Have you ever had a Facebook Ad denied or (worse yet) ad account disabled?

My entrepreneur groups are filled with horror stories from good-natured business owners who have this happen to them.

And while there are many courses that will show you how to create Facebook ads, there are few resources that dive deep into Facebook policy and how to ensure you remain compliant.

Which is why I was thrilled to meet Trevor Goodchild.

Trevor has worked at Facebook and is a Facebook ad policy specialist. Goodchild specializes in Facebook bans, and has worked with the engineers who created the automations that shut down Facebook ad accounts. He's worked with SMBs to billionaires and celebrities including ad agencies of Tony Robbins, Harv Eker, Dean Graziosi, and more.

In this conversation we discuss the nuances of remaining within Facebook policy, including one tip that I’ve never considered but will have immediate impact on almost every entrepreneur that I know who utilizes a VA for their ads.

I ended up doing an audit of all my platforms immediately after doing this interview to protect myself. You may find yourself doing the same.

Schedule a Discovery Call with Trevor: https://calendly.com/trevorwgoodchild/facebookexpert

Register for my Virtual Happy Hour: https://www.adamliette.com/virtual-happy-hour

Learn more at https://www.adamliette.com

Activate The Warrior Within https://www.adamliette.com/awaken-the-warrior

Transcript

Adam Liette
What's going on smoothie operators, welcome to this episode. So glad to have you now. I want to speak for real here, because here's what happens when we're in a growing organization. And I know, like, yeah, you're the operator, you're running a whole lot of shit. And something new comes up. And man, we want to try something new. And who do they turn to they turn to who they already have on the team. It's happened a million times to me before. And it's how I actually accidentally first got into Facebook ads was we needed someone to do it. They said, Adam, you can figure that out, can't you? Yeah, it's easy as pie, isn't it? So you know, a couple quick courses later. And I just failed miserably, as most of us do when we first start. But over time, we ended up learning these things. That being said, knowing that we're going to be in these different environments, knowing that we may be asked to do things that are outside of our comfort zone. Like realizing that, like just starting from scratch and not looking to experts might not be the best idea. And usually don't realize that until you fail at it a couple of times. So with that I wanted to talk about Facebook ads today specifically, like getting into Facebook ads policy, which is where a lot of us, maybe even you have gotten yourself bitten in the ass before. So I got found Trevor Goodchild so Trevor's worked at Facebook itself. Then later at meta. He's a Facebook ads policy specialists he helped launch the Xbox 360 for Microsoft worked at Apple. Oh my gosh, like, hooked me up brother. And his most recent project that Facebook was announced by Mark Zuckerberg himself. So he Facebook, he specializes in Facebook bands, he's worked at the engineers to create those pesky little automations that shut down our ad accounts work with multiple people, including Tony Robbins, Harv, Eker, DS, Dean grazioso, and more. So, obviously, we got a rockstar in the house. Someone who's been there done that has the pictures has the t shirt, including the Facebook t shirt he's literally wearing right now on the call. Trevor, how's it going, brother?

Trevor Goodchild
It's going well. How are you doing Adam?

Adam Liette
Living the dream, man. It's well, it's dark for both of us because it's late. Because you know, it's that time of the year when it gets late too damn early. Yeah,

Trevor Goodchild
the scam they call daylight savings. It's probably is conspiracy theory originated in Scientology or something? No, it's because of the farmers we all know. But what percent of the population is farmers like? 1%. yet? We're still I mean, I want my food. I like food. Food is good. The same time do we really need daylight savings? But I don't think we're gonna do a whole episode on that topic.

Adam Liette
Yeah, it wouldn't be the most enticing episode. That being said, I got like three sides of my house are surrounded by cornfields. So I know a lot more than 1% farmers. But that's the joy of living out here in the sticks. And this is my favorite time of the year. Trevor. Just bring out the country. Like when the corn starts to come down. The deer no longer have a place to hide. And it's prime deer season. And so I got my crossbow ready to go. I'm going out this weekend.

Trevor Goodchild
All right, well, I wish the Jew luck evading evading your arrows. You should just go out with David Bowie knife clinch between your teeth and painted in camouflage and take it down Hanahan combat then then you've respected the spirit of the deer

Adam Liette
Oh my gosh. Well, that's how many of us first

Trevor Goodchild
time my wife No.

Adam Liette
Mother if you can't tell the pre interview guys was really it was fun already. So I knew like from Jump Street that this is gonna be a fun interview. But I think David Bowie knife in the woods covered in blood is how many of us start our Facebook ads journey? Yes,

Trevor Goodchild
no, I think we started it's how we end up after bans you Yes. Right. Right. Got that crazy look and you're just like waiting, you know, kind of like Wolf of Wall Street trying to try to wade through everything in the paperwork in the in the craziness of corporations trying to stop businesses from making money. And it's insane how much we've seen this. You know how many billions of dollars Facebook lost when the Apple iOS update happened? It was insane. Like the thing is that the trickle down effect people don't connect the dots. Now how does Facebook save more money? Right well laid off a whole bunch of people increased it automation. So what does that do? decrease your chance for being able to run an ad without extra eyes on it, robot eyes and robots making decisions for humans. We've already seen a preamble here of the matrix AI robot Terminator Total Recall, however you want to phrase it with Facebook's vicious automations. Look at Mark Zuckerberg. His description of the metaverse where you go and work and play and eat and sleep and all this crazy. It matches almost exactly the description of the matrix on the wiki. It's insane.

