Ep3 - How to Hire a FB Ad Company! What to pay, and how to manage them

Adam Sand:
That's the boat sound and you know what that means, time for another Anchor episode. On today's episode, I'm going to show you how to find, qualify and hire a Facebook ad agency to run your Facebook ads, how much you should pay them and hire to manage them. All right, cue the intro music.

Narrator:
This is the show where you'll learn the mind hacks, strategies and process we use every day to turn everyday roofing companies into the dominating local authority with our ultimate roofer marketing method. You'll also learn how we use Facebook ad to rapidly and affordably scale up business for roofing companies and generate leads on autopilot, putting you in touch with the right customers who pay the right price at the right time. Here's your host, Adam Sand. Now, let's get after it.

Adam Sand:
Today we're probably going to piss a few people off, but this is a question that didn't actually come in through the anchor.fm app. If you have questions, you can always submit them to me through the anchor.fm app. You can just quickly hit a button, record a question at any point in the middle of the episode and I will always answer them in the next episode. But today's question is a result of what I have seen being asked on Facebook group after Facebook group after Facebook group, as well as a couple of experiences I had today with some customers, clients, and students.

Adam Sand:
The first step to hiring anybody to run your Facebook ads in your roofing business is you first need to find a person or a company who can do it. There is one way to easily find someone who will do your Facebook ads for you. All you got to do is go on Roofers For Life, roofing sales claims and discussions, or the Roofing Entrepreneurs group on Facebook and say, "Hey, does anybody know how to run Facebook ads?" And your inbox will absolutely blow up with people offering to sell you leads, to sell you Facebook ad management, to sell you coaching, offering you their free book, offering you their free webinar. There'll be no shortage of people throwing them at you, and this is where the problem begins.

Adam Sand:
Now, I don't want this to come across as me being bitter. In fact, I have transitioned away from solely helping roofing companies with their Facebook ads to now coaching and teaching ad managers how to do it, simply because I've recognized there's a huge problem in the industry, and that's that every roofing company who's hired a Facebook ad guy somewhere at some point has now had a little bit of success with Facebook ads and now thinks that because their ads worked that one time with what they had for content, that now they could just pimp this kid out to every roofing company all over the country, and now they want to simply start an agency and they start promoting themselves. Now, this is where the problem starts.

Adam Sand:
I have seen countless roofing company owners who have no marketing background simply start a Facebook ad agency because they think that because they got leads, they must be some kind of fricking magician. Let's get one thing clear, the United States economy has gone through what many would say is an unprecedented economic boom, the longest running bull market in how long. I'm not even American I'm Canadian, so I have no horse in this race. It's not like this is my country, my politics. I don't give a rats who the president is or what economic indicators are. The point is, many people would say that if you live in the states, you're currently going through an economic boom.

Adam Sand:
A rising tide raises all ships, which means that almost anybody could run a successful roofing company right now, and that's not to short change anybody's hard work. It's not to discount anyone's success. It's not to tell anybody that they haven't done something special. I am sure there's many people out there who have done something special, but we've been here before. I'm from Canada where the economy is nothing like that. There's a saying that you see who's swimming naked when the tide goes out, and everybody who's a real business person actually appreciates a recession because it washes away all the crap, it gets rid of all the people who wouldn't succeed in anything other than a rising tide. In that kind of economic environment, when all of a sudden you see every roofing contractor, every person who was maybe doing blogging yesterday, or maybe they own a company and they hired a Facebook guy and now they're a Facebook ad agency or coach, what that means is that they're the benefactor of a great economy. It doesn't mean they actually know what they're doing. That's the first thing you need to understand.

Adam Sand:
With that out of the way, we now know how to find somebody who can run our Facebook ads. Now we need to learn how to qualify them. There's a few easy little tricks that you can do that I found are miraculously effective at seeing if, first of all, is someone lying? That's the number one problem that is facing the roofing industry, and frankly, many industries. Bt the roofing industry and construction in general is about five years behind everything else. Everything that you saw in the personal training business or real estate or mortgages, everything happened five years ago in those industries is now filtering its way into things like construction. We're generally about five years behind all the marketing trends that are working in the buy online, low ticket, high volume type environments, or the service based professional businesses like dentists and chiropractors. Whatever's happening in those industries now, you're going to see happening in construction five years from now.

Adam Sand:
At any time a industry starts to proliferate and starts to gain a massive interest in Facebook ads, as well as the technology or the ability to fulfill that business, starts to become prevalent in all the roofing companies, such as more awareness about CRMs, creating content, using video roofers, taking more of an active role in their own social media, those are the signs that now everybody shows up to say, "Hey, have you been spending all your time putting stuff on social media and haven't been getting results? I can teach you how." When that becomes the sales pitch, that's when you start seeing the signs of proliferation.

Adam Sand:
And just like five years ago in those other industries like chiropractic and dentist and personal trainers, you had people that suddenly jumped on the bandwagon and companies like click funnels, they have almost made the concept of just digital advertising's best practices, which is create an ad, drive traffic to that ad, drive traffic to some kind of page, ideally you want something like a landing page, a landing page is just a website that doesn't have any buttons or navigation to any other parts of a website, it only has one direction you can go and that's to the next step so that it squeezes you in. It used to be called a squeeze page and a landing page. Well, now, I don't even use the software click funnels, but I have clients who say, "Hey, I need you to build another click funnel," because they've all seen a click funnel video.

Adam Sand:
You get a lot of people, roofers or digital marketers, teenagers, guys living in their mom's basements, people who've lost their jobs, and they're sold in this opportunity of becoming a digital marketer, and that's okay. There's nothing wrong with people pursuing a career. Everybody has to learn at some point. But they see this dream, they get sold the opportunity and the one thing that you need if you're trying to sell people on taking your digital marketing course or for learning how to build landing pages or learning how to run Facebook ads as a generality, the sales pitch usually goes something like this, "Do you want a new career? Do you want to tap into the huge opportunity in growing market of online digital advertising? Buy my course, no experience necessary. We'll teach you everything. You can do it with no money and no education, no training and no marketing experience. We'll teach you at all for my course, just buy it for 13.99."

Adam Sand:
People go and take a course and they become click funnel certified, or they become a digital marketer certified agency. I took Rick Mulready's course, or they'll go to Billy Jean, a number of courses, they'll go and and take that course and they learn the fundamentals of building a landing page or how to run a Facebook ad, and that's when they're told to then go out and pursue business. They're taught things like don't sell yourself short, price yourself high because that presents you as being higher value. They said, "Go hit up the chat groups, put out lots of comments and engage with other people in the industry and tell them that you do Facebook ads." All of a sudden you start to see it all over the groups.

Adam Sand:
The first way that I've always found to just see if someone's full of it, because today, I interacted with a Facebook marketer who I seen was getting pretty active in the Facebook groups for roofers, and then I saw he was offering a book and it caught my eye because his book was called ... You know what, I won't get into it actually, because then everybody might know who he is, and I don't really want to throw this guy under the bus, but it was very similar to the name of one of my products. I was kind of like, "Huh." I look at what he's doing, and here's how I figure out if someone's full of it. If someone's touting themselves as an expert, they'll usually have the same few lines, because they're going to have insecurities about their current status. They're going to usually start a Facebook page and their business Facebook page will have two weeks worth of content, 11 followers, most of them are their friends and their mother, and they're going to present themselves as a consultant, they're going to use lots of buzz words like masterclass, agency, ad represent, certified.

Adam Sand:
I mean, roofers should be familiar with this concept because we see it in our industry all the time, but you're going to see that kind of language and they're taught things to say to overcome these objections because at the end of the day, they do need to start somewhere. They're taught certain things to say, sometimes they say things that are a little bit cheesier like they were at a traditional marketing agency doing flyers and postcards, or they used to work for an ad agency like Yellow Pages, and now they went on to start on their own. A lot of times these stories are true, more often they're not.

Adam Sand:
Again, how do you tell if they're lying? Well, I have a very simple trick and it works really well. Some of the biggest brand names in online marketing are going to be DigitalMarketer and ClickFunnels. You can go right into the ClickFunnels group, they have an official group for everybody who ever joins ClickFunnels. There's 200,000 marketers in there. First of all, if they're promoting themselves in the roofing groups, and if I was you, the first thing I would do is copy their name, go to ClickFunnels, DigitalMarketer or any of the other big, big sites or big, big groups, type their name. On the left hand side, you can sort them by who posted it, you can paste their name, and you can sort it by most recent, ascending down, so you can go their oldest post.

Adam Sand:
This particular one, within the last month, he asked the ClickFunnels group what a look alike audience is. Now, you can hear about this in all my other podcast episodes, you can see this in my groups, but a look alike audience is a very elementary part of knowing Facebook ads. It's like asking a roofer what ice and water is, to be honest. If you had someone running around town saying he was a professional roofer, and then you just saw him in a local roofing group asking what ice and water is, you'd be very frustrated that he is out there in the market presenting himself as a professional roofer, yet he's asking rookie questions inside of industry groups. You're like, "Hey, man, maybe you shouldn't be running around messing with people's houses."

Adam Sand:
Well, I'm the same way. I look at it and say, "Hey, man, maybe you shouldn't be messing around with people's livelihood." That one incident alone probably wouldn't have bothered me, but I see it all the time. I also have a lot of roofing companies download my stuff from Roofing Business Partner, but I also know that they hear me on a couple of different podcasts being interviewed as a roofing company owner and they hear about the success that we've had with our ebook and some of our funnels. Then they go and Google a roofing company, go to my page and they submit a lead through some of our forms, trying to hack our funnel. They try and see how our funnel works.

Adam Sand:
When I see it, it'll be like, blah, blah, blah at smartmarketingcompany.com, blah, blah, blah at talentedvamarketingagency.com, or something along those lines. I'll usually start a conversation with them and say, "Hello. How are you doing? I noticed your area code wasn't from Edmonton. Just thought I'd say hello. By the way, my name's Adam Sand." They'll just go, "Hey, man. I heard you on a podcast. I just got this roofing company as a client and I was just trying to figure out a good way to advertise for them." To me, that's a problem. I get it that you got to start somewhere. With me, I tested with my money on my company on my livelihood. But that's because at the time when I learned Facebook ads back when you had the power editor and the first version of the pixel and you didn't have video view ads, you didn't have conversion ads, you had links, clicks, reach and impressions, that's all you had for ad campaign setup and there was no such thing as messenger ads or chat bots or display network. We just got to the point where you got ads in the newsfeed. Remember when there was no ads in the newsfeed, only ads on the right hand side? We just got ads in the newsfeed when I started.

Adam Sand:
When I see someone going and saying, "Hey, I just landed a roofing company as a client and now I'm trying to figure out how to market to them," that means they did one of two things, one I respect, one I don't. One, they could have said to the roofing company, "Hey, I'm new to the Facebook advertising world. I've learned how the Facebook ad platform works and I've learned how to test ads and qualify if they work, and I also know how to build landing pages with click funnels. If you'd like to try Facebook ads, I'd be willing to start doing them for free, heavily discounted, just to get a testimonial. Would you be interested in something like that." If the roofing company says yes, it's honest, there's integrity. Unlike a roof, you can't do too much damage, as long as you don't do something crazy like give away guns with a roof replacement or something. You can't do so much damage to a company by not knowing what you're doing with Facebook ads, other than a drastic breach of the terms of service or some, which anybody's who's taken even the most basic course will know how to avoid.

Adam Sand:
The other thing they're going to do is they're going to the thing where they copy something they heard, they've seen how somebody built an ebook for selling dentist work, and they create an ebook saying this is the ad marketing funnel for roofers, and then they go to that roofing company and say, "Hi, I'm a Facebook ad expert. I'm a Facebook business consultant," something like that. "Do you want to pay me to transform your company for $4,000 a month? I'll run Facebook ads for you," and if they then show up on my landing pages or on my funnels or in my business somehow asking how I run my Facebook ads or trying to hack the funnel, then that's when I get upset. Because now, as many of you roofers know, when you look around inside these Roofers for Life or roofing sales, claims, discussions, all these different groups, the consensus today is that marketing agencies or Facebook ad guys are a bunch of scam artists.

