How to protect your Facebook Ads Account from Getting Hacked, Hi-Jacked or Banned with Dennis Yu

Welcome, everybody. Thank you for joining us on today’s special session, we’re gonna be talking all about really a very important topic, which is your your Facebook profile and your Facebook ads account. And now working with with hundreds of digital marketing agencies across the country, and some of them doing Facebook ads, some of them not. It’s just, it’s massively important. If for some reason your Facebook ads account gets flagged or it gets banned, it can really impact your clients. It can impact your own personal profile, which gives you access to Facebook groups and the ability to communicate. And I’ve had a couple of our members reach out saying they got completely locked out of Facebook so they can’t use it at all, which is terrible. And they’ve got to create another bogus account to try and use Facebook. And I’ve had others that are saying, Look, your ads account got shut down and they’re totally stuck and I didn’t really have the answers right. I don’t know what Do I can’t like, plug you magically into someone at Facebook to help solve your problems. And so I was like, who would be the best in the world at understanding how Facebook works at understanding how to really best address this stuff. And I really couldn’t think of anybody better in the entire world than Dennis you. And so I reached out and he was gracious enough to be gracious enough to say, yeah, he’d be glad to come on, and kind of unpack what he thinks the best practices are and what you can do to prevent yourself from being hacked or blocked and or safeguard yourself. So it doesn’t even happen at some point in the future. So without further ado, Dennis, thank you so much for for joining us today.

Thank you, Josh. So I want to preface before we get started going to the details. One is if your ad account gets banned, do not contact me. I have thousands and that literally thousands of people hitting me up saying hey, can you submit a note to Facebook or can you call it Facebook and you know, have them look at my account or for I would love to help, but I’m just not able to. And not because we don’t want to and not because we don’t have time. But Facebook won’t allow us is back in the day maybe when this first. The first time I got banned was in 2007 13 years ago. And I used to be able to make requests internally. And they would honor that. And I did it for some big companies like pizza hut had a problem with this, right? Because they had one rogue person on their account. And I had to and it would the agency was a well known agency that talks about Facebook ads. And I said, well, you’re talking all about Facebook ads should be able to help yourself, right? You’ve written all these books and whatnot, spoken to the big conferences and other friends are like, just help him out. Right? And I did. But I’ve done it so many times that Facebook won’t allow it anymore. And it has to be on your own account. You have to be a client and I’ll explain more about that detail. But yeah, number one is don’t reach out to me. If you need help with your Facebook ads, right if it got banned,

and I can only imagine how how inundated you get with those those types of messages.

And to this is something that you’ll hear from everyone else that’s written an article about what happens when your Facebook ad get banned or your user level good story, your your, like your account gets banned or your ads get disapproved or whatnot, is read the Facebook terms, right, the ad terms show exactly what the issues are. And most of the time, the advertiser whether it’s someone on your team, or even the client is doing something that got you in trouble. In the last six months, there have been a lot of unfair bans because of the automation that Facebook has. And Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook CEO, has said over the last few years that they don’t want to hire thousands and thousands of people to manually do accounting Management, or to work inside the policy team, which is ultimately what controls when ads get banned. So they want to do it through automation. And they believe that robots will be able to do a faster, better and more consistent job. So that means it’s very difficult, and increasingly will be difficult to contact someone for an appeal. If we know that that’s the case, then most of what we have to do is from a prevention standpoint, so that none of this stuff happens to us. And because of that, and we’ll go through a little bit later what the rules are what happens, you know, what do you need to do exactly step by step so that you don’t get banned? And then if you do get banned, what do you need to do step by step? We’ll cover that but more important, I believe, because I’ve been banned many times, and we’ve helped other people get out of a sticky mess several hundred times over the last 13 years. I want you to understand first, what does it look like from Facebook’s point of view? If you understand how Facebook is approaching this, where they’re running this ecosystem, and all these people are running ads, and they’re trying to figure out who’s guilty and who is bad. And what are the rules? If you’re a Facebook, what kinds of rules would you put in place? How would you manage these teams? How would you get around? Can you imagine getting literally millions of requests per day, from people where they can’t log into account? their ads got banned? They, you know, whatever, they lost control of their page, their website got hacked, right? Can you imagine what that must be like? And I’m not saying let’s have empathy for Facebook, because they’re a trillion dollar company or whatnot. Right? I just want you to understand from a policy standpoint, how they might go around, go about trying to protect themselves so that you realize that you are guilty until proven innocent, not because you’re not a good person or because they’re greedy and just wants they want to ban everybody or not because of anything personal But because there are millions of spammers out there trying to take advantage of the system, I want you to understand what that is. I’m going to tell you some stories from my direct personal experience. And I think you’ll start to appreciate the magnitude of what Facebook is trying to do. Now, this is not, not me defending Facebook or trying to say, you know, you’re an idiot for not knowing the terms or you should have an amazing sympathy because they have such a difficult problem. I just want you to understand from a strategic standpoint, because when you understand this, this will help you not only with ads, in terms of like not getting banned, but this will help you on the performance side to do better. Is that a fair deal? Do you guys find that valuable?

Our percent, absolutely, that’d be amazing.

When Facebook first opened up their ads platform in 2012 13 years ago, I was one of the very first advertisers. And this is true even for fliers, which is the self serve platform that allowed us to only run little banners. ads that were 50 cent cpms. And then they moved to a platform where you could actually run ads that had text and had targeting. And as you saw, gradually had more features, as you know, the current modern day Facebook ad system. I had the very first rep that Facebook ever had. And there were only three or four of us that were running ads on Facebook. And I think was her name. No, it wasn’t Molly shoot, I forgot her name now. But she was the one rep. And anytime we ran ads, we would ping her and say, and it was me and two other guys on my team because I I thought, Hey, this is a really cool thing to go after. This could be a great opportunity. And of course you see what it is now. And we would get our ads pre approved. Because we didn’t want anyone to get mad. Now. Remember, this is when Facebook first started their ad program. There was no automation on what was happening. It was just this one girl. She was the one who was Proving our ads. And she wanted to expand what was going on. So she said, we’ll give you a whitelisted account. And why? Because she knew that we were well known for PPC. Because I ran the analytics at Yahoo. And I was the PPC guy, you know, all the stuff around? How do you run Google AdWords? And I’ve given a lot of talks on what’s the viewpoint from the search engine to be able to, like, in the same way, we’re talking about Facebook? What’s the view from the search engine that would cause you to get in trouble for doing something blackhat from an SEO standpoint, right. And we listed all the things that people try to do that would get themselves in trouble and how the sandbox work and you know, resubmission, and, you know, Google Webmaster Tools, you know, which is now called Search Console, all the different tricks there, which should be another session, how to understand things from the search engine standpoint. And she gave us a whitelist account. And to my knowledge, this is the only whitelisted account that’s ever occurred in the history of it. Wow, you guys. You guys know what a whitelisted account is? in the chat, guys, what is what is a whitelisted account? And why is that important?

Don says Yes, he does hold the rest of you guys. Okay? It means there’s no rule says Thomas potentially.

Right? It means we can.

Yeah, odds ads are automatically approved. That’s right. And what we did with the whitelist and I’ll just, huh? I will admit something here that only a one time I’ve never said before. You’ve never heard me say it. I’m never gonna say it again. But because I trust Josh, I’m going to tell you,

this is publicly This is publicly accessible. So

yeah, okay, well, then I’ll I’ll tighten up what I’m going to say here. We were running ads for $50,000 a day against dating sites on cheater sites on Viagra on all that kind of stuff because we had a whitelisted account because one of the guys on our team and I won’t name him said, Hey, we have a whitelisted account, let’s just run whatever we can until we get shut down. And I said, Guys don’t do that. No, but it’s so much profit we’re making $25,000 a day in profit, you know, spending 50 and making making 25 on profit on top of that. I said no. And back then Facebook only had a couple simple rules and mostly ads back then if you remember where our dating sites so we were back then the rule was you could only run dating ads to people that had specified what their preference was. And you know, their male seeking female or know their gender. But we we were running ads against people who were married, which is a no no. And running ads where they didn’t say what their marital status was. Because he could only be single if you guys remember. Which was only maybe 50% of the population so the other 50% was not allowed to be targeted by anyone else. And because we were running ads against a target, no one else was allowed to target. The competition was lower. And our average CPM was maybe 20 cents to 25 cents, super low, right? Of course, today’s average cpms are eight to $10 and all that back then you can remember what it was. And I told her guy or guys, I said, Hey, there, there’s no way we’re going to be able to continue this we’re going to get banned. And sure enough, two months later, we got banned. We made a couple million dollars. And the other guys in the team, they ended up actually breaking off from our company. Because they long story short, they basically just took all the money that we that we made on it right? And I wasn’t watching carefully. And of course Facebook got mad at us and therefore no one could ever have a whitelisted account in the history of Facebook after we had the very first one. So we blew it for everyone else you blow

