What's Happening With Facebook Ads Right NOW?

0:00hi guys it's ben heath from lead guru and in this video i'm going to talk about what's happening with facebook advertising right now specifically the state of things so obviously 2020 has been a crazy year so much has happened with you know virus and lockdowns and civil unrest and all that sort of stuff and that has absolutely affected the facebook advertising industry and we've seen more than ever that yes facebook ads are massively impacted by what's going on outside of what you're doing with your campaigns in terms of ad sets ads adjustments and things like that external factors play play a big role so with that in mind where are we work

0:34right now and what can we expect as we move into q4 of 2020 what can we expect for the rest of the year and moving on i'm going to cover some of that stuff in this video before i do that i just want to quickly ask you to smash that like button click that like button that'd be very much appreciated and really help me out and of course subscribe to my youtube channel if you're new and haven't done so already okay so where are we right now as i said 2020 has been a crazy year everyone knows that and it's absolutely affected facebook advertising we saw that let's say april may

1:04even into june for a lot of businesses they saw the best results they've ever seen when advertising on facebook and instagram and the reasons why are not surprising you know you've got your target market is stuck at home you know and obviously this is going to depend on the locations you're advertising in but for our major markets that we advertise in like the uk us that was really the peak of lockdown shelter in place things like that where you have people that are stuck at home um can't go out and do things or don't want to a mixture of both and they're spending a huge amount of

1:35time on their computers huge amount of time on their mobile devices on facebook and instagram so the amount of impressions that were available were just enormous through the roof and people are also willing to buy stuff because they're bored they don't want to go out to the shops a lot of e-commerce companies did very very well during that time and then you added in the fact that a lot of advertisers a lot of businesses cut their marketing budgets they you know if particularly if you're a local business or anything that requires like face-to-face interactions which is obviously a huge amount of companies um a lot of them cut their marketing

2:04budgets back for sort of from march when we all this all sort of kicked off really and then into april may into june because they didn't know about the financial future of their own companies um that reduced the amount of demand for facebook advertising that reduces the price so a lot of businesses saw the best results possible and actually i've seen i've talked to a lot of people that started advertising let's say started a new business they started advertising in april may june that sort of time and i've spoken to them recently and they're sort of going through their results and thinking i just want to get

2:35back to the point where i was at let's say may and i go i don't think that might that might not be possible that would those were very artificially good results okay they were so good because as i said your target market was like fixed to a location with very few distractions and not forced obviously to be on facebook and instagram that's not how these things work but they were spending a lot of time on there and and so you may not be able to replicate those results and you shouldn't be aiming for that objective in my opinion in a lot of cases because you're just going to end

3:08up disappointed since then july august and now i'm recording this video um towards the end of september we started to see we've seen a much more reversion to the norm so we've seen facebook ad campaigns perform comparably to previous time periods previous years um at least in recent history and things like that where costs have have stabilized um we're seeing people are getting back into the world they're going about their lives they're not just sat at home on their phones buying things that pop up on instagram okay so um if you are looking to judge the long let's say you haven't advertised for very long and you're looking to judge

3:44the long-term viability of facebook and instagram advertising for your business taking july over september as a benchmark as opposed to april may june would be a much it would be a very smart thing to do it'd be a much better thing to do um and it's gonna tell you more about about the future so that's where we are right now now there's talks obviously about second waves and and going back into lockdowns and and things like that and i'm not going to predict all that sort of stuff what will be what will be will be with that happening if we do go back into severe lockdowns what i can say is that

4:16how that will affect facebook advertising is that it'll almost certainly be beneficial for the advertisers that can keep advertising okay um just like we saw in april may and june because as i said captive population lower levels of advertiser competition that's all beneficial there's a few extra so that almost to one side is a few extra things to think about when it comes to q4 2020 and the effect that that is and what's going to happen the effect that external factors are going to have on facebook advertising the massive one that we're already seeing have a big big impact right now is the us election so

4:56obviously this only really applies to advertising in the us but it is very well documented now that political campaigns run on facebook and instagram have enormous budgets put behind them and they were talked about as being very influential in previous elections all around the world but they're definitely going to be used and they are being used extensively in in this election right now what does that mean that's an enormous amount of extra demand for facebook ad space so not only are you competing with other advertisers like you always are right now you're competing with political campaigns that have massive budgets what does that mean we are seeing

5:35increases in costs for a lot of us clients and whenever i'm assessing costs i'm usually looking at cpm so cost per thousand impressions as a benchmark of costs because your cost per conversion cost per click things like that is going to be so dependent on the quality of your advertising the quality of your offers the quality of your landing pages so factors are within your control cpms yes you can target different audiences some are less expensive but in general when you're seeing cpms go up by 40 50 almost across the board you know there's something else is going on and i'm actually convinced it's the u.s

6:10election so i think that the cost of facebook advertising in many parts of the us is going to be quite expensive for basically until the elections happen obviously that's all going to be done after the election takes place so that's a relatively short time period but something to definitely keep in mind october is probably going to be a very expensive month moving on from that we then got two big events in the facebook advertising calendar that are going to have an impact and the impact that these have i think will be determined by what also happens in terms of lockdowns and people's lifestyles and how they look

6:42so first we've got is black friday i predict we're going to see the biggest sales in terms of black friday and what that does for um online retailers for e-commerce businesses i think we're going to break all records so many more people you know a lot of people watching my videos that are interested in facebook advertising are very used to buying things online i know i certainly am and operating that way not everyone was a lot more people have gotten used to that now over the last six months all those people are effectively going to join the black friday community or the people that are active around black friday