Adam Sand:
I mean, you have people commenting all the time, "I call BS. I call scam. I call scam. All you scam artists rapping people off." People start putting these hater type comments on a lot of these ads that I see that are running, because I always end up getting targeted for these guys' ads and a lot of roofers have a very negative impression of the advertising world, and that's a bad thing for the industry. It's just like roofing, if a bunch of guys are running around doing shotty work, unlicensed, not safe, not compliant, doing bad quality work, installing roofs, they're not certified, people aren't getting validated warranties because they aren't prepping jobs properly, doing bad work, that drags the whole industry down, and that's why I've actually added a component to my business of coaching other marketers because at this point, I just got to bring it all up with me, I feel.

Adam Sand:
Like I said, your first tip is to go into some of the other marketing pages and just search the person's name. If the person is asking basic questions, you're going to find out right away. Or if they just have a very limited history inside the group where they're just talking about, "Hey, I just set up a funnel. Hey, does anybody have an example of how to make this work?" If they're asking questions instead of contributing, and I don't mean bragging, I mean contributing, they're actually an taking time to answer other people's questions, that might be a good start.

Adam Sand:
You don't have to find someone with their name. Honestly, I don't spend a lot of time in those groups teaching. I probably spend some more time now that I've changed my business model up a bit. But in the last three years that I've been helping clients, I haven't spent a whole lot of time teaching in those groups because why am I going to teach my competition? The only reason you would ever teach your competition is if you're trying to improve the industry as a whole, to make it better for all of us. But at the time, it was just some new people that came out. I wasn't going to help them. But about a year ago is when I started helping people. I mean, this year, there was three of my past students that had a booth selling marketing at Win The Storm, that's exciting because I'm starting to see the benefit of having given these people my coaching.

Adam Sand:
Let's say you've done that. You've checked online, you didn't find anything good or bad, or maybe you even liked what you saw from their dialogue within other industry marketing groups. The next thing you need to know is how to qualify them to actually be your roofer Facebook ad marketer. One of the first things I say is that it's a lot like hiring a roofing company. You can look for trade certifications or training, any kind of degrees or tickets because there are some valid points to taking the ClickFunnels University or taking DigitalMarketers Lab Plus. There's a lot of different agency training options out there to teach people how to use landing pages, how to use Facebook ads, how to use different SEO tools, how to write or create content stories, stuff like that.

Adam Sand:
Training and stuff like that is great, but it's not always a strong indicator, because that just means they know how to pull the levers and the knobs perhaps, but they don't understand strategy. It's like knowing how to throw a football doesn't necessarily make you a great coach. You don't know how to necessarily write a playbook. You just really know how to throw the ball. That's a great employee of an agency, but maybe not the best manager. Remember, you're looking for someone to essentially become your outsourced marketing department, which means you're the CEO and they're the manager of that department, so they have to know how to run the playbook.

Adam Sand:
Another option is to ask for testimonials. However, this isn't always a strong indicator for a number of reasons. Sometimes you can have a really good first month with an agency, and this is something I experienced with someone I'm close to today, is that you can have a great experience in the first month, you'll give this guy a testimonial because they designed you a really nice website, for example, and then when it actually comes to running ads, they suck. You'll get a good testimonial that has no bearing on their ability to generate leads or to teach you how to create the content or teach you how to get those leads into your CRM and start getting them to convert so you can actually sell more roofs.

Adam Sand:
The other part of testimonials is that some companies don't want a hundred roofers a month calling to say, "Hey, I was just wondering you used X, Y, Z marketing and I was just curious if they're doing a good job," and then they're going to go, "Yeah." You can record a video, but nowadays in marketing, you can't trust anything because you can just go to fiverr.com, F-I-V-E-R-R, Fiverr with two R's, you can go there and get somebody to record a video of a testimonial. Just type in testimonial on Fiverr and you can get people to record those all the time. You literally can't trust anything when it comes to testimonials. Some of the best companies don't really ask their clients to suddenly turn into an advertising source. As far as they're concerned, you're an advertising expert. Why do you need my help? There's an argument for all those cases, but it is something you can ask for.

Adam Sand:
Another way to qualify them, though, is to actually ask them what their system is like, and there's a few red flags to look for. First of all, some people will just start to teach you the Facebook ad platform. They'll teach you, "Well, what we're going to do is we're going to run some engagement ads and then once we get some engagement ads, we're going to build a retargeting audience and then we're going to re-target those people with more ads, and then typically, I use that to then create a look alike audience and then we start to target even more people." If they just start throwing jargon and telling you how they're going to pull on the knobs, that's a really good sign that they either don't know how to sell themselves, or they don't really understand what's going to make the campaign work for you.

Adam Sand:
Knowing how to pull the knobs and levers is a great thing, but the real success of running Facebook ads, and this is the same for Google AdWords, I'm keeping it to Facebook ads because that's the situation I'm dealing with today, but when it comes to Facebook ads, the knobs and the levers present the traffic, it's for targeting it's for reaching an audience with a message. You're just saying, "Hey, Facebook, I want you to show this to these people because I have this goal," and that goal could be, "I want people to comment and like and share," or you can say, "I want people to watch this video," or, "I want people to click and go to my website," or, "I want people to actually give me their emails. I'm looking for people who are at the shopping stage where they're actually wanting to buy"

Adam Sand:
But at the end of the day, if you don't have the right message, the right content at that particular stage, whether it's engagement, watching videos or shopping and actually wanting to get an estimate, if you don't have the right content, the right offer, if you haven't cultivated the right audience through that process, you're not going to get leads. Understanding how the knobs and the levers work is fantastic. You can know how the gas pedal works.

Adam Sand:
Well, "Hey, how are we going to drive from New York to San Francisco?" "Well, we're going to get in the car. We're going to turn on the key and then we're going to push on the gas pedal and that's going to make us accelerate and then we're going to turn the wheel and that's going to make us go left or right, and then what I usually like to do is brake at the stoplights and look in the dishes for deer." Well, fantastic. Where are we going? How are we getting there? Where are we stopping? Where are the gas stations? Are we going to stop for lunch or are we going to wait and go through till supper. How many days is it going to take?

Adam Sand:
They have to have some kind of content strategy that they suggest. If they start talking with knobs, dials, and buttons and stuff like that, that just means that they know how the platform works, which is a great first step, but they should actually be able to coach you on the type of content that you need to produce. That's your second thing for knowing how to qualify them is that they should be on the position where they demand of you some form of content or involvement from your roofing company. Any Facebook ad marketer who sells you on the ability to use Facebook with no work or effort from you, where they're just going to use some pictures or use some stuff that they find online, and then that's going to work, unless it's very, very, very, very, very cheap, you are not going to get the results that you're hoping for because that's not the type of platform that Facebook is.

Adam Sand:
Facebook is a content curator. It's a place where people go to see what's going on in the news, read about what happened with an amber alert. They want to find out what their family's up to, their friends are up to. They're going to watch videos of Elon Musk unveiling the new Tesla Model Y, or they're going to watch highlights from a sports game. They're going there to consume content and connect with friends and family. You, as a business, are paying for the right to interrupt that experience. Now, you have to have something that's going to make their thumb stop scrolling because unlike a TV commercial, you can't force them to sit through your ad. I guess that's not entirely true, there is a way for you to force them, to watch an ad in the middle of a video. But on the broader spectrum, you have to be of some interest to these people. Therefore, you have to produce some kind of content that's going to make people stop scrolling in the newsfeed.

Adam Sand:
What you're looking for is an agency that has either some kind of preset, pre-built, pre-proven content plan that makes sense and it should be something along the lines of build an audience through some kind of content, then drive traffic to some kind of offer, and then assist you in converting those people into leads. That is the real basis of every successful Facebook ad campaign in any industry. Everything will change. The platforms will change. The ad types will change. Sometimes it'll be text ads, image ads, video ads, messenger ads, all different kinds of ad placements, lengths of videos, animated or live action, produced or very raw. There will always be all kinds of different variables, but the three things that will never change is build an audience, warm them up, drive traffic to an offer and convert them into leads. That is the foundation.

Adam Sand:
The big, big red flag that I tell everybody to look for is watch out for people who are selling you leads based on a dollar amount, because there is no incentive for the agency other than to jam your inbox full of names, phone numbers and emails. There are so many scams surrounding this where they say, "We'll guarantee this number of leads," and then they can get people to just call in and leave fake leads. There's just so many things that come around on these guaranteed dollar amount per leads, or they just overcharge you. I mean, if they're just charging you $125 a lead, well, that's great. But, I mean, really, you can generate a lot of leads for $125, but then the incentive is around a dollar per lead, not on building your business, not on really creating your own piece of digital real estate online.

Adam Sand:
I really, really, really want you guys to focus on what is their plan for building an audience? How do they plan to drive traffic to an offer? What they think that offer is, or what successful offers they've seen work in the past and how they plan to convert those people into sales or into leads. That is the foundation that you really want to look for.

Adam Sand:
The whole concept of paying per lead really tells you that a lead is a lead is a lead is a lead, and we all know that's really not the case. I mean, I like to play a game with people, and let's play the game right now. I have a possible customer interested in a roof. How much would you be willing to pay for that lead? They're just a customer waiting for a roof. Okay. Let's say most of the room will guess 10 bucks, 50 bucks. Right? Now, let me tell you that I have a lead who's interested in getting a roof done and they have a 17 year old asphalt roof and they plan on living in the house for another 10 years. Now, how much would you be willing to spend on the lead? Maybe the $10 people turn into 50, the $50 people turn into 60, something along those lines. You're going to pay more for that lead because now you have more information, you know they're more qualified.

Adam Sand:
Let's say now I have a person who's interested in getting a roof done. Their house is 17 years old and they plan on living in the house for 10 more years. It's a 60 square mansion. It's a four 12 roof. They have the money up front and they were burned on their last roof in their last home because the roofer did a bad job, so they've outwardly voiced that they want to pay for quality. Well, now how much are you willing to pay for the lead? 60 square roof, you're probably going to make some serious dough on that roof if you get it done quickly. It's a four 12 roof, it's not overly complicated. Your workers or your subs aren't going to complain and they want to pay for quality, so you know that you're going to not just have to go up against a low price competitor. You just have to sell your value. Here, your $50 lead guys are going to go up to a hundred, your $60 guys are going to go up to maybe 150, something along those lines.

Adam Sand:
Well, now let's say we have a person who lives in a 17 year old house. They want to get the roof done. They've lived in their house for 17 years. They plan on living in it 10 more years. It's a 60 square roof. They were burned on their last roofing project. They voiced that they want to pay for quality and they saw you on a video on Facebook talking about how you prepare your roofs and they like the way that you prepare your roofs. They like the concept of how you put all the different underlayments down and how you prep the valleys and they really want to actually get a chance to meet you and find out how much it would cost to get you to do the roof.

Adam Sand:
Well, now how much do you want to pay for it? Probably a lot. Here's the convenient thing. You don't have to pay a lot because they want you to do the roof. We can't imply that a lead is a lead is a lead, but if you're paying our agency or marketing platform as if all leads are created equally and all leads are the same, then they have no incentive to deliver you a quality lead. Don't incentivize them that way and you won't find that kind of result.

Adam Sand:
I want to talk a little bit about some common misconceptions that give you a false sense of security when hiring an agency. The first one is size. The fact that a company is huge doesn't necessarily mean they're better because they have access to some kind of intellectual capital that the smaller guys don't have. They don't get to buy ads for cheaper. Being a big company doesn't guarantee success. Don't get a false sense of security in the fact that it's a large company.

Adam Sand:

The other thing that you want to know is that a small company doesn't necessarily guarantee failure or make them any harder working. Smaller companies small for a reason. Maybe they don't have experience running a business. They might be able to generate Facebook ads, but maybe they don't have the scale to actually take care of you. Maybe they're running at their limit of clients, or maybe they haven't built good standard operating procedures and processes for onboarding and getting a client up and running. Big company, small company, doesn't make a difference. You can't state it based on the size of the company.

Adam Sand:
The other thing you can't do is you can't base it off of screenshots of previous ad performance. I actually have an episode that I've recorded that I'll be releasing this week that talks exactly about this issue because the Facebook ad platform is changing all the time. A little preview of this episode that's coming up is that Facebook used to have one metric, one thing that you could read to see how your ads were performing, it was called relevancy score. The rule of thumb, if your ads had a low relevancy score, like three out of 10, that your ad wasn't very relevant to the audience. For whatever reason, the audience didn't seem to really connect with your ad. It would be like showing dentures to 18 year olds, it's not very relevant. If you had a score of nine, then in theory, it was very relevant.

