we know, every ad account, every BM has an internal health score, okay? This health score can be affected by several factors such as, if your payment bounces or fails, then there’s a payment issue. That’s a strike. If your ad account gets disabled, that’s a strike. If you’re if you’re, you know, approved to disapprove ratio in the ads is poor. That’s another strike and you have this internal score, which is kind of tracking. And eventually it can just lead to bans happening constantly. And every time your ad account gets banned, and then it gets reset, and you start launching ads. Again, there’s an issue there, the issue is that the optimization resets. So you might see for the first few days of the reset, you know, higher CPMs are CPAs. And this is it’s not stable. So where we come in with our solution is providing stability, most of all, you get ad accounts that are pre vetted, that kind of green status. Because these are official authorized salespartner accounts. They’re not just farmed accounts that you get from Bangladesh. And then the second thing is, if you have a new ad account that you start, you know, from beginning, you have these little incremental billing thresholds that you have to hit 15 20 50 100 a day, and they can take weeks, that’s no way to scale. So our accounts are unlimited spent from day one. And yeah, as Eri mentioned, you are essentially renting the ad account, but you know, the peace of mind you have for scaling your business. You know, it’s paramount,
 
Ben Donovan  08:46
definitely. We were running quite a lot of Facebook ads in 2019, around the time of the US elections, and we had those false positive account shutdowns. It was a nightmare. And I remember speaking to someone then, and one of the sort of tips they gave was to, if you get an ad approved is basically duplicate an ad set, you know, 20 30 times but just change one thing like because you’ve got the copy approved the image approved and but just changed the targeting. So to ramp up the amount of approvals you’ve got in the account, because that was one of the big things is stuff like that still happening. Is it still? You know, is it still kind of touching go kind of platform to market on? Yeah, so
 
Eroslav Georgiev  09:24
yes, to answer your question, it is still happening. From what we noticed it first started to be more stringent and started happening more after the 26 elections with you know, after Trump won it even after that for next one two years, it was more strict than before but it was still not you know, terrible, but especially the last one two and a half years it got more and more pretty much stringent and just these random bands happening all the time. So yes, pretty much it is happening still a lot and if you’re let’s say a new in the space and marketing you want to advertise your brand, and you don’t have either the solid Uh, you know, resources, tools, networks, connections, a lot of times, you end up getting burned by something like this, you can even find something profitable start, you know, scaling your brand, and then you get this random ban, you don’t know what to do. So the people who are truly, you know, at the top, and they’re making, you know, the most money in the space, they, you know, they know this stuff inside and out, they understand how to get around it, how to diversify their risk, and essentially how to structure their business and their assets in the best way possible. Yeah. So
 
Ben Donovan  10:29
aside from robbing one of your accounts, that obviously that’s an option, but what are the principles? You said? They’re doing the things that avoid getting these bands? How can someone keep their Facebook Ad Account healthy?
 
Rohaan Khan  10:43
Yeah, great question. So there’s, there’s multiple stages here. Obviously, the ad account and the business manager itself. Let’s start with that. So the ecosystem of you having a business manager and add accounts in there, they should not be tied to any other poor health assets. What I mean by that is anything that’s already disabled or banned. An example of that is you have a business manager. And there’s a few ad accounts disabled in there, well, then the overall BM, the business manager health is poor. Similarly, if you have admins in that business manager that are associated with maybe other businesses, like maybe you have a media buyer who has other clients, and another one of his clients as a drop shipping client, who has you know, notoriously famous bands or whatever, well, that admin in your BM will therefore impact you, too. So aside from that structure, and I’ll get Eri to kind of describe in detail what the best way to do that setup is. Then you also have the ads themselves, the ad accounts launching ads, what we generally recommend is if it’s a brand new ad account, you launch one ad, put it into review, wait for it to be approved, and then duplicate from that approved ad, what a common mistake we see people make is it down to like 20 ads, because they’re like, let me just do it. Now. I’ll go to sleep, wake up with a bunch of sales, they’ll launch 20 ads, and okay, maybe it’d be a few variations of creatives, but you don’t know if Facebook is going to prove those creatives yet. And yet you’ve launched a bunch. And if they get disapproved, that is a lot of strikes. Remember I told you about strikes earlier, that’s a lot of disapprovals. And overall your account will go down. That’s another reason. Payment Methods like you know, another reason clients come to us is because these agency accounts, there’s no card option, you have to kind of pre it’s a prepaid model, you have to top it up with funds. And that can be through bank transfer. Or if you really insist it can be through car but through stripe, that eliminates the payment, mess, you know, payments, suspicious payment issues, missed payment issues, because that’s another reason why other accounts can go down. So there’s quite a few factors, which leads to, you know, these bands, but I’ll actually just get me to explain the perfect optimized decentralized setup, as well.
 
