Alright so I am a co-owner of a digital marketing company that specializes in facebook ads. Every single person or business I have worked with has explained to me that they have tried facebook ads and “it just doesn’t work” for their type of business. They claim that facebook ads are real easy and they knew what they were doing, but it’s just not right for their type of business. It takes everything I have in me to not laugh at them.
Without fail, all of these people that explained to me that facebook ads don’t work for their “type of business”, I am able to get them a positive ROI on the ads. Turns our they didn’t know what they were doing, which I can understand. I’m a loser and sit at the computer pretty much all day every day creating facebook ads and I’m a member of a handful of private groups that contain some of the world’s top spenders on facebook and get advice from them all the time, so I understand that a profitable facebook campaign doesn’t come as easily to others as it does for me, but that’s why I’m here to help!
So what I would like to do is have anyone interested in trying facebook ads (or has tried in the past) to comment their type of business or what they are trying to sell, and I will explain how I would approach things.
Things to consider:
- Type of ad: conversions, post engagement, video views, website clicks, leads… The objective of your ad can make an insane impact on how well your ads perform. You can optimize for many different objectives and the different objectives will get you different results. Example: If you want your business to bring in new leads, then you don’t want to be optimizing for post engagements.
- Targeting: broad audiences, behaviors, job titles, education level, income and/or salary, interests, highly target multi-layer audiences, demographics, etc. Specialty products or services require a much more dialed in audience. For things that aren’t specialty, you are better off using a large audience and letting facebook optimize to show your ads to the people most similar to people who have already purchased.
- Placement: Destop or mobile? News feed or right column? Instagram? People have different intentions when they are sitting at a computer and when they are on their phone. People are on their phones when they are sitting in cabs or at a restaurant or the gym. Is that the best place to get them to watch a 10 minute video? Probably not.
COMMON MISTAKES
- Not choosing the correct placements. This is the most common mistake. By default, facebook has all of the placements chosen and I’m not sure why because there is no situation in existence where you would want the same on on mobile, dekstop, right column, audience network, and instagram. You have to think of people’s mindset in each of those. People on mobile are “on-the-go” — or maybe sitting on the toilet. People on desktop are sitting at their desk possibly doing work related things. People on instagram are looking at cool lifestyle pictures so only target that placement if you have a cool, lifestyle product or service. The audience network is useless for anything other than trying to get phone app downloads, yet it is selected by default.
- People’s advertising angles and copy aren’t properly revised for ‘interruption marketing’. The mindset difference between adwords and facebook couldn’t be more different. People on adwords are price shopping, people on facebook aren’t shopping at all. You need to show them what is the most unique aspect of your product or service. If you’re a restaurant, show them something different you do or have. If you’re a brand, show them the story about you that sets you aside from the other brands. If you’re an e-com store, show them products they don’t know exist and aren’t going to find at wal-mart
- Check your ad breakdown After an ad is running, you can check the breakdown of where it was shown and who it was shown to. I can’t tell you how many times I accidentally forgot to exclude super old people from an ad only to see that 90% of my clicks went to 75 year old dudes. These people are terrified of technology get scared and crap their pants immediately after clicking on anything.
- Choosing the wrong type of ad versus their audience size/concentration If you know EXACTLY who you are targeting and 100% of the audience you selected would be buyers of your product/service, then you are fine running website click ads or PPE ads.
- Choosing the wrong audience to start with First of all, the audience insights tool in facebook is the most powerful thing you can use. Look for high affinities. Keep dropping different interests in the tool and see what it spits out under the “page likes” tab
- SPLIT TEST I can’t express to you more that you ALWAYS need to split test. I don’t run any ads without doing small split tests. When I am running for a product or service for the first time, I always will split test $5-$10 across 4 different audiences. After that split test, there will be a clear winner and you will only want to spend money on that audience. You may have set $15-$30 on fire, but now you know the next $100 you spend will be on the right audience. I also highly recommend you split test ads. You would be amazed at how much one ad image can outperform another or for B2B how much taking a completely different angle in the ad text can change the response to your ads. I’ve seen so many people try one audience, one ad image, and one angle for their copy. Think about this… You have 4 adsets and one works twice as well as the other 3. You have an image that works 25% better than the others, and you have an ad angle that works 50% better than the others. You put the best targeting, image, and copy into the same ad and all of the suddenly you have a VERY successful ad instead of one that is losing money. This is something everyone should always do.