Adam Sand:
Now the problem with the relevancy score is that sometimes you had a relevancy of nine that never really got you your desired result, and sometimes you'd have a relevancy score of three that absolutely killed it, and there was a number of factors that played into the relevancy score. There would be things like how many likes and comments and shares-
PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:35:04]

Adam Sand:
There would be things like, how many likes and comments and shares were you getting per a thousand people that saw your ad? Or, were you getting any negative feedback, where people said, "Don't show me any ads anymore from this company," or something along those lines? So, they would have these ways of measuring relevancy score, but they never really gave you any usable information because it was kind of just ambiguous. So, they're actually replacing relevancy score with three other metrics. So now one metric has essentially been split into three, so that you actually know the difference between what's making your ads more relevant.

Adam Sand:
So, what this means is that, how you used to know if your ads are doing good or bad has changed. The way that Facebook is now going to measure the performance of your ads, and show it in the newsfeed and allow you access to the inventory has completely changed. So, everything that worked yesterday doesn't work today. The premise of all Facebook ad success is beginning with the end in mind and testing. You always want to think through your campaign, from the beginning to the end. You want to know what your plan is. You don't just want to run an ad and then run another ad. It's not like a billboard that you just put on the street or a ad in the yellow pages. You're not just going to put a billboard up and say, "Okay, let's see how that works this month. Okay. That worked good. Well, let's try something different." And so it's like, yesterday, Toyota was doing 0% on Camry. This month, they're doing free winter tires with any Toyota RAV4. The two ads are not related at all.

Adam Sand:
Facebook app ***[inaudible 00:36:38] having a plan, from beginning to end, how you want to warm up an audience, drive traffic to an offer and convert them into a lead. So, there's a strategy to it, and that's because you're always testing. I've never had two campaigns work exactly the same in two different markets. There's a market in Memphis, Tennessee I will forever have to hold my hat in my hand, because I could not figure out how to get leads in Memphis, Tennessee. If any Facebook ad marketers out there for roofers have figured out ads for Memphis, Tennessee in the last 30 days, hit me up. I have a client for you. But yeah, I've never been able to get roofing leads in Memphis, Tennessee. Therefore, showing campaign performance, even from this month, doesn't necessarily indicate it's going to work in another city.

Adam Sand:
But more importantly, something that happened six months ago or three years ago is not an indication of what's going to make an ad campaign successful today. It's about the effort you put into it. It's old fashioned hard work, and we're going to get to that, how to manage and pay an ad agency. But at the end of the day, Facebook ads are about testing. You can't just copy paste an ad or a system, from city to city to city, from market to market to market, because not every ad is going to work the same as it used to. The way I like to put it is, at one point in time, I had a whole ton of leads that closed at 80% for $8.97 a lead. This is an actual statistic that I pulled off with my personal roofing company. Never did it since. Never pulled off an 80% closing ratio lead, in volume, for $8.97. I haven't been able to do it again. I sometimes think that that's just the golden age of Facebook ads for me.

Adam Sand:
That would be like me saying that, one time, I did score an eagle. I don't know if it's early eagle or birdie. This is how little I know about golf, but it's the better one of the two. I think I hit the ball three times, on a fairly long golf run or whatever, and I got it in three times. And really, I got lucky. Cracked it. Went a long way. Went straight. Hit it again. It went right around the corner, like over the trees. And then I hit it again, and it went like, gosh, like 60 feet and then rolled right in the hole.

Adam Sand:
Now, if I went and told people, "Oh yeah. Yeah, I'm a good golfer. I'm a good golfer. Yeah. I got an eagle on this one hole at Hawks Ridge in BC.", well then, other people may say, "Hey, man. Well, you should come and join our tournament, and join us and play in this team, in this game. Come and join us and do this." And, if I went, I'd be so embarrassed because I'd be clearly way out of my league. The fact that you got a hole in one, or a great shot on one hole that one time, does not mean that you're going to be great every time, all the time. You have to be consistently improving in your ability to aim.

Adam Sand:
It's like saying, because you knew how to lay down one shingle straight, that you're just going to move your hand the exact same way, and the whole roof would have nice clean lines. No, it's about the subtle adjustments as you go. Your shingle courses maybe creep up a bit or creep down a bit, and you kind of straight it out and you adjust. And, you can see it, but when you stand up, nobody else really sees it. So, Facebook ads is about testing, optimizing and scaling, making subtle adjustments along the way to continuously improve the performance of the ads, learning and testing and trying different headlines, different images, videos, different placements, different lengths of videos, different intros to videos. And then after that, you have to test where the ads are sending people.

Adam Sand:
So, anybody who promises a system that, based on some kind of past result, you can't trust it. It doesn't mean they don't know what they're doing. I know what I'm doing. I sometimes show my results, but I don't claim that to be the basis upon my success. The basis upon my success for you will be the fact that I will begin with the end in mind, with a plan. And then we will test that plan, and constantly test every variable along the way to continually try and improve the cost per lead or the cost per for a thousand people generated in the audience, or whatever our objective is at that stage of the campaign. So, always begin with the end in mind. Always be testing. Okay?

Adam Sand:
So how do we put it all together? Because, now, let's say your Facebook ad marketer listens to this episode at the same day and same time you do. And now you talk to them and they just regurgitate all this stuff. They tell you that they believe they need to begin with the end in mind, that they have a proven content strategy to generate an audience, to drive traffic to an offer. They have a good plan for an offer, and then they're going to show you how to convert those people into leads. They tell you that they have an intention to continuously test, scale and optimize the ads. They have lots of previous ad performance that they can show you, but at the end of the day, that's not what's going to work. It's going to be constant testing. They tell you all this stuff.

Adam Sand:
You looked up their name and things look good on that end. And they tell you that they need you to produce some content and that they expect you to be involved in the process. Well, great. So now they just regurgitated everything that they heard on this podcast, so now you will want to hire them, right? So how do you ultimately kind of determine if they actually have that plan in place? I'm going to show you here really quickly.

Adam Sand:
The first thing that you're going to want to look for, once you get past the "Okay, I'd like to hire you. What would your plan be for my roofing company?" We need to remember that not all roofing companies are the same. We're all pursuing different verticals. Some want commercial roofing leads. They only want to deal with roofing buildings. Some might be willing to do any kind of flat roof, not just commercial, but they only do flat roofing. Some only want to deal in premium metal roofing systems. Other companies want to only deal with, let's say, multi-family units, apartment buildings and large blocks of townhouses. Some only want to do new construction and work for builders or developers. Other people might want to only deal with Bob and Betty the homeowner.

Adam Sand:
I've had a client who only wanted to deal with Chinese homeowners, because he spoke Mandarin, in a market where there weren't a lot of people in the roofing industry that spoke that language. So, everything about his ideal customer avatar was built around homeowners who speak Mandarin. And everything about his marketing was Mandarin. All of his images were Mandarin. All of his videos were Mandarin. All his landing pages were in Mandarin. Everything was about that. It was about building trust with a very select community.

Adam Sand:
So, the first thing that they should be looking for from you is if your vertical is something that they work in. If they tout to know the content strategies, the testing required, the audience targeting that they're going to need to drive traffic to an offer, the offers that work and how to properly convert them into leads for commercial roofs, they might not have any clue how to properly set up an ad for Bob and Betty the homeowner or realtors that want to get their clients' roofs changed out before they sell the house. These are totally different verticals.

Adam Sand:
So, the first thing they should be asking you is, "You know what? We'd love to work with you. It would really help us to understand what is your ideal customer avatar? Who do you want to work with?" So, once you have that information figured out, the next thing that they're going to want to do is they're going to want to understand your budget. Any real marketing company, once they'd understand that you want to hire them, they should be interviewing you at the same time. They should be looking to see what your marketing budget is. That's going to be largely based off of your revenue.

Adam Sand:
Anybody with some experience running Facebook ads is going to have a rough idea as to what they're going to be able to produce. Even though I tell you not to base past performance as what is going to be your reality, they understand roughly what they're capable of, what the markets go for. Especially people who pass those initial tests, who have some experience, who know what they're doing, they're going to want to know what your budget is, because they want to figure out if you're going to be even in the ballpark to be able to produce business for yourself.

Adam Sand:
There's a few reasons why them understanding your budget is important, not just for the sake of knowing if you have the money to actually run a campaign or determining if you're "worthy" enough to be their client. But, it's actually very healthy for understanding how much capacity they have in order to run your ads. Because there's a number of different ways to pay an agency, and we're going to get into that, but when it comes to budget, you typically want to spend around 20%... It's not actually 20%. It's more like 17% to 11%, somewhere in that area. But I like to use 20% as a conservative number, to try and figure out what I'm going to be able to produce for this customer. So if they're doing currently $4 million a year, well, that's a big, big budget. You don't expect them to spend $400,000 on ads, because that's pretty big. But, I mean, they might be spending that $400,000 in a lot of different ways.

Adam Sand:
So, if they understand how your business runs, and they see that you're paying door-to-door commission salespeople that are actually procuring their own leads, then maybe they're spending $400,000 a year in commissions. Well, that's their advertising budget. Because they wouldn't be getting those sales if they didn't have those super high commission salespeople. So now I know, if they're paying door-to-door commission salespeople to get to that, and they're paying roughly 10% commission, that's their marketing budget. I need to try and get them to be in the market of spending the extra 1% to 7%. So, that's going to be an extra $40,000 to maybe, say, $150,000 in total yearly ad spent. At that rate, I can usually get a lift of $5 from every $1 invested. That's the whole goal. That's typically how it works.

Adam Sand:
The nice thing about Facebook ads versus door-to-door salespeople is, it's lot less invasive. You can usually get people's attention a lot better, and you can do it faster and at scale. You're not interrupting anybody. You're never making anybody mad. People can just scroll past your ad. And, as much as people want to believe that door-to-door is still alive and well, it's really a dying art. People only respond to the door knockers because their houses were just completely destroyed by hail, and they haven't really found out that there's a better way. We're going to see that changing in the long term. In the long term, you've got people who are getting nest doorbells. The reason they're getting nest doorbells is for security purpose, but also, so when someone knocks on the door, they don't have to get off the couch to tell you to F off, right? And so, people are investing in $200 doorbells for this very purpose. And yet we still think that people are going to want to be interrupted in the middle of supper to be told that their roof sucks, right?

Adam Sand:
And as deductibles continue to creep up and up and up and up, permanent roofing options, things that are going to act more resistant to hail are going to come up, and there's going to be something else that we don't even foresee yet. But, the fact is that knocking on doors is an art that's going away. There's no more Fuller Brush man. There's no more encyclopedia salesman. There's no more vacuum salesmen. People are still using vacuums, and people are still using toilet brushes, but people aren't buying them from salesmen that knock on their doors. So, it's only right to assume that that way of communicating with a customer in need is going to be going away, and we will probably have a lot of people debate this with me. But, the point is, Facebook ads are a great way to get in front of people to express your offer, your brand, the kind of roofing company you are. And you can do it at scale, but the cost is a little bit cheaper, but very close to the same.

Adam Sand:
So if they have a $4 million revenue, or if you have a $4 million revenue, then generally, I'm going to assume that you should have between 1% to 7% of that revenue available to spend on Facebook ads. If you're not, then there could be a margin error there. You can maybe not be profiting enough. Your salespeople aren't spending enough. You're overspending somewhere else in your business. But I want to make sure you're in that area because I want to be able to create a lift that's awesome for you. If you just want to spend a $1,000 a month on Facebook ads, well, the amount of work that it takes to manage $1,000 on ad spend and $10,000 on ad spend, it's not 10X. It's more like 2X, maybe 3X.

Adam Sand:
But the only difference is, if I get you $5 for every dollar you invest in a Facebook ad, if I'm making you $5,000 a month in a $4 million company, you're not going to get excited about that. And, it's too much work to even bother for me. So, that's an important thing is that they're going to want to know your budget, and they're going to have a rough idea as to what they hope and expect to get you. Those are some good, round, kind of approximate figures to work with is that you should be spending 1% to 7%, and you should be expecting $3 to $7 return on ad spend.

Adam Sand:
The next part that you're going to look at when you're actually determining if you're going to hire and pay this person is, you want to talk a little bit about their onboarding process. Every one of these companies, who's going to bring you on as a client, should have some kind of clearly defined onboarding process, that helps you go from having no idea or very little ideas to what's going on with Facebook ads, to ultimately bringing you into their company and giving them all the tools and all the materials that they need to make you a Facebook ad campaign.