Eroslav Georgiev  12:54
Yeah, so So essentially, no matter whether you use agency accounts or not, what we would suggest is to have your setup of your assets as decentralized as possible. So your assets for your brand, you know, in terms of let’s say Facebook ads, for example, would be, you know, your fan page that you’re using to run the ads, the ad accounts that pixel your catalogs, so those are your different assets, right, and then they’re all housed in a business manager or multiple business managers. So one thing as a number one cardinal rule is, you should never house the the assets that for example, the ad accounts, the pixel in the fan pages, those should never be owned by the actual business manager that is running the ads, you know, they should be owned by separate business managers, the business manager, which you’re using to actually run the ads, that should not be owning any assets. Okay? The main reason for that is usually let’s say something happens. And like we said, like we talked about things happen all the time, even if you’re completely white hat, let’s say something happens. Most of the time, the if a business manager goes down is the business manager that is running the ads. And the issue is if your business manager, let’s say owns your pixel, so all your data for your business, let’s say you spent like $500,000, there’s all this data, it’s on the pixel, let’s say the business manager that owns it goes down. Now you just lost that data, you can’t use it. Okay. So what you should do is, like I said, you should have a minimum of two business managers, ideally, three or more. And then you use one business manager purely for creating the pixel fanpages ad accounts should be created by let’s say, two to three business managers, and you share them into a third business manager, through which let’s say you add yourself or like a media buyer to actually run the ads, and you just run the ads from there. That way, even if that business manager goes down, what you do is you unlink the business managers from one another. So you remove the link, so they’re as unlinked as possible. And then you would, you know, get another business manager, share the assets, again, into that business manager share the pixel across share the outcomes across and you continue advertising from there. So this is very important to have this sort of structure to pretty much decentralized and reduce your risk as much as possible. How
 
Ben Donovan  14:53
easy is it to get another business manager just very simple setup or?
 
Eroslav Georgiev  14:58
I mean, it’s it can you depends how you want to do it. But the simplest absolute simplest way is you get a family members great, I probably got like three business managers from my auntie my grandma. So the absolute simplest ways, you can actually get a business manager from a family member, that’s the most more like, you know, like, more like the most whitehat legit way. And you can actually transfer business managers between people. So actually, if somebody creates a business manager, they can add you as an admin and then remove themselves as admin. So you can actually transfer business managers. So that’s one thing you can do. There, of course, you know, we’re not going to name any names, but there’s certain services that offer business managers, but the we would recommend to just start with close friends and family, you know, and actually one little, you know, little easter egg, let’s say one little tip that we would, you know, suggest that you guys have in mind is, if you own a business manager, and it goes down, that’s actually like Rohan mentioned, that can be actually bad for your profile and your other assets, it can put all of your other assets at risk, what’s lead a lot of people don’t know. And what you can do is you can actually transfer a business manager, someone, Elisa, up until recently, what you could do is, even on a disabled business manager, what you could do is you could add someone else’s, let’s say, your grandma who never is never going to run ads in her life, and it’s not going to affect her. For example, you can make her an admin to that business manager and then remove yourself as admin, remove yourself, and then you’re not associated to disable the business manager. So that’s something else that you also can do to make sure you have as little risk as possible.
 
