If you've ever Googled "online marketing consultant," you already know the signal you're sending: you need strategic marketing help, and you're not sure whether to hire a person or a team. That's a meaningful distinction, and the answer depends entirely on where your business is and what you actually need right now.
This guide cuts through the noise. We'll explain what an online marketing consultant does, how their model differs from a full-service agency, what to look for, how pricing works, and the questions worth asking before you sign anything.
An online marketing consultant is a specialist who analyzes your current marketing performance, identifies gaps and opportunities, and builds a strategy to improve results across digital channels. Depending on their background and scope, they might focus on paid media, SEO, content, email, conversion rate optimization, or the full-funnel picture.
The key distinction from an agency: consultants operate at the strategic layer. They are typically brought in to diagnose, recommend, and advise — not to run campaigns day-to-day. Some consultants also provide execution, but their core value is expertise and objectivity. They are not tied to any particular platform or channel, which means their recommendations are driven by what's right for your business, not what they're set up to sell.
Common deliverables from an internet marketing consultant engagement include:
For growth-stage companies and DTC brands, the typical use case is someone who can function as a senior marketing voice without the cost of a full-time hire.
This is the question most brands skip past, and it leads to expensive mismatches.
A digital marketing consultant is the right fit when you need strategic clarity. If you're unsure which channels to prioritize, why your current campaigns aren't converting, or what your marketing org should look like in 12 months, a consultant brings the analytical depth to answer those questions. They are also the right choice when you have internal execution capacity but lack a senior strategist to direct it.
A full-service agency is the right fit when you need execution at scale. Agencies bring designers, copywriters, media buyers, analysts, and project managers under one roof. When you need daily creative output, multi-channel campaign management, or fast ramp-up across new channels, an agency has the bandwidth that a solo consultant does not.
The trap most growth-stage companies fall into: they hire a consultant, receive a strong strategy document, and then have no one to execute it. A plan that sits on a shelf produces zero results. Before hiring a marketing consultant, confirm that you have the internal team or an agency partner who can act on their recommendations.
The hybrid model — a consultant directing strategy while an agency handles execution — is increasingly common for companies that have outgrown founder-led marketing but are not ready for a full VP of Marketing. This approach gives you executive-level oversight without the overhead of a senior in-house hire. If you're evaluating whether that model fits your situation, it's worth reading our breakdown of what a fractional CMO does for B2B SaaS companies, since the two roles frequently overlap in scope.
Not all marketing consultants are equal, and the market is crowded with people who have run a few Facebook campaigns and rebranded themselves as strategists. These are the filters that matter.
Demonstrated results in your category matter most. Look for consultants who have worked with companies at your stage, in your revenue range, or in your vertical. DTC brands have different attribution problems than B2B SaaS. A consultant who specializes in one is not automatically equipped for the other.
Channel depth should match your actual needs. If your biggest gap is paid acquisition, you want someone who has managed significant ad budgets, not someone who dabbles in ads as part of a general practice. If SEO is the priority, verify they understand technical SEO, content strategy, and link acquisition — not just keyword research.
Look for a process, not just opinions. Good consultants follow a defined methodology: audit, prioritize, recommend, measure. If their pitch is entirely about their experience and contains no description of how they'll actually work with you, that is a red flag.
Ask for references you can actually call. Two or three client references in situations similar to yours is a reasonable ask. If they hesitate or provide names but no contact information, keep moving.
Pay attention to honest scope boundaries. A consultant who claims expertise in every channel is either a team or is overstating their abilities. The best ones know their lane.
Pricing varies significantly based on scope, seniority, and engagement model. Here is what the market looks like in 2026:
Hourly rates run from $75 to $300 per hour for most engagements. Execution-focused work sits at the lower end; senior strategic consulting commands $150 to $300 per hour or more. Specialists in high-demand areas like paid search or growth strategy often price above $250.
Monthly retainers are the most common structure for ongoing engagements. Expect $2,500 to $8,000 per month for a mid-market consultant providing regular advisory, reporting review, and strategic direction. Senior consultants working with larger organizations charge $10,000 to $20,000 per month.
Project-based fees are typical for defined deliverables like a full channel audit, a go-to-market strategy, or a channel launch plan. Project fees generally range from $3,000 for a focused audit to $25,000 or more for a comprehensive strategy engagement.
One thing to budget for that many brands overlook: a consultant's fee does not include ad spend, tools, or any execution costs. Their fee covers their time and expertise. Media budgets, creative production, and tooling are separate line items.
The intake conversation with a marketing consultant tells you everything you need to know, if you ask the right questions.
Ask how they measure success. A strong consultant will immediately discuss leading indicators tied to revenue — pipeline velocity, customer acquisition cost, return on ad spend — not vanity metrics like impressions or follower counts. If their answer centers on output metrics, probe further.
Ask what the engagement looks like week-to-week. How many hours are they committing? Who do they meet with, and how often? What decisions are in their scope versus yours? Vague answers here often indicate a lack of structure.
Ask what they won't do. Understanding the edges of their scope tells you whether you need additional resources. A consultant who is transparent about their limits is more trustworthy than one who claims to cover everything.
Ask for examples of strategies that did not work and what they learned from them. Marketing is inherently experimental. Consultants who can only talk about wins have either a selective memory or limited experience.
Ask what happens at the end of the engagement. A good consultant should be building toward a handoff — either to your internal team or to an agency — rather than creating dependency on themselves indefinitely.
EmberTribe operates as a growth marketing partner, not a traditional consulting firm. That means we bring the strategic rigor of a digital marketing consultant alongside the execution capability of a full agency team. For DTC brands and growth-stage companies, this eliminates the execution gap that makes standalone consulting so risky.
Our model works best for brands that have proven product-market fit and need a systematic approach to scaling acquisition — across paid social, search, content, and retention channels. We operate as an extension of your team, which means our recommendations come with the team to execute them.
If you're evaluating agencies alongside consultants, our guide on how to choose the best ecommerce marketing agency covers the evaluation criteria in detail, including the questions that separate strong partners from expensive disappointments.
We're also transparent about fit. If a standalone consultant is a better match for your stage and budget, we'll tell you that rather than oversell the scope of an engagement that won't deliver.
If you're ready to talk through where you are and what would actually move the needle, reach out to EmberTribe. We'll start with a diagnostic, not a pitch.
GIFs have become a universal language on the internet. From blog posts and email newsletters to social media and internal communications, animated GIFs add personality, break up long-form content, and convey reactions in ways that static images and plain text simply cannot match.
But for teams that take SEO seriously, the question is valid: are GIFs helping your content strategy, or are they quietly undermining your search rankings?
The short answer is that GIFs, when used thoughtfully and optimized properly, can enhance your content without damaging your SEO performance. The longer answer involves understanding how Google handles animated images, where the risks actually lie, and what optimization techniques keep your site fast while preserving the engagement benefits that GIFs provide.
