You're Using the Wrong Social Network, Facebook Lead Ads, and The New Google SEO Trend (Trends Dec 2023 Week 2)

0:00All right. So we are going to talk about the trends for the week and Neil's going to go first. What do you got Neil? So trends for the week. You're using the wrong social network. So, Eric, you already saw this, but what do you think the best social network is right now? For what? For advertising. Oh, yeah. It's got to be X, you know? That's right. So it's funny because when you look at the data and the stats, what we're seeing right now is if you are trying to go out there and advertise on social media. you know we looked at a lot of the client data we have as well as site data that we have for Google suggests as well as analytics and what we saw is when we're looking at just social so we took that out as an individual channel right we're not talking about SEO or anything like that we're talking about paid social and when we're looking at the revenue that is generated from paid social and again we're gonna end up just breaking down from a social media perspective so the social channels out up to 100.

1:05Facebook drove 32.37 % of the revenue. YouTube drove 28.19 % of the revenue. LinkedIn, 11.47. Instagram, 10.92. TikTok, 8.44. X, 4.41. Snap, 3.18. And Pinterest, 1.02. There's a lot of other social networks, but they were so insignificant, pretty much excluded them. Now, can you guess the platform that had the biggest return on ad spend? X, 6.8. Pinterest, 5.2. Snap, 4.9. TikTok, 4.1. YouTube, 3.9. Instagram, 3.3. Facebook, 3.2. LinkedIn, 2.6. even though Facebook and YouTube and, you know, we'll loop Instagram in with Facebook, they can drive mass volume. It ends up being, if you're trying to maximize your return on ad spend, you should first juice up whatever you can get out of X, then Pinterest, then Snap, then TikTok, because it's going to create a higher ROI.

2:12Your campaigns won't scale as well because they don't have the volume as, let's say, a Facebook, but you're going to end up driving a bigger ROAS. And LinkedIn, the reason we're seeing crappy ROAS compared to the other social networks, it doesn't mean it's a bad place to advertise. We think it's one of the best places to advertise is because you're competing against recruiters. Not all are you combating, you know, B2B enterprise companies spending a lot of money. People spend a lot of money on LinkedIn purely for recruiting efforts, which jacks up the ad costs for everyone else. You know what's interesting?

2:45I'm trying to figure out, to your point, obviously, you should absolutely max out X if your audience is hanging out there, but there's a problem with daily active users, right? And so I just ran this on BARD, and this is as of December, 2023. I'm gonna share my screen over here. I'm just looking at daily active users across these platforms, right? So check this out. So Facebook says 2 billion, YouTube unknown, Instagram's 500 million, Instagram stories users. WeChat 1.3, and let's just keep going down here. LinkedIn, 700 million. Okay. And is this daily actives? By the way, this could be hallucinating.

3:21This could be hallucinating. That's another thing, right? Snapchat, 332 million. And where's X? Not publicly disclosed. But we know that X has like, I think I've heard Elon or heard, I've seen him tweet before. It's like, I don't know, 200-ish or something like that, which is still a significant number. Yeah. And the data that I didn't share was from the last 30 days. but the reason you're also seeing a higher return on ad spend from uh twitter is because a lot of big corporations are boycotting them based on a tweet elon must put out and then what was funny is is he then goes and puts on uh twitter how uh facebook has i think there was like some trafficking type of content oh yeah yeah yeah he went off to bob eiger yeah was it child abuse or sex trafficking.

4:08I forgot which one it was. But he ended up breaking that down. And he was asking people like, why aren't big corporations boycotting Facebook? Here's a funny reality. One is a corporation, you know, content just on there in a platform. One is them basing it off of a founder. But the other big thing too, is depending on the company, a lot of them will not boycott Facebook. And the reason being is they drive too much volume and just stopping your ads on there can really impact your revenue numbers. Yeah. Again, DAU daily active users for Facebook is 2 billion. That's just Facebook, right? Instagram just stories is 500 million per day.