Rohaan Khan  16:24
Yeah, completely agree. There’s always, you know, other Blackhat methods, we don’t endorse them. Because you buy a BM from someone, there’s always a risk, there’s a risk that they could pull it back, there’s a risk they can take over your ad account. We don’t recommend it. But look, you know, sometimes there’s no other options, and you just have to do it. Just have to be super careful with warming it up.
 
Ben Donovan  16:43
So for the someone who’s just coming in fresh to Facebook ads, like firstly, is there a point where you need to do this? Or would you recommend and do this from day one, when you’re starting out ads? Or in terms of multiple business managers?
 
Rohaan Khan  16:59
Yeah. So the honest answer is no. Because not everyone needs to do this, even though if I said, yes, they could come to us. Now, the honest answer is you don’t need to be doing this. And having agency accounts unless you’re spending at least five to 10k per month on ads. The reason being is because you’re not going to have much issues, if you’re not spending that much. Chances are you won’t have that many ad sets, you won’t have that many campaigns, if you’re just a beginner, what we always recommend is try it out with your personal profile, you know, until it gets banned, and maybe use a friend or family member, the ones that are coming to us in the industry for agency accounts are usually the higher standards, you know, above 10 10k, minimum, but then usually we have some are going above a million per month as well. These big spenders, they require stability, because any day that they’re bad, they’re running out of sales, and they’re not having any traffic on their website. What I always say as well as people are lazy marketers, and they’re relying too much on one traffic source, which is usually Facebook, if they’re overly reliant on one traffic source, and that traffic source goes down, what happens your entire business just collapses and you have no visitors, you have no sales. And if you’re trying to exit your brand, or you’re priming yourself preparing everything for an exit, why why would you have all your eggs in one basket? Because those days that, you know, the article does get banned? And there’s a drop in sales investors or potential buyers of your brand will see, you know, what, why is that? And then the red flags start to appear. Okay, they’re overly reliant on one traffic source, this is alone.
 
Ben Donovan  18:31
So these principles carry over onto different platforms.
 
Rohaan Khan  18:36
So, yeah, this is, funnily enough, a lot of platforms have issues, you know, even TikTok, the most recent one has issues, everyone has issues, you just kind of have to look at which traffic source is giving you the best bang for your buck in terms of your, you know, your ads to conversion ratio. And then also, what you need to consider is, how much are you going to scale any one traffic source? So Google has issues Tiktok has issues Snapchat, I’ve even seen Pinterest have issues. But there’s no doubt that Facebook is leading one depends across businesses depends across offers. But Facebook is the leading platform, in my opinion, for conversions on E-commerce, and TikTok is I think it’s slowly reaching the same level and maybe even overtaking it, the issues persists. But Facebook by far is the most glitchy in my opinion.
 
Ben Donovan  19:27
And with Facebook, there’s been obviously a lot of changes with iOS and you know, data sharing, etc, etc. The pixel has been impacted massively by that. You’re talking about people spending a million dollars a month, there’s obviously still people doing really well with Facebook ads.
 
Eroslav Georgiev  19:44
Yeah, just to jump in there. Yeah, it is very true that a lot of people did get wiped out by the iOS changes. That is very true. However, what I’ll add to that is a lot of people with either a unoptimized offers or not ideal offers or in very saturated more Markets and they didn’t have the right either offer structure a business structure to help them compete more effectively. Those are people that got wiped out. Generally what we’ve seen is people with good offers and good businesses, they still kept winning, you know. So even though the attribution is worse, at the end of the day, it does come back to the business fundamentals, which is do you have a good offer selling to a hungry crowd? You know, that’s if you have those rights. No matter what, no matter where you’re doing a Facebook ads or Tiktok ads or Google or you know, billboards and newspapers, you’re going to make money. And so So the bigger the businesses are the good fundamentals, good offers good funnels, they kept winning,
 
Ben Donovan  20:37
how have you seen what success looks like? Change that over that period of time, because, you know, obviously, there was a time where you could just run Facebook traffic to a dropshipping product page and pretty poorly optimized and run it profitable on the front end. I don’t do a lot of Facebook ads myself now. So I imagine that’s not the case anymore. What does success look like now in current times.
 