you blow it for you blew it for all of us, Dennis

Yeah. And Zuckerberg got mad at me. And I had lunch with Zuckerberg. And we talked about this. And he said, the amount of effort that we’re putting into enforcement on the system and creating rules to protect against people like you really makes me sad, because that back then they had, I think, eight engineers on the Facebook ads team. And he said that, that those were eight engineers that we could have been using towards building better features, and building optimization and building a smarter system. But instead, we’re having to use these efforts to police and create rules against perpetrators I get right. I thought, yeah, you’re right. You’re right. I didn’t want to do that. But a couple guys on our team got greedy. And they spun up all these different accounts that ran ads that clearly pissed off users and gave them a bad experience, which then caused thousands of phone calls per day to come into Facebook’s call center and If you can imagine, he told me there are thousands of calls that were coming in. For every call that they got, there were probably 100 calls that he didn’t get because Facebook buries the phone number, it’s very hard to find a phone number to contact Facebook. Right? And every time there was a situation like what we did, Facebook would add more rules, right? And you you guys have probably heard for every sign there’s a story right? every time, every time something happens, they got to create another rule around it. And now that’s why you have this Byzantine, you know, add Terms of Service, but actually, if you go read the terms, it’s in plain English, it is easy to understand and it’s something that you should review every month, if not more often. Now, let me tell you why whitelisting is important here. When people start up new ad accounts. Most ad accounts are being started up by people that don’t know any better like small businesses and spammers. You can buy a seasoned Facebook account tied to a credit card that’s not been used before for about $50 on the black market. That means the spammers out there are setting up a new ad account. Maybe they’re using phishing techniques to be able to get accounts. That’s something that happens all the time. And they run as many ads as they can, of course, the limit is going to be low. So there’s a progression. Facebook’s put in place this rule to not allow spammers to get very far when they spin up new ad accounts. And I want to explain how this process works. So you don’t get inadvertently hammered if you do the same things. So remember, look at it from Facebook’s point of view. There are tons of ad accounts being spun up. Some of them you know, are nefarious, and these people are creating new profiles. They’re doing it on new computers, they’re using new credit cards. They’re making sure it’s from another IP address. They’re making sure it’s from a new business manager that’s not tied to another account, right. They’re trying to do everything to make it look like it’s not tied to any of the other accounts they’ve already gotten. Shut down. They’re running to a slightly different landing page with a different URL. Maybe they go so far as to have it on another domain. Or like I said, on another computer, I saw somebody who’s a pundit in our space saying, Yeah, if you get banned, you need to buy a brand new laptop from Best Buy and set it up and put a sticker on it so that it’s for Josh Nelson only, or, you know, whatever it is, I mean, yes, if you’re in the space and doing something that’s going to get you in trouble, I suppose that way. That’s what you do. Because you’re trying to fool Facebook into thinking it’s a different advertiser, right? The same has been true on search engines, where if you get banned on Google, Google is smart enough to be able to aggressively match and say, Oh, well, that’s Jay Berkowitz over here, that’s Jay Berkowitz over here, because we’re matching on the the email addresses being used. The IP address, the MAC address, the things related to the browser, like the user agent like they’re trying to do all the the credit card the address, right They’re trying to use all these different factors to say is this the same person who was spamming before and just spun up a new account? So why is that valuable for us? Or how’s that important? Well, if you have multiple people in your business manager, and one of them does something bad, that could cascade and auto ban everyone else inside your business manager, including all the accounts inside your business manager. So the bigger your agency gets, the more important is to have tight policy. So your people aren’t doing any nefarious things. And I know I know Jay Berkowitz is not a spammer. I was just saying this just you know, I just like to use people’s names just for fun, right quickly

is like No, I’m not.

So you’re, as you are demonstrating that you are a good citizen and you are practicing good behavior, you are getting progressively whitelisted. What that means is that initially when you start there’s a lot of limits in terms of what you can spend. There’s limits And how far your ads go. There’s there’s limits. And they basically assume that anything you initially do is really, really suspect. And as you start to demonstrate good behavior, they would, well, they don’t show you this number anymore, but they would show us a relevant score. Right? You guys remember relevant score. Now it’s broken out into three components. Let me explain why that’s important. So they they within the same thing that Google did, okay, so if you understand Google quality score, then Facebook relevance score is the same thing. So as your ads have high CTR, and low negative feedback, you guys know this four kinds of negative feedback, hide post hide all posts, um, unlike page, and what’s the fourth one? Anyway, there’s four. There’s four things that you can, you can click on that require at least two clicks to when you don’t like an ad, right, report spam. That was the fourth one. If there’s a high proportion of that, that will send not only that app But send your account into a queue for manual review. And now they’re doing it automatically the majority of the bands out there are occurring automatically. And it’s done on a point based system. So it’s not that there’s a certain number of disapprovals that are going to get you in trouble. It’s not that. And the reason why is that, that any particular thing you do has a certain kind of weighting to it, right? So if, if you have 20 ads that are all disapproved, because you use split testing, or you just decided they’re using some automation tool, even if your white hat you’re using like a Moran or a Ken shoe, and you spend up lots of ads, that will hurt you a little bit, but not as bad as a lot of negative feedback, running at higher volume, right. So as you as you demonstrate better behavior. They will loosen up how much scrutiny the algorithm has on you. If you have an ad account that isn’t spending as much that hasn’t been around as long, then you’re more likely to get penalized. Doesn’t seem crazy. But it’s that the system is skewed towards the bigger guy. So if you run a big brand agency, and you have some big brands and you and I’ve seen it, you know, like BMW has run some ads that clearly are against the ads to us, they’re more likely to not get banned. And they also are able to talk to their account rep or the partner level manager to be able to get things fixed. They can even get their ads whitelisted, too, which means they won’t go through certain ads, you can submit and they won’t go through the ad disapproved. They can’t get disapproved because some rep internally has flagged that ad is saying, okay, it’s okay. So in the really big accounts, and some of you guys might run some big accounts, you know that you can submit ads to your rep in advance to get their feedback on it and they can put a note in the account so the system’s going to bypass. Isn’t that cool? Have you guys do you guys know about that? Do we have some people here who are big enough that you know what that is? probably have a couple people here

on the chat guys if you’re if you’re familiar and if you’re tapping into that.

So if you’re a small guy, and you don’t have a real Facebook rep and I don’t mean a Facebook marketing expert, okay, you guys know that you get those auto emails like oh, I’m a Facebook marketing expert. I would love to sit down and you know, I have no experience running ads and I want to try to get you to spend more money and having a checklist of all the things I’m trying to get you to use but which is basically using all the different products and my bonuses based on getting you to use all the products that the global sales team the global marketing word orbiter. Yeah, GSO global sales organization. That’s their, they have 6000 salespeople now wants to get you to do Oh, by the way, I have the training that new Facebook ad reps get if you guys are interested in that. I’m happy to share that that’s a whole nother thing. You want to know how Facebook transit their people. One of my friends sent me all his training materials

Yeah. There’s a bunch of yeses flying in that they definitely do want that.

So we should we should do a blog post together on that or do another webinar on that one. I have lots of stories to tell you

guys I just want to check in with everybody who could be better to kind of share this with you guys then Dennis right. He was one of the first advertisers he was the first whitelisted sounds like he personally has met lunch with with Zuckerberg. I think we’re in good hands with like how to properly understand how this works and how to protect ourselves give me a yes or agreed if that’s the sense you’re getting at this moment in time as well. Yeah, heck yes. No doubt hundred percent. Yes. Yes. Yes. Love the stories. Dennis. Thanks for sharing.

And if you’re tuning in now and you didn’t catch what I was saying before, we are covering Facebook from the standpoint of if your Facebook trying to spot the people who are bad. We will cover some of the rules a little bit later. But you can see the post that Molly Pittman who works for Right now as written on smart marketer, you can see the post that I wrote on what do you do if you get banned on how to avoid being banned, detailed post, and there’s a lot of people that have written articles on this topic because it’s a, it’s a topic of great pain, especially the last few months, a lot of people are getting banned. I don’t want to cover lots and lots of detail about that if you guys do want to cover it, we can. But I want to cover it from the strategy standpoint, to talk about the pieces that other people don’t understand. Just like with SEO, instead of teaching SEO techniques and talking about the latest tools and the changes to the algorithm, I want to talk about the strategy of what the search engine sees because I worked at the search engine 20 years ago, my job was to find people are because these all basically assume everyone’s a criminal. Everyone’s trying to trick us. So we had to put in place rules to identify when people are tricking us, and that’s what Facebook’s trying to do put in place rules to find when people are trying to trick them. And because there’s so many spammers out there, unfortunately, if you do something that looks like What a spammer would do, they’re going to label you as a spammer. And it’s going to be very hard to get out of Facebook Jail. When you get into Facebook Jail, and anyone here you guys can attest to that. Right? If you get banned. Well now because of the ability to do an appeal, you know, maybe 50% of time you can get out I think Molly says she’s able to get folks out 70% of the time, maybe because their audience is more white hat. I don’t know. Let’s see what is Dean say please cover what you do when your hat. Everyone of mine on Facebook. Okay, so we’ll talk about what happens when you’re hacked and how you’re hacked and phishing. Josh was lunch as awkward as the government hearings. Yeah, it was it was pretty awkward. But I said, I said this up look. I know for accounts like ours, that you have to personally shut them down. Like you have to personally give people approval. Now this is way back in the day. This is this is before they became this gigantic, gigantic company, and people didn’t really know who Zuckerberg was. So I knew that They didn’t they only had a few people. They had that one girl who was the ad account. She was the Facebook she was Facebook ad sales. This one girl wasn’t Molly, what’s her name? I can’t remember her name. Now. I’ve met with her many times, I would go there and meet with her unnecessarily. Just because I wanted to have lunch in Palo Alto. This is way before they move to the Menlo Park headquarters. That 13 buildings in Palo Alto, if you guys remember, right, that the main one that was the old was the old HP headquarters. It was not headquarters, but it was on there wasn’t Sand Hill Road paceville at the very end, anyway, whatever. I’m getting old. I’m forgetting all that kind of stuff. Okay. So let me go back to where it was. So as you start to behave better as you start to spend more as you get higher relevant scores. As you get less negative feedback. Facebook does a progressive whitelist meaning that they gradually open up your ability to spend more your ads get approved faster, they’re less likely to go into The queue for, though you know, the bot is less likely to disapprove you. And you’re less likely to have manual review as well. Right? So there’s certain things you need to do, like have high engagement, don’t run conversion against cold audiences, if it’s a new ad account, don’t have lots of people in your business manager that you’re not really sure that are not well trained. Don’t take on clients that do anything sketch, because if their thing gets shut down, it could cascade into shutting everything you have down. First use a user, then everything in that account gets shut down, then all the accounts get shut down, including all the users that you have get shut down. You guys know that Facebook’s very clear about these rules where you have one account, one ad account per page. Did you know that

