Facebook Ads in 2021 - What To Expect

0:00hi guys it's ben heath from lead guru and in this video i'm going to talk about what we should expect to happen with facebook ads in 2021 we know that in an industry as dynamic as facebook advertising things change all the time and we're likely to see some significant changes in 2021 so i want to talk about what we think they're likely to be how you can get prepared for them and of course take advantage of of the opportunities that are going to come up as a result of these changes before i get into that trying to very quickly ask you to smash that like button please click that thumbs up

0:28button and of course subscribe to my youtube channel if you are new and haven't done so already okay so i've got a bunch of notes and a bunch of points that i want to make i'm going to gonna run through when it comes to facebook ads in 2021 before i get in touch very quickly say that of course we don't exactly know right who could have predicted that what happened in 2020 was going to happen in 2020 and of course as we know that had a really big impact on all industries but facebook advertising included and we're still feeling some of the effects of that now and

0:58we don't know when that's going to come to an end you know what life's going to look like and when in 2021 whether we get that for whether we get back to full regular life or not so these things are obviously going to have an impact and something completely unexpected could come up that we can't really predict so i should sort of uh state that up front that if you're watching this and something's big has happened after i recorded this well this this may not be as uh as valid as uh as it is when you're watching it um fresh but um but i still think this is

1:26worth going through i still think there are trends and things we know are coming that we can predict that we can prepare for and i said that we can try and get ourselves in a good position to take advantage of okay so point number one i think this is basically guaranteed to to happen in 2021 is that facebook will continue its process of cracking down on rubbish businesses on um businesses that perhaps don't have the long term or their customers best interest at heart they're just in it to make a quick profit and we definitely saw that in 2020 right so and facebook's really been cracking down

2:01on advertisers that aren't delivering a fantastic customer experience and if you're an e-commerce business you've probably seen this where facebook has been very actively going after um customer feedback and they want to know from people that have interacted with advertisers ads you know what was the experience like what was the product like so you've probably seen feedback scores and things like that and if your feedback drops below a certain number for a certain amount of time facebook will disable your ability to advertise on the platform they've really been been doing that much more in 2020 than they had in in previous years and i think that's going to continue and

2:33i think it's very important that facebook do that i think it's very important that they protect the the sort of viability of the platform not just for themselves but also for us as facebook advertisers i think unfortunately enough people have had an experience now enough users have had an experience where they've seen a facebook ad or an instagram ad for something that they like the look of they click on it they go through they buy the the product or service oh well not let's say with a service but more so with a product they buy the product it takes three or four weeks to turn up

3:00it's from a drop shipper that set up last month that is masquerading as a sort of more established business they don't really have their customers best interests at heart they're just after a quick buck then when the product arrives it's rubbish they you try and get in touch with the company there's no customer support available and it's all about experience i think facebook are very aware that if too many of their users have that experience they will start going oh don't buy anything from facebook and instagram ads you just get rubbish businesses and poor quality products and lack of customer service you're better off buying from brands you

3:30know or going elsewhere for products and things like that so that is a real threat to facebook advertising and facebook have been countering it big time in 2020 and will continue to do so with things like feedback scores and they are going to be disabling more and more ad accounts stopping more and more facebook pages from advertising so i think it's good for us in the long run because you you know we don't want facebook advertising to get a bad name we want to be able to advertise in this industry with the trust and confidence of our prospects and that's very very important it does however mean

4:01that in these sort of waves of different disapprovals that facebook advertising going through that your ad account could also get disabled now this happens quite a lot um it's nothing to really worry about provided you haven't been breaking the rules you just need to request a review go through a few steps and you can get your face we had to come back in fact i've created a whole video about how you do that when you get a facebook ad account disabled so i'll include a link a link to that in the video description below i'd recommend you you check that out but um but it what one thing i would

