Marketing Experts Reveal Top Strategies To

Arlen Robinson:
Welcome to the Ecommerce Marketing Podcast, everyone. My name is Arlen and I am your host. And today we have a very special guest, Jessie Healy, who is the founder of Webtopia where she advises eCommerce brands on how they can grow their profits through Social Media Advertising, Google Ads and Email Marketing. Welcome to the podcast, Jessie.

Jessie:
Thank you so much, Alan. I’m super excited to be here.

Arlen Robinson:
Yes. And I’m super excited to talk to you. You know, you actually had me on your podcast and we talked about some really interesting things, some things that I’m really familiar with. I think I talked about affiliate marketing and influencer marketing 

Jessie:
Yeah, I learned a ton.

Arlen Robinson:
and the like.

Jessie:
It was amazing.

Arlen Robinson:
Yes, that was awesome. And I appreciate you having me on. And so we kind of did the podcast swap and really, you know, excited to talk to you and have the honor to have you on the podcast as well. But you know today, I think we’ve really got a nice refreshing topic That I think our listeners of years are gonna be interested in which is Metta’s new advantage plus shopping campaigns And I didn’t know a whole lot about it before You know you introduced it to me And so I think it’s gonna be really exciting and interesting for our listeners and viewers to see what meta has to offer Because there’s so many things that are going on and changing in the world of digital marketing. And this is just one of them. But before we dive deep into that, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background and specifically how you got into what you’re doing today.

Jessie:
Sure, yeah. So my background is a little bit like you. I’ve been in digital marketing for really my whole career, like since I got out of university. So my first job was in working for a business that did online learning. And this was in the mid 2000, early 2000s actually. So online learning naturally lent itself towards, you know, marketing through email and SEO and online advertising. So that’s how it all started for me. And I moved to London and I just went from job to job. progressed my career working in all sorts of digital marketing roles, focusing more and more on consumer-based roles, and then latterly ended up landing a job at Etsy, looking after their international performance marketing campaign. So I was responsible for all of the budget for Etsy outside of the US. And I was running their Google shopping campaigns primarily and affiliate programs there, too. And so after that exciting role, I moved on to another role where I was made the company went bust when I was seven months pregnant. And so that gave me finally the push I needed to, to start my own business. I kind of always wanted to, I’d always kind of toyed with the idea, but you know, had these stable jobs and didn’t quite feel confident. But when I lost my job, due to actually, there’s a whole nother story there about the founder spending the money on private jets and fireworks

Arlen Robinson:
Oh

Jessie:
and

Arlen Robinson:
wow.

Jessie:
all sorts

Arlen Robinson:
Oof.

Jessie:
of crazy stuff.

Arlen Robinson:
Yeah, that’s

Jessie:
But

Arlen Robinson:
so good.

Jessie:
it left like, yeah, it left us without a job. And so, you know, I jumped in there with, you know, heavily pregnant.

Arlen Robinson:
Okay, great, awesome. Yeah, sure did. That’s the error that I was getting actually before on my end. It had something to do with frame rates. What camera are you using?

Jessie:
Hey, so I’m just using my computer camera now.

Arlen Robinson:
Okay.

Jessie:
That might be better.

Arlen Robinson:
No problem. Yeah. It’s a strange thing. That was the issue that I was having when I was going back and forth with them. It was on my end though. My, I have a Sony EV1 camera and it was getting the same error at 18 minutes and it was due to my frame rate setting was, was off. And so I had to,

Jessie:
Wow, okay.

Arlen Robinson:
yeah, I don’t know.

Jessie:
Well, hopefully this works okay.

Arlen Robinson:
Yeah. But yeah, you may want to check that, but yeah, we can, we’ll edit out.

Jessie:
Do you think we need to record the first bit again or do you think they got that bit?

Arlen Robinson:
I think it got it right, usually right when it says that it kind of stops at that point. So I think you can just pick up where kind of where you left off about your background and then leaving, starting your own brand when you’re seven months pregnant and the previous company let you go.

Jessie:
Yeah, yeah, sure. So are we recording now or?

Arlen Robinson:
It’s actually still going. So I think,

Jessie
Okay, cool.

Arlen Robinson:
does it show that it’s uploading on your end?

Jessie:
Yeah,

Arlen Robinson:
Okay,

Jessie:
yeah, it does.

Arlen Robinson:
We’re good.