Adam Sand:
So, they should be wanting your logos, your brand standards, copies of all your reviews, knowing any kind of ad copy or specific kind of lingo that you use. For example, we sell a rubber roofing product, and our company's called Sergeant's Roofing. So, we don't call it by its name, we call it military-grade rubber roofing. They should know that, so that, if you have a certain process, our three-step peace of mind process, or a hundred point peace of mind inspection, when you have something like that, they need to know those things.

Adam Sand:
So, they should have a process for extracting that from you. And then having it cataloged, so that they can work in your absence and they're not constantly sending you messages saying, "Hey, we need your logo. Hey, can we get your tagline? Hey, sorry, what did you call that again? Hey, do you have any customer reviews? Hey, do you have this?" They need to know, upfront, everything that they... It's like baking a cake. The first thing you're going to want to do, make sure you have all the ingredients.

Adam Sand:
And then the second thing they're going to want to do is make sure they have all of their tools. So they're going to need access to your website so they can place the Facebook pixel. They're going to need access to the domain registrar, because they're going to need to usually hook up ClickFunnels, Leadpages, Instapage, something like that. They're going to have to connect it to your domain, so that your leads aren't going to clickfunnels.com/p/optin12347. They want it to be greatroofingcompany.com/junespecial. So, they need access to your domain registrar. They'll need you to give them your business manager or ads manager ID, or they're going to have to show you how to connect your ads manager to theirs, so they can run ads on your behalf.

Adam Sand:
So, they're going to need to get all these things from you. They need to get the ingredients for the cake. Then they need to get the tools to make the cake, so that they're not frantically running around trying to get these things, in the middle of trying to ultimately deliver on the promises that they've made to you in developing you a Facebook ad and getting you results and more leads, and helping you build your company.

Adam Sand:
If they can't clearly define their onboarding process and how they plan to coach you in content creation, this should be a problem for you. Because what's going to happen is they're going to be constantly chasing you. You're going to be chasing them. You're not going to get the performance you're looking for. They're going to blame it on you not getting them answers quick enough or not having the resources that they need. Then you're going to be blaming them because they didn't know to do that upfront. And it's going to go tit for tat, back and forth, and you're going to have a bad relationship. And there's nothing worse than when you're supposed to be playing on the same team, and you're blaming each other for every failure that comes along the way. The onboarding process eliminates all of that. So make sure you get...

Adam Sand:
They don't have to tell you their entire onboarding process up front. I mean, I have some proprietary things that I have in my onboarding process that I never want to put online, because they really do guarantee a lot better success in the campaigns. But, they should be able to at least give you reassurance that they have a very clear, very effective, very repeatable and very systematic onboarding process for getting everything they need and then cataloging it so they have access to it later, while still protecting your privacy, your accounts and things like that. It shouldn't be that they say, "Oh yeah, you just give me your username and password." That's not the way it works. There's all kinds of other ways where they add you as a user on the account, or connect their business manager to your Facebook account, lots of stuff like that. It should never be, "Give us your username and password," because you never want to put yourself in a position where they can take things from you.

Adam Sand:
And actually, that brings up something else, because I've actually seen this. This is just kind of off topic, but something that you should just throw in there for a question, because this is just in the realm of stupid and crooked and unethical. But, you never want them to own your ad account. If you have, you can put in the contract that they own... A lot of them will want to own the copy, because they'll be afraid that you'll just get a contract with them, they'll create the ads, then you'll cancel, and then you'll just rerun the ads over and over and over. And a lot of times, they've amortized in their pricing a skill set spreader over the course of a three-month, six-month, one-year contract.

Adam Sand:
So, they might invest $20,000 into your $3,000 a month account, upfront, on the expectation that they're going to have you for the year. So, they might have in their contract that they own the copy or they own the ad sets or something like that, but they should never own the results. You should always be able to see and look back at your past performance and know what you spent, know what you're paying per lead, stuff like that. They should never own the ad account that is running your ads. You should own it.

Adam Sand:
The other thing that you should always make sure of is that, it's your pixel on the site, because if they own the ad account, then it's going to be their pixel. I've seen this so many times and it's just brutal. So if they're running it from their ad account, they'll put their pixel on. When you're done with them, all that traffic, all that audience is all just gone, because it's their ad account. So, even if they own the copy and the images and all that kind of stuff and you're not allowed to run those ads again if you cancel the contract, that's fair, that's something to expect. But, it should never be that you don't have access to the audience that was generated. The pixel data, that should always be yours.

Adam Sand:
The other thing that I've seen done is where a company will come into town, or a Facebook ad company will go into a singular town, and they'll get three roofing companies all in the same city. And they'll put all three pixels for all three companies on all three companies' websites. So what they're ultimately doing is taking the traffic that you're generating from Google, let's say, so you've got Google traffic, you're spending money with a different agency driving Google traffic to your website, and these people are obviously interested in roofing. Well now, they can then retarget that traffic with their other client who's paying them more money. So even if they're charging you just $1,000 a month to run your Facebook ads, they're able to get kickass results for their $10,000 a month client, because they're stealing and retargeting your traffic. People who came to your website, they retarget with theirs.

Adam Sand:
And another crappy thing that I've seen done is where they'll buy a website like Roof Leads Alabama, or sorry, like a Roofing Services Alabama, or bestratedroofersalabama.com, something like that. And they will put their own pixel on your page, and any other page that they have in town. But then they'll have that pixel for that page, bestroofersalabama.com, and they'll seize in that pixel. They'll basically get all the audience and traffic and build up a lookalike audience. They'll get all that user demographic data. And then, this website, they'll go around town trying to sell it to people. They'll do, it's called a leased funnel. So you'll buy bestroofingcompanyalabama.com or topratedroofersinalabama.com, and they will put your company on there...

Adam Sand:
Sorry. They will have the pixel that was on your site for that site as well. And then they'll go around town and say, "Yep, this website generates a hundred leads a month. We'll sell it to you for $4,000 a month." You don't own the website. You don't own it all. But, you're just going to get to lease that funnel and the leads that come through. And so they will build up that site off of your back and the effort and the money that you are paying for ads to drive traffic to that pixel. So, watch out for that crap. Facebook has put some things in place to try and restrict that kind of stuff, but it is still possible.

Adam Sand:
And I guess the last thing you want to do or make sure of, is that they don't run your ads to... In part of their process, this is probably not the right place in this podcast, but I have to bring this up, is they're not running your ads, they're going to host your landing pages on your site. So part of that onboarding process is they get that domain registrar, so that even if they do design your website in ClickFunnels or Instapages, they host or distribute that page from your domain. So it's like alabamaroofer.com/junespecial, not clickfunnels.com/p/optin123, because Facebook likes the idea of keeping their users safe, especially after all this stupid craziness about Russia and privacy and data and Cambridge Analytica and all this crap.

Adam Sand:
Facebook basically took the blame for users not being smart with how they use Facebook. They go and use these apps on, find out what your spirit animal is. And then based on a bunch of questions you answer, it tells you that you're a deer or a duck. But really what it was is just asking you a bunch of questions about your personality and your political affliction, so that they could sell that information to political action committees. That's all it was. But, by doing so, Facebook took the blame because they didn't protect you from this. And so Facebook's had to really ramp up their standards and expectations for sites to kind of be legitimate.

Adam Sand:
And so when you're running all your Facebook ads for roofing leads to clickfunnels.com/p/optin.html, well, that site can be taken down tomorrow. It's not a piece of real estate. It's kind of like a kiosk set up on the side of the road. You know what I mean? It's like a fruit stand. You can just pack it up and drive away, and nobody knows you were there. If you sell bad fruit, all you could tell people is like, "Yeah, I got really sick, and I got salmonella from some spinach and cherries that I bought at a van that was on the side of the highway that said spinach and cherries." What are you going to do? You can't really go catch them. But if you bought it from a grocery store in a building, you know what I mean, with signs and stuff, and it said Sobey's Groceries, well then you know that you can go to whoever the health board and say, "They're selling bad cherries and spinach, and it made me sick and I got salmonella and my kid died."

Adam Sand:
So, Facebook has to have that same kind of standard and expectation. So if you're there running ads to some kind of landing page site and not hosting it on your domain, Facebook's going to decrease your deliverability. This is an extra challenge. I hated the ClickFunnels process of using Cloudflare, but it's just the way it is. You have to do it, or else you don't get the display. I see so many of these Facebook ad gurus, that they themselves, they're like, "Hey, I'm a business coach. Hey, I'm a Facebook ads guy," and then they're running their Facebook ads to unbalancepages.com/optin1234.html. They're not running it from like businesscoachsuperstar.com/junespecial. You want it hosted on your domain. So these are a couple of little quick tips and part of the onboarding process, that all makes up how you make sure that you're qualifying and hiring these people properly.

Adam Sand:
Next, I want to get into, how do you budget and pay for the ad management costs? So, how much are you going to pay these guys over and above, I guess, these guys or these girls, over and above what your ad spend is going to be?

Adam Sand:
So, at this point, you should be well-equipped to find a Facebook ad marketer, qualify them as being kind of good, and have a good process for now hiring this person. But, now we got to know, how much are you supposed to pay? What is the right amount? What are these guys, what is this service really worth? And so, I like to kind of present it as three different main pricing options, because there's really only three ways you get paid. The first one, and my personal favorite, is a retainer. It's where you pay them a set amount per month as a management fee. And, there can be surcharges for additional services. But, for the most part, you have a static amount that you pay, and there are terms and conditions and certain expected deliverables to be included in that set amount per month. So, you have whatever your ad spend is, and then you have a retainer for all the services included and maybe some surcharges for extra things as needed. So, that is the retainer style.

Adam Sand:
The second one, and probably, I would say, the most common, is a management fee. And that's where they base their management cost as a percentage of your ad spend. So, let's say they have a 25% management fee, well then if you're spending $10,000 a month on Facebook ads, they charge $2,500 a month. Then if you start spending $20,000, then you're spending $5,000 a month on management fees.

Adam Sand:
Now, the reason I'm not a big fan of that is because, first of all, it's kind of like a tax on you growing your business. I get it that, as you get success and want to spend more money on ads, then they get paid more because they're maybe doing more for you. But in a lot of cases, especially with Facebook ads, you're just increasing the budget of ads that are already created, and scaling and optimizing those ads. But you're not always changing it. I understand why Pepsi hires an agency that prices at that model, but that's because they're spending millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars. And if that is your ad budget, if you're spending $5 or $6 million a year on Facebook ads, and there's companies who do that. I know a company in Arizona that is spending $5 million a year on Facebook ads. I mean, this does exist, and they would likely pay a management fee.

Adam Sand:
But if you're $50,000 or less, I don't particularly like the percentage of ad spend model, because the other thing that it does is that, as you start to maybe draw down your ad spend or maybe pull back a bit, they're always going to look at it as, "How much work are we willing to do for this guy for this?" And, costs to try and improve an ad set, like the time invested, the design costs invested, can start to spiral out of control. And, if you just are doing it as a percentage of ad spend, sometimes what you need to get the ads performing enough, to get the client to want to increase their ad spend, is more work than you as an agency might be willing to do at the price of $2,500 a month. Maybe you got to pay somebody a lot more to get there.

Adam Sand:
The third kind is what I call predatory, and other people call, performance. That is ultimately where they get you to report back revenue, and they charge you a percentage of revenue. This is all the rage in the agency marketing business. This is essentially pitched as like, "Oh man, someday, if you really build your agency up and really get involved in their business, that's when you go for performance marketing. That's the whole goal. Maybe you get involved in their CRM or something. Then if you know that they're making $3 million off of your ads, then you go in and say, 'Hey, I'm going to walk if I don't get 10%.'" I hate that. I hate that. As a guy who owns a roofing company, I just know that there's so much that goes into running the business, and you're pricing your jobs at a 25%, 30% margin maybe.

Adam Sand:
You're maybe paying a commission sales rep 5%, 10%, or 5% plus a bonus, or something along those lines. You're paying for advertising. You're paying for the production manager. You're paying for the trucks, the tools. Then you're paying for the roofing crews to show up. You have to buy the material. You have to carry lines of credit, and you have credit card processing fees and insurance and workers' compensation and all kinds of things that are going to just add up and up and up and up and up. And you have to manage all this. And then you have to manage the managers.

