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Do you think social proof makes a difference for facebook ads?

Marketing, social media, advertising

LiveEntrepreneur

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I'm curious about this, so my dropshipping store is doing crap in terms of profitability, my margins were to low to cover my costs. Even with a really high average order value it wasn't enough to save the campaign. So I raised the price and have had a few people buying a different price points. I now have a 2.5x markup. Does anyone here think if my facebook page has zero likes and same with the advertisements that it makes much of a difference?

I feel like the product and the marketing should be doing the heavy lifting and you shouldn't have to rely on buying social proof. Also will doing this damage my pixel if I run a campaign, turn off the pixel and get cheap social proof and turn it back on when i do conversion campaigns?
 
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Andy Black

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I'm curious about this, so my dropshipping store is doing crap in terms of profitability, my margins were to low to cover my costs. Even with a really high average order value it wasn't enough to save the campaign. So I raised the price and have had a few people buying a different price points. I now have a 2.5x markup. Does anyone here think if my facebook page has zero likes and same with the advertisements that it makes much of a difference?

I feel like the product and the marketing should be doing the heavy lifting and you shouldn't have to rely on buying social proof. Also will doing this damage my pixel if I run a campaign, turn off the pixel and get cheap social proof and turn it back on when i do conversion campaigns?
I don’t run Facebook Ads myself, but follow Laurel Portié’s podcast. She says ads for her agency clients run better when their Facebook page has good organic content and engagement as well. To me that means Facebook prefers advertisers that have more engagement on their Facebook posts/page.

Put yourself in Facebook’s shoes and think about their goals and what they will do to achieve them. Align your goals with theirs and you’ll likely get their wind in your sail rather than push you backwards.

As for consumers seeing ads with lots of social proof... I’d guess it helps. I often buy the product on Amazon that has the largest number of positive reviews.
 

TheLearner

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IMO social proof matters. When I buy something on Amazon I’m willing to pay a little more if one product has a lot of realistic looking reviews versus just no reviews or a lot that look like they’re fake (ex. Full 5 stars with 2,000 reviews). Not saying it’s impossible for a product to be that good, but there’s bound to be at least a few bad reviews for any product. Plus there are a lot of people that will buy something just because their friend got one, they might not even need the product but want it only to keep up with their friend group. In the long run social proof will probably save you money on ad spend since you’ll have some word of mouth sales versus always spending $$$ on ads to make sales.
 

seomatic

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Engagement is a very important Factor for your Facebook Ads. I wouldn't say Page likes are super important, you can still have great results with a fresh page. However Post Engagement is important, my client with the best performance gets tons of likes, loves, and care reactions on every ad and a ton of comments with people pinging each other. So that's definitely a sign to look out, but depends also on the industry. What we are usually doing is saving the social proof through different ads by coping the post id. So the ad can accumulate social proof from different sources/campaigns/ad sets.

Since social proof is so important, make sure to use it to your advantage: video testimonials, reviews, ratings ... are the best weapons in the arsenal of any marketer. You can incentivize people to do testimonials, be creative :)

The problem I see with your store is that drop shipping is not sustainable business model (if you do it like 99% shipping from china and then customer waits 2 weeks). Work on local fulfillment otherwise your site will get punished by facebook anyway. We had the same issue with one client after china was in lockdown.
 
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LiveEntrepreneur

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I don’t run Facebook Ads myself, but follow Laurel Portié’s podcast. She says ads for her agency clients run better when their Facebook page has good organic content and engagement as well. To me that means Facebook prefers advertisers that have more engagement on their Facebook posts/page.

Put yourself in Facebook’s shoes and think about their goals and what they will do to achieve them. Align your goals with theirs and you’ll likely get their wind in your sail rather than push you backwards.

As for consumers seeing ads with lots of social proof... I’d guess it helps. I often buy the product on Amazon that has the largest number of positive reviews.
That's very true in terms of "being in the shoes of facebook" but I'm trying to see it in the shoes of customers.
 

LiveEntrepreneur

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Engagement is a very important Factor for your Facebook Ads. I wouldn't say Page likes are super important, you can still have great results with a fresh page. However Post Engagement is important, my client with the best performance gets tons of likes, loves, and care reactions on every ad and a ton of comments with people pinging each other. So that's definitely a sign to look out, but depends also on the industry. What we are usually doing is saving the social proof through different ads by coping the post id. So the ad can accumulate social proof from different sources/campaigns/ad sets.

Since social proof is so important, make sure to use it to your advantage: video testimonials, reviews, ratings ... are the best weapons in the arsenal of any marketer. You can incentivize people to do testimonials, be creative :)

The problem I see with your store is that drop shipping is not sustainable business model (if you do it like 99% shipping from china and then customer waits 2 weeks). Work on local fulfillment otherwise your site will get punished by facebook anyway. We had the same issue with one client after china was in lockdown.
Interesting. I was thinking if I get my 3 ad creatives and get cheap engagement from a 3rd world country give it heaps of likes if it will make a difference. I don't know if it will affect my pixel or data if i turn the pixel off. one of my competitors in dropshipping i dont know if hes killing it or not but has thousands of likes on their fb page and only started a store not too long ago so hard to say lol.
 

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Genuine Social proof can only a good thing and you should be striving to obtain it anyway.

The combination of your product/service, delivery of such product/service and how you engage with your customers is the way to get it.

No different from thousands of years ago. The internet has not really changed things as much as people seem to think.