Rohaan Khan  21:01
So one thing jump in there. Because I’ve experienced this firsthand, you know, as a drop shipper back in 2016, late 2016, late 2017. And then, seeing what it has become now I’ve definitely seen the progression. And you’re right, Ben, you know, back in 2017 2018, you can launch the most unoptimized ads to an optimized landing page, and you’d still get a lot of sales, I think there is definitely more competition now. And I think the ones that stand out and do well, are the ones that make the websites look more branded, more premium, and they have a more optimized, you know, conversion rate process as well, in terms of, you know, having the Checkout button bigger, or, you know, the copy and you know, the ads very, very convincing copy the type of creatives, but at the, at the core dropshipping business model exists, and it will continue to exist, and people will still continue to do very well. I just feel like consumers are becoming a little bit more savvy now. They’re becoming more aware of which Aliexpress you know, all these bargain discount websites. And I think they are becoming a little bit more aware of okay, this does not look like a brand. So how you stand out is to have a branded website or you know, branded packaging. If you have a social account, it needs to have, you know, decent amount of followings. And your look, make it look like a brand new essentially, that’s what I’m trying to say and content that you repurpose from a YouTube video, it’s no longer going to do well, you know, the type of content that’s doing well now is UGC or Custom. With your brand packaging, like, you know, it doesn’t have to be like you don’t have to have inventory in a in a warehouse in the US. But as long as you just make the effort of trying to get custom packaging and branding, I think generally you’ll do well,
 
Eroslav Georgiev  22:49
I think, yeah, just to add on to that. Sorry, just to add on to that, essentially, it’s about the learning curve is steeper, and the bar is higher, to be able to compete, people are still going to be buying things online, you know, in the past now, and in the future, they just the bar is a bit higher now. And if you don’t meet that bar, you’re just not going to be profitable, you’re gonna get you know, you know, you know, destroy the market. And then before, with much less skill, you can make profit. That’s the main difference. Yeah,
 
Ben Donovan  23:15
I think that’s true, right across all different types of E-commerce, you know, dropshipping, Shopify, and Amazon, you know, wherever you’re selling, there, there’s competition now. And so you can’t just put up an offer, you have to optimize the offer and optimize the metrics behind it. So yeah, I think that’s the same anywhere. And so it’s encouraging to hear that, obviously, that Facebook ads are still working, like, of course, they are to an extent because you still see the ads running, right. And if people are running ads over a long period of time, they must be producing some business goals for them. But it’s just Yes, it’s interesting, because I think a lot of people would think, well, I’m going to turn on Facebook ads, and I’m going to make money on those every sale that I make. But, you know, I think you have to be a bit more long term and your mindset then you
 
Rohaan Khan  23:56
at the end of the day, it’s the marketer that’s willing to spend the most to acquire a customer that wins. And what you’ll notice now is anyone just starting off for the first time maybe has a budget of a couple of 100 that will get bullied out of it will get pushed out of the market just because a competitor is willing to spend more at breakeven or even just under you know, a loss. And the reason being is because they’ll make it back on the back end. So again, that branded elements, you know, back in emails, SMS is you know, retargeting middle bottom of funnel, they’ll make it back but a beginner a newbie, it’s harder. It’s still possible, but it’s harder.
 