one account per client and sometimes the client has multiple pages, you need to have multiple ad accounts. Not because you’re trying to spam Facebook, but because They’re isolating that the the relevant score weightings against that ad account and the content that’s being run. also tied to the account. So if if a spammer is running against a particular page, you know, buy viagra.com. And it doesn’t have to be Viagra, it can be like whatever, right? And there’s one ad account that’s running a certain kind of copy to that, that that calculates a relevant score. And if you run that same copy to that landing page from a different account, it’s going to inherit the relevant score, not because it’s tied to the ad account, but because it’s that content. It’s those ads that are tied to that landing page. If you look at how relevance and quality score is captured at the intersection of content and targeting, right, so there it that’s how they can assign a relevant score on ads that are from a brand new ad account, because they’re able to look at the history of anyone Who’s used that copy? or copy that similar against that audience to that particular landing page? So landing pages and domains, which are just combinations of landing pages do accrue a quality score irrelevant score. Does that make sense? So you must choose the right clients, you choose the wrong client, you will get hammered and it will cascade this has happened to us too recently, where we had one of our VA s, we have a lot of VA s, okay, one of our VA s fell for a phishing scam. And it was some as like something where you click on this and we’ll give you $50 and Bill Gates will give you $100 if you do this one thing or give us access to your ads account, and all we want to do is be able to run ads from it and you know, we’ll pay you $100 per day like you guys have seen different variations of this. There’s other ones where they send you an email and says warning. Facebook needs to verify your account because you know there’s been unauthorized activity. So it actually looks like a legitimate message from Facebook, right because Facebook sends out those kinds messages. So click here to re enter your password to make sure that, you know, we could validate that it’s you. And they click on it, of course, you know, it looks like it’s Facebook and then the URL says facebook.com, blah, blah, blah, but that’s a subdomain. Because you can do Facebook, blah, blah blah.com, slash whatever it is. Here, I’ll tell you a trick that we used a long time ago, which is kind of tricky, but I don’t think it works anymore. So you remember when, when the where, before modern day browsers when you looked up in the URL bar that was separate from search and so you go if you saw the, the URL, like name, a name a brand, Josh that you think is reputable. bmw, bmw, okay, so if you’re searching for BMW parts or buying a new BMW, and you click on an ad and it goes to BMW comm, then you might think like, Wow, that’s pretty legit, right? Because I’m getting

you feel you feel feel like you’re safe in that moment.

But what if the URL was bmw.com? dash bmw.com? what’s the what’s the root URL? bmw.com dash bmw.com. I want you guys to type in the chat what the URL what the domain is? And what’s the sub domain? Think about this just for a minute. Because I want you to think from the standpoint of a spammer and from Facebook to understand what they’re looking for.

It’s the Yeah, all

right, is correct. It’s calm, dash bmw.com. And so BMW is a sub domain, right? BMW is a sub domain.com dash bmw.com. But then what what does the user think it is?

A part of that main site? Yeah.

Yeah. Because they think now you and I know that we all know that because we do this professionally. But remember, Facebook is doing this thing on behalf of I think there’s 7 million advertisers Now, and however many 1.3 billion 1.4 billion users, and I remember working with john Faulkner, who, at that time was in charge of Facebook local, right? So they are trying to do all these local things. Of course, Josh and I, we care very much about local. And we built a number of templates. So we built templates, for landing pages for Facebook ads, for realtors, for chiropractors for all these other areas. And I said, Hey, you know, we’ve already got a whole bunch of ads. So if you’re a chiropractor, you don’t have to make all your new ads. In fact, here’s the ads. And here’s the landing pages. Why don’t we just go ahead and build that into the ads tool? Right? Certainly makes a lot of sense. And he said, Yep, these are great ads. Well, you’ve done this for lots of companies. This is fantastic. We would love to do it. But we have lots and lots of advertisers. And we’ve learned that it isn’t super, super simple as an one click buttons simple, then we just can’t have in the platform because people get confused and later Kim, who sold wordstream, and built the biggest PPC agency on the planet with 2% of Google’s ad spend, and 1% of Facebook’s ad spend said the same thing. We were releasing features for PPC management in our tool. And he said, Dennis, I would never include that. And I’ve never claimed that feature and wordstream because our user base is so sophisticated that you know, if we confuse any said, we were dinner one time, he said, if, if it’s more than 5% of our user base, it gets confused by that feature, then we don’t want to have that. Right. So think about Facebook releasing features on how to build ads. They can’t build anything that would not work for general populations. Not all of us here were pros. But think from Facebook standpoint, they have to release something that grandma who just built a Facebook page and now is able to boost the post will be able to understand and it’s simple enough yet. There’s enough options in there that the pro people like all of us can still succeed. So there’s so many people that are getting banned because they don’t know the TLS like how many Have you guys have seen your ads get? Get disapproved, because you had the word you like, Do you suffer from headaches? You can’t say that because you’re pointing something out, or you’re promoting a product that’s not allowed. Or you are but you think it is because somehow it’s it’s a guide on a product that’s not allowed. So it’s a guide to how to make money on gambling, or CBD or medical marijuana or like, whatever, like, just don’t do some shirts, you know, five ways to, to, you know, find the right website that sells vapes, you know, like, just, just don’t do don’t do anything like that could that could just that’s like, tie, like riding on the line. I have a ton of CBD companies that reach out to me saying, Oh, no, we’re like, we read the TLS. And we’re completely in compliance. And I look at that, and I’m like, you’re trying to, you know, yeah, your landing page is compliant. Yes, your ads are compliant. But did you know that Facebook will look at your domain and crawl the other pages on your domain and if there’s any Any kind of claim or something that’s non compliant, even though you’re not running ads to that page, they will shut you down for that. Do any of you guys have medical clients or have anything to do with weight loss or cosmetic right? The beauty guys, right? dentists, and this is coming in some spots and doctors and dentists. And there’s a before and after. Now you guys know in the ad to us, you cannot have before and afters, right? In fact, Facebook’s AI is spotting that automatically in the ads and will kick it out for disapproval. But some of you are running to a landing page that then if you click through to other pages on that site have before and after pictures. So there’s, there’s one guy who wanted he was spending a couple thousand bucks a day and he’s doing pretty well and I will name him he’s a well known fitness personality. And this is how you can overcome injury and be able to get fit again and then you see a picture of him where you know he was fat. And then here’s a picture of him where he’s like super fit and like Muscle magazine kind of stuff. And he said, that’s what gets you in trouble. Because you have your whole motivational speaker thing going on, like, you know, back then I was depressed and fat and didn’t know what to do. And now, you know, I’m very sexy and lean, and I look so good, and I’m smiling.

