This Simple Change Blows Up Facebook Ad Results

0:00my meta ads agency has run more than 5,000 Facebook video ads for our clients and the single most important part of a Facebook video ad is the hook if you get the hook right it massively increases the chances that that ad will be successful and in this video I'm going to show you how to come up with tons of Highly Effective hooks for your Facebook video ads quickly and easily okay so I'm excited about this one I've got my notes in front of me cuz there are lots of different hook options that I want to run through and I don't want to miss any out uh but let's quickly start by just

0:28explaining what exact The Hook is so the hook is the first 3 seconds of your video ads on Facebook and Instagram and it is by far the most important part because if people aren't hooked if they don't watch those first few seconds they're not going to watch the rest of the ad and if they don't watch the rest of the ad they're not going to hear about your product or service they're not going to convert they're not going to take the action that you want them to take so it is it is by far in way the most important part of your Facebook ad and it can make a big impact on

0:57performance if you can improve your hook you can Absolut Ely 10x the number of people that actually watch your Facebook video ad uh by improving the hook you can you can change your hook rate from 3% to 30% this is possible um and I'm going to explain more about hook rates and percentages and how you track this um later on in the video but I just want to really emphasize how important this Hook is at the end of the day if people don't notice your ad in the first place if they aren't hooked Nothing Else Matters it's not going to convert so what's the purpose of a hook here's how

1:24I'd recommend you uh you think about it right so the hook is designed to sell the rest of of the ad it's the first 3 seconds it's very very short you're not selling your product you're not selling your service what you are doing is grabbing people's attention and then convincing them to watch the rest and the rest of the video ad is what's going to get um people to convert you want your ideal prospects going oh that's interesting or yeah that applies to me and then deciding to watch the rest uh based off the back of that and because the hook is the most important part of a

1:53Facebook video ad it's the part that we test the most and I'll have specific testing recommendations later on um as we we go through the this video and how I'd recommend you structure that but uh I just wanted to to emphasize that point okay so let's dive into the hook variations there are lots of lots of different categories of hooks and lot to uh to get through so the first category of hooks that I want to go through are callouts um specifically that use sort of labels descriptors things that people will self-identify and this is literally the person within the video ad saying these labels these descriptors that your

2:24target audience will go yes that's me and then be far more likely to watch the rest of the ad which is the whole point of the hook um as we've been through I really like this as a hook option very easy to do not high production value it's just a case of making sure you say the right words and having a little think about it now of course when you're looking to go after your target market there's lots of different ways people can self-identify and lots of different labels they might have some might be more or less pertinent to your offer so you'll have to have a little think about

2:49that and think well does this one apply does this not uh but let's go through the different types that we could use when it comes to call outs using labels right so the first one we could do is characteristics people's personality trade so you could have things like lazy anxious motivated does someone self-identify as one of those things now of course we're running Facebook ads here so you got to be careful with Advertiser policies if you start a Facebook video ad with are you suffering from anxiety that's far too on the nose that's not going to um um to work but you can kind of say the same thing but

3:20come at it from a slightly different angle so instead of saying are you anxious or are you suffering from anxiety you could have something like young men suffering from anxiety tend to find that so you're not saying are you to the person but you're describing who you're hoping to Target perfectly assuming of course you then have a product solution that helps young men who are anxious but that would be a way of using a characteristic a lot of people think you can't use those in hooks you absolutely can but you have to do it just like I described it's not are you suffering from anxiety it's young

3:48men who are anxious you know you make like a more of a statement or something along those lines or young men who are anxious often struggle with ABC okay so the next one is location based so this could go from really broad to really specific um so you could have Americans being like the most broad term the whole country or you could go with Texans for something more specific or you could go with New Yorkers or you could get really specific and talk about like a suburb of of a city and you can literally have the hook in your ey being like Texans did you know and then you go on to the rest

4:18of your ad and if someone is from Texas lives in Texas they identify as a Texan that's far more likely to grab their attention there are other planes in which you can do this other sort of types of callouts you could be based on income or wealth you know High net worth individuals could be relationship status so you could say things that are going to specifically apply to parents of small children or people with elderly parents or people that are um just about to get married you know they're engaged or they're newly married and there are again you have to be careful to not violate any Advertiser policy so you

4:49can't say something like are you engaged but like how I described previously there are often ways you can go around um addressing this profession is another one if you're looking to specifically Target lawyers or dentists or whatever it happens to be you can use call outs that specifically speak to those people again for this to be effective like with all um the hooks that we're going to go through someone needs to go yes that applies to me or yes that is me or yes that is interesting to me so when you're trying to work that out one of the things to think about in terms of a