Adam Sand:
And then, the idea, even as a marketer, as a person who understands the effort and the work required as a marketer, the idea of taking a company and saying, "Hey, we are doing your advertising. We're sending leads to you. We're not doing anything for your business. We're not automating your company. We're not building you any software. We're not managing any kind of payment processing or anything like that. They might not even be running your website. They could also not even be doing your graphic design. And just because they're generating leads, they feel that they're worth 10% of your business blows my mind. So, I do not particularly love this style of pricing.

Adam Sand:
I get it, that sometimes when you're a small company, it can feel like that person has skin in the game. If you don't make money, they don't make money. The other type of performance-based pay is pay-per-lead, or pay-per-click, where they say, "Okay. For every lead, you pay us $125. If you're not getting leads, we're not getting paid." But, in that example, in both of these examples actually, in one example, that you're paying them for leads, they have no vested interest in the quality of the leads, the branding, building your digital online real estate, building the digital store where people go to find you. And then the other example, they don't have any effect on the profitability of your business really. I mean, advertising certainly can. Branding certainly can. But, I just feel that there's so much more that goes into running a roofing company. I pay for performance. If you're going to get a piece for just advertising, I truly think it's 1%, 2% of the total game of running a roofing company. So, those are the three pricing models. Now you just have to know, what is it worth?

Adam Sand:
I feel that I should add a little disclaimer in that, pay for performance is different for consultants than for marketing agency. Now, it's important to remember that consultant is a highly overused term. And, consultant can mean business expert that can transform your business, or it can also mean unemployed entrepreneur, a person who just takes any job he gets. It's the general contractor handyman of the business world, especially the online business world.

Adam Sand:
But, for example, in my company, Roofing Business Partner, I use the retainer style method. I don't like doing a pay a management fee, based on the ad spend, because I don't want to tax you on improving your business. I might say, "Hey, we've gone from managing just ads for just roof repairs, and we're spending 10,000 a month. Now you're spending 30,000 a month, and you're doing roof repairs, roof replacement, inspections and insurance. We're obviously handling a lot more campaigns and ad sets and ad copy and all that kind stuff, so we might have to work with each other on those kinds of situations, but ultimately..."
PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [01:10:04]

Adam Sand:
Have to work with each other on those kinds of situations. But ultimately we set a retainer for the number of campaigns we're going to run, landing pages, we're going to design infographics we're going to produce, animated videos we're going to make over a set contract period of time. I don't like doing performance-based marketing in a marketing environment because I just don't feel that first of all, one or 2% of revenue isn't worth it for me, for the amount of investment that I have to do, as well as the amount of investment and commitment that you, the roofing company, have to put into producing the right content. So if I get one or 2%, you'll just be like, "Okay, well, you're getting a performance-based incentive. So if you want to make money, go make Facebook spit out dollar bills." There has to be a commitment from both to make the campaign succeed. And for 10%, I feel like that's predatory.

Adam Sand:
Now when it comes to consulting, I have reached a precipice where I no longer like seeing that I charge a company a five figure number, and go in there and then ramp up their business $2 million a year in perpetuity forever, or at least for the next four or five years. I want a... I am now a roofing business partner. I want to have an equity stake in the companies that I consult to and build up more companies in the same way that I built up mine with my business partner here in town. So performance-based for a consultant who's taking a role in improving your business is not predatory. In many cases, it's a way to decrease the upfront cost and increase the expectation that the consultant's time, energy, investment, commitment, Rolodex is commensurate with the amount of energy, or with the reward he stands to gain. So I just want to cover that quick little bit on performance based payment.

Adam Sand:
So now that we know the three types of payment that are available, what should we be paying for all of these things? Well, in a pay per lead scenario, I personally believe that if they're doing a least funnel to you, on a paid per-lead type situation where they own the funnel, they're usually just going to actually charge you a set amount per month with a minimum lease per month. Typically those least funnels are going to run you somewhere between 40 and $80 a lead. They're trying to compete with companies like Home Advisor and other kind of industry-specific lead generation sites. I won't name any of them, but you probably know who they are, who are selling leads for say a hundred bucks. So they're trying to complete with that based on the idea that they're not going to be sending leads directly to you, as far as to your website, something you own, they've built up a funnel. And so they're probably getting leads for a fraction of 40 to $60 because they've built that online piece of real estate.

Adam Sand:
So it's kind of like you are renting a store in their mall. Or you, because now just by being in their store, or being in their mall, you're getting business. So they've paid for the mall. They've caused people to now go to the mall, to see movies, buy things entertain themselves, go to the go-kart track. If it's an entertainment-based mall or something like that usually there's traffic. So when you're renting a store in a big mall with lots of attractions, you pay some kind of... You pay a common area cost for maintenance, and you usually pay a percentage of revenue. You pay for some kind of access to the fact that the mall is bringing traffic. It's not like a store out on the street somewhere. So that's how a least funnel will work, is usually you're paying in the neighborhood of 40 to $60 per lead, and so if they have a hundred lead guarantee or something like that, something to make you feel comfortable, they're going to say $4,000 a month is the cost for their least funnel.

Adam Sand:
Now, if you're doing a pay per lead, well, that's a different story. If they're going to be guaranteeing to send you leads to your website, or your Facebook page, if they're generating leads under your brand, it's really going to depend on how qualified those leads are. So they might get you first name and a phone number. That is not a very high cost lead, so you're going to pay $10, $25, $30, you're not going to spend a whole lot on that. Now, if you're getting name, phone number, email address, and that they've been hit by hail in the last 24 hours, and you are the kind of roofer that's pursuing that kind of business, well, then that's higher. You're probably going to pay a hundred, $125 for that. Now, if it's commercial, commercial leads that they're generating on something like LinkedIn, very rare to get that on Facebook, but if they're getting you commercial leads that are highly qualified and looking for a roofer at this point in time to get to commit to a job, you could pay up to $300 for those leads.

Adam Sand:
So pay per lead is going to be directly related to how qualified those leads are. Those are some good ballparks, but I have seen all kinds of stuff. I have seen minimum commitments. I've seen lead reseller programs where they generate leads in your area. If it's too far out of your service area, then they will buy those leads back from you to sell them. And there's all kinds of stuff, there's privacy problems that are just riddled all over that.

Adam Sand:
So for example, if they're using your website to generate you a lead and the lead that they get use 150 miles away, and then they buy that lead back from you for 50 bucks, they were going to charge you a hundred, they buy it back from you for 50, and then they can go and sell it to someone else for $60. Well technically that's breaching the privacy page that you have on your website, because now you are selling another person's information without telling them. They have opted in for a lead for Bear Paw Roofing, and now they're getting sold to Chuck and a Truck roofing. That customer didn't want to talk to Chuck and a Truck roofing, and now they've used the brand equity of this company to add validity to that company. And that's that's against terms of service.

Adam Sand:
So be careful of people who are willing to do that, because if they're willing to do that, it means they're willing to potentially get you in trouble. Selling your leads to another company to try and reduce the amount of money you're spending on them, because they're not getting you very targeted leads. So just be careful with the pay per lead set up. It'll also depend on whether the leads are exclusive or not. So are the leads being shared with anyone else? So are they going to your website or are they generated from a lease funnel. How qualified are they? How many data points are being delivered and how accurate is that? And then finally, what vertical is it? And whether it's in your market area or not. So just, those are some things to consider with that.

Adam Sand:
Now, when you're considering percentage of ad spent. So when they're including a management expense. Typically, the good rule of thumb is if they are just running the ads, they're not doing any creative, any graphic design, anything like that. They may be managing the creative saying, "We should be getting a video of some people roofing." You know what I mean? They're just giving some basic recommendations. 15 to 20%, depending on you know, how good they are, how well they answer all the rest of those questions. You could be paying up to 50%. 50%, however, would imply that they're heavily involved in the content creation, they're designing all the landing pages, they're taking care of writing the text in the ad copies, providing the images, setting up all your pixels, doing your custom audiences, coaching you on videos. For 50%, they have to be essentially your entire marketing department, at least within the scope of Facebook ads. Everything that goes on Facebook or is involved in Facebook or comes from Facebook, they're providing that.

Adam Sand:
So again, it does vary a lot, but anything over 50% is ludicrous. Anything less than 10%, I don't really know what you're going to get from that. Again, if you're running a budget of 2 million a year, then all those rules go out the window. I'm assuming most of the people that listen to this podcast are like most of the people who actually reach out to me from the podcast, and most people are in the one to $10 million range. And so that kind of gives you an idea as to what your ranges should be for a management expense. And now management expenses do tend to come with one time fees, set up fees, stuff like that. So that is something to consider as well, where they'll do a five or $10,000 onboarding, and that's to do all kinds of website, design, landing pages, graphic, design, coaching, whatever. Setting up systems. But be expecting that.

Adam Sand:
Now retainers, what to pay for retainer. Well, it helps to understand what things are worth. So writing any kind of copy. So writing a blog post or an article, or even just a very long ad. Generally, if they have roofing experience, so let's keep it within that scope, because that's how I told you to hire these people, if they have roofing experience, they have a good idea as to what should work in them, in your market, in your vertical. So they know residential roofing and they understand winter climates, or sunny all year round climates, or hail climates, or ocean-side. So if they understand those things, writing content is generally going to cost you about 80 cents to a $1 word. So if you want a thousand words, you're probably going to spend around 80 to a $100. For a thousand words, you'll generally spend around $80.

Adam Sand:
When it comes to graphic design, now if they have a process for doing say infographics, infographics should generally cost you three to $400 to run a good infographic. There might be some, one time setup costs as far as... I know for our infographics, we design a custom avatar of a character in your company to create a consistent, familiar face in every single infographic. And so we charge a one time fee to design your avatar, and then we have our per infographic fee.

Adam Sand:
When it comes to websites, if they're going to be designing a website for you, that is a completely open book. That can be... I've seen $799 and $99 a month, up to $60,000 and $5,000 a month maintenance. It depends on how many pages, how complex you want it, if you want the fancy scrolling features where things slide in and out, it's called parallax, and how complicated your forms are going to be. There's really no rhyme or reason, they're going to have to justify that to you. I think for a roofing company, if you're spending... If you're only chasing one or two verticals, like you're wanting to do roof repairs and replacements as well as work with some commercial, you shouldn't need to spend much more than 15,000 on a website. And that can be amortized out over a year as a portion of the monthly retainer, or that can be an all upfront cost. But generally that's about the limit. There isn't much that you can do with $25,000 that is going to be much better than $15,000. And to be honest, a lot of roofing companies can get a pretty good website for five. Because, frankly, the people making websites now and the tools that are available for making a website, the skillset is just becoming devalued. I mean, I can get people to design quickly a website and spend next to nothing.

Adam Sand:
But there is certain things to consider. So if they have certain SEO guarantees, then you're probably going to have some kind of monthly fee associated with that. The best way to associate that to a price is to understand the cost of the tools, and I could create a whole episode on the variety of tools that are available for optimizing SEO. But generally every company is going to have to spend around 400 to $600 a month on SEO tools to help them continuously monitor, update, and get feedback from these software tools that tells them what kind of content to create, what kind of keywords to adjust for, what kind of content to write for. And again, you should probably be doing some kind of at least weekly update via a blog with good content. And again, that's a whole other episode. But a thousand words a week, then you're spending, what, 80 to $100 a week on a post, plus the $400 for the SEO monitoring, plus amortizing the cost of your website out. So generally a website's going to cost you around 2,500 to 5,000 a month, depending on how much you're going to do with it. But I want to...

Adam Sand:
So I had to stop myself from ranting there, because I could just go on about that kind of stuff forever. But I wanted to get back to the breakdown of what goes on with creating a Facebook ad. So essentially, if you know nothing about Facebook ads, I'm going to try and summarize this as best I can. Every Facebook ad per se, in the context of how you think of it has three levels. There's a campaign level, and the campaign level is deciding your objective. So you're deciding what you want these ads to do. And you get to pick from things like get people to click on a link to go to a website, so you just want them to click the link. Or you want people who frequently engage with ads to engage with it. So engagement is likes, and comments, and shares. So you want to show the ad to people who are most likely to engage with ads like yours.