And people, you can do that from stage. But if you try to do that on a website, and you’re running Facebook ads to it, you’re gonna get in trouble. And Facebook won’t tell you why. You guys know that right for ad disapproval. They won’t tell you why. When you get banned, they won’t tell you why. I get this all the time from existing clients. And the people are not client saying, Yeah, Facebook disapproved, and I appealed and they won’t tell me why. They don’t have to tell you why. You they don’t owe it to you to tell you why. You need to know what the rules are because they’re not going to sit down, get with you on the phone and explain now I’m sounding kind of harsh, but I’m just telling you, these are the facts. Okay, Google is a lot better. Google believes in account management. They believe in hiring lots of people. They have a huge office in New York, which is their commitment to working with agencies. Facebook doesn’t believe now. They Facebook does Have a have a New York office and it is nice. But it’s more for the bigger clients, right? I’ve been to Facebook’s New York offices multiple times I’ve written on the wall, I’ve eaten their food. It’s not as good as Menlo Park. But you know, or, um, you know, it’s good. But like I told you before Facebook is they have made it clear that there, they believe that automation loops. So this is driven by Mark, they believe that automation is going to be the key forward because the more ads people are making, the more accounts there are, they can’t arithmetically scale to have more people. Now, you might say, well, Google’s smarter, and they care more about their advertiser and all that. And that might be true. But let me tell you, if your Facebook, yeah, branded Google supports 10 times better than Facebook, which is weird to say. And you could say, well, you know, Google’s been around a lot longer. And they make a lot more money than Facebook, which is true. But there’s one key distinction that I don’t see other people saying and that is think about what happens with Google ads. You know us as a currencies, a lot of it, set it and forget it. And most of its text, which is easy to be able to understand what’s going on. People are making many video based ads. I mean, yes, you can, you know, do GDN and you can run inside YouTube, right run ads there. But Facebook ads are a lot of them are video and the number of ads that people are making on Facebook, they’re treating Facebook. And that includes most of you guys. They’re treating Facebook as a as a publisher, place, right your people are making like how many ads when people are making ads for Google. They make ads in the beginning and then it’s already working because it’s searched driven. That’s still most of Google’s revenue. Facebook doesn’t have search, Facebook, you’re interrupting people. So on Facebook, you know who the person is. You know where they are, you know what they like, but you don’t know when they want to buy. You don’t have the demand intent. Because Google, you have the demand intent, but you don’t know who they are. Right. That’s how you search Social together. So the nature of search is that because you have the demand intent, and you know when they want to buy it, then you only need to make a few ads. So someone, whenever someone types in, you know, plumbing company or broken toilet, emergency plumber, whatever it is, right, you can have an ad that’s right there. And you don’t need a lot of ads. And there’s no issue of ad fatigue or whatever, because it’s demand driven the user, you had to initiate the search. But on Facebook, because you don’t have direct demand intent, and arguably, you could say remarketing is demand intent because someone went to the webpage, and they’ve added so for 24 hours, you know, you bombard them with ads. But because Facebook doesn’t have demand intent, there’s no clear way to easily assess the combination, the intersection of content and targeting. Thus, the calculation of quality score on Google is easy because you know what that person is looking for. And you see, and because they initiated that search, and they come to the landing page or goes to call tracking through Google Voice, whatnot, Google can clearly see what’s going on and award a score. Facebook can’t do that because you’re targeting based on what they like or based on or for your clients you’re running. Like for a chiropractor, you’re targeting everyone in the area and talking about back pain, or coming for $27 final exam or whatnot. They don’t they don’t know the clear intent. So it’s hard to figure out a quality score plus people are cranking out more ads. I forgot the number. Facebook told me how many ads are being created per day, but there’s something ridiculous like 7 million ads per day or so can you imagine like how many people like mechanically how many people would you have to have on your ad ops team if they were to manually review every single ad? So they have people that are that are contractors that don’t work for Facebook, but they work for some company like Accenture that Facebook subcontracts out to and Facebook then pays these people like 12 bucks 15 bucks an hour, and the number of ads that they have to process is something insane. I think they have like three seconds per ad. So it you know, flashes up onto the screen and you’ll see there’s articles like on 20 minutes or whatever everywhere they go behind the scenes into The teams that are looking for things that are reported because it’s spam, or people are getting killed, or it’s, you know, people are writing or racial things like these people, they have the thing, you know, pops up onto the screen and have like three seconds to make a decision, like, is this spammy? Is this bad? Is it whatever. And because they and they have thousands of people that are doing that, but the machine is trying to handle everything before it even gets into the queue for manual review, right? So don’t do anything that’s going to get you in trouble. to even get to that point, because by the time it gets to that human for review, you’re counting on whether in that three seconds, they’re going to be able to make a split decision like Marcus bam, right or just approve, right? That’s just way too risky. Never let it get to that point, you will get you will just by law of large numbers. Get there. And if you make lots and lots of ads, you prop and it’s a new account and you have negative feedback, you’re gonna get banned. Like there’s just even if you did nothing wrong, you’re just going to get banned, because that’s just too many shots and Russian Roulette, right? So one of the things that I used to do, and sometimes I still do, and if any of you guys have done this, let me know. So when we name our accounts and ad sets and ads and things like this, of course, you need to have a naming convention, right? So you know, what, what client it’s for, and what the, you know, what the creative is, and, you know, all all the standard naming convention things, UTM parameters, all that. But we would we found that we could name name the thing, like, we love Facebook ad reps, and put that inside the name of the ad set for the ad, right? When we found that it actually worked, because if it came to a human review, and they would see or some of our guys got clever, and the name of the campaign would be we rely on Facebook ads to be able to pay rent for our kids, or you know, we you know, we have five kids, please don’t disapprove our ads. Like that was the name of the campaign, right? Like, why would we do something like why would our people do something like that when we’re building ad accounts? What do you guys think?

Try be there good graces, right?

Yeah. Because you know that the robot is handling most of it. But if it kicks out to a human, then a human in three seconds has to try to make a decision. Right? And there’s there’s too much information there for them to try to evaluate what’s going on. So by doing things that are nice and same things, by the way, for ad disapprovals, and for you when you do an appeal, right, because you know that when you get when you get banned, there’s the thing will say, oh, would you, you can submit a repeat an appeal. And what most people do when when they click on the appeal button, they wait as long as thanks like, I’ve never done anything wrong. And you guys have been unfair to me, and I spend a lot of money. I’m really important on Facebook. Can you know how many people come to me saying I’m a really big deal? I spend $5,000 a month on Facebook, you know, that’s IRS part they would really care for anything. $5,000 a month on Facebook. Okay, do you I’m sorry, like maybe back in 2012 someone would have listened to you. But no one’s crying any tears and even guys that are spending like Dean, grassy OC and Tony Robbins. Their team came to me a couple months ago because they got banned. Right. And like, yeah, we spent two, two point like $2.3 million last month on our launch, you know, we had Russell Brunson and all this involved. And I said I’m sorry $2 million is not enough. No, but we’re you know, I’m you know, I’m, this is for Dean grassy OC, and Tony Robbins, like these people who are working, you know, processing ads processing ads, they don’t know who Tony Robbins is. all they’re doing is just they have three seconds to just apply the criteria. Is this good? Or is it not good? Is it good is not using constantly pressing red or green, red or green? Right? Can you imagine? So? So all the stuff where you put in like, Yeah, but look at how important I am. And look at how many accounts I have. And I’m friends with so and so. And we’re spending a lot of money or we could be spending a lot of money. You know, us as as an agency, we have these other guys and we’re growing as our agency. Next month, you know, or next year we might even become a big agency that doesn’t do any good. So any kind of attacking any kind of meanness, any kind of promising any kind of well I’m gonna write to the Better Business Bureau about how you guys are and tell everyone about you know, join the line of all the people that are mad at United Airlines for breaking guitars are mad at Verizon or t mobile or Comcast for like being rude to you like, they don’t they really don’t care about stuff like that. So when you do your appeal, make sure that you are courteous. And before you do your appeal, look again at the ad to us to see what is okay and not okay. Josh and I can drop a link to that. Just be sure you’re not a dum dum because if you get in most seriously, when I see people submit the appeal and I go in and look at their ads, you can clearly see like they’re violating us. Yeah, they’re making ridiculous claims that are unsubstantiated. They’re using Before and After Effects. They’re making income claims or whatnot. That’s somewhere on the website, but not on the landing page. They’ve had enough ads that are disapproved. And some sometimes the, the engine will tell you when the ad is I’m not talking about the account being down. When the ads are disapproved, it’ll show what the reason is. And they’re just ignoring it. Because they said, I get this all the time. So make sure that you’re not guilty of this. They’ll say like, Yeah, well, I just resubmitted the ad and it was okay. Well, yeah, it just it just because the ad came through initially and wasn’t banned, and you’re able to run traffic on it doesn’t mean that that ad is okay. No, but I’ve been running that ad for the last month and it’s going great. So you know, how can they possibly disapprove it now? Because of progressive whitelisting, right? Because that ad that is that came through, maybe you have done a good job for that particular client or you have a group of clients, and they just auto approved it. And get, you know, let you spend $5 a day and $10 a day and so forth. That’s why we use the dollar a day technique. By the way, that’s why we do awareness consideration conversion is that we want to build up Good trust score a good quality and relevance ranking, right? We want high engagement, we want low negative feedback, so that we get further along in the whitelisting on a new account. And it’s not just because remarketing against a warm audience you’re selling to a warm audience is better than a cold audience. It’s true, your cpms are better because you’re relevant scores better like all that, like, mechanically, that’s good. And that like, that’s just good marketing, right? The different stages of the funnel, that’s psychologically how people buy. But the other reason is it sets us up for less ad level disapproval, which leads to less account level banning. Does that make sense?

Yeah, so there’s, there’s a reason

Yeah, go ahead.