Adam Liette
Well, we went there, I love it. I think for the for the average listener if they weren't. So I remember when when the iOS update came out and what it did, I was running ads at the time, about cost overrun like $500 A day at that time. And it it absolutely crushed us. So if people don't remember, like, what was that all about? Or like, what exactly was happening around that time? Because you obviously had a far different look at it than I did. Well,

Trevor Goodchild
oh, man. That's that's a long topic. I don't know if I want to go into the details of all that. But basically, the iOS 14 update, I believe, what it did is it stopped you from being able to use cookies to retarget. So they had to shift into different formats of tracking people. And the ads and there are still ways you can do it. But it also, like so many things happened with look alike audiences for special ed categories being axed. Like, it's like one domino that starts then has everything else that follows I think one of the things that people don't realize is that you should keep up with new updates for Facebook's ad policies, not because it's interesting, but because they like ads enter into a learning phase in the ad auction so to speak, but with the policy bots, so the existing policy bots have to adapt, like in the like neuro linguistic programming for the new automations. For that to work in the algorithm. Well guess what, you know, just when you release an ad on the newsfeed when you go live, it goes to bet on the ad action to see, well, is there another, you know, business or advertiser targeting the same audience with more money, more specifically better word ad copy. And then based on the evaluation, your ad is seen above or below the other ads targeting that same audience. Now the problem is that with AD policy automations you have there's no real tools to moderate that. It's just kind of like election year, new policies COVID new policies, let's just see what the hell happens iOS 14 new policies, election year new policies, and it's you're in this constant mood bucks the stop pay for hashtag stop hate for profit boycott that went on, we have major big box stores, and GEICO and just dropping out of Facebook advertising, hundreds of millions of dollars left the platform, guess how many people's ads got fucked up. Later on that year, when all these big box stores started dumping their money back onto Facebook and re advertising again, it couldn't calibrate it right. And so when you zoom out and look at how automations affect the advertising sphere, one of the things you can do to kind of have an edge up is prepare for disruption when you see an announcement or a PSA from the Facebook news website or PR sites for Facebook's developments or even developer hubs for developer.facebook.com. And keep track of this and be prepared like okay, new policy is about to roll out be prepared for everything to get FUBAR for a while. Right.

Adam Liette
And it's such an interesting concept like preparing for disruption, like you and I have both in our respective careers kind of lived with that chaos in different fields of work and in this same field of work as well. Like if How do you prepare for disruption? Or like what kinds of things would you recommend that entrepreneurs do like is it making sure they're on their on multiple channels? Or is it like what kind of things can we do to protect ourselves or at least to have the maybe just the mindset that things are gonna get all crazy?

Trevor Goodchild
Well, forgetting supragranular dialing down to Facebook specifically, I like to silo different business managers that don't have connections between each other of the same Facebook profiles and the admin or editor roles in the business manager settings. And that way if for whatever reason one of these new ad policies retro actively flags and ad that used to be okay with the new policy now is not and they want to punish me for something they had approved before. Then I'm not trapped where the dominoes start to fall in that business manager may be unrelated as another ad accounts or the same ad account. I was separate ad type per ad account. get affected too, right? Because then when you have all your eggs in one basket, it's so much more riskier where if you have it spread out Over several different business managers, while it is a little more of a pain in the ass when it comes to everyday, you know, working and routines and shit, it's better than losing a lot of money when Facebook full stop, turns on an ad you've had off for two years, re scans it with their automations because some new policy happened. And then retroactively banzi completely right, it happens, which is insane. It's not even like they turn it on, rescan it and then punish you for some stuff. That was okay, when you ran it. And there's no appeal to that you can't, you know, so that's what I like to do. I like to diversify the sources through which ads are run through, that really helps out. And sometimes that means hiring a bigger team. Sometimes it means hiring people off of Fiverr or something like that, as long as they are not located in specific countries that Facebook has kind of red alerts about because of clickbait firms that are there.

Adam Liette
Which countries are those?