7:19so i think we're going to see monster volumes of sales so i think yes it's going to be an expensive time to advertise but it's also going to be a very very effective time to advertise for a lot of e-commerce businesses and businesses that sell things that lend themselves well to black friday you can eat ecommerce you've also got a lot of online businesses online courses and things like that i'm certainly gonna be doing some black friday stuff myself on my courses and um so yes it's gonna be more expensive but obviously we're past the election then and i think we're going to see so much buyer

7:49activity that the increased cost from increased advertiser competition is more than made up for i think that's going to be a really good time of year to advertise then of course the next one after that is christmas now christmas always results in an increase in cost again that can be offset by increased buyer activity so if you're an e-commerce business an online business something that lends itself reasonably well to christmas even if you're like a local business you know and provided you're able to be open uh you know you've got a restaurant or a pub or a bar or something like that where people are gonna really provided

8:17they're able to really want to get out and see friends and family potentially they haven't done much of that um for a lot of 2020. things can be a great time for those sorts of businesses to advertise as well it's not just a case of e-commerce businesses but you are we are going to see increased cpms it's not something to be aware of that always happens around that time of year so what i would i would say looking forward is that if you're advertising in the us pre-election is going to be tricky basically no matter what you're advertising obviously if you're not in the u.s these

8:47political campaigns are only being advertised in the u.s so if you're not in the u.s you're not going to see that impact in other markets so don't worry about that too much after the election there's going to be i think basically a split there's going to be a lot of businesses that are looking to generate a lot of basic basically service-based businesses and things like that that are going to see um probably a bit more difficult time of things than they would usually see now that doesn't mean you can't advertise you shouldn't advertise i'd recommend that if a lot of businesses you continue to advertise because of course if you are

9:18service based you're usually going to be generating a very very healthy return on ad spend because most service-based businesses have average customer values that are quite large and therefore you can easily overcome ad spend so if your ad spend goes up by 20 30 percent you're thinking okay well my robots are still massive my constraining factor on my facebook ad campaign is capacity it's reaching them reaching enough people it's not necessarily the cost so if that's the case then yeah of course no one wants to pay 20 30 more for advertising but if you do it should be the end of the world then on the other side of things the

9:49sort of the other side of businesses the e-commerce businesses the um online businesses the even the experience based businesses like i mentioned they're likely to see a really really good time of things as i said there's going to be more advertiser competition so your cpms are going to be higher maybe not perhaps not than they are now in the us but higher than perhaps they are you know then you'll see come january february into the beginning of next year so your cpms will be higher but i think advertiser competition is going to go sorry user activity is going to go through the roof there are so many people

10:24and it's easy to not think about this if you're not in this demographic and you don't really have friends in this demographic there are tons and tons particularly of older people that didn't really buy anything online still you know we like to think that everyone does but that's not the case but they've had to they've basically had to over the last six months and that change in buyer activity is likely to result in amazing black friday and amazing christmas for a lot of facebook advertisers that are advertising products that fit e-commerce online experience based all that sort of stuff so i would recommend really taking advantage of that

11:01don't you know not go for it with black friday aggressive discounts aggressive discounts is what i would recommend they really do work you might see cost per purchases that are really really really small if you can use an aggressive discount for a black friday sale so that's basically where we're at hopefully that has uh has been useful before you go a couple of three things that i want to quickly mention the first is my free webinar called three killer facebook advertising strategies to double or more your revenue and in this webinar basically breaking down different sales funnels that we use for our clients these sales funnels work

11:37tremendously well they're very much proven and i break them each down into component parts and explain which one you want to use depending on your type of business because there's no one-size-fits-all when it comes to facebook advertising you need to know the right sales funnel for your company and that's what i share in this webinar completely free link is in the video description go ahead and check it out i think you'll be glad you did other free thing is my facebook ads mastermind group there are 50 000 members in my facebook ad mastermind group recently at that milestone and that is absolutely fantastic something i'm very proud of

12:05one of the biggest community of facebook advertisers in the world and it's full of people just like you want better results from facebook ads asking questions getting them answered interacting with each other helping each other out i do free live trainings in there every week so go ahead and join links in the video description completely free we do we'd love to have you in that i think you'd be very glad that you were that you did join and um oh and the other thing i want to quickly mention is our services so my company lead guru is a facebook advertising agency we create manage and optimize facebook

12:35ad campaigns for our clients and if that sounds like something you'd be interested in if you want to be able to hand over your facebook advertising to a professional agency that could not only take it off your plate but also get most likely much better results than you're able to achieve by yourself because we spend millions of dollars on the platform and this is exactly you know we do this day in and day out then if you're interested in that go ahead and book a free call with me again link is in the description right at the bottom where you can book a free call with me book a free strategy

13:01session where it's very informal i'll basically ask you questions about your business i'll see if you're a right fit for us if we feel we can help you i'll let you know about our fees and our services and things like that and we can basically go from there and just to let you know that in order to qualify for a free session with me you do need to have a budget of at least three thousand dollars per month so if you're not spending that then unfortunately qualify then we won't be able to have a call or work with you but if you do meet that criteria

13:26i'd love to speak with you please go ahead and book a call um oh and by the way i'm usually booked up two two and a half weeks in advance something along those lines and there's a lot of demand for our services which we're very fortunate about but just wanted to let you know in case you're planning for the future i'd recommend get one booked in sooner rather than later if you found this video useful thumbs up that would help me comment below to let me know and of course subscribe to my youtube channel best of luck with your facebook ad campaigns guys i hope q4

13:52is a fantastic quarter for you and you are able to generate fantastic facebook ad results i think a lot of businesses actually are in what's been a difficult year for for a lot of people so um so yeah thanks guys bye for now