Practice practically speaking like phase number one. If you’re running ads, or if you’re going to run ads, the very first thing you should do is read those terms of service understand like what’s okay and what’s not okay, because like he said, like 10 times, they’re not going to tell you why your ad was disapproved. They’re not going to tell you why your account got banned. You have to read those rules, understand them and make sure that you’re in compliance. Right. And I think that’s the most basic thing that, you know, don’t be lazy, spend 20 minutes and read it, understand it maybe like, right, Dennis, Would you say that’s kind of the first? Absolutely,

that again, that’ll take care of 80% of the issues that we see out there. The other 20% is going to be things related to your setup, on how you set up your business manager and how you authenticate and the training that people go through making sure you have to factor in your email your comm email, making two factor on as accessing Facebook, making sure all of the people that are working on your accounts, go through proper training, and also read the TLS because if any one person on the client side or on your team does something bad that could wipe out everything that you have, the bigger your agency is right, make sure your processes are in place on which clients you’re willing to accept. If they’re not an active client, kick them out of your business manager like these are all processed things you need to have a multiple have more than one admin on any particular account, whether it’s the page or the ad account. Your business now you have multiple admins, but not 50 admins because then they’ll make it this, like these are all setup things and how you said we should do another training on how you set a business manager. Because if you set up a business manager, right, that’ll take it’s easy to solve problems here before they happen. And the way you set up your business manager, then later where you’re in trouble and you’ve submitted multiple appeals, and now you’ve created a new ad account, but then we use Facebook and associate Josh Nelson here with Josh Nelson here, they got this is a spammer. They got disapproved and you’re trying to make more ad accounts or trying to use a different credit card and you’re a good person, you’re not a spammer, but you’re doing the things that a spammer is doing when they’re just spinning up more ad accounts, right, all using another computer or like, they’re gonna catch you, okay? Like if you think oh, no, I’m gonna do it for my buddy’s house. I’m gonna set up a computer I’ve never used Facebook ads on. I’m going to put it under his name and a different credit card and I they’re going to catch you. So just try to do it the right way. Like these people that like just like when I was doing this at Yahoo, and my job was the Police people that were trying to trick us on SEO. They thought they’re so smart like, oh, Dennis, we’re doing triangular linking. And there’s no way you can catch us because we’re running through a link laundering layer that is private. No one else can I believe me, our team sees right through that you’re like a fat person hiding behind a piece of dental floss like I see you. Okay? And Facebook, their team, they can see it. Don’t, please, please, please don’t try to pretend you’re smarter than Facebook. They will catch you. I promise you. I’ve met with a lot of their engineers, they will catch you. So at this point, I want to change gears and ask you. What do you think about this, what we’re talking about here, which is a strategy if you’re Facebook, and you’re trying to minimize costs, and you have people that are making lots and lots of ads, because that’s the nature of Facebook, and you want to put in place automation and you’re looking for simple rules that will catch people that are doing ridiculous things. You’re doing your best to try to put some humanly readable, easy to understand add to us. You’re putting training out there on how to use business manager your face The blueprint, which arguably, it wasn’t as good as the training they had before, but does that make sense on the strategy like looking at it from Facebook point of view on how progressive whitelisting works, and how you can have enough points until eventually they suspend your driver’s license, basically, right? It Like, do you guys think about that this is, that’s what I want you to understand first, so you’re not constantly off balance and you know, worried about changes that Facebook’s making. And then you’re just never going to get there if you’re worried about these changes and all but I heard that Mollie Pittman said this and Dan Henry said this and Josh Nelson and Dennis, you said this, like, I want you to understand this core piece. This will solve most of your problems. And then I want to talk about two things. One is what exactly do you do step by step. Now, before you get in trouble, and then two is what do you do once your ad account gets shut down? Okay, I want to cover those two parts. But before we do any questions on the strategy here.

I see a lot of a lot of it makes sense makes a lot of sense. Any questions, are we ready to dive into the The technical aspect of this stuff, if you’re excited to hear him one pack this, say, let’s do it or something like that. All right. And by the way, everybody wants to see a training on how to set a business manager correctly. But yeah, they’re ready to dive into those two key things. This is this is great, Dennis, thank you. Thank you for going back to the fundamentals. Right. It’s not just do these type of things. Big smart. This is what Facebook’s trying to do, like, understand the way that they’re processing this. So thanks for leading with that.

Yeah. Thank you guys and understand the fundamentals. So I do technically have some connections inside Facebook that once in a blue moon, I will cash in some chips, because we just really need some help. But any advantage, any perceived advantage you think I have, because I know some people that Facebook is rapidly disappearing, because we’re all slaves to the robot, right? The bot is judging us so we have to abide by the rules. It used to be I can pull strings. It’s not that anymore. So I don’t talk about this topic very often because I don’t want people hitting me up on Hey, my ad account got banned. Can you come? Can you contact me today? Right? So I don’t talk about that is anytime I’ve talked about it I get hundreds of requests from people saying Oh, my, you know, I run this agency or my friend has this ad account or they lost control of their page, they got hacked, and you know, contact Facebook or, and some really bad ones to where one of my friends who was his, his son, well, he’s a general authorities, which is a big position in the Mormon church, and his son had his account that was hacked, and someone then posted all these, like, put his face on, like, nude pictures of other guys and like things like that, and it was just bad and, and he contacted me in the middle of the night and said, Dennis, can you help me because this is just really bad. And you know, he’s a general authority. And um, yeah, hang tight. I’ll get it taken care of next morning. It was fine. Right? In that case, fine, right? Plus, the LDS Business College was a client of ours, we were building their learning management system. So that too, okay, they also weren’t. So they were a client too. So it wasn’t just like it was a friend, it was like, I could go to Facebook and say, Hey, I have this particular issue. I have a business case because it is a client. And here’s what happened. If you could just take care of this one thing I know, it’s not directly related to the ad accounts and all that, but I could use some help here, please. Right. And they’ll, they’ll honor that, but very, very rarely. So I don’t talk about this topic. because too many people just I don’t want to be seen as an expert in what happens when your ad account gets banned. I know the answer, but it’s only you know, go to Mali. That’s why I keep saying the Mollie Pittman, like Molly wrote this great article though. She goes through this step by step piece, right. So if

you didn’t get the message loud and clear, do not personal message or email Dennis expecting him to do anything directly with Facebook on your behalf. He’s sharing his general as generously with us, but he can’t personally deal with everybody’s hacked account or everybody’s personal issues with their Facebook ads accounts. It doesn’t mean

I don’t want to help it quick. Yeah,

I would ask you a quick question, what is your approach or strategy on staff member profile accounts? Do they use their existing personal profiles? And then attach them to our business manager? Or do we create new ones with our company domain name using their email address?

That is a 5050 question. It can go either way. I see a lot of people going both ways on that I am a PR, I believe in the core of what Facebook is, which is one profile per person, right? And Facebook has, and there’s different things you’ll see and how they built their system that ties around the idea of one unique profile for one unique person. And Zuckerberg has said this as well. And I believe that’s carried through and the engineering. But the risk of that is if any of that person if that person on their profile does anything to get that user level account in trouble. It could cascade so that goes back to your hiring procedures. You’ll see some agencies that do eat Calm, or do MLM or things that are in kind of that category that you don’t, by the way, you don’t want to be in that category. But if you do, then my hat’s off to you. And they’ll create separate company profiles. And you log in through that, but then you need a different computer, and you need to, then you’re not going to be as effective because then you have multiple things you have to log into. And yes, Facebook does have some new tools that allows you to switch between, you know, the switcher profiles and things like that. But I’m a fan of let’s just honor their principles. I believe in what Facebook said, I believe in Zuckerberg and what he’s, I believe what he said about building community and all that. And we just need to abide by the rules if we want to play in their system. It’s not what we think. Let’s understand that. That’s why like Twitter is such a haven for spam, because anyone can create 50 different Twitter profiles, right? Facebook allows you to have one profile, and if they catch you with two of them, they might shut you down. And that’s actually a blackhat thing to do, which is to have two of them. You might be like oh no, but you know, there’s my personal thing here and No, I my personal my, my business is separate. So I created another profile. And Dan Henry says that you should like, well, that’s not actually within the TLS. And the reason why they said a business manager was to allow user level access to people that was independent of accessing, like who your friends are and pictures of your kids, right? Business Manager allows for the invite of someone who has an email address, and even if they’re not on the Facebook platform, but if you’re an agency, you need to understand and live and breathe your client and live and breathe, how Facebook works and look at the the stuff in through business manager and look at, you know, through the viewpoint of being a consumer. So I believe that you should have one profile, even though it does open you up to more, but there’s risk on either side. So there’s no one clear answer. But if you’re doing things the right way, if you believe in telling the stories of your clients, if you’re not trying to sell something that’s in a gray area, use your actual profiles. Good

afternoon. Hey, thanks, though for answering that. I think the reason that most of our staff didn’t want to was because of notifications been piling into hundreds of notifications a day. So I think there’s probably notification options. So I think I think you’re right, the one profile per person.