Ben Donovan  24:30
Definitely. You talked about obviously, people spending a lot of money on the platform and obviously very keen to hear if you do have stories of clients you’ve worked with and you know, sort of case studies and how they’ve grown but specifically with your interactions with people that are spending lots of money. What are the people that are in the top 1% of advertisers, marketers? What are those elite performers doing right now that maybe other people aren’t?
 
Eroslav Georgiev  24:58
Yeah, I’ll give my two cents on This. So for me, it all comes down, you know, back down to the offer, you know, anyone can go and do a Facebook ads course and learn how to run some ads and launch some ads. You know, that’s, that’s not like the barrier to entry there is not that high, you know, anyone can do that and learn to run some ads in a few weeks, however, where the real money is made, like the top top people, they have this very innate and solid skill set of just marketing skill, marketing knowledge, and that is able to look at the market, look at the competitors. And then from there, you know, combine that with their insights and just decide, okay, I’m gonna make, you know, this and this, and this exists in the market. But however, if I also make an offer that does this, and this, and this, nobody else does this, and My offer is much more unique. So that’s innate marketing skill, which just comes with experience and iteration. That’s not going anywhere, you know, and the same kind of skill, which let’s say 50 years ago, back in madman days would help you to sell a product, that same level of skill, that same isn’t the same ROM that is still what is needed. And that is still, for me, what is the clear differentiator between a top 1% marketer that actually scales and makes you know, a lot of money versus somebody that doesn’t, of course, there’s other other things such as, you know, understanding the the algorithm understanding how to, you know, make your assets as safe as possible that those are also factors. But it come for me, the main thing is, comes down to the marketing skill and understanding how to make a good offer in the market. Yeah,
 
Ben Donovan  26:27
that’s really good. In terms of your the clients you’ve worked with, are there any stories that you can sort of share with us that would encourage the audience about you’re growing and kind of some, maybe some obviously, achievable stuff, like not just pie in the sky dreams? But what what’s still possible in the world of e-commerce?
 
Rohaan Khan  26:45
Yeah, well, we can disclose too much, because obviously, we signed NDA with our clients, and we can’t reveal someone’s product I wanted to do, but we do have a $30 million brand that’s working with us. And they were in its restricted vertical, it’s totally white hat. But it’s just, it’s one of those new verticals, which is still like, you know, there’s policies still being worked on. The biggest thing I’ve seen from their side, what, which led to their success, first of all, obviously getting approved for ads, we at Orange trail, we actually have X Facebook employees working with us. And one of them is a compliance manager who helps us to get, you know, ads approved within the policy to make sure that matters happy. But also, you know, the client can have some room for marketing in the way they’re like. They had multiple consultations with our compliance manager. Eventually, we got them approved with, you know, the copy and everything else the landing page. And they were just trying to like, try different angles. And eventually we got them approved. So the ads are now you know, they’re scaling up. But aside from that, they’re also testing a lot of creatives. This is what I see, leading to a lot of success with, with, you know, people in this industry and ecommerce, it’s all about testing, testing, testing, especially creatives, as Eri mentioned, you need to have a validated offer, the offer needs to be solid, it needs to be well timed in the market. And if you have that, then the next step is okay, which stage in the funnel am I looking at optimizing next? It’s the obviously the marketing the creatives, if you have a good solid creative video that explains the product well, or you know, high quality images that just you know, it’s self explanatory. It’s all about testing the creatives. And then the last step is obviously, the website, the funnel, you know, is it super optimized? Do you have a custom landing page? You know, how is your checkout process. So these are like, You need to audit multiple stages of your funnel. And a funnel is just not just your website. A funnel can also be you know, which stage if it’s the ads, you know, so it’s multiple stages. And I think creatives is what when, these days, something that works on TikTok may not work on Facebook, and vice versa. So you really have to just invest in creative and move fast. What we also noticed is speed, especially with the bigger players, they really like to move fast with testing and creatives, because it’s a numbers game, at the end of the day, you’ll find one that slaps you know, but it’s about, you know, economies of scale, you have to have multiple at the same time to be to be any can’t be waiting, you know, a month Oh, let me get this creative agency. They’re gonna send it in three weeks. No, that doesn’t work. So and also one more thing, so the professional looking videos actually don’t do as well as the UGC homemade style videos that it’s mind blowing, but that’s just the way it is. And I feel like it’s because it blends in with the platform’s more you’re on TikTok, you’re scrolling your your newsfeed and an ad is interrupting you it’s interrupting your time that you’re looking at your friends your family or your favorite you know influencers. This art is interrupting you so it better damn well be worth it. And the first thing is it blends in. So it looks like it’s just another post. But second of all, you know within the opening three to five seconds there needs to be a hook it needs to capture the attention and have enough value for them to watch the rest of the video. So these are kind of little things that I’ve noticed in my opinion. Eri, have you noticed any other you know, differentiators from the big players? The eight players from the B?
 