4:28recommend around that is be really careful with your ads with your ad copy avoid certain trigger words that you know facebook are likely to have an issue with in your industry it completely depends on depending on what industry you're in what those trigger words are think about your ad creative no close-ups of body parts or you know there are various things that facebook do not like you need to be careful and be on top of that to try and not get your ad account disabled in the first place but that is something we're going to continue to see and overall it's good even if it's frustrating in the uh in

4:55the short run what so point number two is kind of a continuation on from that but it's it's a more it's a wider general theme and that's that businesses in 2021 that have a longer-term approach to facebook advertising are likely to see better and better results now we've seen this since you know many many years ago when we first started advertising on the platform that when you advertise for an established brand it doesn't have to be a huge brand but something that we recognized within the industry they operate in the results from the facebook ad campaign identical campaigns for an established brand and a completely unrecognizable brand

5:30and the established brand is going to produce many many more conversions much lower cost per conversion and and in general their results are going to be a lot better and that has been that process i feel is only um increasing the the importance of a brand is is increasing and i think it is in part because of what i talked about people who had enough bad experiences now you know there's still lots of people that are relatively new to online retail the best practices for how to do things are still being developed for a lot of people you know people know how to go buy things from shops and where to find

6:04the best stuff and which shops to go to and online do they really know are they i think more and more people are turning towards brands because they've had that experience not just through facebook you know i've personally ordered things through amazon i'm sure you have and they turn up and you think oh that thing's rubbish i wish i hadn't bought that i wish i'd paid a bit more money and bought from a brand that i know i think a lot of people have had that experience purchasing things online they're gonna do that more and more so that means they're gonna buy more and more from brands they know

6:28and they trust okay so what does that mean for you as a facebook advertiser does it mean you should put all your money into brand awareness campaigns no i think one of the best ways to grow a brand is to acquire tons and tons of customers and deliver a fantastic customer experience you know if you're a local business like a restaurant for example acquire loads of customers get loads of people to come in offer a massive discount or whatever if you have to do that provide a fantastic evening show them that your your decor is really nice and you've got a great you know uh feeling in the place and there's a

6:59great atmosphere the food's fantastic the service is great obviously a little bit difficult you know with lockdowns and things like that depending on where you are but um by doing that that builds a brand that person then has a fantastic evening they go away and tell their work colleagues they tell their brother and sister and and you know family members and friends i said have you been to that place down the road it's fantastic and then when your ad pops up in front of someone who hasn't been in yet and the ad pops up and says why don't you come along to our restaurant and that person's been recommended it

7:28already by someone they know they're far more likely to do so the same applies to national businesses acquiring loads of product acquiring loads of customers delivering a fantastic product or service getting it so good that people feel the need to tell friends and family about it means that when you advertise to those people's friends and family who are also into the same stuff you're far more likely to generate a purchase so i don't think you should be running brand awareness campaigns and putting all your budget behind those i think you still want to be running conversion campaigns as i recommend but just really focus on the brand side

7:58of things as well so make sure your packaging is fantastic make sure you've got really good customer service focus a lot on delivering a fantastic customer experience after the sale is made and that makes a big big difference okay so that's that's point number two right point number three and i think this is perhaps the biggest thing we're going to see in 2021 is that we are going to continue to see privacy uh adjustments made to facebook advertising to honest the whole digital marketing landscape based on privacy reasons so the big big big one is ios 14 the ios 14 release i've already published a video on this so go

8:36ahead and check that out i'll include a link in the description below is is potentially we don't know at this point as of recording this video potentially gonna have a big big impact on facebook advertising and i think there are changes that are going to be made um based on we don't want or society is deciding they don't want facebook google whatever to be able to track people as much as they do now and if the ability to track people as much they do now goes away or is hampered that's obviously going to affect facebook advertising in its ability to target based on people's interests your

9:13facebook's going to have a harder time working that out it's going to affect facebook's ability to optimize campaigns it's going to affect facebook's ability to provide you with data that you can use so i think the clamp downs on privacy are going to have maybe a short-term negative impact i think over the long run it's a good thing we again for the same reasons i mentioned in point one we don't want facebook advertising to get a bad reputation we don't want society as a whole to turn on these advertising platforms and in order for them not to do that we need to play by certain rules okay so