4:46Messenger is 1 billion, right? You can't, you can't ignore that. Then you have Instagram, then you have WhatsApp. Like Facebook has a whole company meta, their daily active users must be through the roof. Oh yeah. WhatsApp too. Okay. That's not disclosed, but here's the thing. Pinterest only 98 million and that's monthly active users so it's much smaller um than than these other ones so um i think what's up has over 2.7 billion active users uh it's not telling me what's a daily active users that's monthly active m-a-u uh i just googled it so i'm global monthly for monthly is 2.7 yes according to status yeah but your key takeaway here is i think let me know if i'm wrong it's to maximize these channels first oh they don't have this from 2019 it was 500 plus million daily active users and if you look at status the monthly active users only goes back to 2021 and it was a billion roughly less than what it is today so i don't know what it was in 2019, but you can probably assume a billion plus for daily active users.

5:58Which channel? WhatsApp. Okay, got it, got it, got it. Based on that assumption, I would say it's at least a billion daily active users. So Meta as an overall company probably has, call it three to four billion daily active users. But with that, keep in mind, a lot of users on Instagram will also use Facebook, will also use WhatsApp. So I don't know how many of those are actually unique. Like my key takeaway for this one is to maximize if your audience is hanging out there, maximize the ROAS on these other ones. But, you know, obviously, like you have to have a balance, right? If a lot of your users hang out of these other ones, like don't forego them either.

6:35Yeah. And look, you got to do whatever you believe is right for your business. If, you know, you feel that Elon or anyone didn't say anything unethically, you're going to get massive ROI from it. And what I would do if you're a startup or a smaller business, first focus on the channels that are going to give you a better ROAS. and then worry about the more competitive channels like Facebook later on. Yeah. All right. So mine is kind of this whole what's old is new again type of thing. And so people will be like, okay, direct mail is dead. And it's like, okay, direct mail is new again, right? Now in this case, remember Facebook and Instagram lead ads, Neil?

7:11No. Okay. So Facebook lead ads is basically like when you can just fill out your lead form directly. Oh yeah, right then and there on Facebook and they didn't have to go to your website. Correct. Same thing with Instagram, right? But the thing is when they launched a product a couple of years ago, it was really crappy. And everyone just like tried it. And then like it's like, okay, the leads are too crappy. You know, you can't edit the form fields and all that. Now, here's the thing. This has actually changed. Let's go back to it really quickly. My buddy did the Facebook lead ads for a gym. So he would market all the gyms throughout the United States and have like a 90-day new you program.

7:44And when he did it on Facebook and captured the lead right then and there, the lead quality was just shock. It was cheaper. But he, in total, if you look at, let's say, and he was spending around three, 400 grand a month, it was cheaper and he was getting way more leads, but he went back to sending the traffic to his own website. It was more expensive. He got way less leads, but he generated more revenue and more profit overall. Yep. So what we're doing now is, I mean, if you want to increase the quality of your leads, what can you do? You can probably add more qualifying questions. Sure, you're going to, you might get less form fields, but they're going to be higher quality.

8:19You can now do that within Facebook and Instagram lead ads. So here's what we started to do. We started doing this for the email list too, because when we were initially struggling with$11 CPAs, we're like, dude, that's not going to work. I was like, just go try lead ads, right? Lead ads immediately dropped the CPA to like, I think$4 or something like that. And it's just going to get better over time. And we're like, okay, that's going to scale well. And then even with our regular conversions that we've dropped it to$5, but we're going to continue to push lead ads. And then for fun, what I did last, last week, and I was like, oh, I want to kind of just try this for like retargeting for our own stuff.

8:50And for bringing in leads for an agency, right? The, the, and we're doing retargeting for this, the it's like$20 per lead or something like that. Now are the leads quality? No, I would say for, for every 10 or so, maybe one's qualified. So 10%, right? So still though, you might be paying$200 for a lead. If you have a high lifetime value customer, you should be doing it. So anyway, that's my experience. And like, basically not Not only just for lead ads, but whatever has been old that might have worked maybe five, 10 years ago, maybe think about testing that again, because it might just start to crush it.

9:23Yeah, it is. It's all worth the experiment. Even if you had a bad experience or something in the past, doesn't mean that it won't perform great nowadays. And Facebook and some of these other platforms, they want to keep people on their own platform because they make more ad revenue. So it's worth testing out their new features because they're going to continually work to make it better because it makes them more money. Yep. All right. You're up. So let's talk about new Google trend. And this is going to change the way you create content. So there's two charts that I actually want to show you. The first one, Eric is showcasing.