Adam Sand:
There are reach ads. Reach is where you want to get to as many people as possible. So you want to restrict the number of times people will see your ad so that if someone has already seen it, Facebook won't show it to them again for seven days. So that's just for reaching as far as you can to try and get as many people to see it, but they won't see it as often. Your objective could be video views. So you want to put it in front of people who frequently watch videos and are in your target audience, so you want them to watch your video. And then there are conversions. Conversions are where you want people to ultimately complete whatever goal you have. And you want Facebook to learn about the people who converted, so sent in a lead would usually be the most typical term. So if they go to your website or your landing page and you have an offer for free 55 inch TV with your advertising, or sorry with your roofing. Well then if five people or 50 people converted on that landing page, submitted a request for an estimate, well, Facebook will learn about those people, what kind of traits or behaviors they've been up to lately, and will try and get more people like that.

Adam Sand:
It might seem tempting to always use a conversion objective, but there are strategies around not using it. So for example, if you run an engagement ad to a video first and get a lot of likes, comments, and shares on it and then take that same ad with all the likes, comments, and shares and turn it in and run another campaign that's a conversion objective, it will convert even better because the ad now has what's called "social proof," meaning that it's got lots of likes, comments, and shares. Strategies I could go on for ever, but that's why you have all the different campaign objectives.

Adam Sand:
So like I said, there's three levels. The first level is the campaign level where you decide what your goal is, your objective. And that list was not all encompassing. There's plenty more. The second level is the ad set level. So this is basically a set of ads. You can have one ad or multiple ads in it, but this is where you define your budget and your audience. There's a few other things as well, but primarily this is where you define who you want to show the ad to. So you can use demographics, types of people. You can use interests things that they're interested in, or certain behaviors that they portray to Facebook or that Facebook catches them doing all over the internet. You can target custom audiences, people on your email list, or people who've engaged with videos or Facebook ads, or comments on your page, all kinds of stuff. So it's where you define who you want to show the ads to and how much you're willing to spend per day or in total on those ads.

Adam Sand:
Now within the ad set level, you would then have your ads. And this is where you actually design what it is that people see on Facebook. So you're doing the actual, what we call creative, the ad copy, the image or video. This is where you actually decide what the ad looks like. And again there's a certain... There's tricks to all of this. But to set up an ad for you.,So if you say, "Hey, I want a Facebook ad," there's ultimately an amount of time that it takes to do this. To properly set up a good Facebook ad campaign, so set up the campaign, set up the ad sets, have multiple audiences. So usually typically you're going to have a couple of ad sets with a couple different audiences in each one so that you're going to test one audience against another audience.

Adam Sand:
So you can see, okay, Hey, let's see how we do from 35 to 45 year old people who own homes who are in the top 25% income. And let's see how we do from 46 to 55 year olds who are in the top 25% income. And then you'll usually create one or multiple ads that are the same in each of those ad sets. So you'll maybe create an ad with an image and an ad with a video, or an ad with the same video but two different headlines. And you'll have that same video with the two different headlines. So you'll have a total of one video, two different headlines, and you'll have that same thing in both ad sets. Now this is incredibly difficult to visualize, I'm sitting here drawing it with my hands. But the concept is that to do something proper like that, if they have all the design creative ahead of time, something like that properly set up and checked, pixels all connected and tested, that's usually going to take about an hour. I'm sure somebody's going to pipe up is it's going to be like a roofer, "Oh, it could do it faster." And you're right, you absolutely can do it faster. But again, we are trying to figure out how much you should budget for things being done well and done properly. And so it usually takes about an hour.

Adam Sand:
Now that's not where their work ultimately stops, though. If if they're running ads for you, they're not only going to have to do the ad campaign set up, usually they're going to have to write the ad copy and ultimately create that ad. I like to budget a hundred dollars for every individual ad. So if they're going to create two ads, then budget a hundred dollars per ad, so that you can kind of put that in there. And that hour that it takes to set up that campaign that's a pretty skilled job. And so that's usually about $150, because there's a lot that can go wrong once you get that going. So you want to build in that pricing.

Adam Sand:
Now where the costs ultimately come up is when you start doing scaling and optimizing. So scaling and optimizing should be done... I mean, again, this is one of those things where there's a hundred right answers. But a safe bet is every three to five days, or every thousand to 2000 impressions. Every thousand of 2000 impressions, you want to be trying to find a way to improve or scale up the spend on the ads. And again, there is no right answer to this. I've seen really crazy results by simply scaling up the budget. Could be so how much you're spending on the ad every day, you're going up 1% per hour, 24 hours a day. So if you were spending $100, you're spending 101 an hour later, 102 10 an hour after that, and so on, and so on, and so on. And some people wait three or four days, and then they scale it up 15% and never more than that.

Adam Sand:
So, I mean, there's a lot of ways to skin a cat. And again, there's some there's a lot of different concepts that have been tested and Facebook's always changing. But scaling and optimizing is something where people need to dive into your ad account and spend a couple hours in there every three to five days. And they're going to do that. They're going to generally spend, I would say it's safe to say about an hour per campaign. So usually when you start out with an ads manager, you're going to be running a lot of ads.

Adam Sand:
What I like to do, and what I've seen as being a good, best practice is where you come in and I've set up as much as 96 different ads. So we'll have two campaigns, we'll be testing 12 audiences in each campaign. So now you've got 24 ad sets. And then you'll go and set up four ads. So four different ads to set up against these different ad sets. So each ad set has four ads in it, now you have 96 different ads. But you're testing different headlines, different copy, you're sending them to different audiences, you're testing different ages or different areas of town, different income levels, different headlines. And so all along there if you set up all of that, that's a $5,000 touch right off the start.

Adam Sand:
And that's why usually you're going to have some kind of onboarding or upfront thing, because you're talking about 50 hours worth of work to craft all the ad copy and put them all together and then go through and double check that you posted the right link in every single one. And there's tools that you can use to make this process faster, but those tools also cost money. So that's something to consider. So, I mean, depending on how complicated you want it to get, you should look at it like that. That's why I say kind of look at it as $150 a campaign, and then a hundred dollars per ad within those campaigns. And then obviously if you're doing a lot, then you get the economies of scale, that's why 96 ads is only 5,000. So when you start to get really high, some stuff gets a little faster.

Adam Sand:
So now in addition to setting up the ad, you're going to usually have some kind of coaching that's going to go along with creating content. And so someone is going to be helping you, they're usually an account manager or a content manager, they're going to be helping you create videos or graphics or something like that. We already discussed the cost of graphics, but then there's going to be coaching. And you have to think about this person as a fairly, very experienced, highly paid person. This is like a manager, like someone in your company that you would hire to be a production manager. This person would be worth 60 to a hundred thousand per year. So if they're going to be coaching, if I hire this person to work for me to help you with your campaign, and they're going to spend two weeks helping you get everything all set, get some coaching done, it's probably going to be two to $4,000.

Adam Sand:
It is something to factor in. Could be less, they could just hand you a script and say giver, and then provide you with no feedback. When I say coaching, that should mean that they help you script the videos, you perform the videos, they provide feedback, you go back and redo the videos, they help edit them, you send them to the ad company, the ad company then uploads them, puts them into your Facebook business manager, does the transcripts and makes it so that the words, the subtitles, pop up at the bottom. That's what I mean by really good video coaching.

Adam Sand:
And then finally, you're going to have landing page design. And once the landing page framework is created for your roofing company, the agency can typically reuse them and just change the ad offers a lot of tools like Instapages have something like Instablocks that allows this to be done fairly quickly. But to get your first landing page set up is, again, you're probably going to look at 1000, $2,000, depending on how complicated it is and how many features you want included in it.

Adam Sand:
So, write all those things down, and you can budget what it's going to cost for a good campaign manager. I like to say that if you're spending less than 5,000, you're going to run into two problems. And so I want to get into those two problems because now we've kind of covered everything and how to pay, or what it costs. The next thing we need to discuss is how do you manage them? But 5,000 should be the budget for most of you. Yeah, 5,000 a month should be around that budget. I'll get to more explaining more why in the next segment.

Adam Sand:
Okay, we're getting to the end. So you, at this point, should have found a Facebook ad marketer, qualified them to be skilled, and competent, and ready and willing to take on your business. You know how to properly hire them, and to tell them what it is you need, and to make sure they're the right company for you. And you have also got a clear understanding of what you're paying for and that you feel it is within the budget that you've set aside and you know roughly what kind of performance you should expect from that.

Adam Sand:
This is now the most important part. So even though every other part was incredibly important, all along the way, and there are certainly details that you can't ignore, this is ultimately what determines the success of your entire Facebook ad marketing campaign. Because although you are hiring another business to help your business, this is a business-to-business transaction, you are ultimately the CEO of your roofing company.

Adam Sand:
Now I don't care if you are $1 million a year guy, who's 50% of your business is going out as subcontracting to builders and developers, or a larger roofing company, and then 50% of your business is repeat and referral and stuff you get from lawn signs, and now you're just starting your very first Facebook ad campaign. You're still the CEO of your roofing company. If you're running a corporation, you're the CEO. Or if you're at the point where you're doing 5, 10, 20, $50 million in business, you obviously understand that you're the CEO and it is your job to either manage them, or manage the manager who's managing them, and properly train them to manage this outside company that is now going to be running the Facebook ad marketing department of your company. So no matter what size company you are, you are the CEO of that company.

Adam Sand:
So as the CEO, it is your job to effectively manage this department. And if it fails, you have to treat it as if it's your fault, if you didn't manage it effectively, so you have to pay attention to this part of the episode. And in fact, the whole reason for this episode is actually because one of my students who was in my marketing course, my yearly journeyman program, he went out, figured that he learned enough to be dangerous, through my course, that he could hire another Facebook ad manager to now deploy some of the campaigns. So he went out and hired this agency, and it's a reputable agency. And so upon hiring them, they made a deal that they understood clearly what the goals were, what they wanted to do. And really, the plan was laid out in my course. Like I said, this is what he wanted to execute.

Adam Sand:
And that it sponsored this whole episode because he called me up and we just started chatting. And he said, "How's things going?" Because we've actually jumped online and I've helped him with some of his ads before, totally free. Just he said, "Hey, there's a storm. Can you help me set up an ad?" And I was like, "Yeah, sure, no problem." So I just checked up and said, "How's things going?" And he expressed some frustration And said, "Hey, can I chat with you in an hour when I get home? I just want to show you my ads and just get your thoughts on how this company is running them." And I thought that was a pretty fair request. And so I agreed.

Adam Sand:
An hour later, we hop on the phone and he shows me stuff that just drives me bonkers. I know that this company knows better. I know that this company is capable of better performance. And I see that he's got, for example, and a lot of you might not understand this, I'll try and break it down very easily. But there's an ad campaign set up where the ad set has two ads in it. So remember what I just said about ad sets? Ad sets are where you define the audience and the budget. So then he had two ads in there, and those two ads were one with a video and one with a picture. So one had a video. It was an ad, when you look at it scrolling by it stops and there's video. The other one was just a static image. Otherwise, everything about the ad was the same. The budget was the same. The audience was the same.

Adam Sand:
Both ads, each had 18,000 impressions. That means that... I think the reach was about the same. So the both these ads had been seen by about 18,000 people. So at that point, we know what people are thinking when they see the ad. 18,000 people is a huge sample group. They set up this ad a month ago, so this has now been running for a month as the exact same ad.

Adam Sand:
Now one ad was getting triple the clicks, meaning when people saw the ad, they stopped scrolling and they clicked on the ad to take the next step. That's called click-through rate. One was getting triple the number of clicks. And so it was kind of clear to see that one ad was causing people to stop and take an action. Coincidentally, and this isn't always the case, but coincidentally, triple the number of people were then sending in a lead. So each one of these ads had burned through $800 or so over the course of the last month. And so the client is okay with spending a few grand on ads every month, and he's now spent $800 to get two leads, and then $800 to get eight leads. Or no, seven leads. So yes, it was two and seven, both sent just over $800.

Adam Sand:
Now, in my opinion, and again, remember what I just said in one of the previous segments, every 1000 to 2000 impressions, you should be scaling and optimizing. You should count the count in your budget that you should be paying someone to scale and optimize these ads. He was paying a reasonable amount, to my understanding, to have these ads scaled and optimized. And in there, there was no scaling and optimizing. There was no adjusting at all. So this ad went to 18,000 people and only got two leads, and it just was allowed to run. He could have easily canceled the one ad with the image that wasn't getting any clicks and also wasn't getting any leads. And that isn't always the case. Sometimes you get less clicks and more leads for all kinds of reasons.