5:21spectrum with your call out hooks is how broad versus how specific to be so I talked about that briefly with the location based there is always going to be sweet spot for every business like broad would just be everyone in your market like let's say it was my business it would just be a hook that is Facebook advertisers like all Facebook advertisers that that's on the really broad side of things really specific might be e-commerce businesses spending more than $100,000 per month and that might be too specific because in my business's case we work with lots of other businesses that aren't just that right aren't just e-commerce businesses

5:53spending more than 100K per month so there's often a sweet spot for my business it might be a compromise it might be something like spending ending more than 5K per month on Facebook ads that's typically our sort of minimum range for our done for you Services we have other offerings that um um suitable for smaller business and that but for our done for you offering that's typically a minimum so we might start with a hook like that that's a compromise it's not being too specific and just going after a certain type of business because we do serve uh all different types of businesses um but it's giving a bit of information to make

6:20it a bit more specific now it's really hard to work out how broad versus how specific to be before you've done a bunch of testing so my recommendation would be create a whole bunch that sort of fit into different areas test them and see which uh performs best would be my recommendation there now before we get into some more video hook options that you can use HubSpot who I'm partnering with on this video have created a fantastic free resource that contains 50 High performing Facebook ads there is a link in the video description below where you can download these Facebook ad examples they've included ads from Nike Hulu VMO and so much more

6:51my favorite part is that it's sorted by industry to make it easy to find exactly what you're looking for using this free resource to find High performing Facebook ads to model from is one of the the absolute best ways to create Facebook ads that deliver great results you don't need to try and reinvent the wheel especially when you're learning I'd strongly recommend you check it out and use it to level up your Facebook ad creative check the link in the description below and thanks to HubSpot for sponsoring today's video okay another type of hook that you can use are questions so you start by asking a

7:18question that you are very confident that your prospects will say yes to your ideal prospects will say yes to okay so I've got some examples for my business do you struggle to get your Facebook ads to work now now we know that the people that are potentially going to work with us hire us um are going to say yes to that question if they say no well they've probably got it they don't need my help to begin with right so that's a good hook for our business I'll give you some other examples do you spend too much time cooking and cleaning let's say you had a service that helped people out

7:47with that and that might be a a a question that people are going to say yes to and therefore are more likely to consume the rest of the video ad do you dream of changing careers if your product or service is related to that that might be a good hook and you can think of other examples for your business specifically so then we've got conditional statements they're a little bit different to the questions questions are just quite like do you or are you or have you you know about a thing conditional statements have an if component to it and that's why they're different I would normally prefer to use

8:16a conditional statement because I feel the Buy in from the person um hearing it is is likely to be greater if it describes their situation uh but we can absolutely test both they're very valid let's give some examples of statements explain why they work right so for my business again if you spend more than 100K per month on Facebook ads we guarantee you a 30% Improvement in your Ros in 3 months so if if you meet this criteria then something about us business offer a few different ways to do that but it's if then that's that's the condition another example if you can't walk your dog in the park because

8:54of reactivity we have the perfect program for you if you have this problem we have the solution you'll see if you see my retargeting ads pop up you'll see I use this one quite a lot cuz I I do like it takes a little bit more thinking around the questions and they are linked but I think a little bit more powerful and then we can use outstanding results that can be a really good hook because if that's interesting if it's different if it's something that people go oh wow look at that again they're far more likely to watch the rest of the the video ad which as we know is all

9:24important and again this is one that I use in in in my ads quite a bit now what we typically use uses client result screenshots so when we have a client where the results are just incredible you know we're going to be a 40x row ass or something like that which we are able to achieve from time to time we will take a screenshot if we can or use a video of it and we will stick that right at the beginning of some of our ads because we know for anyone that's running Facebook ads that's struggling to get great results they will see a 40x R Us and be like what that's incredible

9:52and then they'll go on and and watch some more um most likely so it works really well for us but here are some other examples because obviously lots of different types of business can use this uh here's what I came up with see how this client added 100K of value to their home with our solar panels trying to sell solar panels one of the benefits might be that increases the value of the property that could be a hook to be like wow really it could add 100 Grand to the value of a property and they only cost you know 15 or 10 or whatever they cost