Jessie:
Yeah, so there so there I was freelancing and it just totally took off and I had you know got really amazing results for clients on both Facebook and Google and WordSpread and then I started hiring people and that was five years ago and now the agency is a seven-figure agency and we have a team of 20 around the world and Yeah, it’s all going amazing

Arlen Robinson:
Okay, that’s awesome. That’s quite a story. You know, I hear different stories like that from people that have started businesses and sometimes it just takes that push to kind of get you there. You know, it sounds like you really already had that entrepreneurial spirit in you and something you were kind of putting off, but you know, it took that experience, you know, for you to be seven months pregnant, losing your job and then trying to say, okay, you know, if it’s no… If now is not the time, then when will it be? And then that’s kind of what

Jessie:
Exactly.

Arlen Robinson:
motivated you to jump forward and kind of

Jessie:
Yeah.

Arlen Robinson:
lit the fire under you. So that’s, yeah, good to hear. And I’m glad things are going well for you guys, for

Jessie:
Yeah.

Arlen Robinson:
sure. So, as I mentioned at the top of the episode, we’re gonna be talking about Meta’s Advantage Plus shopping campaigns. And for those that are listening and viewing that are not familiar with that, why don’t you break it down for us and tell us what it’s all about.

Jessie:
Yeah, so Advantage Plus launched, it’s a little while ago now, I’m going to say, it was probably six to eight months ago, maybe even slightly more. But it was the, I guess it was Facebook’s answer to performance max, in a way, you could compare it to that if you were comparing it to Google. But basically what it is, it’s Meta’s most automated campaign available. And what it allows you to do is basically upload a ton of creative, very little kind of targeting information to Facebook. And then the algorithm will do all of the heavy lifting for you, to find you your audience. You give it your goal. You know, if we’re in the talking about the e-commerce world, that goal would be conversions optimized for purchase. And you kind of, you kind of let it run. But that being said, like all things with meta advertising. there’s kind of no such thing as automated because you’ve got to look at what’s working. You’ve got to test different settings. You’ve got to compare it to like whatever else is going on in your ad account. You’ve got to compare it to what you’re seeing in other ad accounts. And the devil then is in the detail. So in order to get it to work in an optimal way, you have to test different settings. And I can talk you guys through and your audience through today, some of the, you know, what’s been working for us in the majority of accounts. But I would say with you know, Facebook and Metta and paid social media buying and Google as well. For that matter, there’s never kind of a hard and fast set one way of doing things. There’s, there’s a place to start and then you, you know, observe the results and you follow the data and you decide what to do next. Based on that. The other thing I will say is we’ve done a lot of analysis of, you know, the configuration of advantage plus within an ad account, whether it’s like the whole spend or part of the spend. And we believe firmly still now that it’s best to have Advantage Plus running alongside your normal conversion campaigns and not to give all of the budget to Advantage Plus. That’s, I think, putting all your eggs in one basket and, and trusting too much in the platform, I think. But also we’ve seen genuinely better results when we have them both running together.

Arlen Robinson:
Okay, great. Yeah. Interesting stuff. And just to kind of backtrack, some me and my audience are totally clear. So when you say upload, you’re able to upload a kind of a ton of creatives. Are you talking about just graphic things, very little content, and it’s able to analyze that, analyze what your goals are, and then come up with specific ads based on just that content and your, based on those, excuse me, those graphics and your goals.

Jessie:
No, no. So it hasn’t gone as far as I guess that is what performance max to an extent does. You can upload like, you know, static images and then it will kind of turn them into videos. No. So in the case of advantage plus what we’re doing is we’re, we’re developing ad concepts, we’re developing video ads, we’re developing, you know, static ads, carousels, all of those things. We’re developing those maybe elsewhere in the ad account. A lot of times we might test ads. in the more traditional way in the ad account. And then we’re putting a whole lot of them into advantage plus.

Arlen Robinson:
thing.

Jessie:
So Facebook advises 20 or meta I should say, advises 20 to 30 creatives per campaign. That’s a lot, right? That is a lot of ads to have to develop. We at my agency, we aim to have at least 10 pieces of creative and we do find this tends to be, we get good results when we have. 10 pieces. And then if we have it have more, we might add more, but 10 is kind of our basic minimum for this campaign type. And this makes it quite different from, for instance, a conversion campaign where you typically would aim to have no more than three or four ads live unless you had a very large budget. So that’s kind of a different factor here. It’s less there’s less kind of manual switching on and off of ads, and you’re just kind of giving Facebook the free rein to run with them.

Arlen Robinson:
Okay, gotcha, gotcha. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I mean, it really just seems like this is with the machine learning, this whole AI, it’s, it seems like, you know, like you said, it’s doing a lot of the heavy lifting, but it’s still not, or at least now it’s not at the point where it’s a kind of a set it and forget it, you can’t just kind of add the your creatives there and then let matter go to town with it. And, you know, you still gonna have to monitor you still gonna have to make tweaks, but It sounds like

Jessie:
Yeah.