Think of some pubs near where you live.

Some are always busy, full of happy chatty customers and some only have a handful of people in and seem to have a dead atmosphere.

The former has a formula that works and the latter doesn't.

Now think about if the latter paid for 50 people to come and drink in the pub one Saturday night.

Then what?

It would still be dead going forward. The owner would have failed to identify the problem and therefore failed to fix it.

You need to identify the real problem and not talk about buying engagement and social proof from 3rd world countries because - and you know this deep down - that is not proof at all.

Dan
 
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seomatic

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Interesting. I was thinking if I get my 3 ad creatives and get cheap engagement from a 3rd world country give it heaps of likes if it will make a difference. I don't know if it will affect my pixel or data if i turn the pixel off. one of my competitors in dropshipping i dont know if hes killing it or not but has thousands of likes on their fb page and only started a store not too long ago so hard to say lol.

I wouldn't mess with it. FB is smart and knows that it's "fake engagement" and people are not really buying your product. Remember they have all the data from view to conversion.
So what I would do is to run a campaign with optimization event purchase and target worldwide (or the countries you are shipping to) and then optimize the whole funnel till it looks like this.

Screen Shot 2020-11-29 at 12.30.02.png

You should be profitable if you reach that, because it means you are outperforming your competition. FB is an auction after all, so if your funnel is better than your competition you should be profitable. Likes and Engagement will come naturally if your creatives are top notch. Social proof is like the icing on the cake but it can't make really bad ads profitable.
 

LiveEntrepreneur

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I wouldn't mess with it. FB is smart and knows that it's "fake engagement" and people are not really buying your product. Remember they have all the data from view to conversion.
So what I would do is to run a campaign with optimization event purchase and target worldwide (or the countries you are shipping to) and then optimize the whole funnel till it looks like this.

View attachment 35802

You should be profitable if you reach that, because it means you are outperforming your competition. FB is an auction after all, so if your funnel is better than your competition you should be profitable. Likes and Engagement will come naturally if your creatives are top notch. Social proof is like the icing on the cake but it can't make really bad ads profitable.
I had really good creatives, paid someone to do them, 3 different versions and the quality ranking, engagement, conversion ranking were all below average for the most part. I had 10 different audiences. Though my average order value was very high lol. I'm guessing if i tested that many audiences and creatives i can assume the product is a dud?
 

LiveEntrepreneur

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Genuine Social proof can only a good thing and you should be striving to obtain it anyway.

The combination of your product/service, delivery of such product/service and how you engage with your customers is the way to get it.

No different from thousands of years ago. The internet has not really changed things as much as people seem to think.

Think of some pubs near where you live.

Some are always busy, full of happy chatty customers and some only have a handful of people in and seem to have a dead atmosphere.

The former has a formula that works and the latter doesn't.

Now think about if the latter paid for 50 people to come and drink in the pub one Saturday night.

Then what?

It would still be dead going forward. The owner would have failed to identify the problem and therefore failed to fix it.

You need to identify the real problem and not talk about buying engagement and social proof from 3rd world countries because - and you know this deep down - that is not proof at all.

Dan
Interesting. I don't know what the actual problem is, I'm guessing it might be a issue of credibility and I want to fix that by having some social proof.
 
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seomatic

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I had really good creatives, paid someone to do them, 3 different versions and the quality ranking, engagement, conversion ranking were all below average for the most part. I had 10 different audiences. Though my average order value was very high lol. I'm guessing if i tested that many audiences and creatives i can assume the product is a dud?
How many Creatives have you tested? Try different marketing angles and styles. Image ads, video ads, carousel ads, dynamic product ads ... there is so much to test. Even for video ads there are endless angles and approaches to test. I believe you barely scratched the surface.

You can easily find out if it's the product. Just check your competition. If they can make it work, you can too.
Might even borrow some ideas for creatives: Ad Library
 

LiveEntrepreneur

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How many Creatives have you tested? Try different marketing angles and styles. Image ads, video ads, carousel ads, dynamic product ads ... there is so much to test. Even for video ads there are endless angles and approaches to test. I believe you barely scratched the surface.

You can easily find out if it's the product. Just check your competition. If they can make it work, you can too.
Might even borrow some ideas for creatives: Ad Library
recently I did almost 1k in revenue a week but cost per purchase is always way too much. cpm always around 30+$ i swear all these guys on youtube are bullshitting who have 3-5$ cpm no matter what product i sell or how much money i invest, cant get it anywhere near there.

my competitor has millions of views and according to their social proof people have ordered heaps but i cant capture anything near that. I've tried for one product 3 different creatives, spent even thousands on one product but still the cost per purchase is too high. I've raised the price a lot and I had gotten a couple of sales but not enough to be profitable. now im currently doing 1 creative and 1 marketing angle because the products are so simple there isn't really much to add imo.

But I'm going to be trying another product and going to be doing custom footage hopefully with it with 2 angles and see how it goes.

What do you think of my campaign structure here? this is what i want to do.1608008744041.png
for each ad inside the adset i will have 2 different videos and marketing angle. so 2 videos, 2 marketing angles, 2 different pieces of copywriting and i will duplicate it across the other adsets. What do you think of this strategy?

Originally I had 3 different videos, but same copy and angle across all ads inside the adsets.

Like you said there is so much to test but I can't just test every little thing, I will so too much money so I try to focus on the important stuff first which is the creative and copy, correct me if this is wrong though.
 

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