10:17right that sounds great here's another example how this Texan mum lost 50 in 6 months without exercising now on the face of it that sounds like an outstanding result in 6 months £50 she's a mom so there's implied there that she's busy doesn't have much time etc etc um and again that would be that's kind of combining a few different ones you've got the outstanding result in there and you're also using the location based call out and you're using the descriptor of where someone is in life the fact that they're a mom so you're kind of combining a whole bunch there and once I go through these you'll start

10:46to think through these of examples of ads and and even add headlines and things that you see and you go oh yeah they're using that and that and that and that like the example um that I just gave there so obviously these results need to be true you don't want to get in trouble for making false claims but if you can add these in and hopefully you've been able to produce some fantastic results for your customers clients Etc um and then you can absolutely go ahead and uh and add add in examples like that and they can do really well people going wow really how I want to know how that's possible how

11:15are those results possible and therefore they consume more okay so hooks don't just need to use words they can use visuals as well and I'm get into that in a second before I do just want to quickly let you know about Facebook ads Mastery so Facebook ads Mastery is my brand new course with School community so it's exclusive material not out on YouTube or anywhere else um that you can get access to it's literally the training stuff that we use now to train new staff to get fantastic results for our clients it's our best possible material showing you how to get the best possible results with Facebook and

11:44Instagram ads like I said it comes with a a school Community say's over 600 business owners just like you in there that you can connect with um ask questions of myself and my team are in there all the time answering questions providing feedback to ads we do live calls and live trainings so basically just try trying to provide as much value as we possibly can to make sure everyone gets the best results possible it costs just £97 per month there is a link in the video description you can click on that go through and uh and check it out and hopefully I'll see you on the inside

12:11okay so like I just said hooks don't need to just use words they can use visuals as well and the best hooks are going to combine words like a call out with more specific um visuals okay now we always need to be conscious of meta's Advertiser policies because there are some things you can do to grab attention with visuals the is not going to like there's a reason why when you're scrolling through Facebook and Instagram you don't see Facebook video ads start with people doing this a lot right just going mad or doing something because meth is not going to like that that scene is is too much even if it it would

12:41help from a marketing standpoint by the way if you could be that overt with with your movement but we can still do certain things that do grab attention and that's one of the most important things of a hook is to grab attention and that I think often the the call out the words used is going to more of the getting someone to go oh yes that's me I'm going to find out more the visuals is more about attention grabbing and that's kind of how I think about it often although the visuals can look to do both and we'll go through um some examples so if we've got attention

13:12grabbing visuals or things we can do to grab more attention bright colors now that sounds super basic right but if I'm wearing a bright red t-shirt as opposed to like a Navy one like I am now then that's going to grab more attention in in in uh in a video ad and you'll see that a lot of my ads I am wearing a bright red t-shirt for exactly that reason so that's just a really simple way of making something more colorful to grab more attention it can you use a more colorful background sometimes yes sometimes you can't if you have options somebody just stands out more um there's

13:42kind of a trend and this is happening more and more and I've done this to some extent where you record your video ads in nature where the background is quite spectacular again it's an attention grabber right it might not be applicable to your product or service I mean I'm selling Facebook ads related stuff sometimes when I'm out for a walk in my dog and I walk in you know beautiful cotsworld Hill and I have like a fun background and it's like it's just to help grab people's attention so clothing I talked about background even hair color you may or may not want D hair I'm certainly not going to die anytime soon

14:08but there are things you can do to make things more odd more unusual more bright um and stand out uh more clearly movement you can't do this at the beginning of a Facebook video ad but you could have someone just sitting in a chair and getting started you could have them walking again a lot of my video ads I'm going to be walking because there's not only then the interesting background there's then the movement which helps as well um there are different ways you can Implement movement you could do that with the editing you could move the camera uh a few different ways of doing it I've got some video ads live right

14:37now where I'm um like sat at my laptop and then I'm calling my cameraman over who then walks with the camera to come over that's creating a lot of movement but it's that initial like yeah yeah come over here come over check this out that movement helps now the next one and this is a great way to grab attention even if it sounds quite basic and that is attractive people more attractive people get more attention than less attractive people and it can be awkward I've reviewed so many Facebook video ads it can be awkward to say to a business owner I don't think it should be you in

15:07these video ads oh okay either because you could find someone much more attractive or someone much more charismatic and much more comfortable on camera some people just aren't naturally very good at that and it'd be very difficult for them to develop that skill and you think look we could hire an actor to do this for you find someone much more attractive it won't cost a lot of money and I think you're going to get significantly better results because Attractive people they just get more attention uh we all know that's true Mark have used that forever um and you know it just it is what it is