Arlen Robinson:
it at least will get you going. Um, so,

Jessie:
Totally.

Arlen Robinson:
okay.

Jessie:
Yeah, and I think like, there’s a lot of talk about like is media buying dead and like, what’s the role of agencies when, you know, a lot of this stuff is being automated. And I guess what it means is like, this is my view kind of on the industry. What it means is, yes, so like three, four, maybe five years ago, media buyers were spending a lot of time testing audiences and switching audiences off and on and analyzing the performance of different ad sets. Now we’re much more focused because the playing field has been leveled. So, you know, whether you’ve got a good media buyer or not, the algorithm’s doing a lot of that media buying activity for you, but now it means the bar’s been raised for how good your creative needs to be, for how good your landing page needs to be, for how good your offer needs to be. And that couple that with like, there’s so many more econ brands out there, they’re all getting more sophisticated. So actually in a way, whether it’s an agency or an in-house team, the talent and the… expertise that’s required to make an ad account work, I would argue is higher. It’s just a different maybe set of skills or a different, it’s kind of more strategic now rather than more just lots of button pushing and lots of kind of analyzing of audiences.

Arlen Robinson:
Gotcha.

Jessie:
So it’s changed the game. It’s definitely changed the game, but I wouldn’t say it’s automated the game.

Arlen Robinson:
Okay, gotcha, gotcha. At least not at this point. Yeah, that makes sense and I totally get that. And I can see how it has kind of upped the game a bit in a certain sense. I mean, how would this different? So let’s say the campaigns that are created with Advantage Plus, how do they differ from just the traditional online marketing campaigns that you would just create as an agency or just as your brand directly? you know, manually, what would be really the difference?

Jessie:
Yeah, I mean, the setup process is probably a little, it is definitely quicker than, especially the way we did media buying, you know, three to five years ago, where you would have to set up multiple audiences and you would kind of duplicate them and move the ads across. There’d be a lot more kind of manual button pushing required. So, you know, an agency might be structured more to have like a lot of junior team members whose job it was to like build audiences and build ads. And then, you know, write reports on what’s happening. Now it’s, you know, you’ve got your 10 ads that you’ve created kind of separately outside the ad account, and you’re putting them into this advantage plus. So that job of like putting them in there is definitely a lot quicker. But I guess it’s more like what’s being automated more than anything. The set up a little bit, but it’s more the day to day optimization of the campaigns.

Arlen Robinson:
I see

Jessie:
You’re just making fewer changes on a day to day basis.

Arlen Robinson:
Okay.

Jessie:
And actually, I saw a quote from a friend of mine, Barry Hart, and he was saying how, you know, a lot of times he audits accounts and we see this too. And we’re the agency or the media buyers trying to justify their presence by making lots of changes.

Arlen Robinson:
Yeah.

Jessie:
And by doing that, you’re actually messing with the algorithm and not allowing it to do what it needs to do.

Arlen Robinson:
Okay.

Jessie:
So we have to kind of like ignore that desire to wanna kind of mess with stuff to fix it up and actually allow the algorithm to. do its job. It’s got more data than us. It’s got more information and it’s able to find the best performance if you let it.

Arlen Robinson:
Yeah, I see. Yeah, you’re right. Because you can, even if you’re not an agency, of course, like you said, a lot of agencies will have a tendency to try to keep doing stuff because they got to justify their costs and everything that they’re charging these brands.

Jessie:
Mm-hmm

Arlen Robinson:
But at the same time, a digital marketer that’s responsible for these campaigns, the same type of thing, they’re getting paid and they’re like, they can’t just sit back and just let it run. run to town, you do have to do some things there, but I do see what you’re saying where you do have to give it a chance, let the algorithm do what it has to do, then analyze. And then of course, there’s still the component of doing some testing, like A-B testing. And actually speaking of A-B testing, how would that come into play if you’re creating multiple campaigns and you’re trying to see which outperforms the best? Where does the… advantage plus kind of fit into that type of scenario.