Google crawls GIFs the same way it crawls any other image format. The search engine reads the file name, alt text, surrounding context, and page metadata to determine what the image represents and how relevant it is to a given search query.
This means the standard image SEO best practices apply to GIFs just as they do to JPEGs and PNGs:
email-marketing-workflow.gif is far more useful to Google than giphy-12345.gifWhere GIFs differ from static images is in file size and rendering behavior, both of which have indirect but significant effects on SEO through page performance metrics.
GIFs do not directly hurt your search rankings. What hurts your rankings is slow page load times, and GIFs are one of the most common contributors to bloated page weight.
A single unoptimized GIF can easily reach 5-10 MB - larger than entire web pages should be. When a page loads multiple uncompressed GIFs, the cumulative effect on Core Web Vitals can be severe:
Google has made page experience a ranking factor, which means anything that degrades load speed - including oversized GIFs - can pull your content down in search results.
The solution is not to stop using GIFs. It is to optimize them properly so you get the engagement benefits without the performance penalty.
There are several proven techniques for keeping GIFs fast-loading without sacrificing quality or visual impact.
The most straightforward optimization is reducing file size through compression. Several approaches work well:
A well-compressed GIF should typically be under 1 MB. If your GIF exceeds 2 MB, it is worth revisiting the source material or considering an alternative format.
For larger or longer animations, converting GIFs to HTML5 video formats (MP4 or WebM) is one of the most effective optimizations available. Video formats use modern compression codecs that deliver the same visual output at a fraction of the file size.
A 5 MB GIF can often be converted to a 200-500 KB MP4 that looks identical to the viewer. The implementation uses the HTML tag with autoplay and loop attributes to replicate the GIF experience:
<video autoplay loop muted playsinline>
<source src="animation.webm" type="video/webm">
<source src="animation.mp4" type="video/mp4">
</video>This approach is particularly valuable for hero sections and above-the-fold content where page speed has the greatest impact on both SEO and user experience.
Lazy loading defers the loading of GIFs that are below the fold until the user scrolls to them. This reduces initial page load time and improves Core Web Vitals scores without removing any content.
Modern browsers support native lazy loading through a simple attribute:
<img src="reaction.gif" alt="Description" loading="lazy">For more granular control, JavaScript-based lazy loading libraries like lazysizes offer features like placeholder images, fade-in effects, and custom threshold settings.
GZIP compression at the server level can reduce GIF transfer sizes by up to 70% without any change to the original file. Most modern web servers and CDNs support GZIP or Brotli compression, and enabling it is typically a one-time configuration change.
Check with your hosting provider or CDN to confirm that compression is enabled for image assets. This optimization benefits all images on your site, not just GIFs.
GIF optimization is not purely an SEO concern. Accessibility compliance affects both user experience and search performance, and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) have specific requirements for animated content.
WCAG 2.1 requires that any animation that starts automatically and lasts longer than five seconds must include a mechanism for the user to pause, stop, or hide it. This matters for SEO because:
Practical ways to meet accessibility requirements for GIFs:
prefers-reduced-motion CSS media query to serve static alternatives to users who have requested reduced motion in their system settingsAlt text for GIFs should describe both the content and the action depicted. Unlike static images where you describe what is shown, GIF alt text should convey what is happening:
Descriptive alt text serves double duty: it makes your content accessible to screen reader users and gives Google additional context for understanding and ranking your content.
While the risks of GIFs are primarily performance-related, the benefits are engagement-related - and engagement signals do influence search rankings.
Content with well-placed GIFs tends to keep readers on the page longer. Animated visuals break up walls of text and give readers visual anchors that maintain interest. Since time on page is a behavioral signal that search engines monitor, GIFs can indirectly support your rankings when they contribute to a better reading experience.
Pages that use GIFs strategically - as visual explanations, process demonstrations, or reaction moments - tend to have lower bounce rates than text-only pages. When readers stay and scroll rather than bouncing, Google interprets this as a positive quality signal.
Google's quality evaluators look at whether content provides a good user experience. Pages that use multimedia elements thoughtfully - including GIFs, images, and video - score higher on user experience criteria than pages with minimal visual content.
This is particularly relevant for content marketing strategies where the goal is creating comprehensive, authoritative resources on a topic. GIFs can serve as visual evidence, process demonstrations, or data visualizations that add genuine informational value to the page.
Content that includes GIFs is more likely to be shared on social media and linked to from other websites. While social signals themselves are not a confirmed ranking factor, backlinks from other sites remain one of the strongest ranking signals in Google's algorithm. Content that earns natural backlinks through shareability and engagement value will outperform content that does not.
Based on the data and best practices covered above, here is a framework for incorporating GIFs into your content development strategy without compromising SEO performance:
GIFs will not ruin your SEO - but unoptimized GIFs absolutely can. The format itself is neutral in terms of search rankings. What matters is how you implement it.
When GIFs are compressed, properly tagged with alt text, lazy-loaded, and used strategically to enhance the reader experience, they become an asset to your content strategy. They keep readers engaged, reduce bounce rates, and make your content more shareable - all signals that support stronger search performance over time.
The key is treating GIFs as a deliberate content element rather than decoration. Every GIF on the page should earn its place by adding informational value, illustrating a concept, or enhancing the reader's experience in a way that static content cannot.
With social media advertising becoming more and more efficient and targeted every day, we’re often left to wonder what little details we can tweak to make a massive difference for the visibility of a brand.
One of the factors that can help your campaign objectives are ad formats. Some of the ad formats that you may be used to interacting with across social media platforms include:
But does one ad format rule them all?
Mixing up ad formats can benefit your brand. By using various methods to communicate your current campaign, you’re able to increase brand perception positively by 8 percent.
Ad formats shouldn’t necessarily be selected simply because they look better or it’s your personal preference. Instead they should be chosen according to the objective you’ve set. Some ad format types are more finely tuned to different objectives and audiences.
Let’s take a look.
Trying to get your foot through the door?
If you’re at a stage in your business where you want top-of-funnel audiences to recognize your brand, or perhaps you’ve launched a new product that you want to raise awareness, your priority should be: impressions and reach.
This is where it gets a bit tricky. Your unique views (impressions) are driven by whether or not your ads were engaging to target audiences.
In a perfect world, an ad would go viral, right? With hundreds of thousands of viewers sharing your content it makes sense that you would be getting more out of your ad spend. However, to be realistic, not every (or any) of your ads can go viral and quality is hardly a factor in anything going viral at all. So you should never formulate their strategy relying on that.
Instead, you should focus on using ad formats that are best suited to increase awareness, that consistently get good impressions and engagement. In most cases, that means video ads.
Video ads regularly achieve higher engagement rates, and can be extremely effective at persuading audiences to interact with your ad.