Trevor Goodchild
I mean, I can't tell you. Yeah, if I told you, I would have to kill you. There are air quotes around that I am not mean that literally do not cancel me. No. No, I mean, like just the classical third world countries that have clickbait firms like Malaysia, Philippines, places like that, you have a higher risk of getting flagged just having an operator and one of those countries. Now two years ago, it wasn't a problem. But now, the newest like epidemic that is happening is a lot of these countries. I don't know if it's government sponsored or state sponsored and kind of some black ops shit. But there is just this incredible flood of hackers, people doing fake and imposter accounts, people creating Facebook pages, named after a Facebook warning word for word. So you click on it, and you think it's Facebook, but it's a hacker page. Like, they're getting clever now. And it's just at a scale that used to if you had a VA in the Philippines, it wasn't as big of a deal. But now because those same countries have a lot of these hackers and imposter accounts, clickbait form stealing identities, this happening at a scale. That's insane. You know, I used to run this Facebook group, over 26,000 people in it. And you know, we'd meet up in person, it was like a real thing. And the flood of people I saw from Bangladesh, from the Philippines from Pakistan, that are coming in to try to steal people's identity. It was insane. It was insane. I don't know what's happened globally, if it's just a response to the economic hard times or recovering from the 2020 pandemic or I don't know what's happening, but it is at such a threshold. Now Facebook's teed up its automations regionally through specific you know, geo locators, if you are in even that area. Just logging onto the internet at Faith and at Facebook is going to you're gonna have some eyes on you. So

Adam Liette
Holy shit. And amongst my peers like everybody and their mother hires a VA in the Philippines, like you have a frickin vo VA in the Philippines right now. So I need to keep her the hell away from my facebook ads account is what you're saying. Don't

Trevor Goodchild
tell your wife put her up in a nice house, you know shit.

Adam Liette
Honey, I'm not gonna do that. If you're listening to the episode.

Trevor Goodchild
That chance Oh, no state side, the state side. I mean, so it was what I recommend to a lot of my clients. You know, I've helped major brands that have had celebrities, everything else, literally have their accounts that were locked up, get unbanned for for major brands. I don't offer recovery as a service. But when I was a project manager at Facebook last year, I was able to help out right. But the thing is, is that I what I told him and everyone else that encounters this kind of issue is college labor is cheap. It's almost at Philippine level, you can pay a smart intern who's taking classes in marketing and business. They would love the experience and they would actually genuinely get something out of it. And so it would be sweatshop prices, but more wholesome values. And you wouldn't risk the IP mismatch of having Facebook say hey, you're in Vietnam Hey, you're in the Philippines this doesn't look right. Why do you have someone accessing your US page from the Philippines? Oh, now you're banned? Oh, now your page is restricted from advertising like all the frickin drop shippers saw during the pandemic and China delayed shipping page quality scores went below one they couldn't advertise customers complain it wasn't their fault. Right. But it's the bands are vicious when it comes down to that. So to avoid that, that's what I recommend now no shade to the Philippines and all the great marketers that are there are VAs that are there. Right now. I wouldn't go beyond I wouldn't go beyond stateside for vas. I would find someone in the college market you could hire or just someone locally because you can filter on Upwork and Fiverr. Of course, if John is really John, I don't know. Maybe they've all So created fake us profiles to who knows it's crazy the the level that it's at right now, which is why you have to be a lot more careful. When it comes to cybersecurity cyber security is going to be one of the biggest topics to emerge in 2024. Because people are starting to catch on that. It's not optional anymore. You have to have it.

Adam Liette
I mean, I wonder if we could. Like, I wonder if there's like a user way of like verifying where someone is like doing a traceroute or getting, but they can do that with a VPN just as easily, can't they? You

Trevor Goodchild
could try to ping someone, but if they have multiple servers with a VPN, like good luck, so yeah, good

Adam Liette
luck. Exactly. Sorry, I might even go local. asked for a picture of their driver's license. I don't know, Is that racist? Or am I gonna get canceled? Now?

Trevor Goodchild
I started to accurately quote Taylor Swift lyrics. And, and give the reason why they are impactful. There you go. Um, no, there's actually,

Adam Liette
so I just lost my citizenship.

Trevor Goodchild
I got one of my business colleagues, she has her friends with and or talked with the CEO of fiber. And she's got a bunch of really cool templates for what do you do when you're hiring a VA? What kind of questions do you ask? And it's real interesting, because it goes into, like psychology of how they're going to think about the answers they're going to say. So they're specific questions to ask to get an idea of how they're thinking. And there's certain points where you can tell if you're half assing, or if they're actually thinking about answering the question, which is one of those red flags like, nope, nope, you're dialing it in your delegate in. And it's a really cool process. But vetting is really important. No matter what you're doing.

Adam Liette
For sure, man, we went down a couple rabbit holes already. I love it. And it all kind of came down to so we definitely learned a couple things about like how we should do our hiring practices right now, especially for touching your, your your ads platforms, which is really helpful. And I'm gonna get ready to make a move the other way. So this, this, the timing of this interview is amazing. Just

Trevor Goodchild
to stay out of the market right now, you know, maybe I'll change but right now, it's just yeah. And

Adam Liette
I know I've I've done the multiple ad accounts before. It's actually it's one of those things, like once you kind of get used to the flow of it. Still kind of sucks. You can't see everything in one screen. But it's, it's whatever. Yeah, you know,

Trevor Goodchild
I once got, this is like, a one time thing with me, don't tell anyone. I got an ad account disabled. Because I was being lazy for my ecommerce store I had, and the picture of the product that I was selling was blurry. I was just rushing through it. It was stupid. It's a rookie mistake. I know. They literally have a flag, they tell you for low quality images. But they instantly disabled my ad account. But guess what my other products, which were cooking products were in different ad accounts. They weren't affected by the ad account. Getting disabled, didn't stop sales from coming in, didn't shut off those ads. Segmentation is so important when it comes to running ads and ad accounts.