9:55Now, we talked a little bit about this, or he'll share his screen, in one of our previous podcast episodes. Back in the day, when I started blogging, the average result on page one of Google was 2 ,300 words. The longer form content you wrote, the better off you were. I went so crazy. I started creating ultimate guides that were 30 ,000 words. No joke. They were literally as long as it booked. They would get a lot of backlinks, rank high, get a ton of search traffic. A few years ago, from when Brian Dean ended up doing a study with Atrus and a few others, it dropped down to 1 ,447 words. And more recently, we're continually seeing the trend go down.

10:31And it's because of the TikTokification that we talked about in the past, in which people are used to more short-term content. TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, everyone's pushing it. And when you look at the average workout per industry, and we'll break some of them down, automotive. And these are for popular articles that people are cranking out. 474 words. Construction, 427. E-commerce, 581. Economics, 619. Education, 749. Energy, 640. Engineering, 306. Entertainment. Engineering, by the way, had a lot of video content. That's also a shorter word count. Entertainment, 856. Insurance, 675. Investment, 604.

11:14Real estate. Investment also had, by the way, a lot of video content. Real estate, 567. Retail, 606. Sports, 612. Same with video content there. Technology, 907. Travel, 887. Travel had a lot of images, like tons of images, more than any other categories. If you've ever built a website, you know how tough it can be to keep a strong design while ensuring site performance is fast. That's where Framer comes in, and it totally changes the game. Framer is the design-first, no-code website builder that lets anyone ship a production-ready site in minutes. I recently built a custom landing page in just a few hours.

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13:29Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash marketing school. Go to shopify.com slash marketing school. Shopify.com slash marketing school. Interesting. Let's pull up your next one, yeah? Yeah, and then when you look at each industry and the type of content that people are producing that generates the most traffic, and Eric's about to share the graph, because there's different types of content that you can end up creating, right? You got like how-tos, list-based content, just general blog posts. There you go. Thank you for making it bigger. I'm getting old. What type posts, why type posts, video posts, et cetera.

14:13And what we found for most industries, the most popular forms of content were how-to and list-based. No joke. And what this is getting at is like, it's going back to the basics. You know, everyone's making their content marketing so complicated, but a lot of people in most industries prefer how-to content and list-based content. It's really that simple. And everyone's just like going out there and be like, okay, we're going to try this crazy new strategy. And this is how we're going to rank number one on Google instead of just basic stuff. Like Eric is going out there on a single grain website, which has been working out well for him.

14:51He's creating comparison-based articles like MailChimp versus HubSpot, right? I think you're doing tons of content like that. And then he's shaking his head yes. And he's doing it with AI. And then he's going and having a human tweak it. It's not sexy content, but it's producing traffic for him. And it's producing really qualified leads for his agency. Oh, sorry. Just to clarify on that one. So the MailChimp, that's old stuff we did for affiliate, but more so like services type of keywords. But yeah. Yeah. So comparison, like give us an example of the services based keywords that you're doing.

15:26So for example, you might do like PPC services or PPC management or something like that. So he's creating massive articles or just basic articles on like what it is, how does it work? How do you get started? Then having a human go in and modifying it. And he's generating leads from it. And this is the kind of traffic that I believe when you share the stats, it was getting around 17 ,500 visits. Oh, that one's different. So that's another experiment we're running. But the one you're talking about, Neil, is AI-assisted content where we're taking like blog content or podcast content like this and we're making it into the how-tos, the listicles, and all that.

15:57But the service-based content that you're creating, the basic stuff, and actually all of them are basic, and I don't mean it in a bad way. I mean it in a good way. When you're creating the service-based articles, how much traffic is it driving you? That's driving even more. That's driving, I think, in the last – this is a six-month experiment. I think it's driven like 30 ,000 clicks or so, and it's going up. And you're getting leads from it? Correct. How effective has the leads been? You just. All right. So the point I'm getting at is, and I don't know all of Eric's strategies like the back of my hand because he has so many of them and good for him for that.

16:32But whether he was creating the service based articles or the comparison based articles for affiliate or he was creating basic how to stuff that he's taking from the podcast and using AI. This is basic content that's driving him a lot of qualified traffic and leads and generating him revenue. People are making their content marketing too complex. And what we're seeing is shorter articles are performing well and people like the basic stuff like how-tos and lists instead of like crazy advanced stuff.