Adam Sand:
But he could have stopped and said, "Okay, let's take a look at why this one's performing so much better and let's try something else." So for example, if it says "Attention, Calgary area residences, or Calgary area homeowners, blah, blah, blah, here's our special for the month." And you say, "Okay, Calgary's the entire city." What if we said, had them break into two, and we went with two different neighborhoods in Calgary. Maybe we know two different neighborhoods that frequently need roofs done. What happens if we just try changing that to the neighborhoods? And then maybe you could see that one started performing even better than the other, and so you could continue to scale and optimize your ads. Or maybe if you changed something on the page that they went to, you could get more leads from the page that the ad was sending the visitors to. There's so much that could be done, but there was absolutely nothing. It was just set up the ad and let it go.

Adam Sand:
That is the level of the level of involvement that you get from putting a billboard on the side of the highway. You just put the billboard up, see how it goes. Hope it did okay. You put an ad in the newspaper, you don't get to see how many people saw it. You don't get to see if they put your ad on the third page and in half the newspapers and on the 10th page in the other half the newspapers. You don't get to see which people were necessarily more likely to call, if they had maybe two different numbers on each of the ads in the newspaper. This is old-school marketing where you just put the ad up and hope it works, and then maybe at the end of the month, go back and say, "Well, this one performed better than that one." You have up to the minute data.
PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [01:45:04]

Adam Sand:
... well, this one performed better than that one. You have up to the minute data. You are getting a real-time feed of everything that is happening with that ad. You're seeing how many people are watching the video, how long people are spending on the website that they go to. You're seeing whether they click to see all the rest of the text or not, so maybe they're investigating more. You can see which ad causes more people to like and comment and share. You can see everything. And so to go in here and see that my student had done this, and there was multiple examples of this. And then there was ads that were set up that were doing awesome and they were turned off, and there was no custom audiences created and so what a custom audience is where you say, "I want to put a list aside, if this is a five minute video, everybody who watches three minutes or more, I want to put them on a list for later."

Adam Sand:
Because then you could show them an ad, and say, "Hey, these people took three minutes out of their day while they're on Facebook, instead of watching Elon Musk reveal the Model Y or watching a cat video, this person actually sat and watched a video about how we clean up a roofing project site." They're obviously interested in roofing for some reason, some of them might be roofers, but a lot of them are probably homeowners that are going to be in the market for a roof soon. That's a good group of people. Well, there was no audiences like that created, so then no ads could ever be set up to target them. So I know this company knows better and I still blame the student, but it frustrates the heck out of me, it's because of bad management. So I want to show you how to manage your ad manager.

Adam Sand:
So now that you've heard a horror story, it's time to learn how to manage your manager properly. There are three main stages to working with a third party outsourced Facebook ad manager, and part of it could be done in-house two. But the three stages are onboarding, content creation and then running campaigns, so paid traffic. So the first step is onboarding, and we already discussed this in a prior segment, but you want to make sure that they get all the ingredients and all the tools they need to bake your advertising cake. So ingredients are going to be ad copy, so any predefined lingo or language that is specific to you, your process, your company, slogans, stuff like that. You want to make sure they have your logos, your brand standards, those are not the same thing.

Adam Sand:
Logo is just the logo, brand standards are how far the logo has to be placed from anything else, what colors are allowed to be placed on, whether you can make it black and white, what it's supposed to look like in black and white, if the tagline where it goes, below or to the side, stuff like that, if it's stackable or not stackable. Brand standards just make sure that your logo always looks the same, plus it'll include your colors. Generally, every business or brand will have three to four colors that are consistent throughout everything that is in their advertising. So if your colors are blue and dark blue and purple and gray, if you have red suddenly showing up, it's going to appear off brand. So you want to have brand standards.

Adam Sand:
You're going to have any industry association logos, so OSHA or certain safety trade certifications is something that you belong to, or even just like Owens Corning's Platinum Certified logo. Anything that is considered to be social proof of your company, any finance companies you work with, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So those are the ingredients, then there's the tools. The tools would be making sure that they have access to any websites that they need for managing your domain, managing your website, managing your Facebook ads, they're going to need your ad account ID. All of this, I can include in a PDF, but it's there.

Adam Sand:
There's going to be a checklist of things that they need. Usually I suggest that you work with somebody who has something like LastPass in place. That's an app that allows you to share a password, but they don't actually see it, they just click on a link and the website that you want to give them access to fills in the username and password, but they can't change your password. They can't see it. They're just granted access to the page, and then you can take that access back at any time. So, that's a great tool.

Adam Sand:
Also, Google Drive, Dropbox, that's where you would upload all these ingredients, and also sometimes you're going to put access to tools in there as well. So that'll be part of the onboarding process. That should take about a week. You don't want to take much longer than that. You want to make sure that you can gather all of that together, because you're excited plus you're spending money. So you don't want to lollygag getting them the things that they need. Usually when you do an onboarding, they have told their team, "Hey, we're onboarding XYZ roofing. So we need to make sure that Jack is available." And so Jack moves everything off his plate to manage your onboarding, maybe he's your account manager. Well, if you're lollygagging on getting him the details, what ultimately happens is Jack then gets busy on another project, things start to fall apart, and that's the beginning of a bad relationship.

Adam Sand:
Stage two is content creation. This is where you start to now create anything that's going to be used to attract attention to your company. A lot of times they're going to coach you through videos. You're going to be paying them to do graphic design for ads, creating landing pages, creating buttons. Just anything that's creative. They're going to coach you through videos, design infographics, create PDFs, white pages, anything that you're going to distribute, your coupons. So you're going to be, "Download disc coupon to receive a free metal value with your roof." Or anything like that. So they're going to be responsible for that in most cases, or you are, but either way, it's got to get provided because they need something to use to attract people to your business, and then to drive the traffic to an offer, and then to convert those into leads.

Adam Sand:
So then there's landing pages that get designed, they have to be tested. So that content creation period can take a week, it can take a month, it depends on the complexity of the campaign. The biggest thing is for you to be active in it and to be thinking what you can do every day, getting your team involved, if you have to, and then also making sure that they're active, and every day, there should be communication on the content creation project, because if you're not communicating with them, you're going to be the not squeaky wheel. And the squeaky wheel gets the grease, the not squeaky wheel is assumed to be okay. And you'll all of a sudden turn into this panicky client, if I guess your second monthly retainer fee starts coming out and you are not anywhere near done your content creation phase.

Adam Sand:
You're going to feel like you just spent that money on nothing. And that's just the reality of the situation. So you want to get your content creation done as quickly as possible to make sure you're daily engaged. Once that's done, this is where everything starts to fall apart, is that you create the content and you say, "Okay, I did my job. You have access to everything. You have all this stuff to work with. Go bake me my cake." doesn't work like that. You have to be checking in with them. So this is how I expect my clients to work with me and what I'm expecting from my team to make sure that roofing business partner agency customers are taken care of. So in the first month, we want to make sure that once paid traffic is running, every three days, there's a conversation.

Adam Sand:
We are discussing what's going on with the ads. There's nothing more painful for a customer, for you, than when you have ads running, leads aren't coming in yet, and you're completely uncertain as to why or what's going on or what you should expect. So every three days at the most, you should be reaching out to your ads manager and saying, "Hey, I just want an update." And the first thing they're going to say is, "Oh yeah, it's still early. We're just learning some stuff." You're like, "Absolutely. What have we learned?" So no matter what they say they're doing, whether it's audience generation, learning how to target, testing audiences, seasoning the pixel. There's mean all kinds of buzzwords and lingo that comes out. You want them to reflect upon what they've learned and what they think they should do next.

Adam Sand:
Every three days, every roughly thousand impressions that an ad has been exposed to, there is valuable knowledge to be learned, because there is data to be reflected upon. So every three days, you have to reach out to them and say, "Hey, what time can we get on a phone call or a video chat or a Zoom or a Google Hangout and just go over my ads?" And they're going to say something, you say, "Okay, great. So what have we learned, and what's next?" And you want to know that they're actively doing it. The next day, so the immediately following day, so the fourth day you always say, "Hey, I just wanted to double check, was that done? If not, can you get it done and let me know when it's done?"

Adam Sand:
You always want them to have to let you know when it's done. It's just good management. Don't just tell them to do something, tell them what to do and tell him to let you know when it's done and then write it down, make a note, put a post-it not on your monitor, do something, tell your wife to remind you. But on day four, follow up and make sure it's done. If it's not done, make sure you say, "Hey, can you get that done today, and can you let me know when it's done?" You teach people how to treat you. You teach marketers how to work for you. So that's on day four, and you repeat that cycle over and over and over again. It is completely reasonable to not get any quality leads for the first month. That can and will happen.

Adam Sand:
It's happened both ways. I've ran an ad and day one, it's producing leads. I've also ran ads and not been able to get anything going for a few weeks, nothing meaningful anyway. Bullshit, pardon my language, bad leads. I've had cities that didn't convert. I've had landing pages that weren't running properly. But if you're monitoring and checking and testing every three days, you're going to make improvements to the customer's campaign. But it's up to you to manage your manager or manage your ad campaign company, depending on the size of your company. But you have to make sure there's reflection going on. Now, any time that you notice that your ad costs and ad budget isn't being spent, you have to know why.

Adam Sand:
So if you've told them that you have a budget of 3,000 a month, 8,000 a month, 20,000 a month, sometimes it can be difficult to spend all that budget. There has to be a plan as to what is going to be done with that leftover budget. Are you going to tack it on to a future month, or are you going to consider that good to go? So you want to make sure that kind of feedback is happening based on how much money is being spent. After the first month, you want to make sure that your ads manager is in the habit of providing you an end of month report. There has to be either some kind of document that's sent to you, or it could be a live video going over the campaign performance as a summary. They could send you a spreadsheet that's being updated every day, but that doesn't mean you don't have a meeting at the end of the month.

Adam Sand:
Now Facebook ad managers hate reporting. They hate it. It's the most boring and most overlooked part of the whole job, because first of all, they understand what's going on, and anytime they do reporting with you, generally, they have to one, admit their failures and flaws, two they have to teach you things, and three, it takes a bunch of work that doesn't actually move the needle in your business in a direct, tangible way. And so it's the first thing that gets overlooked. There'll be that, "Hey, we should get together and have a call and go over the campaign." And you'll say, "Yeah, sure. When do you want to do that?" And they'll say, "Oh, whenever you're available, I'm good." And then you'll say, "Oh I'm busy right now. I got lots going on with the roofing, but maybe Friday." And then they go, "Yeah, sure."

Adam Sand:
And then you get hung up on Friday or forget, and then they go, "Okay." And then it's like, "Yeah, no problem." And then a little conversation happens, "Yeah, no, it was good. You've spent this much per lead." Because you don't even know what to get in a report. So here's the things that you're going to want to make sure that you understand, and then there's going to be the information that you need to communicate back to your manager, and therefore you're going to have to set up a system for tracking this. So the things that you want to always check with them. One, you want to know what your cost per a thousand impressions were. You want to know how much you're spending to put ads overall in front of a thousand people. Now you can break this down and go into each ad, but you want to know from an overall perspective, how much you're spending to reach a thousand people.

Adam Sand:
And there's reason for this later, and as you learn more from this podcast, you can pick it up and run with that. You want to know how many clicks went to your landing page or lead form. How many total clicks did you get? Then you want to know how many leads did they say that they've generated for you? So in their opinion, how many leads were sent to you? And you want to match that up against whatever you have. And you want to make sure that you have how many people have been added to what custom audiences. So if you're doing custom audiences of how many people watched a certain video or how many people landed on a landing page, but didn't submit a lead, you want to know what custom audiences are being built because these are assets.

Adam Sand:
Facebook even defines them as assets within the ads manager. It lists custom audiences as assets, because with that, you can understand what kind of long term impact you can have on your group. And you also want to know how many people were added to your follower account on your Facebook page. This is not important. You can't deposit likes and you can't deposit your followers or pay your mortgage with your followers, but it's important to understand is your following growing? Are you having an effect on the local community? So these are the things that you want to make sure that you're getting from them. You also want their opinion on some wins and some lessons learned throughout the month. Any reporting back should ultimately come with, "Hey, this is what we learned about marketing your company. These are some wins that we have. This ad performed particularly well, and this is why. This ad kind of sucked, and this is why."