Adam Liette
Dude, that's like scares the shit out of me. Like, image. Like, it's that holy

Trevor Goodchild
crap. You have no idea the things that people have gotten flagged for. And I could never share all of them this magic book of flags that I have. Wait, that's not a good thing to say. Non

Adam Liette
Disclosure agreements a bitch I tell you. Yeah, right. But

Trevor Goodchild
the problem is, is that the engineers that created these don't live off of the profits from Facebook ads, neither do the folks in Facebook ad support. So the real life context behind their advice is non existent. It's like going to the dentist and asking for advice on dental care from someone who watched a few YouTube videos and trying to trust that advice with your money, your safety your your teeth, that you're gritting and now getting poor teeth care. Because you've trusted the advice of people who do not have skin in the game. And that's one of those things where it's one of the saddest things I've seen, one of the biggest critiques I had at Facebook internally was they don't value expertise in the same way. There is a whole team of marketing experts back in the day before they were rebranded as meta marketing pros. That was fired because they became too competent, therefore more valuable, therefore, having higher wage and because they didn't have to pay a higher wage for a more competent employee. They fired a whole team of people just to hire flunkies to read scripts instead. No one's getting served. They're not the workforce, not the local economy, not the advertisers. So it's just one of those things when you get to a scale and Facebook, take shortcuts and they do what they can to make it work. On the other end of that you have advertisers desperate for clarity because an ad got flagged they don't want their bids. It's manager disabled. And they have somebody from a sweatshop essentially giving them advice. And they've never run ads to make money. And it's like, yeah. Okay, you know what you're talking about, buddy? Sure. Okay. All them page like ads you've ran. Yeah. Tell me about ROI. Yeah.

Adam Liette
I made the mistake of it was like eight months ago, like, Hey, you want to have a call with our Facebook ads expert? And I'm like, yeah, why not? I've never done that before. And I was like, the advice was so bad. It was bush league rookie level, like, holy crap, like 2012 called at once this ad plot. Yeah. Once again, strategies back. Like, we haven't done that. So

Trevor Goodchild
your reviews on Yelp? Yes. Thanks. Thank you Facebook. All right. Now, yeah, it's one of those things where it's like so this is what I try to do. I you know, one of the one of the best marketing books out there is automatic selling machine. And, and it's a great book. And one of the things that ended was written a long time ago, I met his daughter. Of course, his name is escaping me on air right now. What is his name?

Adam Liette
Do you have Chet Holmes? Yeah, Chet

Trevor Goodchild
Holmes. So Chet Holmes daughter, I believe Amanda. I met her recently. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, I met her recently. And we're not best friends. I mean, I just met her recently. And I picked up the book after seeing her in person. Manama Hartselle takes the daughter of Chet Holmes to sell me the book. I'm skeptical events to know so much about the book. So I bought the book and I was really excited to see they have such a great section there on edutainment. And edutainment is so important. And I think what we're seeing a lot nowadays is ad fatigue. The millennials and Gen Zers are tired of being told, are you broke, hurt, pregnant, lonely, afraid, fat, diabetic, intellectually stunted, click learn more and will make your retarded ass better. And just like, there's tired of this kicking the pain point, this old school PPS problem pain solution formula. I mean, it still works. You still have VSL letters that work. But the formula doesn't work anymore. That's why you see influencer marketing on the rise, because there's so much ad fatigue that now audiences are saying, Well, who do I identify with what shares my values who seems most like me, that's why you see native ads that look like not a studio environment, but a regular person, outperformed the studio looking ads on Facebook, like it's a thing that we're seeing on and on. And so, now, I'm looking at this and I'm like, alright, what is the best way to approach any market any niche in the industry, educate people about the problems they're trying to solve, empower them to do so. And then position yourself as the best choice for that solution. And it's like, it's great. It establishes you as an authority on a subject matter early on. You're doing good in the world regardless, so you feel good. You don't feel like a damn car salesman. You're actually educating people. You know, one of my biggest inspirations was Jeff Walker and I was on a JV receiving end of a JV with him and Andrea vols on Andrea vols email list and I met her in person at launch con she's a cool person, one of the OGS and Facebook marketing and I saw this email from her about hey check out my friend Jeff he's got this cool thing blah blah blah and I was like all right, whatever I clicked on it t shirt and jeans downhome personality here let me spend an hour actually teaching you valuable things at the end by the way you want to level up I pretty much invented email marketing take the next step right and it was amazing because you don't have to be as customer to have benefited and have value from that and so I think with this you know where a lot of people get shut down on Facebook as they're still going on this fucking yellow paper you know the fucking phone book yellow phonebook add you know or or shock and awe and all this stuff and lose 1000 pounds in three weeks click learn more to find out how its

Adam Liette
policy monster shuts that one down. Yeah,

Trevor Goodchild
doesn't sound realistic. And so but even if it did, that, old formula is not it's not in anymore. People want to be educated people want to sit and they want you to teach them something. The webinar format has never died out and I think you can be more policy compliant. If you steer away from pain points, steer more towards education steer more towards edutainment, the policy bots are less severe on that. And you get a lot more Lifetime Customer Value.