In order to convert customers you have to make sure that you are also driving traffic of the right leads. These two ad formats have been proven to help drive conversions.
A carousel ad is perfect for driving high-intent traffic to your site. The ads stand out and lead directly to a product that a user clicks on, making their journey short and easy.
Video ads are also a great tool for conversions as people get invested and often check out your website. A video format also allows a brand to relay all the necessary information that it needs to give out in order to convince a customer of their unique selling point.
At the end of the day, ad formats are very relevant to what your campaign is trying to achieve. However, you cannot drive a social media advertising campaign solely on what format you pick.
For example, if you pick image ads you must imbed it with a witty copy to captivate audiences. A video has to be relevant and informative, not confusing or off-putting. The ad format is just a piece of the puzzle...if you get the other pieces wrong, viewers will dismiss your ads without a second thought.
Whatever ad format you’re using, it’s crucial that you have Pixels set up so that you can retarget the people who may have seen your top-of-funnel and middle-of-funnel ads. Without your Pixel set up properly, you’re basically working on that same puzzle with missing pieces you’ll never get back.
As always, finding the best ad format for your objectives is a matter of experimentation and iteration. As you set up your campaigns, consider which ad formats you want to test with different objectives. Best practices are only as good as the results you get from them!
There is a phrase we repeat often at EmberTribe: always be testing.
Testing, especially structured, methodical testing, is the foundation of sustainable marketing performance. The most effective growth marketing strategies are built on the scientific method applied to advertising: develop a hypothesis, design a test, analyze results, and iterate based on data.
This approach stands in direct contrast to the "set it and forget it" mindset that plagues most advertising programs. Running ads without a structured testing framework is essentially gambling with your budget. You might get lucky, but you cannot replicate luck, and you cannot scale what you do not understand.
Growth marketing relies on repeatable processes to develop hypotheses, discover results, draw conclusions, and iterate on findings. This is smart testing, and the five case studies below demonstrate exactly how it translates into measurable business results.
Before diving into the case studies, it is worth understanding why most paid advertising programs fail to reach their potential.
The typical approach looks like this: a brand creates a handful of ads based on internal assumptions about what will resonate, launches them with broad targeting, and waits for results. When performance is mediocre, the response is usually to increase budget or swap in new creative, again based on assumptions rather than data.
Smart ad testing takes a fundamentally different approach. It treats every campaign as an experiment with controlled variables:
By isolating and testing these variables systematically, you move from guessing to knowing. The following case studies illustrate what happens when brands commit to this methodology.
Result: Second highest sales day ever, trailing only Black Friday
Read the full case study here.
A gift and accessories brand came to EmberTribe looking to expand its cold audience reach ahead of a major new collection launch. Rather than relying on a single creative concept and hoping it would land, we built a systematic testing program.
The approach: We launched multiple campaign ads spanning a variety of messaging angles, from product-focused to lifestyle-oriented to value-driven. Each angle was tested against distinct audience segments to identify which combinations of message and audience produced the strongest engagement and purchase signals.
The insight: The winning creative was not the one the brand's internal team would have predicted. Testing revealed that a specific messaging angle resonated far more strongly with cold audiences than the brand's default positioning.
The result: Armed with this data, we rapid-tested ads for the new collection launch to identify winning creative before committing significant spend. The launch produced the brand's second highest sales day in company history, surpassed only by Black Friday, a day with built-in consumer demand.
Key takeaway: Testing before a major launch reduces risk and amplifies results. The cost of running test campaigns is a fraction of the cost of launching with the wrong creative and wasting your biggest promotional window.
Result: 8.77x return on ad spend
Read the full case study here.
A sports coaching subscription service faced a common challenge: they could not find enough qualified audiences on Facebook to validate their advertising strategy. Their target market was real, but conventional interest-based targeting was not surfacing it.
The approach: Instead of assuming we knew the audience, we treated audience discovery as the first testing objective. We began running traffic across multiple targeting approaches to identify which generated the best engagement signals and build the brand's Pixel data from scratch.
The insight: Lead generation campaigns offering valuable content (an ebook) proved to be the most effective audience-building mechanism. Each download gave us conversion data that refined our targeting further, creating a compounding improvement loop.
The result: By continuing to optimize ads for audience definition, urgency messaging, and cost efficiency, the campaign achieved 8.77x ROAS, an exceptional return for a subscription-based service with a niche audience.
Key takeaway: When your target audience is difficult to identify through standard targeting options, use testing as a discovery tool. Let the data reveal your audience rather than forcing assumptions onto the platform. This approach is especially valuable for brands with unique value propositions that do not fit neatly into predefined interest categories.
Result: 2.71x ROAS through targeted audience refinement
Read the full case study here.
A children's clothing boutique had a strong product but faced a significant challenge: their price point was higher than most competitors in the children's wear market. Generic audience targeting was attracting price-sensitive shoppers who were unlikely to convert at premium pricing.
The approach: We extensively tested creative formats for cold audiences segmented by interests, behaviors, and lookalike profiles. But the real breakthrough came from restructuring the strategy entirely, moving from broad reach campaigns to a testing-and-refining approach focused on smaller, highly targeted audience segments.
The insight: Consistent retargeting of all engaged users proved to be a critical component. Visitors who had already interacted with the brand but had not purchased needed multiple touchpoints before converting at the higher price point.
The result: The combination of refined cold audience targeting and persistent retargeting delivered 2.71x ROAS, transforming what had been a traction-focused campaign into a genuine revenue driver.
Key takeaway: Premium products require a different testing methodology than commodity products. Price-sensitive audiences need to be filtered out early, and retargeting becomes essential to convert the qualified prospects who need more time and exposure to justify a higher purchase price.
Result: 400,000 unique user sign-ups per month
Read the full case study here.
This client needed to scale user acquisition through Facebook traffic, but the target audience, competitive landscape, and optimal messaging were all unknowns at the start of the engagement.
The approach: EmberTribe began with extensive market research, analyzing the client's target audience, competitors' advertising campaigns, and competitors' content strategies. This research informed the initial hypotheses that guided the first round of testing.
The insight: Creating and testing hundreds of ad variations was necessary to find the winners. The process was not about creating one perfect ad. It was about systematically eliminating underperformers and iterating on the elements that showed traction.
The result: Through continuous testing, iteration, and scaling of winning combinations, the campaign scaled to 400,000 unique user sign-ups per month. This kind of scale is only achievable when you have a testing framework that identifies what works and enables confident budget allocation.
Key takeaway: Scale requires volume testing. You cannot find the winning ad combinations by testing five or ten variations. Systematic testing of hundreds of variations across audience, creative, and copy variables is what separates campaigns that plateau from campaigns that scale. A strong ad creative testing framework is the foundation of scalable acquisition.
