Salome Schillack:

So you may have noticed that your list-building ads, your webinar ads, your video series ads, any ad that you optimize for conversion is costing, in some cases, even as much as twice the amount that it did only a year ago. We have our friends Apple, and this iOS update to thank for that because when people opt out of being tracked from an app like Facebook or Instagram on web pages, that means that our Facebook pixels become blind and a blind pixel can neither see a conversion nor feed that conversion back to the ads manager so that the algorithm knows what to optimize for. So if you, my dear friend, have seen your ad costs double, triple, quadruple gazillion-duple because of this iOS update you are not alone. Now we are very excited about a little thing called lead ads. Lead ads has been around for yonkers of years.

Lead ads started as an attempt by Facebook to prevent people to click off of the app away from Facebook, away from Instagram and onto a landing page. And Facebook kind of did this half-hearted effort of creating these lead ads so that we would run more ads to get people to opt in and give us their email address without the need for those people to then go to a landing page, which is not good for Facebook or Instagram if people go to a landing page, because clicking away is never good for Facebook or Instagram. They want to keep the eyeballs on the platform because if the eyeballs are on the platform, then they can communicate with you. So Facebook launched lead ads, and lead ads originally was very simple. They kind of looked like a conversion ad and you click the button and then it would automatically pull in the email address that you have registered with Facebook and you had to manually download those email lists as CSV files.

It was awful. It was horrible. So we never, ever, ever really used it because conversion ads worked fine and Facebook had no real incentive to make these ads better until iOS happened. And all of a sudden Facebook has all the motivation in the world to make these ads better. So we are actually now going back to using lead ads as our list-building ads. And we've been trying, we've been running a test in my account and my lead ads, my list-building ads are cheaper than what they have been in years and years and years and years. I was laughing about it the other day, because it was like, wow, iOS has done me a favor. Cause my list building is cheaper than it's ever been. And this is because we're using lead ads.

Lead ads are ads that keep people inside the app. So what that means is Facebook now has an ad, shows your people an ad, it looks exactly like an original conversion ad. And then when you click the learn more button, instead of sending you to a landing page, it kind of creates this native experience. And it's in this native experience where Facebook did a really poor job in the past. But now that they have this new found motivation, they are doing a really great job of allowing us to create beautiful user experiences and actually automatically collect these email addresses, even if they are pulled in from your Facebook account or if you manually enter them. So in the past Facebook would just automatically put the email address that you have signed up to Facebook with in your ad.

And that wasn't very effective because who can remember the email address that they signed up with Facebook for? I think I was 22 when I signed up, so I don't even know what email address I use to sign up to Facebook. So that wouldn't create a very good quality lead, but now you can manually enter your best email address. So that kind of gives you the exact same experience as you would have with a conversion ad that was going to go to a landing page. So let's just look at a little bit, how are they different? They are different in first of all, they keep people on the app. People are not off of the app to a web page. They are staying within Facebook or Instagram, where they see the app. So that person looking at your ad stays in the app to complete the conversion event. So those there's no more need for a landing page or a thank you page created on your website.

There's no more need for a pixel. It all happens inside the app. So let's think about for second, how do they work? What is it that is happening exactly? So your ad on Facebook and Instagram looks exactly the same way as it would when it was set up as a conversion ad in the past, the main difference for the person clicking on your ad is what happens after they click on your call to action buttons. Lead ads take the viewer four different, let's call them pages, but it's not quite a page. It's more like a screen. Maybe it's screens. Let's call them pages. The first page is the intro page. This is very similar to your old landing page. It's kind of been designed to look like landing pages and to replace landing pages.

The second one is the form. This is very similar to what we used to have as the light box or the form box, the thing where you ask them for their name and their email address. The next thing, so once they've entered that they go to another page. That is your privacy policy. Now this is where it's a bit different is in the past, we only needed to link to our privacy policies in the footer of our landing pages. But now Facebook actually pulls up this giant privacy policy, which is a bit off putting, but I suppose they're checking their boxes. So it pulls up your privacy policy. It's not a very pretty page and you know, we don't like it, but it's there. And then finally it comes to the thank you page. Now the thank you page is not exactly like a thank you page we're used to, that we built in our website or on Kajabi or lead pages or click funnels or Kartra or somewhere.

We hope that Facebook will make this a little bit better, but what this final thank you confirmation page has is it has a call to action button at the bottom. And so I have been using that call to action button at the bottom to create a link where they can go to my actual thank you page. So the thank you page that I used to run when we ran these ads as conversion ads, I'm now sending them there and my call to action button on that thank you page says, watch the video. Because if I say go to thank you page, they're not going to click on it. They're just going to click away. They're just going to leave. But if I say, watch the video, now I'm taking that relationship with them that just started with them giving me their email address.

Now I'm taking that relationship a little bit further. Now let's dig into a little bit more of each of these four pages. Let's start with your intro page. So remember you have your ad that looks just like your conversion ad, and then they click on your conversion ad and they go to the intro page. The intro page is completely optional, but if you choose to remove the intro page, it takes people who click on the ad directly to the form page, where they put their name and email address in. Now that can work, but in most cases we want to give people a reason to give us their name and email address. So first we want to go, I have this great thing and here's why you want it and then ask them for something, right? So I would keep the intro page.