Adam Liette
Yeah. So interesting, like Jeff Walker like, I read PLF I've I took the free webinar. I never bought the course. And I've ran at least 500 PLF launches in my life. Because it became a formula that oh, well, you just gave it to me. And if I wanted more help, I could buy the course. But the the value of that education was so high that I've ran, I've made millions of dollars off yellow PLF launches. Nice, because it was it was, it was right there in front of us. And I'd met CEDS daughter, too, last year. So she's doing the rounds, he was at Funnel Hacking live last year in the lobby. So nice. That's so cool, man. And I think for, for the I'm just getting into this side of marketing, or I'm just starting to market, like the education aspect of it and just be yourself. Like that takes away a lot of the, like, barriers that we put in front of ourselves and the and the oh, well, if I worded this way, it's in policy, right? Because let's be perfectly frank, you said, make sure we know the policy, and I guarantee for every Facebook advertisers listening to the show, but 1% have actually read the policies,

Trevor Goodchild
even if you did the problem is is that it's kind of like subtext in the conversation. Some people can't read behavioral cues very well and Miss subtext that they've Yeah, need to shut up and leave, keep talking. And then and then at band camp, let me tell you this other thing that happened, you know, somebody who can't see those cues. That's the thing with this is that even if you studied them, you wouldn't understand why you're getting flagged, because the reason why you're getting flagged is based on machine logic SQL, if this, then that from one applet to the next. And it's not based on human logic. And so as a result, lets you speak bot and understand exactly how they operate is very hard, you can do a 60%. Good job. But there's a big 40% Where this is that subtext, this is that kind of behavioral cues beneath everything else. That is the causation for why this policy bot would move in for the strike to kill how they build profiles in the background, like a really, really passive aggressive roommate that doesn't talk to you, but leaves me little notes. If you've left the dishes overnight. Yes, I'm talking to you. It's why I live alone. But it's like there's different types of automations that Facebook has, and they have different functions. So there's things not one bandbox, right, and so how that integrates with the user experience from the newsfeed aspect and then as and then as someone running ads is different. And so there's so much content context, or should I just say, context, that sounds I'll reinvent that word. I like it. Maybe here it really is the context because it looks so simple, but you feel like you're getting conned when you get shut down. And Mark Zuckerberg needs a cat like a Bond villain just stroking it. Yes, my pity. I think that would be a good skit. You too, which is great.

Adam Liette
But only if you wear that shirt when you do it, brother.

Trevor Goodchild
Yeah, exactly. No, I was, uh, the first Facebook shirt I got actually had to get like the, the bigger managers to get it for me. And it's it was, it was like a moment. I was like, Oh, here's your shirt. Here's the shirt. But you've earned this. You've earned this. You've sacrificed the blood of 100 version advertisers never, never hurt before by these bots. Now. Join us.

Adam Liette
You can have a bonus or the shirt, which was? No, that was not and there is no bonus. It's just the shirt.

Trevor Goodchild
Yeah, that was not a question ever asked of me. Yeah. I think

Trevor Goodchild
I think you know, one of the one of the things that that people also could benefit from, is to look at Facebook advertising to the eyes of like a cranky old conservative white man. And the reason why I say that is because as liberal and progressive as Facebook likes to paint itself as especially with his PRs with the people of color with plugs in their ears, holding technology or VR glasses. And, you know, we're the hip, new progressive company. And for their credit, they have Black Lives Matter on the wall at Facebook, I don't get a racy feel from at all I don't feel that way. They have that I've worked at companies where I'm like, wow, you some good old boys here. But they're, you know, this is not the case there. However, at the same time, when you think about how the engineers program these bots to flag content, it's kind of like, what's his name from? Leave it to Beaver Ward, where it was the father. You know, he had like the Schnauzer poodle with the base of his nice leather armchair and he had the tobacco pipe in the newspaper. Bernie's, this ad looks like a complete scam, you know. And as funny as that is, it's really what you want to kind of look at is that extremely conservative, you know, fearful of offending others kind of way, when you look at, could this ad possibly get flagged? Is there anything about it, that would cause it to get shut down? Because the problem advertisers have is they think in their minds, well, this looks fine to me. But they don't understand that it's not people it's not, I mean, unless you get a troll, that's just using the self reporting tools to fly you, which really sucks. Nothing you can do about that. But other than that rare occasion, it's not the people that are shutting down your ad, it's not Facebook users that are shutting down your ad, it's Facebook, hypothetically, role playing as your target audience saying, Oh, this may hurt some feelings, oh, this may not be appropriate for for this set of people. They're playing the moral authority here. But it's machines that are doing this through a pre programmed kind of conservative flagging method. So if you look at your ads, you're thinking, Okay, if I, you know, hated life. Now, if I was skeptical of ads in general, what is there in my ad to be skeptical about if I was this ward type? Old school 1950s person, right? And then actually does help if you do that.