Result: 300% lift in revenue compared to the previous period
Read the full case study here.
A high-end lingerie brand needed to communicate product fit, a critical purchase factor, through digital advertising. Static images alone could not convey the comfort and quality that differentiated the brand from competitors.
The approach: We focused testing on video content showing models moving in the products, combined with testimonials, social proof from awards, and concise copy addressing the discomfort that many consumers associate with the product category.
The insight: Our team tested and iterated extensively across multiple creative formats including dynamic broad reach targeting, single images, videos, carousels, and Dynamic Product Ads (DPAs). The video-first approach consistently outperformed static creative, but the specific combination of video format, testimonial integration, and copy framing required significant testing to optimize.
The result: The testing program delivered a 300% lift in revenue compared to the previous period, proving that creative format testing is as important as audience testing for brands where product experience drives the purchase decision.
Key takeaway: When your product's key differentiator is experiential (fit, feel, taste, usability), video creative that demonstrates that experience will likely outperform static imagery. But you still need to test the specific execution: format, length, messaging angle, and proof elements.
Across all five case studies, the winning formula is consistent:
You do not need a massive budget to start testing smarter. Begin with these fundamentals:
The brands that treat advertising as a discipline, grounded in structured experimentation rather than creative guesswork, are the ones that consistently outperform. These five case studies prove it, and the methodology is available to any brand willing to commit to the process.
⏱️ This post is part of a blog series, “Great Scott! The Future of Marketing is...” that will answer questions about marketing trends from emerging technologies to changing views about the role and purpose of marketing. From the Four Ps to the Four Es: Time to Remix the Traditional Marketing Mix
In 1960, Xerox introduced the first photocopier, minimum wage was $1, and cassette tapes were on the verge of being invented. Our phones were rotary, our news was delivered by hand, and milk men were heartily employed.
It was also the year that marketer and academic E. Jerome McCarthy introduced the Four P’s—product, price, place, and promotion—in his book Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach. This foundational text has been taught in university marketing courses ever since, leading to widespread acceptance of the Four P’s as the pillars of a solid marketing framework.
Considering milk men and cassette tapes feel several lifetimes behind us, it’s not hard to fathom that this paradigm might be in need of a face lift (which interestingly, has been around since 1916).
McCarthy’s first P, product, refers to the tangible good or intangible service being sold to consumers. Marketers must have a solid grasp on their product’s value, strengths, and weaknesses. What makes your product unique? Can you find it on every street corner? How will you stand out from the competition?
Long considered to be the primary driver of sales, price impacts everything from profit margins to perception and is particularly important if you’re entering into a crowded market, which almost everyone is.
Place is the physical or digital location where your product can be purchased, and promotion refers to the ways in which you disseminate information about your product.
In 2009, thought leader and CEO of Ogilvy & Mather, Brian Fetherstonhaugh, proposed a new formula that replaces the Four P’s with the Four E’s—experience, exchange, every place, and evangelism—repositioning the marketing framework to center around delivering meaningful value to the customer.
In Fetherstonhaugh’s new model, experience is the new product. It’s no longer enough to simply fill the need provided by the product itself. Today’s consumer is looking to buy an experience, and every moment they invest in your brand factors into their ultimate satisfaction. This is especially true for e-commerce and SaaS companies, whose interactions and customer service form the basis of the product itself.
Fetherstonhaugh posits that price has been replaced by exchange. So much is offered for free today that brands cannot depend on price alone. Price now represents an exchange for value, and that value includes the entire customer journey experience, before and beyond the point of purchase.
Thanks to the most transformative invention of our lifetimes (hint: you’re holding it), place becomes every place. We live in an era of immediateness, where almost anything is obtainable from the palm of our hand and deliverable to our doorstep within hours to days. Brands need to meet customers where they’re at, whether that be a physical location or online via your website, social media, or other channels.
In 1960, promotion meant utilizing various channels controlled by large media organizations. Today, promotion is replaced by evangelism. Depending on their following, any one of your customers holds the same power to reach the masses. Social media has granted word-of-mouth marketing unlimited potential. Marketers must embrace customers’ power and inspire them to be ambassadors for the brand.
The silver lining to this new power dynamic? If marketers provide a valuable experience with a meaningful exchange and meet customers where they’re at, placing a megaphone in their hands is a good thing. Transparency is welcomed by those who have nothing to hide. And similar to earned versus paid media, positive testimonials carry more weight. One study found that online reviews impact 67.7% of respondents' purchasing decisions.
What’s the takeaway here? The future of marketing can be summed up with an age-old mantra: the customer is king. Scratch that: customer-generated content is king, and if you execute the Four E’s correctly, you’ll reign supreme.
Facebook unveiled a new way of monetizing live online events in 2020 and we were quick to take this new feature for a test drive.
Before we give you the details of our experience, first let’s take a look at the details of paid online events.
The need for Facebook paid online events arose from COVID-19 shutdowns that required large gatherings to either shut down or move to a totally virtual format. Enterprising businesses began using Facebook Live broadcasts more frequently to engage customers even when they couldn’t be together.
Facebook paid online events allow businesses to monetize their live online events by charging a one-time access fee collected upon guest registration. The goal is that businesses can create an event, get registrants, and collect fees all in one place—and then host their event from that same platform.
This is a pretty neat, accessible idea, especially for businesses with fewer resources on-hand to facilitate online events.
Your page is eligible for paid events as long as you’re in compliance with:
✔️ Facebook's Partner Monetization Policies
✔️ Paid Online Events Terms and Conditions
✔️ Apple's App Store Guidelines for In-App Purchases
✔️ Google Play’s Monetization and Ads Policy
Plus, your Page has to be in a region where paid online events are available.
You can check your Page’s eligibility for monetization by going to Creator Studio > Monetization > click the View Page Eligibility button in the Status widget at the top of the page.
💡 Promote your event to increase registrations and raise awareness to new audiences.
💡 Start your live stream early to tackle those pesky technical difficulties that can occur when starting an event online.
💡 Communicate expectations for your event so that registrants know what’s going to happen. Post a schedule in your event description or in posts on the event.
💡 Change the date and time if you have no purchases but still want to hold the paid event. This will give you more time to reach registrants.
💡 Only post content you have the rights to and make sure it’s in compliance with community guidelines.
EmberTribe scheduled a paid online event for one of our clients and ran an event response campaign to promote it. Here’s what we learned from our first experience with paid online events through Facebook.
The pros: solid targeting, good clickthrough rates, and good CPMs.
The cons: with $1000 spent, we only got 4 sales and $80 in revenue.
What we learned: While it’s possible that not enough people were interested in the topic or the price was too high, we believe that ultimately the problem is with event response campaigns themselves.
With event response ads, people don't even need to visit your event page. They can just click "interested" and continue scrolling through their feed. We theorize that's what most people who saw the ads were doing.