But if tasting this, if you just want to see how works or if you're brand new and it's easier for you, you can go straight to a form page. The form page is where the lead provides the detail they need to opt in for your offer, for your lead magnet, or your webinar, or whatever it is. Typically, we would only ask for their name and their email address. Ideally you want to keep this one simple and only ask for that. In some cases it will automatically pull it in the name and email address from the person who is scrolling from their Facebook profile. I hope they change that because I would prefer for people to not automatically pull in that email address, you can edit it, you can customize it to rather enter their best email address. So maybe that's something you can put in your form copies, enter your best email address.

Because certainly if Facebook pulls in my email address, I signed up with like 750 million years ago, it's not going to be my best email address. So the form can only be customized to a degree. We can choose the image that appears on the form and, and the content or the text. So there's a short piece of copy required here, but we can't change the fonts. We can't change the color of the call to action button or even the spicing and the formatting. So Facebook still has a bit of work to do on this form page. After they give you their email address, they go to the privacy policy page, which again, it kind of pulls in the same banner image, the same image that you had on the form. And it just sort of summarizes the first few paragraphs of your privacy policy, not a pretty page. We hope Facebook finds a better way to show us that.

And then finally, they go to the thank you page. The thank you page lets the user know that they've successfully opted in and gives them the option to visit your website via our call to action button. This button takes that new lead to web page, and this is your opportunity really for smart marketing. This is where you can add a video. You can invite them to your Facebook group. You can tell them that there's a secret question waiting in their inbox for them, which gets them to open your first email and engage with you. That's what I do. Or you can send them to a podcast episode or something like that.

So think about how can you, this person has just said yes to you. This person has just become a lead. What can you put on that thank you page to really build the relationship and give them even more of your goodness. Remember to provide some context or information on the thank you page, the Facebook landing thank you page, the little piece that's still on Facebook, to entice them to click to go to your website. So that button shouldn't just say click here or click to learn more. It should say, come watch a video or come join the club or find out about whatever, something that they want. Okay. Now what take do you need to set up these lead ads? It is a little bit more advanced. It is a little bit more expensive initially because you are going to need a paid Zapier account. You can only run these if you have a paid Zapier account because the paid Zapier account has the functionality to zap your CRM and your Facebook account.

Even if Facebook says it ... We had a bit of a laugh about this, because Facebook says it's fully integrated with all of these CRMs and then they have all the CRMs that we use. And then we figured out, yeah, it's fully integrated with all these CRMs using the paid version of Zapier. Okay, so Facebook has a little bit of miscommunication, misinformation here. And so you need this, you need the Zapier zap to be set up so that your CRM, where you capture email addresses can actually then be added to your email list and tagged as a lead inside your lead magnet. Use tagging inside your CRM so that it kicks off the right automated sequence for people coming into your lead magnet or into this automated sequence. And then ideally, this is what we're doing. Ideally, you still want to have one tag for people coming in from your lead ads and one tag for people coming in from your original conversion ads, if you're going to be running both.

The reason I say this is because these lead ads are so new, if we think about lead ads from a most profitable customer journey perspective, and we want to figure out where our most profitable customers come from. We want to be able to pull out our email list at the end of our launch and look at the tags that are applied to all of the buyers. And we want to be able to see, did the people who came in from the lead ads perform as well in my launch as people who came in for my conversion ads. Because here's the thing, these lead ads are so new, we don't know if Facebook is just showing it to people to give us cheap leads and they're not quality leads, then it's better to pay more for a conversion lead than for a lead ad lead and just get the more expensive lead, but know that your more expensive lead is actually going to convert to a sale, rather than getting cheaper leads and they don't convert to sales.

Now, once we, I feel like a year from now, we're all going to know exactly, lead ads perform just as well as conversion ads when it comes to making a sale down the funnel. But for now we just don't know. So I'm still putting half my list building ads into conversion ads, half my list building ads budget into lead ads. And at the end of a launch, I will be looking at how the two converted to actual sales in my launch. All right, is there anything else you need to be able to run lead ads? Let's look at what else you need. You need an image. The instant form used in the lead ads require a banner image. The dimensions of this banner image is 1200 by 628. Write that down or remember it, or look it up on Facebook.

It will be if you Google the dimensions you need, you'll find that. We suggest that you take one of your ad images and resize those, or take the banner image on your old landing page and resize that one. And do make sure that you have a look at how it pulls through on mobile and on desktop before you run it. You're going to need a link to your privacy policy on your website. And you're going to need a paid Zapier account. Okay. That is a mouthful. So now you know that if you're building your email list, you have two options for how to run those ads. The one is conversion ads. It's the old fashioned way where we send them away from Facebook or Instagram to a landing page and then they give us their email address, and then they land on a thank you page.

The other way to do this is lead gen ads, native ads that live inside the Facebook app or the Instagram app, does not take people away from the app, but we're still figuring out if it is the best quality leads. They're certainly cheaper at this stage than conversion ads are, so try them out. Now I want to hear from you. Let me know. In Instagram, send me a DM on Instagram, send me a DM on Facebook, send me an email at hello@ShineandSucceed. I want to know if you're running lead gen ads and how are they working for you? Tell me, and if you have sold your online course after running lead gen ads, I want to know if you saw a drop off in sales or if you saw the same number of sales, because we need to pool our resources here so we can tell every listener what the best practice is in terms of lead gen ads.

All right my friends, you go and try your lead gen ads. Do not forget about Amy Porterfield, my mentor, the person I learned for or learned from, and still learn from every day, since 2015 is opening her digital course academy in September. If you want to find out more about that, join the bootcamp she's got running right now. Go to ShineandSucceed.com/DCA. Have a lovely, lovely week. Bye!