Adam Liette
It's an interesting way of like, it's like left brain, right brain when you're reviewing your ad copy. And your ad creative, like you want to your creative side is like, is this hitting the points? Is it? Is it appealing? Is it doing all this, but then you have to like, flip the script. And almost like, I would have to do it in different days, to be honest, and be able to, like do that kind of flip. But like, I'm wondering how to do it from a practical lens. Like if you're a solo shop, if you're a multi person shop, like I can see like in putting that into process of like what they're looking for in a review process. But yeah, it's like looking through your ads and two different lenses. Yeah,

Trevor Goodchild
I mean, I say that in obviously, the easiest solution is to hire someone who's worked at Facebook and ads, tech and project management, I happen to be the only person in the world who offers this as a service in the in the, you know, public market. So yeah, I'll teach you a bunch of shit that will be more on the lines of teaching you how to fish versus giving you a fish, right. So it'll educate you and all that, I blog a lot. And part of this SEO, it's part of my client acquisition funnel, but part of it is also I want people to understand how a lot of this work so they can avoid getting banned, because folks don't realize when you know, fucking Tim Cook is making these speeches about how he loves small businesses. And that's why he's doing this iOS 14 update, you know, or how Facebook's talking about how much they love SMBs. And they're there for the little guys. And the reality is, if you're a mom and pop shop, and 50% of your annual sales come from a Black Friday ad or a Thanksgiving ad or a Valentine's Day ad, depending on your industry, and Facebook shuts you down because you get one word wrong. And now you've lost 50% of the profit you have as an SMB for the year. That yeah, people are affected real people. And I never understood Tim Cook's approach, because he was demonizing advertisers as if they don't have wives, children, houses bills, you know, it's like, it was really weird to see that approach. And then like, what did they start doing adding ads to iTunes or some shit? Like it was just like the aftermath? You did not practice what you preach there, sir. But, you know, yeah. It's just one of those things where it the reality is that there's a lot of people that are caught by how automated everything is, in this AI Gold Rush that's happening right now, as the next thing. You know, the problem with that is that there's a loss of your voice, there's a loss of that human to human contact, which is why we see people that smaller colleges have a better relationship with the professors. It's like the same thing, you have more distance between you and the person making the decisions. There's less accountability, and there's less help all these senators making decisions about wage or economy or things that they're not affected by. Because they're in you know, making more than 400k A year is just kind of one of those things where there's a huge disconnect. And the only way to stay above it is to try to get as educated as possible on how these automations work and why and stuff like I mentioned before about learning new policies. One of the articles I wrote for a Social Media Examiner was about deleting old ads, and I suggest that you definitely screenshot them so you have a copy of what you did in case you need to redo it or whatever, but delete them. Because what if they become no longer in vogue for Facebook, and they retro actively flag and shut you down, could assault her that just deleting the ad stood

Adam Liette
it happened to me last week, like a client of mine, I believe didn't get shut down, thankfully. But it was an ad from four years ago that they had something funky in the UTM params. Because the person that set it up didn't know what the frick they were doing. And they had something funky in the tracking code. And like, I'd spent three hours tracking this damn thing down. And I just deleted the ad. And like, Okay, it's good now, and thankfully, it is good now. But holy crap is like 434 year old, go ahead that they just suddenly flagged for a bad UTM Bram, it was insane.

Trevor Goodchild
You know, I'm not sure what Facebook's market value is right now. It's in the billions, obviously. I don't know. You know, Musk has been eclipsing, and everyone else recently in profits. And then Bezos is up there, as well. But you know, the problem is easily solved. It's something that Facebook doesn't want to do, because it requires an upfront lost and ongoing costs. But if they simply built 1020 3050, new centers around the world for ads, and gotten more human eyes on this, they would make billions of dollars more from advertisers whose money they're not getting it they improperly or accidentally or just severely shut down for something minor, that with a little more hands on experience, in actually training their workers, they can make what I do obsolete, and then people would have less bans, Facebook would have more money. But not only that, this goes broader globally. Think about that. 50 new centers spread across the world for Facebook's customer service for ads, that would generate tons of local economy for the cities and towns that would help especially during this pre, you know, recession, whatever the F we're in the quietly quitting quiet resignation, pre resuscitation recession period that we're in. Yeah, it's not just going up, or is it going down? Is inflation going up? Is it going down? I mean, this whatever, we're in this weird limbo, it would help it would help so much of a change lives of not just the workers but their surrounding communities. And that's where I'm talking about like the human the human touch, people lose that when you get so huge. And economies of scale, make it to where you think your only business model is outsourcing labor and not training them and then having what millions of advertisers trillions of ads, you know, shut down incorrectly, like it's just insane.