Eroslav Georgiev  30:10
Yeah, I think I was just pretty much agree with that add on to that is just the big players on top of what we already said, you know, they have this innate marketing skill, which just comes through the years and I’ve experienced in iterations, they move fast. You know, they they come they have an idea they execute, okay, does it work, does it not? If not, they go on to the next year, that idea, they move fast. That’s probably the best thing. And of course, they just think they know, one thing I’ve noticed, even for my, through my experience, having a paid ads agency before is some media buyers, for example, they think big, some media buyers are spending, you know, $500 per day, and they’re thinking, wow, this is nothing this is I want to scale up to 5000 per day, some media buyers are spending 500 per day, and even if they’re profitable, they’re thinking, Oh, I’m spending so much I need to be careful. Let me just reduce it, you know, so there’s certain different, you know, things needed. And one of them is also just the ability to think bigger, you know, because part of making a lot of money is mindset, you know, how you view money affects what you do in business?
 
Ben Donovan  31:07
Yeah, great, great, great advice that is so much about mindset for sure. Ron, you mentioned there about policy. I just wonder if there’s some pointers you can give on? What are the most common things that cause ads to get rejected? I know, it’s a bit of a specific but just for someone just starting out, they might not realize how, you know, sensitive the Facebook algorithm is. And so whether it’s the copy the images, or there’s, you know, a certain number of things that are the most common reasons why ads get rejected and obviously affect account health.
 
Rohaan Khan  31:43
Yeah, excellent question, Ben, we have noticed a certain few that are recurring. And they’re the ones that our reps give the biggest feedback on. I’ll start off and I’ll just list as many as I can, because some of them it’s case by case. So I can just give you a generic answer here because it depends on the product and the offer. exaggerated claims is one of the biggest one if you have an overly exaggerated claim in your copy in your headline in even your website description. Because as you know, Facebook and a lot of these platforms have spider crawl tools which scan your landing page when you launch an ad and it just detects Is there anything noncompliant? So exaggerated claims What could that be? Well, you know, this pill will make you three inches taller well it’s not really true is that that that exaggerated claim will definitely you know be non compliant. And that’s why health is always such a risky vertical, especially in e-commerce to run ads to you really have to be smart with how you write the copy. Don’t make exaggerated claims but find ways to word it in a way that kind of bypasses that. Obviously don’t you know sell snake oil but have claims that are realistic and achievable whilst also within pushing the boundaries of marketing because that’s what copywriters and marketers do, you have to always push the boundaries until it will be accepted. Second one is discounts This is a surprising one that we didn’t really pay much attention to until we saw recurring feedback from reps. So now we have an internal policy document that we share with our clients discounts that are too large in Meta’s eyes it can actually be seen as exaggerated or even a fraud or scam so if you have 50 to 70% discounts yeah like you know and they’re year round like there’s  no it’s in it’s in the middle of April or something and you have a 70% discount like what’s going on there so meta doesn’t like that. Discounts they recommend it should be 30% or less okay that’s another one Yeah, use other platforms or like meta or logos that are of the platform this is a big risk if you have some kind of Facebook logo on the landing page or even in the ad stay away from that that’s that’s a big no no don’t take someone else’s content this is I can’t believe I have to say it but we see it so often. Do not take someone else’s content or if you’re going to do it be smart about it because sometimes like they leave the logo in and everything it’s just it’s ridiculous that’s what I think so far Eri you have because that’s what I can think of a top of my head
 