9:45it's safeguarding the long term but apple have introduced with the ios 14 they're going to introduce a pop-up um in facebook and instagram apps where people basically are being asked do you want this app to track your activity um online and if people select no which we feel a good chunk of people will that is going to affect facebook's ability to collect data which we know is very important to facebook advertising so what does that mean i think things like what we talked about brand is going to become really important it also means that we may have to change our approach in terms of campaign structure and things like that

10:18instead of trying to generate a short term return on ad spend so spending you know 50 a day to make 100 a day perhaps you need to take a longer term approach and go we're in the game of acquiring customers less matching that up penny for penny with the revenue generated versus cost spent because we know that acquiring customers is going to lead to um increasing in brand awareness larger customer base that we can advertise to in the future and all that sort of stuff i always think the crackdowns on privacy is going to make retargeting a little bit more difficult so people that focus on let's say a five

10:53or six seven step retargeting funnel there are less and less of those now but still a thing they're going to struggle more and more so you're going to want to get into more of a simpler sales funnel the sort of thing i recommend anyway right direct to offer lead magnet strategy should still be fine omnipresence content strategy is absolutely fine it's retargeting but it's not done in a you go through this step then this step then this step and this step it's more of a we're putting all this stuff in front of these people consistently and you should still be able to do that um with these updates but um

11:22but yeah but i do think that this is going to have an impact how much we don't know um it is in the short run going to reduce the effect of some facebook advertising seems like a negative thing and it may well be there are also massive opportunities going to come out of that right if some advertisers leave because they don't know how to make it work in the new system that's going to reduce competition that's going to reduce cost so those of us who stick it out we may see even better results okay from some of these updates so so there are definitely positives to uh

11:50to come out of this um even if it may seem like a little bit of a negative to us advertisers in the short run um i strongly recommend by the way you do check out that video that i've done about ios 14 and what that's likely the effect the likely impact of that again link will be in the video description with that with that one we've also seen very recently that the eu have introduced some changes um again primarily for privacy related issues around messenger so there's not so many so people who have been running message campaigns in the eu have had a lot of those that

12:18functionality um taken away there are always going to be solutions to any changes that are made you just have to be aware that there are changes you have to work out what's going to work going forward are we producing tons of content on all that sort of stuff so don't worry about that and stay on top of it and i said it might work out beneficial but it's important to be aware and i think we may not have seen the last of this you know going into 2021 i think there's going to be more and more of this going forward and we just got to adapt okay point

12:48number four is that apart from the impacts to the platform that um are going to happen from sort of external changes like apple's ios 14 update any government intervention the platform is going to continue to improve we've seen massive improvements in facebook advertising over the last five six seven eight years and i think where possible we're going to continue to see that so what does that look like that means that as an advertiser i think you want to trust facebook more and more go with what facebook recommends so for example facebook at the moment is strongly recommending your own conversion campaign supposed to traffic you want to do that it really makes a

13:25big difference um we've got the data from facebook we've run tests ourselves makes a huge difference facebook are recommending automatic placements as opposed to edit placements that is the best approach to the vast majority of time not quite always but if you're running a conversion based campaign you do want to go with automatic placements and there's going to be more and more of this stuff within a facebook ad account the facebook is going to sort of recommend or have this default that you want to go ahead and use and as some of those settings perhaps targeting perhaps delivery becomes more and more automated the real differentiating factor here

13:57between us and you know between uh sort of high quality facebook advertisers and those that get mediocre results it's going to be the ad creative so that's really where you're going to want to differentiate when you're going to focus of course the offer and all that sort of stuff is very important as well but that is going to be a big area of focus going forward so that's what something that i would recommend focusing on and being aware of um trusting them more and more taking less into your own hands effectively with changes okay point number five is around the cost of facebook advertising so there's a lot of factors that go into