- Not using the Facebook Pixel This teaches facebook about who your customers are. If you are a brick and mortar place trying to get people to come in, you don’t need to worry about this, but for anyone selling online, you absolutely need to have the facebook pixel installed on every page that is a part of your checkout process. It teaches facebook who your customers are and shows your ads to the people most similar to the once that have visited your website or purchased in the past.
- Use video when you can… even if all you have is pictures If you ever pay attention to your news feed, it’s about 70% videos at this point. Facebook HIGHLY favors videos and allows them to get more reach and get reach for cheaper because more people engage with them. If all you have is pictures, you can use a service like animoto.com to quickly build a sweet looking video with text and transitions in 20 minutes or less.
- Not Using Lookalike audiences For people who aren’t sure how these work, think of it like this; you can build an audience of the 1% of people in the world most similar to the people who __________. The black can be egaged with your page, watched a certain % of your video, went to your website, spent a certain amount of time on your website, purchased from your website, added to cart, and a couple more. Let me give you an example.
- Not using retargeting You can retarget anyone who took any of the actions listed above. A great example is a restaurant or bar. Keep a custom audience of everyone that has engaged with your page in the last 90 days. Have right column ads running to them all the time. All day on tuesday “Hey, don’t forget to stop in for taco tuesday tonight!” Then all day wednesday “$2 local draft night. Come in!” “Come see ___ play next thursday”. You get the point. This is used as branding to the people who already know your business exists, so it works really well.
/ / / WORKING EXAMPLE OF THE LAST TO PRICIPLES PUT INTO PRACTICE: So I had a product for bourbon lovers that I wanted to sell but the targeting wasn’t good. I had options like the super expensive “Pappy Van Winkle” which had an audience of 12,000 people (too small for what i was doing) or I could go with “Jack Daniel’s” which was 23,000,000 which was way too broad, so here’s what I did.
I made a 2 minute long video showing some of the best bourbon’s in the world. Ran the ad at $5 a day for a few days to the small “Pappy Van Winkle” audience. I now have 300 people who watched 95% or more of the video. I make a lookalike audience of those 300 highly engaged people and got the 1% of the US most similar to those people. So I now have an audience of 2,000,000. The perfect size. Right between the small audience and broad audiences that I found. I ran my ad to the new audience I created and absolutely killed it.
I will keep adding to this part as I get responses to the post and think up other possible mistakes
ADVICE TO BRANDS I got a lot of questions from people trying to start brands last time I did this. You need to tell them a story. You need to know exactly who your target audience is and tell them your story.
/ / /DROPSHIPPING Alright so i’ve seen numerous posts in here and other subreddits about starting dropshipping stores and much speculation as to whether or not it works. I’ve spent the last 5 years of my life doing nothing but facebook ads and I can assure you that the easiest way to make money online is to run facebook ads to a dropshipping store.
This is all you need:
- a shopify store (14 day free trial then $30 per month)
- a domain name ~$10
- a good product to sell (find dropshippers on aliexpress)
- a little bit of knowledge about facebook ads
how to set up a store When using Shopify, there isn’t really a whole lot you need in order to to start selling. First, sign up for an account, then head over to godaddy and register a domain. Pick something generic where you can sell many different kinds of products. What usually works well is something “deals” related. Something like mydailydeals.com would be fine. Don’t waste too much time trying to think up the perfect name because that doesn’t matter.