Adam Sand:
So some wins and some losses and some, and so what we've learned from that. Because this is going to allow you to continually manage your ad marketing team and continue to keep the pressure on it and hold them accountable to, "Hey, didn't we learn that lesson already? Didn't we work on building that audience up already?" Because if they get in the habit of feeding you excuses and just experting you into silence, they'll continue to do it forever. Because again, a lot of these Facebook ad campaign companies, what they're doing is they're selling so many companies on using their service and then they don't have enough people to deliver on it.

Adam Sand:
So then they put themselves in a position, especially if they're under pricing themselves, that they have too many clients and not enough time to handle them. So they just literally wait until customers get mad before they deal with them. You have to make sure that they know that you're the one customer that they can't mess around with. You're the one customer that's going to call them every third day for the first month. Then you got to make sure that they know that on the end of the month, they have to have reporting done, they have to have some lessons learned, some wins and some losses and they have to be prepared. And it could take you two months before they really understand that you're not messing around. You're there to make sure that they're a high performing ad management company.

Adam Sand:
Now this is a two way street. They need to know how they can improve the ads that they're giving you. So you need to be able to report back to them how long it's taking your team to respond to a lead. If they get you a lead, how long does it take you to get back to them? You need to be honest with yourself and with your ads manager that the results could also be based on how good your sales organization is doing. And the sooner you create that accountability two way, the better it is, because what will often happen is if you're taking too much time and you're not being honest or you're not reflecting on that situation every month, when your ads aren't performing and your leads aren't selling, you're not converting leads into sales, you will start to want to blame the advertising company.

Adam Sand:
You will start to tell them, "Hey, your leads aren't selling." And so you need to hold yourself and your team accountable to make sure that you are running a proper sales department and not wasting the leads that they're generating you, because there's also crucial data that you're going to learn from those leads that you can then feed back to them. This is such data as what city are they from? Typically, when you're starting off a Facebook ad campaign, they're going to cast a very wide net. They're going to cover your whole city, your whole state, your whole region. Whatever your direct marketing area is, they're going to cast a wide net. But we all know that there's certain cities that are older and newer. There's certain neighborhoods that were fresh, brand new builds, and there's certain areas that every roof needs to get done in.

Adam Sand:
So you want to make sure that they know how they can narrow down their targeting, because here's the thing. If they're showing your ads to everybody in the entire city, every homeowner, and 50% of your city is brand new builds and 50% is old, they need to know how they could narrow down to just specific areas of the city or specific areas of the state. They also need to know what certain customer demographics were working for you. Because as you're going and you're talking to them and saying, "Okay, what are we doing, and what's next? What are we learning and what are we doing next?" When they tell you, "Well we're going to try targeting 45 to 50 year olds and test that against 35 to 45 year olds."

Adam Sand:
Well, if you come back to them and say, "Hey, you know what? The 45 to 55 year olds were selling really well." Maybe you're only getting half the leads from 45 to 55 year olds, but you're selling at a 60% closing rate on the 45 to 55 year olds, well, they might inherently think, "Oh we're not doing very good with 45 to 55 because we're only getting half the leads." And then if you didn't tell them that, "Hey, you know what? The 45s to 55s, they're paying full price. They're not haggling. They're being very responsive to our estimating process, and they're closing at twice as high as those younger people." Well then they might decide to shut off the ads of those younger people, or you might decide that you have to create a different content to warm up the audience of younger people further before trying to push them into giving you their information and requesting an estimate.

Adam Sand:
There is so much that they can learn. So they need to learn about what is happening with these leads. So you want to report back the time, the area, and which demographics tend to be serving you best. And any other information you can give them is great. If people are mentioning a certain offer, if people keep telling your salespeople, "Oh, I loved this video," or, "Oh, I loved that infographic." This is all information that you want to feed back to your Facebook ad campaign crew, because they're going to turn that information into improved targeting and scaled and optimized ads. Now this is going to happen every single month at the end of the month. Once you get into the second, the third, the fourth month, you don't need to be on their case every third or fourth day. But if you ever start to feel that things are starting to creep back into not squeaky wheel land, it's very important that you start getting back on top of the every third or fourth day.

Adam Sand:
You never, ever, ever, ever want to do what that student did in the last segment where you just let them run an ad and you ask them to make changes or ask them questions, they don't answer the questions, they don't make the changes, and you just run an ad for a month that isn't successful and you blow $800 to get two leads because you didn't decide to say, "Hey, let's stop the one with the image and put the budget towards the one with the video." So the success ultimately comes from your ability to manage them, because all too often, the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and the one that doesn't squeak is just the one that gets left alone. You do not want to put yourself in the position to be that client.

Adam Sand:
For roofers, this should go without saying, but there is a difference between a dream client and a nightmare client. And I will say that dream clients tend to get better results than nightmare clients. You might think that when I say being a good manager means constantly harassing and beating your marketing team to get better, that isn't the case. I'm not telling you to do that. There's good managers, good leaders, and there's bad managers and bad leaders, and then there's clients that are terrible and there's clients that are awesome. So I want to give you a few tips on how you can be a dream client, because it will only serve you in the end. The first and most obvious way to be a dream client is to pay the bill on time. If you're invoiced on the first of the month, make sure that you pay the invoice on the first of the month.

Adam Sand:
There's nothing more annoying and more uncomfortable and more awkward than having to go with the hat in your hand to the company that you're helping build their business and say, "Hey, would you mind paying the bill? I sent the bill to you last week, let you know that it had to be paid in seven days. Could you just pay the bill?" Nothing worse than that, especially when you're working with a newer, smaller agency, a lot of the time they're paying for tools, they're paying for people, they're paying for help, they're doing all kinds of things to try and build their business, and if you're not paying the bill on time, it's going to make their job a lot more stressful.

Adam Sand:
Bigger companies, they're just going to feel disrespected and they're not going to want to help you. They're just going to feel like you don't care about their business. So always pay the bill on time. The other thing that I think is important to mention is don't let your customers proof your ads. What could I mean by that? Don't let your customers proof your ads. The annoying thing that in an agency, your customer will sometimes do is you will send them a blog or an advertising, like an ad copy, what it's going to say as far as the text in the ad or what the offer is, what the expiry date is.

Adam Sand:
You'll design a landing page, you'll have features and benefits and a call to action, maybe dictating what the offer is, or an automatic email autoresponder that is sent to a customer when they opt in. All these kinds of things that you'll set up for your client, you'll send it to them and say, "Hey, can you check this over and let me know if that works for you?" And they'll say, "Yeah, yeah, it looks good." They barely read it. And they go, "Yeah, yeah, it looks good." It's fantastic that you trust us. As agencies, we appreciate the trust. The problem is we will have considered this job done, and there's a certain workflow that goes through creating these things and making and testing these things and making sure that everything's done so that you've checked off all the boxes and done everything right.

Adam Sand:
It's kind of like you can't put the underlayment on after you put the shingles on. You could, but it makes more work for everyone. So when you, as the customer allow us to put up an ad or run some kind of copy in some place, and then a week later, your customers are messaging you saying, "Hey, your ad says it expires in June, but it's July." Or they say, "Hey, are you really still doing this and that offer at the same time?" What happens is then you go, "Oh, hey, I didn't notice this, but we need to change that." Quite often, that's more work than you'd think to go back and fix stuff. And sometimes you might be testing different ads, so you might have 30 different ads created and you have to now go through all 30 ads to find out which ones had that text in it or that expiry date or that offer.

Adam Sand:
And it's just a whole bunch of work because you didn't do your job, which is you're supposed to proofread things. And nobody wants to come back and say, "Hey, Mr. Customer we have to charge you extra because now we have to put an hour worth of work in to go try and find that." They want you to be happy. The same thing goes for images, videos, anything like that. Check to make sure your phone number is right. Check to make sure your address is right. They're going to do everything they can, but you have to remember, they are looking at hundreds of things all the time. And quite often, when you send them the text, they're going to paste it in. If you sent it with a spelling error, they're not going to check or correct your copy that you create, they're just going to take whatever you asked for, copy/paste and put it in.

Adam Sand:
So don't let your customers proofread your work. Another thing that is really typical is that when you ask a client for something, you ask them to create a video or to get you an answer on something, they just don't do it. If you're wanting us right to manage your campaigns effectively, we know that there's a limited amount of time in which it takes to get everything up and running, we probably have people on a schedule, teams that are waiting for work. And then if we ask you to have something done by Tuesday, and you don't get it to us until Friday, we're in a position where we have to stay late, work late, move people around, change the schedule, try and get it done, or it doesn't happen until Monday, and you might miss a crucial weekend, and then it's going to take three days to get those ads seasoned and make sure we get some data back.

Adam Sand:
We lose almost two weeks worth of information simply because you didn't get something done by Tuesday. So if you're working together, you have to be on the same team and make sure that your design or your ad copy or your Facebook ad deployment crews all have the stuff that they need to get the job done, so they're not making things up as we go. So always, always, always try and get everything that they have requested to them on time, make it a priority. And the last thing that I think is something that I feel gets quite often overlooked, but it's don't assume that people are mind readers.

Adam Sand:
Don't assume that your Facebook ad company is going to be able to read your emotions, understand the depth of your text messages and see the context through the message. Have very open communication. If you don't like something, bring it up. If you want something done, make sure you mention it. Don't assume that if you say, "Hey, I want to do an ad for ventilation." Don't assume they understand every single thing that you're asking for. They aren't mind readers. You have to put some effort in. Yes, they will do 90% of the work, but you still have to do your 10%.

Adam Sand:
I see this all the time where they just expect someone to read their mind and make them happy, and this is what births all kind of problems down the road because an ad performance goes down, resentment kicks in, people stop trying, people start looking at each other in a bad way. So have a good open communication. Make sure that they know what you're thinking and feeling at all times. This doesn't mean emotionally unload on them, this doesn't mean be mean to them, but you just want to make sure that they have a clear understanding of what you're going through and how you're reacting to the campaign and what you're looking for and what ideas you might have. So have good communication. Don't assume that your Facebook ad company is a mind reading company.

Adam Sand:
Well, there you have it, folks. This has been a long episode, holy crap. Now, you know how to find, hire, qualify a page and manage your own Facebook ad marketing department, whether it's in-house or out of house. I really sincerely hope this ad helps all of you. If you are looking for a little bit more, and you want to get the best results out of your Facebook ad campaigns, I highly, highly, highly suggest you take one of my training programs. It is so, so valuable to know enough to just be dangerous, by simply knowing the fundamentals of how to set up a campaign, how to measure how it's doing, how to read the reports, understanding some of the lingo. You can really, really improve your relationship with your Facebook ad manager. And if you're a Facebook ad manager and you know you're a rookie and you know you're starting out, and you feel maybe even a little bit threatened by some of the information that was shared inside this podcast today, reach out to me.

Adam Sand:
I have a program that teaches you how to create really, really, really good Facebook ads for roofing companies. What I've learned after running hundreds of campaigns, creating hundreds of infographics, posting hundreds of videos, I have all this information locked away and I'm actually teaching a program to help other Facebook marketers learn how to improve the results. Because as I said in the beginning, I want to elevate the marketing side of this industry. There are a lot of people out there teaching, training, coaching, and growing the roofing and the installation and the insurance side of this business. But right now, the marketing side is just the wild, wild west. There's all kinds of people running around making all kinds of promises who have no idea what they're doing, and I could hate on this side of the business, I could be mean to them, I could call them hacks like the roofers would call bad installers.

Adam Sand:
But at the end of the day, I know that if I bring up the rest of the industry, we all benefit as a result. So if you'd like to learn more, definitely check on my website, roofingbusinesspartner.com and look into one of my educational programs. If you're a roofing company or a manager to roofing company or an owner, learn enough to be dangerous. Understand the lingo, that way you can communicate in terms that your Facebook manager can understand, and they can tell you things that you're going to be able to understand the context and know what they're doing and how hard they're working to make your business great. Thank you so much for listening. I super appreciate your attention. I know this is a crazy long episode. I imagine you're listening to it in parts. There's a part of me that thinks I should be breaking this up into multiple episodes, but I'm just going to try this out and see how you guys react. Thank you so much. Please like, please subscribe, and if you're listening on Anchor, send me voice questions. Let me know what you guys think.
PART 4 OF 4 ENDS [02:16:32]