14:32the cost of facebook advertising in 2020 in general we saw times where the cost of facebook advertising dropped so initially when we first went into the lockdowns in certainly countries like the uk us we saw a decrease in facebook advertising costs cpms went down why did that happen not necessarily because there were a few advertisers there were some you know a lot of business stopped advertising because they couldn't be open local businesses physical locations some scaled their budgets back down as well because they didn't know about their financial future so that reduced competition but also supply massively increased right basically populations were forced to stay at home

15:06they were spending lots of time on social media on their phones ipads computers whatever and that reduced the cost that lasted perhaps a couple of months more advertisers joined the platform in sort of mid-2020 because of course that's one of the only places they could now reach their customers they you know they may have advertised in all these other locations but if people are stuck at home and they're spending a lot of time online well that's where you need to advertise to them and so then we saw the increasing cost um come up out of that we also saw spikes in costs for 20 uh for the election the us election

15:36particularly obviously in the us and we saw um a reasonably expensive q4 q4 is always expensive because you've got black friday you've got christmas but probably more so this year again because people know there's going to be a lot of online purchases a lot of e-commerce activity and also that's the place where they need to reach their customers right so what are we going to see in in 2021 i think all things being equal without massive impacts from the ios 14 and things like that which might be the case by the way guys we might not

16:05see huge impacts for ios 14. we i think we see fairly stable costs throughout 2021. i think we we have reached somewhat of an equilibrium under this new paradigm of people spending a lot more time at home and i think that's likely to continue as i said if ios 14 and any other privacy related um issues that come up and and are introduced and curtail some of the data reporting in particular and potentially some of the effects on us now but particularly the data reporting and facebook ads i think that's going to cause a lot of people to leave the platform where they'll go i don't know

16:36because as i mentioned in my previous video the ios 14 update is not just going to affect facebook ads you can't just think oh stop advertising on facebook i'll go and advertise on google or something all other platforms can be affected as well you know it's not like apple have said only facebook can't track people's activity online it's going to be all online advertising platforms so where they'll go who knows but i do think there'll be a drop off in in some of the demand facebook advertising which may well increase the cost so for the first time in a long time we may see a significant decrease in facebook

17:04advertising cost which obviously represents a massive opportunity for those of us that are able to work out how to make it work with the new system and the new setup i said i'll have lots of content on that so that is um yeah that is i think we're likely to basically see stable costs or potentially a good decrease depending on the effect of some of these big changes that are coming up but you know it's a it's an interesting thing to think about i think we're very unlikely to see an increase in cost which is obviously great news for advertisers not only because of what i've already

17:36mentioned but also many countries are not going to be doing probably so well economically and companies can be one of um guarding their pennies a little bit more so some of the bigger players might reduce marketing spend for 2021 all that sort of stuff okay right point number six and this one again is uh perhaps not really one associated with 2021 it's probably gonna have much more of an impact if it does have an impact later down the line but facebook have been hit with a lawsuit an anti-trust lawsuit and the objective of which is to basically get facebook to split facebook instagram whatsapp into separate companies the argument against

18:14facebook is that they're a monopoly and they either buy or just copy whatever their competitors produce and of course you know governments for many many decades have wanted to break up monopolies because they're seen as bad for for the end user so facebook have said they they've contested this they said they will fight it and they will take it to court if if need be um which probably means that this is going to be wrapped up in legal issues for years so the impact of any lawsuit like this is likely to take years and years to have any impact on us as advertisers if there's any impact it could have in

18:492021 is that facebook may choose to delay using whatsapp as a placement for facebook ads now you can use whatsapp as a destination so someone clicks on that they're sent through to whatsapp now and have them you have been able to do that for a while but they haven't yet introduced whatsapp as a placement option now originally they said they were going to do that in 2020 but it never happened and by a placement option i mean you know obviously you go on facebook you go on instagram you see ads just about wherever you go you see on your feed all that stuff you don't see them in whatsapp you