Next you need to pick a theme for your store. The style of the store is going to be little dependent on what products you plan to sell and what the demographic of your potential customers is. If there are big brands that sell similar products to yours, try to find a theme similar to their website. You can always change the colors in the theme settings, just look for a good layout.
tips: -large “add to cart” or “buy now” button. Go into the settings and make it orange or green. something that stands out -pick a theme that pushes people to checkout when they click the button. some themes just put a little blip by the cart symbol at the top and the potential customers have to click on the cart to check out. You don’t want that. You want them to be pushed through the checkout process
how to find products There are countless ways to find good products to sell. You can browse through other facebook pages and see what other people are having success selling, you can go to amazon best sellers, or find things that are selling on ebay. Pretty much any product you can imagine will have a chinese knockoff version that you can find pretty cheaply and sell, just make sure your aren’t infringing on any patents or trademarks. You can also scroll through aliexpress and try to come up with your own ideas. If you are really knowledgable in some niche, try to stick with that. It will be much easier in the long run.
Adding the product to your site You can go in the backend of Shopify and add the product manually or use the Oberlo app to upload the product straight from aliexpress (we’ll talk more about Oberlo in the “Plugins” section below). The two most important things about adding a product to your site are making sure you include the best pictures and you have a description that really sells the product or answers any questions that people might have.
tips: – always have your product be “discounted” if you want to sell if for $19.99, have $39.99 crossed out (if it’s believable for that product). Someone thinking they are getting a deal will always make them more likely to buy. – creating some sort of scarcity increase conversions example “only X left at this price”
plugins needed – Oberlo: this is to make adding products and fulfilling them through aliexpress much easier – Best Currenct Converter: dumb name, but it actually is the best one lol. Use this if you want to run outside of your own country. – Lucky Orange: This allows you to watch visitors and see what they’re doing then they visit your site. This helps you understand why people are leaving or what they’re spending the most time reading – Product Reviews: self explanatory.
– Hurryify: a countdown timer show scarcity and increase conversions.
how to run facebook ads This is probably the most dificult part if you’ve never done it before. The two things that are most important when it comes to the Facebook ads are 1.) The type of ad you run and 2.) Who you target.
Type of ads: The type of ads you’re going to want to run are Website conversion ads. So make sure you take your facebook pixel and put it in the backend of the shopify store so that the pixel fires at each step of the checkout process to give Facebook information on who is buying. When running conversion ads, you have the option to have the ads optimized and bidding for different parts of the checkout process. The most common are “View Content” “Add To Cart” and “Purchase”. You’d think it would be best to optimize for Purchases, but sometimes if you’re starting out on a lower budget or a product with a higher price point, it’ll be best to optimize for Add To Cart or View Content. Also, remember, for everything there is no absolute rule of thumb. Always be split testing and trying new things.
Autobidding or manual bidding? There is some discrepency between which works better. For beginners, I would recommend doing autobid. Manual bidding has a bit more of a learning curve.
Targeting: The easiest way to figure out targeting is to use the audience insights tool. Enter a relevant page brand or product in the interests section then click the “Page Likes” tab sort the results by affinity. Try to find a result with a high affinity that is also an option that you can put in as an interest. Keep taking the interests you find and putting them in the interest feild until the results that show up have affinities higher than 100X. These will be good starting points for your targeting for your ads as long as you are sure they are a relevant audience for your product.
Layering: Sometimes it is helpful to layer an additional audience. If you find a relevant interest, it man be easier to add an additional interest so that the only people who will see your ad are people who are in both of the audiences you chose.
If you skipped the beginning of the article and went straight to the dropshipping part, scroll up to the “Working example” I posted about. This can be very helpful
The last thing I would like to include when it comes to dropshipping, is test lots of products. Once you have a product that’s killing it, create a store around that product (realted prducts, upsells, cross-sells, etc..)
This post is shared by jem89. You can read more of his great advice on this thread
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