Eroslav Georgiev  34:24
those are some of the main ones related to the health ones before and after pictures and a big no no, you have to be very careful with before and after pictures just Facebook absolutely just hates that. So we’ve seen a lot of ad accounts go down because of before and after pictures and it could be selling cosmetics or some diet or even there was there was some ads for this guy refurbishing kitchen so doing over your kitchen is there before and after the kitchen and that still got you know disabled so you got to be very careful with that specific concept.
 
Rohaan Khan  34:53
Yeah, very, very good point Eri. And if you don’t want to do it side by side, what you could do is have one image At the top of your description, and then have some text in between and have another one below. But yes, very true. Side by side, it’s a big nono. Even in your ads, it’s a big no, no. So don’t don’t do that. Another one is the policy and privacy pages, we’ve noticed a lot of clients don’t have them done well, you really need to have your terms of service, your privacy policy, your refund policy, shipping policy, every page, in the in the footer, have them done well, this is something that most people, they just get a copy paste from. From the internet don’t even like incorporate like your details, well make sure you have it first of all, but second of all, try and optimize it as much as possible. It’s free, all the information is on Google, you can find it.
 
Eroslav Georgiev  35:41
And just to add on one thing, it’s kind of a callback to the previous topic. But related to this, one thing about the top 1% of advertisers is they generally do have a quite good understanding of the policy and they know how to, I’m not gonna say break, but they know how to kind of skirt around the policy where their ads are still compliant. But portraying certain things, which if done another way would be not compliant. So you know what I mean. So there’s, for example, there could be two advertisers, both advertising some sort of diet, you know, the, the new would put up before and after, hey, that’s how you’re going to look. And then the professional one top 1%, marketer would still get across the same idea, they will still make it clear in the ad, hey, you eat this, and you’re going to lose some weight. But they’re going to do it in such a way where it’s not noncompliant for the algorithm. So that’s also one big difference. Yeah,
 
Ben Donovan  36:31
that’s good. Yeah, there’s been so many changes, I wonder if you can even predict it. But what what do you feel is the future for Meta Facebook advertising? What what is it? What does it hold for us?
 
Eroslav Georgiev  36:46
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s going to stay strong for the foreseeable future, I think is is on a bit of a downhill, but it is going to stay strong, mainly because Instagram is still going strong. So I think for the foreseeable future, it is going to be so one of the major platforms, we know and we see everyone sees it, TikTok is taking more and more and market share. Of course, Google is still going to be there. Overall, I think it will stay strong. But it’s going to be on a slight decline. And as an advertiser, I think if you want to, of course, be profitable to scale your brand, of course, don’t overlook Meta, make sure that you can make your rent profitable on Meta. However, with that in mind, as we talked about before, get profitable and Meta, but try as much as possible to diversify and get profitable on the other channels as much as possible. And also, then, obviously, own your own list. Own your own audience, get as many people in your emails and so forth. Yeah, just diversify as best as possible.
 
Ben Donovan  37:43
Great tips. Good stuff, any sort of parting advice, then before we close up key actions, key takeaways for anybody? Is there anything? I haven’t asked that? I should have asked anything like that at all?
 