Yeah. And I want to focus today on what to do so that you don’t get banned. And what happens if you’re banned. There’s a lot of awesome other topics that we could talk about on Facebook. And I want to save those for another webinar with Josh, I get the sense we’re going to be producing a lot more content together based on the feedback that we have here and we have a we have good people here and I want to help you guys just, I’m not a god or anything like that. I just want to share experiences because I’ve made so many mistakes, I’d hate for you to make the same mistake, especially like Josh said, because there’s just fundamentals that you need to have. So number one, number one is let’s set up our business manager properly. I won’t go into the details of what that means. But basically, verify all of your accounts as you can I don’t mean blue check verify like business manager. Verify Make sure your people are well trained. In other words, they go through actual training, they have a quiz. So set up different blueprint quizzes that they have to be able to pass and earn those badges. Make sure everybody including you reads that Facebook Terms of Service. Make sure that for any ad account, you have at least two admins. Make sure for any page you have at least two admins do not run out of a personal ad account. Make sure everything is tied inside your business manager. Make sure the client has a business manager and from their business manager, they give you access to their business manager. Make sure that you have ads that are set up properly in three stages of the funnel on awareness consideration conversion, some people call it like hook story offer or story sales, you know, whatever. Like there’s three stages of the funnel Okay, awareness, consideration, conversion, we call it why what do it that way and that way, you’re not going to be trying to sell against a cold audience. Selling on a cold audience will give you negative feedback, even if you think it’s clever, even if that ad like this is one I hear all the time from agencies over that ad performs so well. Yes, but you’re also generating negative feedback if your ads getting less than 1% Ctr. If your videos are not getting a through play of 15 plus percent, if you’re not getting 25% of people or I’m sorry, yeah 15% on the through play, if your your base CPM, on any ad, no matter what objective you choose, if the base CPM is higher than say $10 or $20, you are that ad is in trouble, right? I see a lot of people running ads where that base CPM is up in the 3040 $50 range, right? Because, because you could look at you know, when you’re looking at your ads, and it starts off with performance as the first drop down, and then you have delivery, performance and clicks like all these other ones there, go look at delivery to see what your base CPM is independent of what objective you’ve chosen. And if it’s high, that and even if it’s on the three relevant score factors, they show, you know, not enough data or they say below average or whatever, which is not really helpful. If that CPM is high, I use that as a proxy for your relevant score is low. And that’s a check engine light, right? I know that you’re going for leads and you’re going for sales. And there’s there’s client and business goals. But if that CPM is, you know, in the $30 plus range, that’s a check engine light saying, and I’m not saying By the way, if you have some ads that are high CPM, that doesn’t mean you’re about to get banned. So I don’t want to scare people now. But just that’s something you need to look at, right? Because a high CPM is because of a low relevant score low relevant scores, because people are marking that as spam. And you have low positive feedback. So you have high negative feedback relative to high positive feedback. Same thing that Facebook or same thing that Google does, and quality score is what Facebook’s doing and relevant score. Does that make sense? If you get that you can have very few ads that get into the queue for manual review. You just don’t want to have any ads that get into manual review, even if you think you’re following the process. Okay. So you want you want your ads to be so good that the users don’t even think that it’s an ad even though it says like sponsored what you don’t want people to realize, Oh, this is an ad and you’re interrupting people and all the things that people do to try to you know, interrupt people as part of ads, you want it to be educational and inspiring and entertaining. Like, that’s why we do the one minute why videos and we have the, you know, lawn maintenance guy or the chiropractor who have we had them tell their stories about what matters to them that that’s not going to generate negative feedback, it’s also going to generate a high relevant score for that ad. That also will go all the way up to the account level, did you know that you have an account level relevance score?

You know, the same is true on like you guys are nodding your heads. Facebook is the same, Google’s the same thing. So what we do is on a new PPC account, so I’ll just I’ll show you the parallel on Google is we would run against their brand name, you know, on and whatever the name of that and we’d run against the company name, whatever, got a really high CTR, and that would increase the quality score for that particular app. And then we’ll increase the quality score for the overall account because it goes from the ad to the ad set to the campaign to the account level that all these score rolls up on a weighted average. Facebook does the same thing. So we’re constantly making sure that we’re doing things that are pleasing the user, we don’t want negative feedback on our organic posts, we want to see the same thing. We don’t want. Negative feedback counts from minus 100. In the algo, rating, a likes worth one point a share comments worth six a shares worth 13 points, negative feedbacks worth of minus 100. Right? If you’re if your organic posts are not getting much reach, it could because you have a small page and you’re not posting material, not posting video, but if you if you have any negative feedbacks, like more than a couple negative feedbacks, which are the four kinds of negative feedback, it doesn’t mean it’s not someone commenting saying oh do you suck. There’s four things that they can actually do Mark when they click excellent report the ad and you know, the four things I told you, if you’re getting more than a couple pieces of negative feedback, relative getting hundreds of likes and comments and shares, that’s a sign that your content is not being liked by the users, the algorithms going to notice it, even if it’s on organic basis, that that tells you something. The other thing that I like to do, but Facebook won’t really tell you is that you want to, you want to boost posts. So I’ll actually I got a plug in my computer here real quick. Hang on.

Take your time. Hey, if you’re getting value, and this is like a lot deeper than you expected, give me a like or a yes or something in the comments here. Dennis’s like 10 levels deeper than you ever expect. It’s gonna be right. All right, that is if you’re good. This is awesome.

I’m trying to inoculate you guys to understand, um, so that you this content, like whether you’re watching this in 2020 or 2023, it’s still going to be valid, because these are the core founding principles on what Facebook’s about. And I’ve met with Zuckerberg, and other people and I’ve talked about it right. I helped build the initial ads for the Facebook ads platform if you remember that. Because my buddy Brian Rosenthal is the one who built power adder you remember And he came to me said, Hey, you know, I’m an air I don’t really run ads. But we so I know it sounds kind of ridiculous. But what should we put inside the system? And I said, Well, you know how Google has the Google Ad manager, we should do the same thing, right, as a tool inside Facebook. So we, we were lucky to be involved in the building of Facebook ads. And the ads that we ran way back then, were the beginnings of what was the personalized ads that you see today? Right. So I’m everything I’m what I’m telling you is not just conjecture, I’m telling you this. I’ve talked to lots of people at Facebook, I’m telling you, this is proven it’s true. So the stuff I’m telling you about relevance score rolling up, we have negative feedback, and therefore boosting posts. So you know, when you’re on the clients page, on the company page for their name of their business, and then the public figure page on Facebook, which is their name, but it’s a page not as a profile. Almost every agency gets this wrong. They don’t know the difference between page and profile. They’ll say, oh, Dennis, I saw what you did on your page today. That was my profile. There’s you have two business pages, right? for the client, you have whoever their leader is as Josh Nelson but but as a business page public figure, and their company, right and the business page allows you to have ads and analytics. So you’re telling stories, you’re having engagement, that’s not going to get negative feedback. When you boost posts that have great stories on them, then your it’s going to help you and it’s going to drive more leads, you can run remarketing against it or you don’t even have to run remarketing especially if you’re doing just local that will work just literally taking content that was working okay and transferring it to a public figure page where it looks like a profile but it’s not and you’re boosting those posts will generate more leads generate more traffic it won’t necessarily drive traffic to the website but it will drive more overall goodness it’ll drive more people in the search who and then you can see that that came from Facebook if your analytics is done properly right from a straight last click ROI standpoint, it won’t look as good. You’ll have people from Facebook that will tell you that you shouldn’t boost posts, right was like oh no, don’t do that. That’s only for small businesses. Well, why do you have That big blue boost Post button. Why is it that the program you have that got shut down because of Coronavirus temporarily to teach businesses city by city and having these conferences? Why is that thing called Facebook boost? Because that’s the way the algorithm works. The idea of paid behind Facebook and this is some This is when I had a conversation with Zuckerberg. The idea behind advertising on Facebook, this is what he told me was, if we did a job that was so good, people would not realize that it’s advertising it would feel like a recommendation from a friend. It wouldn’t be some kind of interruption. And if we realize that’s the case, and we want to entertain and educate while we sell at the same time, and we teach our clients how to do video, you know, the one minute video, dollar a day, all that kind of thing. That will you’ll be way less likely to be banned. If you drive cold, cold audience straight to email collection or phone or straight to a website and they’re leaving Facebook, off of a cold audience. Your base cpms are high, you’re more likely to get ad disapprovals you’re getting negative feedback. I’m not saying don’t do that. But try to warm people up, it doesn’t take much, you know, $200 a month $500 a month budget per client to warm people up. And then all these other ads you’re running, you’re gonna perform better. You’ll see what I’m saying. So the basic setup of running ads at one people up in the three stage funnel, having everything set up in business manager, everyone’s reading the ad TLS. That should eliminate most problems before they ever happen. Right? And I think you’ll see people saying the same kind of thing. They may go into deeper kinds of precautions on weird things, like try to use a different credit card or create this other fake profile. I just, I don’t think that’s a sustainable thing to do when you have lots of people, especially if you hire VA to help you. That’s just not going to work. It needs to be simple. Okay, so does that sound fair in terms of the what you need to do to prevent being banned just like be a good citizens basically, right? Yep.