Jessie:
Yeah. So in terms of testing ads, like I think in recent years, we’ve moved away from manually AB testing in the sense of we no longer would take ad A and give it a set budget of a hundred dollars and add B and give it a set budget, a hundred dollars and run them exactly the same for the full course of the test. Like you would in a more traditional scientific experiment because because of the way the algorithm works and it’s actually optimizing in real time, you can never have like a true A-B test because add A has kind of, a certain people are reacting to it. So Facebook’s gonna start showing it to more people like that. And it’s in real time adjusting the whole way it’s being optimized for you. So you’re not really able to do a controlled A-B test that’s kind of a random test because the algorithm’s kind of messing with it the whole time. So what we have moved towards more now is like giving the algorithm enough content and enough information so that it can then get you the best result possible. So the algorithm itself is employing kind of scientific A-B testing. So for instance, it would show your ad to 500 people over here and 500 people over here and then decide which of those two 500 people are the best type of people to show your ad to. And I’m simplifying it and I don’t actually know if the number is 500, but it is doing real time testing through it all the time. So what you need to do is give it enough content and give it enough data points to work with so it can do that. So if you only gave it one ad, it can’t do what it wants to do, which is test different ads on different people.

Arlen Robinson:
Yeah, yeah.

Jessie:
So we typically, even before Advantage Plus, we would typically give an ad set three, maybe four ads, and then the algorithm will go and find the… the people, the combination of people and ads that works best and to get you the result you want. Now that we’ve got Advantage+, it’s doing that at a larger scale. So you’re giving it 10 pieces of content or 20 pieces of content, and it’s going out and doing those kind of like micro tests and then using that information to optimize and show the ad to the right people. So I’m simplifying it, but because no one knows exactly how the algorithm works, we can only guess,

Arlen Robinson:
Right.

Jessie:
but essentially, I guess machine learning has taken over really simplified manual AB tests is what, you know, is what I would say.

Arlen Robinson:
Gotcha, gotcha. Well,

Jessie:
Yeah.

Arlen Robinson:
that makes sense. And thanks for that breakdown. Now from, you know, you’ve been working with this for quite a while with, you know, with your own company and with the brands that you’re working with. Have you seen any specific industries or sectors where Advantage Plus has been particularly effective?

Jessie:
Yeah, I mean, I know for a fact, I work in primarily e-commerce and it’s, it’s amazing for e-commerce, like a hundred percent. That’s probably the best. Well, actually, I don’t know, because I don’t know having, I haven’t talked to people from, you know, lead generation parts of the parts of the world, um, other types of audiences. So, um, so yeah, but I can tell you that advantage. Sorry about this. Can you hear that?

Arlen Robinson:
No, it’s fine. You can

Jessie:
Yeah.

Arlen Robinson:
go through.

Jessie:
Okay. just give me two secs. I’m so sorry about that.

Arlen Robinson:
problem.

Jessie:
His dad’s supposed to be looking after him, but yeah.

Arlen Robinson:
Oh, gotcha.

Jessie:
Right, so should we just step back a couple of, now where were we?

Arlen Robinson:
Yes, so I was asking you regarding the, what sectors, of course you mentioned e-commerce, was there any other sectors that you guys have seen that have been really effective using this?

Jessie:
Yeah, so definitely ecommerce it works super well for and that’s where we’ve seen a lot of great results. I would say as well, any sector where you’ve got a fairly high volume of conversions coming through. So the algorithm needs a lot of data. So if you’ve got a very high ticket product, for instance, where it’s a very long consideration window, and you need to nurture them for a long time, then advantage plus probably won’t work as well because it won’t have enough data. So Advantage Plus definitely needs enough spend and enough data to go through. So I haven’t tested it myself. So lead generation tends to have lots of conversions and lots of data so that I imagine that would work well. Um, but where it’s like, you know, very high ticket or very, um, slow conversion or not a lot of conversion data in your account, it’s probably not going to work as well, that would be my guess, but yeah, e-commerce all the way.

Arlen Robinson:
Okay, gotcha, gotcha. Well, that sounds good. That’s definitely good to know. Well, as we get ready to wrap things up, I wanted to see, could you actually, from your experience, share some examples of businesses that have successfully leveraged the Vantage Plus shopping campaigns to boost their sales and kind of what were some specific things they did and some takeaways that we can get from that.

Jessie:
Yeah, sure. So a lot of our client, well, all of our clients are using it to some extent that accounts where we’ve seen the best results with advantage plus, probably ones where we have a large catalog of products. So fashion brands, for instance, that have, you know, lots of fashion items are available on their website, and we’re able to share a catalog with advantage plus. So So there’s a data feed coming from the website, using Shopify that feeds into Advantage Plus. And then that seems to be a really effective business type where Advantage Plus works really, really well. So we’ve been able to successfully scale up accounts and scale up the spend at a profitable KPI for a large number of our clients, but specifically, Some of the best examples have been fashion, yeah.