Our takeaway: Paid online events might be successful if you have really good organic reach, but we’re now wary about putting a big advertising budget behind them. If you do run an event response campaign, it's probably best to just do retargeting.
Facebook made its recommendation guidelines public, and there is a lot for marketers to unpack. With ongoing pressure on the platform to better manage problematic content, this move represents a significant step toward transparency for businesses and content creators operating on both Facebook and Instagram.
Understanding these guidelines is not optional for brands that rely on organic reach. Content that violates recommendation criteria will not be surfaced to new audiences - effectively limiting your distribution to existing followers only. For growth-focused companies, that distinction can mean the difference between a post reaching 500 people and 50,000.
Before diving into the restrictions, it helps to understand what Facebook recommendations actually are. Recommendation experiences are the platform's algorithmic surfaces that introduce users to content from accounts they do not already follow. These include:
These recommendation surfaces represent some of the most valuable organic real estate on the platform. When your content qualifies for recommendations, it reaches users who are predisposed to engage with your brand - but have not yet discovered you. Losing access to these surfaces significantly limits organic growth potential.
Facebook has organized its recommendation restrictions into five categories. Content in these categories is allowed to remain on the platform but will not be recommended to users who do not already follow the account.
This category targets content that, while not explicitly violating community standards, sits close enough to the line that Facebook does not want to amplify it. Examples include:
The resharing provision is particularly important for brands. Even if your original content is clean, resharing a borderline post from another account can affect your recommendation eligibility.
Facebook applies extra scrutiny to content in categories where misinformation can cause real-world harm:
For brands in the health, wellness, or financial services space, this means your content strategy needs to be built on substantiated claims and educational value rather than hype-driven messaging. Factual, well-sourced content is far more likely to qualify for recommendations than promotional material.
This category is essentially Facebook's war on engagement bait - tactics that generate clicks and interactions but leave users feeling annoyed or deceived:
For marketers accustomed to using contests as a growth lever, this restriction changes the calculus. While contests are still allowed, they will not be amplified through recommendations. That means you need to weigh the value of engagement from existing followers against the loss of potential discovery by new audiences.
Facebook's quality standards target content that does not meet a minimum bar for originality and credibility:
This category reinforces the importance of original content creation. Brands that rely heavily on curating and resharing third-party content may find their recommendation eligibility declining over time. Investing in original thought leadership, proprietary data, and unique perspectives is the more sustainable path to organic reach.
The final category addresses factual accuracy:
For businesses, the practical implication is straightforward: ensure every claim in your social content is accurate and can be substantiated. A single post flagged by fact-checkers can impact your entire page's recommendation eligibility.
The recommendation guidelines create a clear dividing line between content that can grow your audience and content that only reaches people who already follow you. For brands investing in organic social as a growth channel, optimizing for recommendation eligibility is now a core strategic consideration.
Recommendation restrictions do not operate in isolation. Facebook's algorithm evaluates pages holistically, meaning a pattern of posting restricted content can suppress the recommendation eligibility of your entire page - not just individual posts. One borderline post will not destroy your reach, but a consistent pattern will.
This is why regular content audits matter. Review your posting history through the lens of these five categories and remove or archive content that could be flagged. Think of it as maintaining your page's algorithmic credit score.
Brands that have been banned from Instagram Ads or Facebook Ads face additional penalties: their pages will not be recommended at all. This creates a compounding problem where advertising policy violations bleed into organic performance.
For brands running paid campaigns alongside organic content, maintaining clean ad accounts is now doubly important. An ad disapproval issue does not just affect your paid performance - it can throttle your organic growth as well.
Based on these guidelines, here are actionable steps every social media team should implement.
Review your page's content history and align it with Facebook's recommendation criteria. Pay special attention to:
Remove or archive anything that could be pulling down your page's overall recommendation eligibility.
If your brand operates multiple Facebook pages that post identical or near-identical content, deactivate the redundant ones. Facebook's quality signals penalize pages that appear to exist solely to amplify the same content across multiple accounts.
Consolidate your social presence around a single authoritative page with original content.
Pages that have purchased likes, followers, or engagement in the past will not be recommended. If your page has a history of bought followers, consider whether the inflated follower count is actually hurting you more than helping. A page with 10,000 genuine followers will outperform a page with 100,000 purchased followers in the recommendation algorithm.
Follower quality also affects your engagement rate, which is a key input to Facebook's distribution algorithms. Low engagement rates signal to the algorithm that your content is not resonating - further reducing reach.
The common thread across all five restriction categories is that Facebook wants to recommend content that genuinely benefits users. Content that educates, informs, entertains, or inspires will always outperform content designed to manipulate engagement metrics.
Practical ways to create recommendation-eligible content include:
Facebook regularly updates its recommendation guidelines as the platform evolves. What qualifies for recommendations today may not qualify tomorrow, and new surfaces for recommendations are added regularly.
Assign someone on your team to monitor the Facebook Business Help Center and adjust your content strategy as policies change. Proactive adaptation is always less costly than reactive damage control.
These recommendation guidelines reflect a broader shift across all social platforms toward quality-first content distribution. The algorithms that power content recommendations are increasingly sophisticated, and platforms are rewarding authenticity, originality, and user value while penalizing manipulation and low-effort content.
For brands that have always prioritized genuine value creation, these guidelines are not a threat - they are a competitive advantage. As platforms tighten their criteria, brands that cut corners will lose distribution while those that invest in quality will gain it.
The bottom line: align your content strategy with what Facebook's algorithm wants to recommend, and the platform will do the distribution work for you. Fight against it, and you will find yourself paying for every impression.
To carve pumpkins, of course. 🎃
It also means we’re all gearing up for a busy Q4 selling season and taking stock of what’s really scary this time of year: costly marketing mistakes that affect the bottom line.
This post is part cautionary tale and part kick-in-the-gourd for eCommerce businesses still trying to hide from the holiday season just around the corner. Let’s break down some marketing mistakes many eCommerce businesses are making right now, and how you can escape their same fate.
😱 Waiting too long to prepare for Black Friday.
We've been talking about Black Friday 2020 since this August, and for good reason. It’s not only because we wanted to will the hot Summer days away, but because all projections estimate that holiday shopping will begin earlier than ever this year. If you haven’t nailed down your Cyber Month sales plan yet, there’s still time...but not much. Some big name stores are going to kick off their sales as soon as November 1 breaks.
😱 Not testing paid ads early enough.
You don’t want the paid ads you’re running for holiday sales to be test campaigns. They should be tested, re-tested, and optimized to reach tried and true status by the time the critical sales dates come around. Give yourself a few weeks to test creative, audiences, and retargeting strategies. By the time Black Friday comes around, your ads should be lean, mean, revenue-earning machines.
😱 Haven’t optimized their website for mobile.