Okay. Now let’s talk about the part that the people really want to talk about. And because it comes from straight to this point, they get that that horrible email from Facebook, where they feel like they’re a criminal. And it says, No, your account is has been banned. And don’t try to reply back because this decision is final, right? You know, the language is written really harsh. It’s like, you’ll never be able to get this back and it’s too late. Don’t try again, right? And the same thing where you log into your business manager, and there’s that warning at the top saying, Hey, your, your ad accounts been disabled for policy violations. What policy violations, they don’t tell you why. But if you want to appeal it, click on this blue link and you can appeal it and it opens up a form. And most people are like, Okay, I’m gonna fill out that appeals form. And they put in all this other stuff, which the Facebook people won’t read, because it’s way too long. Keep it short and sweet. On what you’re doing. show that you are you believe in the Facebook TLS that, that you’ve done your research to try to figure out what’s wrong and say, we really are, you know, we’re we’re doing our very best to abide By the TLS. And we can’t figure out where we must have gotten in trouble. Well, most of the case, you’ll find out where you’re going, you got in trouble when you read the TLS. Or maybe you got hacked, which is another weird exception we’ll cover in just a minute. But if you if you’re doing the things that are right from a preparatory standpoint, and maybe someone on your team submitted an ad, they got a leg, a lot of negative feedback, or maybe they went to a broken URL that can also get you in trouble, too much of that, then you’ll end your appeal. About half the time, maybe more, it’ll get your account back, and it’ll turn back on and you’re like, I just dodged the bullet. The other part is, maybe you’ve done nothing wrong. Right? And it’s just the people who are, you know, your ad got disapproved by the robot. And now when you do the appeal, it goes to manual review. And this is the first time a human seeing it. They’re like, Oh, yeah, oh, it was fine. We’re so sorry. Everything’s back on again. Right. Have you guys had that where you got turned off, and then you submitted an appeal. I know that happens all the time. That’s totally cool if you didn’t do anything wrong, and you just the robot was just not very smart. And what we’ve seen in the last five years, especially with the robot is that when a Cambridge analytic a happens, they make the robot tighter. Like literally I’ve talked to the people on the policy team, which you’re not supposed to be able to talk to. And they turn the thing tighter. So more and more ads get disapproved, and more and more accounts get banned. Why? because they’d rather just judge you guilty, rather than like, here’s the thing where, like, I forgot what it was, but I want to say it was one of our clients and they were, I don’t know, delivering meals or something at a local church or whatever it was right. And it wasn’t anything about politics, maybe just mentioned that it was a it was over at the church in the parking lot or something like that. But it wasn’t political. It wasn’t about religion. It wasn’t about you know, race or discrimination or anything like that and just gotten banned over and over again, right, those ads or that the ads got disapproved. So the the robot is still learning and what they they literally can turn the dial To disapprove ads that are just like, sort of like a trigger finger where it just like, it’ll just start disapproving tons and tons and tons of ads. So when when those waves happen, don’t get alarmed. Just know. And you’ll hear the chatter from everyone else saying, Oh, yeah, this is happening to us too. We got all our ads, you know, banned, you know, our account got shut down. And I know it’s a terrible thing. Sometimes you might have to go back to a client and say, you know, we’re stuck in Facebook Jail right now. And we’re doing the best we can. And you know, we’ve submitted an appeal, and it just might take a few days. And I know it’s maddening because you expect them to reply back within a couple hours. And sometimes they do. But usually it takes a few days, and we’ve had some of them where it’s taken three or four weeks for them to get back. So just set the expectation with the client. And with your team that may take a while. The other thing is that if your appeal gets but by the way, if it was a robo rejection, which is typically what happens and you are kind of polite and you make sure your stuff looks good when you set that appeal, you’ll get that account back. A lot of the times you can often appeal again. So don’t just appeal again the next day, okay, if you didn’t hear back, don’t just submit another appeal. wait four or five days. I know it sounds crazy because we really need it. And we need the leads and like the clients were like, I get it. But just wait. Because if you get declined on that second appeal, you’re probably not getting it back. And then your only option is to set up a new account. That’s brutal, right? Because all the things like you have to rebuild the custom audiences, you have to build up that history. Again, it’s just like a new website or new Google account. It’s just a really bad situation. Now some of you agencies will have access to chat support. You guys know what I’m talking about what chat where you can chat with the Facebook Rep.

That when you can chat? Yes. Okay. Now, some of you won’t have it. So of agencies, you know, maybe 10 or 15%, depending on how big you have it or how big you are, will have the ability to chat with Facebook. So when you can chat with Facebook, you can explain your case and then it goes into a ticketing system and these people reply back right away, they’ll investigate. But those people don’t have the power. What I want you to understand is that the policy people are separate from GSO, right. GSO is global sales organization. It’s all the all the account reps all the way up to the partner managers and the people that run sales overall. For example, if you’re an agency, and you’re spending enough money, then you have a rep that has a Partner Manager that’s in the Chicago office. Right. You know, agencies are handled in the Chicago office, you know that right? They used to be in Austin. They used to have account reps that handled agencies by vertical in New York like e calm in New York, you know, LA for meeting entertainment and London, in Dublin that handled most of Europe. There’s a Singapore office for a lot of Asia. I’ve been to all these offices. I love eating their food. So if you’re an agency and you’re not in a particular vertical like automotive and CPG And whatever, then you’re running up through a group that’s in Chicago. And that will give you access to a real rep, not a Facebook marketing expert. Don’t say all dentists, I have a rep, I talked to them. No, no, that is that person cannot help you. There’s someone who just got out of school, and they’re there just to try to get you spend more money. And they have an automated report that shows you, which are the features and business objectives and how their accounts spend. And so they’re trying to get you to increase your spend period over period so they get a bonus. So they you know, that they cannot teach you, they cannot help you when your ads get disapproved. They will not even address those questions. But if you’re in that agency program, and it goes up through Chicago, then that’s another level of support where they will probably help you. But last time I checked, there’s maybe 50 agencies in that program. So if you’re one of them here, I don’t think anyone here is in that program. If you are living I highly,

highly doubt it.

Okay. It used to be a spend requirement. So three years ago, it was maybe like a million or 2 million a month. And now a million a month is not a big deal. So that that’s not enough. I see people Spending 10 million a month. It’s not big enough, like it’s not even spent. That’s not even the main criteria. It’s what the vertical is that you’re in. And whether you have a client that’s in one of the categories that are one of the geographies that they’re trying to go, Does any of you have a client where you have a Partner Manager, not a rep, you have a Partner Manager, and one of the key verticals and you get invited to some of these events or to betas or special support because if you have a fortune 500 company, then for sure you have a Partner Manager. And then that gives you a separate level of access. Like if you like when, if you have a big chain, right like McDonald’s or something with lots of locations. I don’t mean for the franchisee I mean for corporate, then you often have access to the partner level manager that will give that will bypass a lot of these other pieces.

I’d say the lion’s share of the people on the line that are watching this are we dealing with the average local plumbing company lawn care company chiropractic Office. So we would fall way under the threshold of what Google would see as an agency, you know, that deserves that type of access. So if we can speak to like, Look, you’re not going to get a partner, you’re not going to get like chat support, like, how do you deal with this in the most effective way possible with that being the case? So you do one after.

So you do two levels of appeal. And if that doesn’t work, then unfortunately, unless you, you have a great connection, you’re just going to,

like Dennis, right? of a person? Yes. Oh, no,

no, no, they’ll do that. Like I did this as a special favor for john.

Like, I’d seriously like I could pull up my phone and I can show you how many messages I get per day from people that are hitting me up and stuff like that, right.

I’m just kidding.

Yeah. So you basically have to do the appeal. And within the first you basically get two appeals, right? The first one they might not respond to, don’t freak out. Four days later, five days later, submit another appeal. Do not get mad. Be very polite. At what you’re doing, but don’t write an essay, don’t write this giant thing is not some court case you’re trying to do in the, in the court of Facebook, right? If you have abided by all the things that we’re talking about, within the first two appeals, you’ll probably get your account back 70 80% of the time, right? The first appeal, they just probably need to get around to it, because it’s just somebody they got like three seconds to look at your thing. And they’re trying to make a snap decision. They don’t have all day to read your thing. They’re just trying to figure out what’s going on. If that if either of those two don’t work, then either you’re going to use a backup ad account. So we’d like to have two ad accounts. And just as a backup and season the pixel, which is sort of gray hat. But for big accounts, we

often want to share the pixel you share the pixel to both accounts. That way, if one gets shut down, at least you’ve got a backup where you’ve got the custom audience and the other stuff.