Arlen Robinson:
Okay, okay, good. Yeah, that’s, that’s awesome. That’s really good to know. You know, it’s just one of the things that I’ve seen in dealing with, with Metta and their whole kind of ad system. And what I always tell the e-commerce businesses is, you know, one of the things that I guess you have to kind of fight, and we talked about this earlier is, you know, they do make it pretty easy to kind of get in there, activate these things. You know, if you said upload your creatives and get it going. And so, You do always have that kind of tendency to take your foot off the gas, so to speak, and then just kind of step back, let them kind of control things. But you do still have to monitor things. You still have to be heavily involved. You have to be able to pivot when needed. And, you know, if it’s not performing, obviously that’s kind of a good point where, you know, you may have to shift some things.

Jessie:
Absolutely. Yeah. And Advantage Plus doesn’t necessarily work for all accounts, but I would say if you’re giving it a test, then make sure you give it enough time. So give it a couple of weeks

Arlen Robinson:
Okay.

Jessie:
where you’re running it and you’re giving it enough budget before you say, well, this didn’t work for us and make sure again, you’ve like got enough budget on it. You’ve got enough creative in there and that you’re kind of giving it the best possibility of like being successful before you throw the baby out with the bath water.

Arlen Robinson:
Gotcha. Well, that’s good to know. Yeah. Really good to know that you do have to give it some time. It may, you may not see some instant results. So if you, after a few weeks, you didn’t want to kind of start to analyze

Jessie:
Yeah.

Arlen Robinson:
everything.

Jessie:
Yes, absolutely.

Arlen Robinson:
Okay, great. Well, that’s been an awesome conversation, Jesse. I’ve definitely learned a lot about, you know, Meta’s Advantage Plus campaigns. And so, you know, I’ve definitely be able to kind of enlighten my, anybody that I’m talking to that’s in the e-commerce space. And I know all of our listeners and viewers are going to get a lot out of this. conversation as well. 

Jessie:
Yeah.

Arlen Robinson:
But to close things out, I always like to switch gears a little bit just so our audience can get to know you a little bit better. If you don’t mind sharing one closing fun fact about yourself that you think we’d be interested to know.

Jessie:
Yeah, sure. So I am an avid snowboarder. I live, I actually moved from London to where I live now in New Zealand, where I live in a mountain town so I can go skiing and snowboarding every week. And I represented my university at snowboarding. So there you go.

Arlen Robinson:
Wow. Okay, that’s some awesome stuff. Yeah, before we recording, I was telling you, I had went skiing for the first time in a long time. I hadn’t been skiing in several years and I went to Park City, Utah. I’m a skier, I’m not a snowboarder. I know there’s a kind of a little rivalry sometimes on the mountain between skiers and

Jessie:
No,

Arlen Robinson:
snowboarders. Okay,

Jessie:
I got lots of skier friends, my son skis, so yeah.

Arlen Robinson:
yeah, that’s awesome. Um, yeah, I’m really jealous that you’re, you’re able to, you’re able to take advantage so much because you’re right there in a mountain town. That, I mean, that’s one thing that I can do to kind of keep my skills up. I’m lucky to go once a year because I live in Florida and of course there’s no snow

Jessie:
Wow,

Arlen Robinson:
here.

Jessie:
no

Arlen Robinson:
Oh yeah.

Jessie:
snow.

Arlen Robinson:
I either have to head North or West or, you know, East in the winter time. But, uh, you know,

Jessie:

Yeah.

Arlen Robinson:
uh, I’m definitely trying to get back into it because it, it is a lot of fun skiing and snow.

Jessie:
Yeah.

Arlen Robinson:
Well, that’s awesome, Jesse. Well, thank you for sharing that. I really appreciate that. And lastly, before we do let you go, if our listeners or viewers wanna reach out to you and pick your brain anymore about Meta’s Advantage Plus, what is the best way for them to do it?

Jessie:
Yeah, sure. Well, I’ve actually put together a advantage plus guide that I can share with anyone. So just email me on hello at Web topia.co. So not.com.co. And that’s Web topia. So W E B T O P I A. And I will send that guide right over to you. But apart from that, follow me on LinkedIn is probably the place I’m most active. So you can search my name, Jessie Healy, and I’m over there on LinkedIn. I’m also on Twitter as well. And I’m starting to grow a little following there too, but hope to see you on the social media.

Arlen Robinson:
All right, awesome. Well, thank you for sharing that. I will definitely have those social contacts in our show notes, the link to your website. I definitely encourage people to reach out to you and connect with you, you know, and see if you’d be able to help them out.

Jessie:
Perfect.

Arlen Robinson:
Okay, Jesse, well, this has been awesome talking to you. We really appreciate having you on the e-commerce marketing podcast.

Jessie:
Thank you for having me.

Podcast Guest Info

Jessie Healy
Founder of Webtopia