15:41so if that means that you're hiring someone else to do your video ads instead of you being in there that's absolutely fine from a business standpoint I do think it's also better to not have that tied up with the business owner if you ever want to sell your business very difficult if you're the one in all the ads you're going to have some sort of ongoing commitment there um and you don't want it be to be constrained by you all the time unless you've built your business around a personal brand which we have in my case therefore I'm in all my ads but it is very useful if you don't have that

16:06you're like an e-commerce business for example to be able to use lots of different people that aren't always you allows you to create more ads um and it means that you're not the bottleneck okay so the absolute Master Level of using Attractive people in your Facebook video ads is to combine that with using an influencer so a lot of influencers are attract to people not exclusively but they are but if you can combine the two so it's a more attractive person which is going to get more attention but also if it's an influencer someone that your target market knows about those are nearly always the scenarios where we see

16:39the absolute best hooks best performing hooks best hook rates are when we've got an influencer in the video ads and we know that that's a scroll stopper someone goes they recognize that person they go oh and they check it out purely because of the person in there now of course you could combine that with them using the call out method within their hook as well to really grabb someone's attention and then they're far more likely to consume the content far more likely to convert purchase become a lead um Etc I've actually got a whole separate video about using that as a creative strategy I'll include a link um

17:09in the video description right so those are the attention Grabbers there's other things we need to talk about when it comes to the visuals in your hook the next thing is we've got the setting so you want the setting to make sense and again speak to your ideal Prospect so if you are selling to dentists it' be a really good idea to record the video ad in a dental practice it's just immediately going to speak to those people they're going to almost subconsciously but obviously also consciously if they give it any thought think this is for me and you're likely to um improve your performance you know

17:40if you're selling meal prep I think is one of the examples we gave previously to busy Ms do that in a domestic kitchen potentially with you know kids kicking off in the background and all sorts to to make things difficult that is the right setting to sell that product or service and you want your audience to immediately identify with the scene with the setting they're more likely to a consume it and then B convert if you do likeness this is an important one people are more likely to watch content from people that look sound act like them they're also more likely to buy from ads that include people that look sound and

18:17act like them and they simply do that because if someone is of a similar age same gender looks like they have other elements of their life that are similar let's say you know you're someone who's in quite good physical shape and the other person the person in the ad is in quite good physical shape you immediately think they're like me therefore if they have got a solution to a problem um that apply to their life it's also a lot more likely to apply to my life if you try to sell a product aimed at young women for example and you've got an older man in your video

18:48ads it's just obviously not going to do as well and you can break that down to be really quite specific now that does mean if you have multiple customer avatars like your product service has quite broad appeared and you're like well some someone who kind of looks sounds acts like this would be interested but also someone who looks sounds act like this is interested absolutely fine use different people within your video ads and create a whole bunch of different versions and you can have multiple avatars and you'll see like businesses that often have their products Services have broad appeal the ones that you see on TV commercials and

19:16things like that that have really large budgets and they will have lots of different types of people within their at likeness is uh is really important okay so the next thing that we need to think about when it comes to our hooks are what actions are taking place within those first few seconds you know we've got all the various things other things lined up but we want the actions that people are taking to make sense so we used the example earlier of um let's say it's a business that sells some sort of dog training related thing right and one of the problems that they address one of

19:46the the things they have a solution for is someone can't walk their dog in the park because of reactivity they're sort of reacting negatively to all the other dogs if at the beginning of your Facebook video ad you have footage of a dog being re active in a park and that causing issues Von oh Jesus Christ Von that is going to make it's going to resonate with someone that has that as a problem and they are more likely to pay attention particularly if you combine that with some of the other things that we might want to include in our hooks like call out and they're thinking well

20:20this is exactly for me I have that problem I can see it taking place in this ad they're more like to consume it more likely um to purchase uh and become a lead okay you know other examples might be you could have someone in let's say you're a local business you could have them walking past a local landmark or you know I've seen ads local to me recently that that do this really well and again if someone lives lives in that place they're going to be like oh look that's just you know that's just down the road that's where such and such is oh they're far more likely to pay

20:48attention because of the action that's taking place you're walking past interacting with something local that uh that people can see so you can use those options that we've discussed to create tons of hook variations particularly when you start combining various elements from different types um I mean literally hundreds thousands of of different um hook variations so here's what I recommend you do when you next record your video ads record like the the meat of the ad the core content of the ad but then record a whole bunch of extra Hooks and then add in the different hooks in editing to create sort of different ad variations and then