In 2019, 39.6% of holiday season eCommerce spending can be attributed to smartphone and online shoppers. Shopify reported that a whopping 69% of sales over BFCM 2019 weekend were made on phones or tablets. That’s a big (and growing) share of eCommerce spending, and it’s not something you want to miss out on because your website just doesn’t work on a mobile device. Right? Right.
😱 Confusing, inaccurate, or just plain crappy product descriptions.
Remove friction for shoppers by providing thorough, relevant information in product descriptions. This information should answer common questions, speak to your target audience, and maybe even bust a few objections from the get-go.
😱 Not defining your target market.
Not only is targeting everyone, everywhere extremely expensive, it’s also ineffective. Before you can rake in the big sales, you need to understand your customers. Go beyond a one-size-fits all approach and deep dive into demographics, behavioral data, personalization, and testing to define and refine your target market.
😱 Slow page load speed.
How long do you think a visitor is going to sit around waiting for your site to load? Unfortunately, it’s about 3 seconds. In 2018, a Google study found that page load speeds between 1s to 3s saw the probability of bounce increase 32%. 1s to 5s load time bumps that number up to 90% bounce probability. The answer definitely varies by person and perhaps your chances are better if they are a return customer, but why take chances?
😱 Confusing checkout process.
So your customer has added an item (or 5, 10, 15, 20) to their cart and they initiate the purchase process. You’re this close 👌 to making a sale. Why would a customer exit now? It turns out, there’s a lot of reasons. Your checkout process should be easy to complete. Don’t force visitors to create an account, provide unnecessary information, or take them through needlessly long and confusing forms. Online shoppers can be fickle, and your conversions are only as good as sales completed.
😱 No email marketing plan.
Emails aren’t all about making sales in eCommerce. Since your customers don’t get a chance to interact with your store space, salespeople, or product in person, you need to think about how you can build a relationship with customers. Make sure you’re keeping your store at the top of their mind and getting them excited about upcoming sales.
😱 Surprise fees.
$12 shipping?! No, thank you. We’ve probably all added an item to our cart, initiated a checkout, and even entered our address only to find out that shipping is just...not worth it. Be up front with shipping costs or additional fees. Don’t catch customers by surprise with fees they didn’t anticipate. Include copy on your website that gives clear and concise information about shipping fees. Offer estimates if possible. And if you can swing it, offer free shipping to push shoppers over the edge from browser to purchaser.
😱 Not taking enough time to nurture customers.
There are definitely upsides and downsides to the long 2020 holiday shopping season. One upside is that people who would typically do their shopping in stores will be more likely to make eCommerce purchases, and they will be more deliberate about their purchases because they can’t interact with them ahead of time. That means you have more time to reach that customer with the right kind of ads, emails, social media, etc. that will push them to convert. Take advantage of the Cyber Month timeline to catch audiences, nurture your funnel, and make the sale...and invite them to make another purchase before the season ends.
Phew, that’s a lot of scary mistakes. The good news is you’ve still got time to prepare for huge Q4 sales and avoid these mishaps.
You’ve been warned!
This post is part of a blog series, "Here Be Metrics," breaking down the primary aspects of the so-called pirate metrics for growth marketing. Keep up with this series and others by subscribing to our blog!
Seeing a skull and bones on the high seas sent people fleeing in fear of imminent attack, for pirates wasted little time once their presence was known.
Although they should not attack customers, corporations today should likewise waste little time taking action once a target sees their brand. The move from awareness to acquisition is a critical process in the customer lifecycle, and the businesses that master it build the foundation for sustainable, profitable growth.
In the pirate metrics framework (AAARRR: Awareness, Acquisition, Activation, Revenue, Retention, Referral), acquisition sits at a pivotal point. It is the moment when an anonymous audience member becomes a known contact, a lead, or a customer. Everything that follows in the growth engine depends on how effectively you execute this transition.
The goal of acquisition is to move people from undefined groups to individual leads or customers. It is the conversion from passive observer to active participant in your brand's ecosystem.
While cannons and swords were effective when pillaging ships and towns along the high seas, today's civilized markets call for a more nuanced approach. Corporations must entice, rather than force, customers to join their tribe.
Image Credit: 500 Hats
Acquisition can be defined as the moment of the very first transaction with a customer, or simply the act of bringing new customers and clients into your business. This transaction often is not a monetary payment for goods or services. Instead, it is normally an exchange of information and permission. The target audience volunteers their personal information with the understanding that the company will contact them in the future.
To entice customers to make this exchange, many companies offer immediate value in return. Coupons, PDF downloads, ebooks, free trials, and membership deals are all common offerings that serve as the catalyst for converting an interested visitor into an identifiable lead.
Image Credit: 500 Hats
With regard to metrics, acquisition focuses on data related to lead capture and the efficiency of your conversion process. Understanding these numbers is fundamental to optimizing your sales funnel and improving growth over time.
These metrics tell you how many potential customers you are bringing into your pipeline:
Volume alone tells an incomplete story. These metrics reveal how efficiently your acquisition engine operates:
The relationship between these metrics matters as much as the individual numbers. A low CPL is meaningless if those leads never convert to customers. A high CAC is acceptable if lifetime value is proportionally higher. Growth marketers obsess over the ratios and unit economics, not vanity metrics in isolation. This approach to understanding what truly matters beyond surface-level ROAS separates effective acquisition strategies from wasteful ones.
For online marketing campaigns, the volume of acquisition data available makes this metric category particularly powerful. In addition to the core metrics listed above, digital marketers can access highly granular data points including:
With such detailed information, the moment of acquisition can be fine-tuned to maximize the conversion rate and minimize the cost of acquisition. This data-driven approach is what separates modern growth marketing from traditional advertising.
Tracking metrics is necessary but not sufficient. You need a deliberate strategy for generating leads and converting them efficiently. Here is a framework for building acquisition systems that scale.
Relying on a single channel for customer acquisition is fragile. Algorithm changes, cost increases, or market shifts can devastate your pipeline overnight. The most resilient acquisition strategies spread effort across multiple growth marketing channels:
The gap between a visitor arriving at your site and that visitor becoming a lead is where acquisition happens. Every element of the lead capture experience affects your conversion rate:
Landing pages. Dedicated landing pages with a single CTA consistently outperform general website pages for lead capture. Remove navigation, minimize distractions, and focus every element on the conversion goal.
Forms. Ask for only the information you need at the point of capture. Every additional field reduces completion rates. You can always collect more data later in the relationship.
Lead magnets. The value exchange must feel fair to the prospect. A generic "subscribe to our newsletter" CTA underperforms a specific, high-value offer like "Download our 2026 DTC Growth Playbook" or "Get a free audit of your ad account."
Social proof. Testimonials, client logos, case study results, and review scores near your lead capture points reduce friction and increase trust. Showing real results, like the outcomes from proven case studies, gives prospects confidence to take the next step.