Adam Liette
And double that, like 50 centers across the world, that community would have a connection to Facebook, the PR value of Facebook would go up exponentially. Yes, people would come back to the platform that have left it, we'd have better quality ads that are working better in our ecosphere of information, versus just the same old shit all the time. And

Trevor Goodchild
any better workers would be a brand ambassador for Facebook, whether they like it or not, they would be partial preferential to Facebook because they work there as they be on it more which means they're going to encourage more people to get on it that they know because there are no more like it's a it's a trickle down effect. It's clear what that can do. But Facebook doesn't want to spend that money that's the thing they don't want to spend the money on that despite the money we generate. Because they don't think that way it's about the next biggest trend let's reverse engineer tick tock discovery engine and all this kind of shit and make Instagram no longer about you know pictures of food and and near naked models which is the good old days before this discovery bullshit run everything

Adam Liette
no idea what you're talking about with that? Yes, everyone.

Trevor Goodchild
Nearly Winter's coming clothes on on Instagram. Yes. Yes. The mean Winter's coming in the the scantily clad man in the giant fur coat yes that's what everyone's dressed as. i i You think the most conservative people and then you look at her Instagram profile. Oh, what's the streak here

Adam Liette
oh my god.

Trevor Goodchild
I've had friends. Oh, that's you're announcing this on Facebook. Really? Okay. Well, it's not an ad Facebook's not gonna ban your you know only fans like him. It's not good luck.

Adam Liette
Good luck. Let me know how that works out for you. You

Trevor Goodchild
know I saw the craziest YouTube Ed recently and it said do you want to train your team of only fans girls where you have control of their profits and help them make more money and make a killing yourself on the

Adam Liette
inside dude just get arrested for that and like Romania or something who was that?

Trevor Goodchild
I didn't Here What's tell me what's, what's it.

Adam Liette
I mean, it was like I've drawn a blanket his name he's like, he's one of those like dude style influencers who just got arrested in in Eastern Europe. Oh, damn it. He was basically like running and only fans type brothel. Wow. Yeah. I forget why am I brain brain dumping his name because I really don't care about and that's probably why I don't know. Yeah, it's like three months ago news. So it's old news now,

Trevor Goodchild
obviously it's back with the cuneiform tablets. It's Yes.

Adam Liette
But oh my gosh,

Trevor Goodchild
I I think that what a lot of people also with common mistakes I think people make with Facebook advertising is they also take it real personal, you know when when their Facebook ads get shut down? And the thing is, is that, you know, what do they say worry is just misdirected imagination first of all, from a self help perspective doesn't help you. But from a realistic perspective, it's machines that you're mad at. And have you kicked the machine? Does it feel good? Does the machine look like it's feeling pain? does it respond? It's just that you're kicking your fridge basically getting mad at these bands in the shutdowns because it's not a person 99% of the shutdowns now, probably, logistically, I would say especially a category stuff, real estate, politics, bedding, things like that probably does have human eyes on it more than automations due to the sensitive nature and legal consequences of those kinds of ads that Facebook has to face. You know, so I think there's a lot more oversight on those versus the bots doesn't make them any easier to run because you have extra, you know, red tape. But I would say everything else is just machines. And so if you don't take it personal, it would stop those impulsive reactions that after an ad is rejected, ultimately appealed me appeal, let me just hit appeal. And the problem with that is when you hit request review, you're just getting a robot to review what a robot is done. And have you ever asked a cop to honestly judge another cops actions? With police brutality? Yeah, very. They're real objective. Same thing, no objectivity there is machine bias for machines. It's literally how machine learning works. It's the it's the nepotism of machines, they're using their patterns to repeat those patterns and expand upon them, and learn, you know how to optimize that. But he will get stuck in these loops because of that. And so when they get mad, their Facebook ad has been shut down. They merely click Request review, or they try to appeal it without spending the time to figure out oh, why was this shut down? Could a flag that shut this ad down, possibly be more severe than I think it is and possibly be repeated. And I don't know 50 or 100 other ads that I've already run or I'm currently running at the same time? Oh, shit, that one flag now becomes counted 100 separate times, it's not counted once, just because this

Adam Liette
is how we speed our speed demon our way to a ban.

Trevor Goodchild
Exactly. Right. So there's a lot of consulting and how to start a business like programs will teach you how to advertise on Facebook. And most of them are wrong. And one of the things they commonly teach you, as it'll say, okay, run Facebook ads here have the first 100 here like this. And they'll they'll they'll do it in these batches, because they've discovered that you can slip some non compliant ads through through sheer volume. But the problem with that is that the ones that don't make it, it magnifies the flags that you have for them and risks of shut down. And the other thing is that so what you slip to non compliant and through that is a ticking time bomb. So now your revenue that you're living off of is based on this time bomb that now with a new policy or a rescan, they found Oh, you're not compliant, we're shutting your business manager down. And the advertisers like oh, this is out of nowhere. No, it's not. It was there all along, you know, and so that's the thing is that a lot of this old school marketing shit from Eugene Swartz era, which I mean, breakthrough advertising is one of the nominal books that established the industry.

Adam Liette
Great, it's also behind me.