21:19test them so you've got basically the same core ad but maybe with 10 different hooks that you then run as an experiment and if you do that and you do that repeatedly you'll quickly get a sense of which hooks work best for my market which perform best and like I said because that is the most important part of the ad if you can get those bits performing really well and Performing well that that is such high leverage because so many more people watch the rest of the ad and then you're likely to get many more uh conversion sales leads whatever it is you're looking for can be

21:46a complete Game Cher when it comes to um your return on ad spend I'd also recommend that you know come up with all the options go through what I just discussed um see what you can produce but keep an eye on other people's ads because every now and then you will see something you think that is such a good hook I am definitely going to use that in my business so I think it's natural people to even advertise is to skip a lot of ads or or not really pay attention it's like if something's you know particularly if you can see that it's obviously been running as an ad for

22:13a long time because there's tons and tons of social proof on it so it's clearly working um you can be like oh yeah really interesting what they did is their hook there could I do that yes I actually could let's go ahead and Implement something like this now I know this sounds like quite a bit of extra work right adding in all these hooks um and creating Lots different ad variations actually think in some ways this can be less work than creating five whole different Facebook video ads you create like three video ads and then 20 different hooks um because the hooks are so quick and easy and short to to record

22:40and the editing afterwards shouldn't be that uh that difficult but in terms of what's the best bang for your BK I think that because this has such an impact on your performance and actually doesn't take that much extra time to create a whole bunch of hooks this is right at the top of the list for me in terms of priorities and things that I would work on even if you have limited time to work on your Facebook and Instagram ads now I mentioned at the beginning of the video about hook rate is a specific metric that we will track so let me quickly show you how to actually go ahead and do

23:07that okay so to show you how to do this I'm just jumped into a quick example um Facebook ad account I'm in ads manager and there's no campaigns in here because um it's an example ad account but you've got this column section here so you've got columns and then you've got default options but what you can do is go down to the bottom and then you can customize columns to display various metrics that you specifically want to track now hook rate is not one that meta provides by default and hook rate very simply to explain what it is it is the number of 3 second video views divided by the total

23:39number of Impressions that's how you work it out right so we can create this even though meta doesn't provide it so we can do this thing called create custom metric up here and then we can call this literally hook rate uh there may well be other options in this example add account cuz I use this to um you know demonstrate things all the time and then we select the metric right so I want 3 second uh it should pop up no it hasn't uh let's go with video views there we go 3 second video plays and then we're going to divide that by Impressions okay so we got 3C video

24:12views divided by Impressions basically what percentage of people that saw the ad made it through the 3 seconds how many were hooked hence hook rate okay uh we can access you know you can just add a description who can access this only you whatever whatever whatever anyway create metric okay and now what we can do is we've got this hook cre new in here and we can add that in if we just tick the box next to it you'll see down the bottom here beneath all these other various pieces of information we've got hook great new and we can go ahead and drag that higher up that's how we go

24:40about creating it we can click apply now there's no campaigns in here so it's not going to show that but let me just show you an ad account with this as an example okay so here's uh one of our ad accounts that has actually got video ads running that are retargeting ads for our Facebook ads Mastery uh of course with the community that I already mentioned we' got these three ads at the top here we've got this rate information so we've got this one is a 16% hook rate this one's got a 14% And that one's an 11% I could go back into the hook rate metric

25:05and just change you know the 0.11 to a percentage and display it that way but you know either way same thing right um so you can actually track this right so you can have different ads different hook rates you can test and you can see alongside obviously your cost per result and your return on ad spend and often they will correlate right the higher the hook rate the better results will be not always because especially if there are different ads um you know if you've got the same core of the ad but with different hooks then the better hook rate nearly always results in in better

25:33results but if you've got different like body of the video ad um then you can have variation there but you can track this and you can see wow this hook gets a 18% hook rate this hook only a 6% hook rate this one a 14% hook rate and you can use that information to go about optimizing your campaign so just a quick thing you can do within ads manager to create this custom conversion and go about doing it that way now once you've got your hook rate up and your Facebook ad results have improved significantly because of it you're going to want to SC and if that's the case I'd strongly

25:59recommend you check out this video because in that video I walk you through my favorite scaling strategy the easiest way to scale Facebook and Instagram ads successfully without breaking them whilst maintaining a really good return on adpen so go ahead and check it out