Yeah. Yeah, but you only want to do that on the bigger accounts. And you can have, like I said, multiple admins. So make sure like make sure there’s not just one because if that person, let’s say the client, or just use the agency owner lose access, then everyone can lose access, right? So you won’t have a second admin. But if all this stuff fails, then you’re going to set up a new ad account. Now, when you set up a new ad account, you don’t want to just all of a sudden put in everything that you’re, you know, copy everything over. Or actually, it’s very difficult to copy everything over us to be able to when we have Power Editor and that kind of thing, but when you set up your new ad account, start with simple engagement posts, don’t try to sell you just want to warm up the account. You don’t want to get disapproved. I wouldn’t worry too much about trying to use a different credit card or different computer or all the different ways to try to make it look like you’re a different person, unless you’re a spammer and you’re in CBD and alcohol and tobacco and gambling and like weird things like that. In that case, nothing that i’m saying is gonna apply to you because you don’t believe in the core principles that Facebook has. You’re just trying to get around their system. But if you believe in the things we’re talking about, it’s okay to set up another ad account. And you’ll be able to and that new ad account should do okay, as long as you’re not getting any negative feedback, just spend a few dollars a day. Boost posts that are interesting and fun, do not generate negative feedback, want high engagement and then start to layer in your sales posts and start to increase the spend gradually. You might take your time take two or three weeks to be able to do this don’t that’s why you don’t want to rely upon Facebook as a major method. So certainly, you have Google I really like tik tok and Snapchat. And yes, you have the ability to target by geo and by age. So it’s not just teenagers. I love doing stuff of YouTube. Just because if Facebook goes down, you don’t want the client or your agency to be all of a sudden be screwed. That’s why I don’t believe in vertical as agency. I know I might, you know, anger some of the people here that specialize in just SEO, or specialize in just PPC or just video or just Click Funnels or just because if any one of those things go down you’re Your whole portfolio is at risk. I love going by vertical like what Josh and I talked about with a lighthouse. So I just want to serve chiropractors and if right now texting campaigns is what it is for chiropractors and you know, whatever it is like I, I don’t want to be channel level dependent. Channel level dependence also opens me up to competition because then they could find someone else’s SEO, someone else’s Facebook ads someone else does Google ads, you know, whatever it is, right? When I own the relationship at the, at the lighthouse level that I create installation. So the new account Don’t worry about the new account and other people trying to, you know, Facebook trying to associate because they will associate they can figure out that that’s, you know, Jim Boykin, or Josh Nelson or you know, Jay Berkowitz or whoever it is right.

And if that, that should work for you. And the common question is, well, should I at this point, should I wait for the appeal? Should I try to appeal one more time? Should I try something else because they really have a lot of account history. And these custom audiences have been working really well and if this if that if I have to start a new ad account after start all over. Or even if I’m able to use the pixel from the other account that got shut down. But it’s, you’d be surprised Facebook is learning faster and faster, and their ability to exit the learning face. So it used to be, you’d have an ad that was working. And even if you made a new account, duplicated the ad or you know, somehow got shut down and made a new one, like you’d never be able to get back up to where you work. And the same is true of Google even today, where you, you have these ad accounts that are 10 years old, that are running ads, some of you guys might have that. And even if someone else tries to compete with you, especially as an affiliate, they, they just can’t unseat you, even if they copy the ad have the same bid. They’re just if you can’t shake someone out of the tree is what we call it. Right? So don’t but that was before today. It’s not that big of a deal because the window of time they look back to see what the history is, is getting shorter, shorter. It used to be months. Now the Facebook folks won’t tell me exactly, but I think it’s a couple of weeks. So it’s not that big of a deal. You can re import your custom audiences, your plumbing, you can transfer very easily, which has all your tracking and your tags and that kind of thing. So it’s not that big of a deal to spin up a new account. It’s just, it’s just going to take you a couple weeks, maybe even a month to get back up to where you were. I’ll give an example of this. That was inadvertent. So we did this for Howard Johnson, and a couple other hotel chains, which have a lot of properties a couple months ago. And we had to migrate everything over to new accounts, because they were bringing everything in house away from their other agency. And they were afraid of like losing all the data. And they the account performance, because they had ads that were driving a ton of bookings, even during Corona. And, you know, we have this whole list of how we do the migration if you guys want I’ll share that with you. And we lost. Yeah, and just just send me a note, whatever, Josh, send me a note and I’ll give you like, whatever it is, don’t don’t come to me go to Josh. Right. You’re in seven figure agency. By the way. If you don’t know about Josh Nelson, and you’re just starting your agency, you want to learn everything that Josh has to say you want to get his book on having a seven figure agency, you want to join some of the masterminds he has, you want to follow him on Facebook, you want to join the groups like everything related to scaling an agency, you need to listen to Josh Nelson. I’m telling him, he’s not paying me to say this. And a lot of people might say, Oh, well, Dennis, don’t you teach how to grow agencies as well? Yes, but not the same. Josh and I have complimentary techniques. Okay. Ours is more inbound driven in more like strategy, and his is more tactical step by step. Especially if you don’t have an audience and you don’t have the advantage of having the connections and you want to follow more of what Josh is saying. Right dream 100. Thanks for saying that. I appreciate it. Yeah, you need there’s so many people that are going to try to say, Hey, you know, buy my $2,000 mastermind course, I’ll tell you the secrets on how you can have a seven figure agency by next month like, Don’t listen to that. Listen to what Josh and I are saying, You’re getting this information for free. Okay. I’m telling you, other people, there’s no secret that if you pay money for you’re going to get the secret that I’m not going to tell you only people that pay me 10 grand a month, I’m going to tell you the secret There’s no secret. That’s the secret. All right. I’d love

to just I want to, I know that you’ve got to jump to another call. So I mean, yeah, I don’t want to just you know, you’re at the 555. Mark.

I want to see any any further questions that you have. I saw one other question here about if you get hacked, if your account gets hacked, if your page gets hacked, because someone fell for a phishing scheme, or whatnot, that unfortunately, is very hard. So you can submit a bunch of you have a bunch of people, you know, go to that page or profile saying that this thing’s been hacked, you can try to use chat support if you have that. To do that. If you’re a client of ours, we maybe can do you a favor and make a request, but it’s very, very limited. But don’t use that as a thing to come reach out to me. You just don’t want to allow anything to get hacked. Because when when you get hacked, and someone else is abusing your ad account and running stuff as custom audiences on your pages, they’re just going to burn your account just like all the other accounts that are able to burn and then That point you’re probably just gonna have to start over if you got hacked it’s just unfortunate and because you’re in the bucket of the millions of consumer issues that happen each day where people fall for phishing camp See I almost fell off like every month I these phishing scams they come at me and I see them and I almost fall for them right? So just train your people that the really the answer is train your people to be able to spot phishing scams never allow for the for them to give approval to anything make sure everything is two factor on your Google accounts on your Facebook accounts on like everything two factor right some people complain saying oh my phone doesn’t support two factor can’t check my mail my phone sorry, too bad get a new phone enable two factor. Everything’s two factor okay. Business Manager two factor, right.

I know I know. You gotta hop this has been amazing. If you got value from Dennis Be sure to thank him. Um, how can they connect with you for the dentists if they’ve got questions that they want to learn more? Yeah.

So you can send me an email Dennis at Blitz metrics comm you can send me a message on LinkedIn, if it’s business connect with me on LinkedIn, do not connect with me on Facebook, I’ve been at the 5000 limit. That’s the 5000 friend limit. And I’ve been there for like 12 years. So do not message me unless we have met in person and we are actually friend friends, right? But I always respond on LinkedIn, it might take me a few days. If you send me an email, I do always respond. And I’d love to hear how you guys are doing. I’d love to see you grow your agency. The reason why I love contributing to groups like this with Josh is because I believe in what Josh is doing. Josh Nelson is a good man. He surrounds himself with good people. There’s a lot of bogus training that’s out there. Most of the stuff you’ll hear about what you should do when your Facebook ad gets shut down, or how you should generate leads or some secret way to do whatever secret thing. Most of it is just not informed. I want you to listen to people who know what they’re doing, who actually run seven figure agencies like Josh and I did. And you’re in the right place right here. You’re not going to learn everything in this particular live weather. You’re watching this on the replay on Facebook Live or in zoom. But I want you to learn from the other experts, not what they say watch what they do. And I’d love to hear from you. Thanks,

Dennis, thanks so much for taking the time really appreciate it. I’m going to try and get a checklist from Dennis on how to properly set up your Facebook profile and your page and your manager account. And if enough of you are interested, maybe we can talk Dennis into coming back on and talking about how to set up your business manager correctly. So I know you got to hop

thank you so much for taking the time to spend time together. Thank you.

It’s an honor. So if you guys want to hang out for a second that was that was that was great. I’ve got Josh Wheeler on with us still as a co host right Josh? Are you still here? Wheeler. It’d be fun if we were walked away. Let’s see. So any I mean, this isn’t necessarily my area of expertise, you know, managing Facebook ads and dealing with on hacked accounts. But I’d love to have an open discussion since we’re here and we’re looking at it sounds like we’ve got some people that are really well versed in this topic. Were there any specific questions you guys wanted to just kind of address while we’re while we’re here and talking about this topic?

Going to unmute.

Alright. Looks like that’s look like looks like that’s all. Alright guys. Well, thank you so much for joining me. I hope that you got some good insights. Dennis’s is like very, very high level with this stuff. So I’m going to try and say, Hey, Dennis, can you get us a checklist, like the very specific tactics that we can go back and implement? So I’ll get that and we’ll send it out to you guys. And if you have any questions, the great thing is Dennis is in the Facebook group. So you can tag me You can tag Dennis. He’s very responsive on email and on Facebook. So questions about this? Let us know and we’ll we’ll take it From there, I think Thank you. Thanks, guys. Talk to you soon. Thanks a lot, Josh. Absolutely