Acquisition does not exist in a vacuum. It is one step in a larger journey that begins with awareness and extends through activation, revenue, retention, and referral. The most effective acquisition strategies consider what happens before and after the lead capture moment.
Before acquisition: Invest in awareness-stage content and advertising that warms your target audience before asking for anything in return. Cold audiences who have had zero prior exposure to your brand convert at significantly lower rates than those who have engaged with your content.
After acquisition: Plan your activation sequence before you generate leads. A lead that sits in your database without a follow-up plan is a wasted acquisition. Automated email sequences, personalized outreach, and timely follow-up calls ensure that new leads move toward the next stage of the funnel rather than going cold.
Even experienced marketers make acquisition errors that limit growth. Watch for these common pitfalls:
Optimizing for the wrong metric. Maximizing lead volume while ignoring lead quality fills your pipeline with contacts who will never buy. Focus on qualified leads and downstream conversion rates, not raw numbers.
Ignoring channel attribution. If you cannot attribute leads to specific channels and campaigns, you cannot optimize your spend. Invest in proper tracking and attribution before scaling your budget. Understanding which audiences to target for lead generation requires solid attribution data.
Neglecting the post-capture experience. Acquisition is not the finish line. A lead captured without a clear activation path is money spent with no return. Build your nurture sequences and sales processes before you increase acquisition spend.
Over-investing in one channel. Even if one channel is performing well today, market conditions change. Allocate a portion of your budget to testing new channels continuously.
Do not waste time delaying acquisition. The moment your target demographic becomes aware of your brand, move toward actions that will acquire them as customers. The pirates of the high seas did not dally, and neither should you.
Start by auditing your current acquisition metrics. Calculate your CAC, measure your lead conversion rates by channel, and identify the biggest drop-off points in your funnel. Then prioritize the improvements that will have the highest impact on volume and efficiency.
Acquisition is the engine that powers every subsequent stage of the growth marketing framework. Master it, measure it relentlessly, and optimize it continuously, and you build the foundation for a business that scales predictably and profitably.
If you’re using Facebook ads, the Facebook pixel is a huge asset.
You should be using this key tool to realize the full potential of your social ad budget. With a little learning under your belt, you can use the pixel to gain major advantages for your results.
Facebook Pixel refers to code on a website that measures an advertising campaign’s effectiveness by interpreting the actions visitors take on the website.
In other words, the Facebook Pixel is an analytics tool that helps you track the conversion rate generated from Facebook ads and builds the target audience for future ads. Businesses can use it to ensure that their ads go to the right people.
It sounds a little weird, right? We train horses, dogs, sometimes dragons…
But a snippet of code is a whole other animal.
Training your pixel means that you don’t run a campaign with the purpose of getting a huge profit but rather to find the right audience. When you find the right audience, conversions should naturally follow.
The only conversion that you can optimize for without a pixel is link clicks. On the other hand, a pixel makes it possible for you to optimize a variety of conversion types in close alignment with the goals and aims of the business.
The Facebook pixel allows you to gain insight into how people interact with your website and allows you to track customers across the various devices. To put it simply, it can track whether the customers saw your ads on mobile and turned to the desktop before making a purchase, or the other way around.
It’s the real brains of your Facebook advertising operation.
To sum up, training your pixel is essential because it creates a customized audience that will most likely convert and turn into a lead by learning about your audience.
This brings us to the next point.
The Facebook ads delivery system uses machine learning to optimize for results. The delivery system collects more insights about the right target audience each time one of your Facebook ads is displayed (or as ad pros say, “served”).
You’ll know that your ad is in the learning phase because the Delivery column in your ads manager will indicate the ad set is “Learning.”
The learning phase is a critical time for Facebook’s machine learning to kick in and collect helpful information that will help you optimize your campaign. Thanks to the learning phase, you can get information that can take your ads from running on your assumptions to running on a data-backed hypothesis.
The learning phase is typically defined by 50 conversions that need to occur per ad set within one week’s time. Sometimes this number might be more, sometimes less, depending on your particular niche. We like to say 50 is a good rule of thumb, but not a magic number.
Now this part is important. It might go against your instincts to tweak and optimize, but during the learning phase you should avoid changing any of the following:
You can’t touch these!
Because if you do, Facebook will start the whoooole thing over again. Basically, by trying to tweak with variables during the learning phase you’re not allowing Facebook the chance to properly learn.
It would be like introducing a new topic in math class every day and expecting a student to master the information on the fly. Not fair.
FEATURED RESOURCE: This one-pager walks you through the stages of the Facebook learning phase. Ditch the confusion and master Facebook learning!
At this time, Facebook has had the chance to explore all the best possible options to deliver your ad set.
Each time your ad was shown, the delivery system learned how to optimize your ad’s performance. This in turn helps you learn what ad strategies are working for your business and which ones you can toss out.
If you don’t get past the learning phase, Facebook will let you know that the ad set came back as “Learning Limited” — the ad set is not getting the required number of conversions for optimization or the system predicts that the ad set won’t be able to garner enough optimization events in the coming future.
It’s not the end of the world, but it does mean you’ll have to try again with a different ad set. We really value failure here, so even though Facebook comes back as “learning limited,” it’s definitely possible for you, the advertiser, to make educated adjustments to your ad creative to improve on future ads.
👍 If you’re not getting to that 50 conversion benchmark for purchases, try moving up the funnel and adjusting your ads for things like link click, page views, etc. That way you’re more likely to get the ad set through the learning phase and you’re getting more eyes on your ads (always a good thing). Once you’re optimized for top of funnel conversions, you’ll be better set up for bottom of funnel conversions.
👍 Run fewer ad sets in the beginning of your process. Remember: quality over quantity! If you have a limited budget, focus on a few key ad sets early on that you can really get through the learning phase as quickly as possible with a solid basis for scaling your ads for conversions.
👍 If you're not getting whatever the objective is that you’re going after, it could be that your ad creative just isn't hitting right with your target audience. So try testing new ad creative. Try out creating multiple ads, changing up the headline, making other bold changes to the ads before you enter the learning phase and see if any of these succeed.
Just like training a dog, training your Facebook pixel takes a lot of time, flexibility, and patience. But if you stick with it and make it through that learning phase to start optimizing, your pixel will be able to fetch you better results.
We all love the idea of having our own Pinterest board, right? It shows off our taste to the world, allowing them a glimpse into just how unique and interesting we are.
Here are some other Pinterest tips to keep in mind:
📌 Make sure to include branding in your content, but keep it subtle enough so that it doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb. If it’s too in your face, your audience may not want to pin it and you lose traction from the start.
📌 Another Pinterest best practice to keep in mind is to focus on keywords that your audience is likely to search. If you use targeted keywords, you will come up in users’ searches and your brand will gain increased visibility. Take some time to compile relevant keywords and come up with appropriate board names.