19:18may well do going forward you may see ads in between your various chats or even within a chat an ad might pop up um facebook haven't done that and they might decide not to because i think if they're going to try and argue in this legal battle that they're not a monopoly they will want their separate um sort of entities in facebook instagram whatsapp to appear more like separated it's not just one massive thing that's sort of welded together and ads makes it feel more like that they're going to want to argue that facebook competes with twitter and and linkedin and the whatsapp competes with all the various messaging

19:52apps and things along those lines okay so um so i don't think it's gonna have a big impact it might mean a delay in whatsapp as a placement which would be disappointing because i'm very intrigued to see what will happen with that when that does become available but i've had a lot of questions about that it's nothing to worry about in 2021 i'd be amazed if there's any sort of resolution on that 2021 to be honest i've done a lot of research into it and i'm no lawyer but given what i've read it seems like um the the the allegations are going to be very hard to prove and stick so

20:26sort of the balance of probability from what i've read is that facebook will be absolutely fine and they'll be able to to sort of beat off this this lawsuit um but of course we will see and that is developing thing i think to us as facebook advertisers if the long-term consequence was that you advertise on instagram through one website you have to advertise on facebook through another website because they're they're now separate entities it wouldn't be the end of the world you know we'd adapt we'd work it out it'd be absolutely fine so six points there i think the overriding thing that i want to get

20:57across here is a message of positivity it's easy particularly with the ios 14 updates and things like that to get um a little bit scared a little bit anxious about what's coming obviously you know facebook advertising is incredibly important to my business and and and it will be to many of yours but change does not equal bad right it's easy to think it does particular things are going well for you right now but change could just as easily equal great fantastic and whenever there's change there's going gonna be challenges you're probably gonna have to find slightly different ways of doing things i'm gonna have lots of content on that

21:34so just make sure you keep watching the channel subscribe and keep an eye on the videos but there's also gonna be great opportunities you know if the effectiveness of some facebook advertising features drops off and the competition leaves and costs go down hey that's great for those of us that stay right um if facebook find other ways of doing things now that they can't track as well they may even improve their platform for all of us we don't know what's going to happen but i can guarantee there will be a mixture of challenges and there will be and opportunities okay and the the how the year goes for

22:05you won't depend on what facebook does to his ad platform or is forced to do it's going to depend on how you react to those changes nothing you could do about him you want to react to the best way possible and i'm certainly going to uh to help you through that okay hope that's been useful if it has please give it a like please also as i said subscribe to my channel if you haven't done so already comment below to let me know comment below if you've got any questions i'll try and answer as many as i can and i'll certainly see them all um before you go a couple

22:31of things that i i quickly want to mention the first is our facebook advertising services so my company lead guru is a facebook advertising agency we create manage and optimize facebook and instagram ad campaigns for our clients and as i've already discussed i think 2021 is going to be quite a turbulent year i think there's going to be lots of changes we're going to be very much on top of this very much at the forefront of working out and if you want to get better results from what you're already getting right now or you want help navigating those changes we can certainly help you do that okay

22:57so if you're interested our services and we do have a 3k per month minimum budget so you need to meet that criteria but if you do that criteria and you do want you are interested in working with us you can book a free call with one of my uh one of my team um right now in fact you can click on the link in the description below that'll take you to our page on the website you can find a slot you know over the next days weeks whenever that works for you and get that booked in have an informal chat we can tell you more about our

23:22service you can tell us all about um your business we've probably worked for the business like yours before and got them great results we can share those details you know if if we're able to um and and yeah that would be great to uh to work with you obviously um other free thing i want to mention is my facebook ads mastermind group so free facebook group full of facebook advertisers we're just shy of 60 000 members as of the recording this video one of the biggest communities of facebook advertisers in the world which is absolutely amazing i do free live trainings in that group regularly and we would uh

23:52yeah we'd absolutely love to to have you in there so um again link in the description there's a whole bunch of links in the video description so check that out but go ahead and join and we'd uh love to have you and i think you get a lot of value out of it questions are being asked answered all the time and uh yeah okay best about your facebook ad campaigns guys uh i am looking forward to 2021 i think it's been massive opportunities i hope you are as well and i will talk to you soon bye for now