Trevor Goodchild
Right? You guys spend like 800 bucks to buy a copy these days. It's like, you know flowers to Eugene Swartz for the methodology the blueprint it's great it's amazing but it's not current. It's not modern. It's not if you're going to be advertising on social media platforms but you can use anymore you have to adapt and part of this adapt ation is not following it against the wall and hoping something will stick

Adam Liette
good knowledge bomb after knowledge bomb and I just got some of my Facebook groups it's like it's like a daily thing like my ad got shut down. What should I do and in you go on the comments like No, make sure you appeal and now I'm looking at the guy that gone. Oh my gosh,

Trevor Goodchild
the dumbest thing ever. You have to appeal manually with a person not with the machines. So

Adam Liette
but I think you hit the nail on the head. It's like, take the time to look through the ad copy. and maybe pull up that policy that you haven't read yet. And try to find out what it is because like you said it could be in 50 other ads? Yeah. And it's, yeah, it's a ticking time bomb. So if you want to protect your business, like, stay on top of this, and

Trevor Goodchild
I want to give you an idea of how grainy this gets one of my early clients was a millionaire at 18 years old, through dropship. And guess what? He was selling baby products? Goddamnit Why didn't I get on that gravy train, or baby train, whatever you want to call it. He was so rich made all this money was with baby as and, or baby products. I mean, and he heard about me on the grapevine. And he's like, Trevor, I need help. Can Why am I shut down? And I looked into his account. And I went to a Shopify page for the it was a baby's nightlight. He's like, Trevor, how the hell is Facebook shutting me down for a baby's nightlight? So I did an audit, which is one of the services I offer. And I audited this funnel, and I audited his ads, because ads are actually really good. They No, no issues there. The copy was good, the creatives is good. We get to a Shopify page. And I see it immediately. It's probably within 60 seconds I spotted I figured it out the end of one word, and the beginning of the next words filled out the word dead. And the Facebook bot machines were flagging it for morbidity. And we changed the copy, rearrange the order of the words. Everything's fine. But that's the level of granularity that it comes to with how they scan and flag stuff

Adam Liette
on your landing page to so it's all Facebook. Yes,

Trevor Goodchild
the whole funnel? Yeah. That your page, it's your landing. It's your website, your lander, you know, it's the ad itself, the hierarchy of like criteria, the most scan thing first is the ad copy above the the creative then after that, it's like the headline beneath the creative, then it's the creative itself, then it's does the display URL match the actual URL you put in behind there? And then it's like the lander for your website or whatever. So that's kind of the hierarchy of how important it is to get these things, right. Because this is like this kind of vague. What do they call that in Stranger Things the upside down world. This is kind of like the in between place, there's an upside down world between a Facebook ad and a lander where there are certain things you can get away with on a landing page you cannot get away with on an ad because the ad is Facebook's IP. So there's higher risk of them. And but it's not like it's it's anything goes wild wild west like there is still you have to abide by the policies. But there's a little more wiggle room on a landing page because it's not Facebook's IP so so

Adam Liette
I should probably make sure my entire website which does have some military themed stuff because of my background. I better make sure there's like no gun pictures at all on that. Yeah. Well if you need some help, I know a guy that know I know a guy Yeah, this guy. Yeah. I've known him for like 70 minutes, but it's been like holy crap. I've told you out inom two broken legs. They told me when I went to Nam, never go full retard. Never. I just want to start imitating Forrest Gump now. And talk about shrimp cocktails Francesca Biles, fried shrimp. Popcorn. Like best

Trevor Goodchild
movies ever? Well, hopefully, your your audience has learned a few things from me during this interview and isn't gonna go, you know, into the dark without knowing that you really absolutely look at it more realistically and audit every part of your funnel. For

Adam Liette
sure, man and like Where can the audience learn more about you and maybe get an audit themselves? Like where can we find you on the web? Well,

Trevor Goodchild
I have my email of course, Trevor at Trevor w goodchild.com. That's easiest way to get a hold of me my LinkedIn Trevor W Goodchild is a big Facebook behind me easy to spot. And of course, you can go to my blog jetski shaman.com. And this is just as it sounds, it's like a jetski on the lake meeting. A medicine and murder should run like Sean Connery a shaman. I don't know if you've played a shaman and that movie medicine man but he wasn't it. But jetski shump and tech COMM And on there, you can also get a free ebook for you know, five mistakes that Facebook ad agencies make.

Adam Liette
Awesome, brother, this been a lot of fun that you're definitely a character man, I could talk to you all day. So we'll definitely stay in touch and good luck to you. And for all of you out there running Facebook ads if you aren't checking this shit out yet. I think you've there's been enough warnings in this episode of what can happen. So get your shit together. Get on top of it. Take care of yourself. Thanks so much, Trevor. Have a good woman. Thank you. Hey operators. I believe that within each and every one of us realize a warrior in waiting this warrior is able to conquer any obstacle that comes their way to discover how to awaken your warrior spirit and conquer. What's holding you back. Go to Adam liette.com and join awaken the Warrior Within