📌 Pinterest, like Instagram, is a very visual platform and not just any old images will do. Plan your Pinterest imagery to catch the attention of a scroller.
📌 Don’t just post and pin to create content. Be deliberate with your content strategy—this is a good time to curate your board. Entire boards can draw users and turn them into followers, so that they know where to keep going for more content. For example, if you’re a men’s clothing eCommerce shop, don’t just pin a shirt or slacks here and there, create boards with outfit ideas for different occasions and seasons.
📌 Remember, a pin can be linked back to a description for more context. This means Pinterest can always play a part in a larger advertising campaign for your business. Just pop your store URL, or even better, a landing page URL, into the pin to lead traffic to your website.
📌 When in doubt, research what other companies are doing with their organic content on Pinterest, and emulate the strategies you like.
Any avid Pinterest user won't think twice before answering a firm “No”!
But that’s probably because they use real life to influence their Pinterest boards and not because they're marketing mavens.
The truth is, Pinterest does not rely entirely on fresh content to overtake older content on its feed. Pinterest has stated that all content across board browsing, search browsing, home feed, and category feed is viewed equally. 🤯
Pinterest decides what should make it to a person’s feed according to the quality of each post as opposed to how recently it was uploaded. As a brand, quality over quantity will definitely serve you well.
Admit it, marketer or not we have all talked about algorithms being (scarily) artificially intelligent, real-life Skynet, and a sinister machine that monitors all our actions and knows us better than we know ourselves.
But do we even know what algorithms are?
We assume there is this one algorithm in a top-secret file at Google Headquarters that’s prized for listening in on our conversations and reading our minds.
But there isn’t just one algorithm, there are many algorithms—each one personalized to produce a result we care about.
For example, putting a pan of water on the stove at a certain temperature for a certain time is a way to reach the result of boiling hot water. This is one equation, or rule, or sequence. Adding eggs to the boiling water and letting them stay in for a certain period of time leads to hard-boiled eggs. This is another sequence that leads to a result.
Continuing with that metaphor, when you type a query into the Google search bar, it doesn’t just fire one sequence to get your result, it fires up an entire kitchen of line cooks. 🍳
Algorithms are excellent tools for optimizing your marketing campaign because they provide what we love best: data. They can help you pick apart your audiences’ complex decisions. Here are a few examples of how you can use algorithms as a marketer.
Algorithms help monitor the behavior of your demographic and suggest the likely hours during the day when your leads are browsing online.
Having a pool of valuable behavioral data can help you remarket to the right people at the right time. If you share that information with your broader marketing team you can even use it to design a unique campaign that incorporates highly targeted information about your audience.
Algorithms can help you personalize the way you show an ad to your consumer or a lead. Remember that song that played on Spotify shuffle? Wasn’t it exactly the kind of tune you were looking for? Now how did that happen? Or that ad about artisanal potato chips made from handpicked Idaho potatoes...how did they know that’s just what you were craving?
Google uses algorithms to show you information that you are likely going to be interested in, such as targeted news articles and tutorials. That means you’re not just being delivered the answer to your query, but information about your query targeted for you based on your search habits.
Targeting is what allows the internet to predict what you may feel like eating the next day. It has consumed so much of your behavioral pattern that you start panicking Google is reading your mind. It’s not…
Or is it?
No seriously, that's just how proactive algorithms are. They make use of something that we hear a lot: Machine learning, aka another way of saying artificial intelligence.
Machine learning helps figure out what your customer is thinking. Are they browsing? Are they going to spend soon? Are they looking to spend now? Basically, it helps you determine the stage of your buyer’s journey so you can address it.
🛠️ Find out how you can build a better funnel with retargeting. →
Sounds great right? By now you feel ready to drive your entire digital marketing campaign based on algorithms. We’ve said a lot of great things about them so far, but are algorithms really the bee’s knees?
The answer to that is yes and no. Google algorithm and machine learning is great at monitoring behavior and 7 times out of 10 it does strike true, but the times it does not is because algorithms cannot grasp context. AI can predict a customer’s response to likely be a certain way, but what if the routine context is changed (as it is in life), rendering the data ineffective?
That being said, algorithms remain the foremost tools to learn about humans and their actions. They have brought us far in the way marketers engage with audiences and it has proven effective. For that reason, we have to raise our glass to algorithms that make our lives as marketers just a little easier and more data-driven.
Advertising on Facebook is not for the weak-willed. There’s a lot to know and a lot to learn about Facebook ads to master Facebook marketing skills. That’s one of the reasons there are so many educational resources about Facebook advertising—there’s so much to know!
Luckily, the overlords folks at Facebook have produced tons of learning materials for us lowly marketers.
The Facebook Blueprint certification exams are targeted to digital marketers looking to demonstrate advanced proficiency using Facebook advertising services across platforms. There are 8 total certification levels:
One of our own EmberTribers, Joe, set out to test what a Facebook Blueprint Certification Exam is like and determine if it’s worth the hassle. He took the 100 level “Digital Marketing Associate” course as his test. After finishing his exam (passed with flying colors!), he reported back to us about his experience.
Here’s what he had to say:
Some other questions that our team had for Joe about the process:
Do you think the 100 certification is necessary for Facebook competency?
No, this level is not too difficult and covers a lot of the basics that any seasoned Facebook advertiser would already have under their belt. Taking the certification exam for the 100 level is more of a resume builder than a knowledge builder for those already familiar with Facebook digital marketing.
Was there a fee attached?
Yes, the fee for each exam is $99.
Is it a lifetime or time-limited certification?
The certification is good for 1 year.
Facebook's Blueprint course is a great foundational tool for advertisers. But what about the spaces "in-between" where many marketers find themselves wondering how to address using ads for growth?
Since our agency's inception, we've profitably spent more than $100 million on Facebook runnings ads for ourselves and our clients. We wanted to put all of this practical knowledge to work by creating a free Facebook ads training course for founders who are serious about growing their business with paid ads.
If you're not familiar with Facebook ads yet, you will want to start with the Facebook Blueprint course. Once you're done, we recommend bookmarking our free Facebook ads course or signing up for lessons sent directly to your email inbox.
In these training modules, we outline strategies and tactics that you won't find in the Facebook help section. Take time reviewing these training videos to learn from our deep knowledge of Facebook ads.
Digital marketers seeking a higher level of proficiency in Facebook ads should consider studying up on the 200 and up level certification to get the most bang for their buck. The certification itself, while nice to have, isn’t necessary to become a competent Facebook advertiser, but the lessons can help you boost your skill level.
And if you’re not comfortable learning the ins and outs of Facebook, it might be a good idea to bring in someone steeped in Facebook ad success. Hey, we know some people 😉.
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