Rohaan Khan  37:56
Yeah, I mean, the biggest piece of advice I could give is get familiar with what the policies are. And it’s not hard that you can actually Google Facebook policy, Google policy, just take 5-10 minutes out of your day, and learn them, especially if you’re spending 1000s on ads, it makes sense to just skim through it and see, okay, you might learn something, you might learn something new. And even if you’re a following policy, or you think you are to the best of your ability, and you’re still getting disabled and banned, then of course, you know, Orange trail, we can always help you out. You know, I think the biggest reason people come to us is because they’ve exhausted all options. They’ve tried, you know, running ads as clean as possible, and they just can’t. So they come to us and we can set you up with an ad account within a few hours to 24 hours. We have a dedicated account manager team from around the world. So you will have 24 Five support in Slack. So each timezone, you know, US, Europe, Asia. Like I mentioned, we have this Compliance Manager, which in my opinion, is the secret weapon. You know, you can have tailored feedback on your offer your website where cannot get this anywhere else, try talking to Meta, you’ll be waiting weeks for just the support to get back to you. So you know, we provide all of this in a nutshell. And we are an agency that is feeling your pain because we’ve been there before, so we know exactly what you’re going through. biggest piece of advice also aside from that would be as Eri mentioned, diversify your traffic sources. You need to have multiple streams of traffic. If you put all your eggs in one basket, you are at the mercy of that one platform. It’s not a good look. If that platform somehow just disabled your ad account BM your page even your traffic is gone and you don’t have a business anymore. And of course the orange trail you know, you can always find us at www.orangetrail.io It’s not for everyone. We do have a screening process. So have a call with us and see if you’re eligible. Eri you have any parting advice you would like to share as well.
 
Eroslav Georgiev  39:58
I mean, you cover a lot of it just to So I although stuff, yes, I would say just some parting advice for people watching this, if you’re in the E-commerce space, if you’re in the business space is just a lot. I feel like a lot of people, you know, there’s three layers of thinking there’s tactics, strategies and principles. I think a lot of people are stuck in those tactics, which is like, what is this next hack that I’m going to use, you know, 2% look alike audience of this, blah, blah, to get that next Ross, a lot of people are stuck in that tactical level thinking of small, little things. Whereas a lot of the huge growth and huge things happen at the highest level, the principal level thinking, which is, what principles can I use to make my offer my business as unique as possible in this market and make it a very, very strong competitor in this market? So that’s where the huge gains happen. I just think a lot of people are stuck in this smaller level tactical thinking. I’d say that’s just keep that in mind.
 
Ben Donovan  40:46
Yeah, sage,
 
Rohaan Khan  40:47
it’s actually, actually I just wanted to say one final thing, Eri, that’s probably one of the best piece of advice you could give to someone. And what I’ll build on on that is, Elon Musk always says you get paid in proportion to the level of problems you solve, the bigger the problem, the more you get paid. So when you really consider if you, you know, go past that tactical phase, and just think, at the top at the principal level. really consider what are you selling? What are you offering? Is it necessary? Is it you know, is it a problem solving product? Is it well timed? Is it you know, something that people will buy it because they need it? Or is it you know, something that it’s desirable? And when you really consider and start asking these questions, you really filter out your products, your services and think, Okay, this is not really essential. We are scaling up this fast simply because it’s a well timed offer. It’s very exclusive. And it’s a huge problem solving, you know, service. So really consider that for whatever business you solve in the future as
 
Ben Donovan  41:46
well. Absolutely. That’s some great advice there for all of our listeners. guys. Thanks so much. I really appreciate this conversation. It’s orangetrail.io. That was the website, wasn’t it? Yeah, correct. Yes. And we’ll leave the link in the description of the show notes, etc, as well below so people can check it out. Guys, thanks so much for coming on. Really, really appreciate your time.
 
Eroslav Georgiev  42:07
Thanks for having me.
 
Rohaan Khan  42:08
Thanks.
 
Ben Donovan  42:09
Oh, folks, thanks for listening to this episode of the brand builders show. You heard it there. If you want to get in touch with the guys at Orange trail. Find out if they can help you get a secure set of ad accounts and help you on your Facebook advertising journey. Make sure you do that. And I will see you in the next episode real soon.