E-commerce + driving traffic

[LPPC]

Hi all,

It's time for me to create a progress/execution thread. Three reasons for this:
1) I can ask questions I will stumble upon in my journey and hopefully have them answered here.
2) It gives me an overview of my action-taking and it holds me accountable/motivates me.
3) Maybe I will inspire others to take action.

Big thanks to @hughjasle for inspiring me to create my own e-commerce shop and drive traffic to it with Facebook ads.

Right now I have found a product I'm going to run an ad for soon. Shopify website and ad is ready. I'm planning the Facebook ad settings now and I have the following question.

Somewhere on this forum I found this advice:

"it also pays to duplicate each ad in a set so you have 3 identical ad's running on the same set at the same time as they can have widely different outcomes when released into the wild. Run them all for a few days cut the worst 2"

I'm planning to split test my ad campaign. Would you split an ad of 10$ into 3 duplicates of 3.333$ each? Or will it work unfavorably in some way?

Thanks!

 

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[eTox]

Adespresso has a great amount of valuable posts on how to get started with facebook ads. I suggest you check them out, they were invaluable to me when I was afraid to launch my first ad a week ago, I am still learning from them, I suggest you should too.

 

[IGP]

Hi all,

It's time for me to create a progress/execution thread. Three reasons for this:
1) I can ask questions I will stumble upon in my journey and hopefully have them answered here.
2) It gives me an overview of my action-taking and it holds me accountable/motivates me.
3) Maybe I will inspire others to take action.

Big thanks to @hughjasle for inspiring me to create my own e-commerce shop and drive traffic to it with Facebook ads.

Right now I have found a product I'm going to run an ad for soon. Shopify website and ad is ready. I'm planning the Facebook ad settings now and I have the following question.

Somewhere on this forum I found this advice:

"it also pays to duplicate each ad in a set so you have 3 identical ad's running on the same set at the same time as they can have widely different outcomes when released into the wild. Run them all for a few days cut the worst 2"

I'm planning to split test my ad campaign. Would you split an ad of 10$ into 3 duplicates of 3.333$ each? Or will it work unfavorably in some way?

Thanks!

You need to spend more money than that. You also need to test different ad creatives and different objectives.

For example:

You could have 2 objectives (Clicks vs Conversions)
You could have 3 audiences
You could have 2 images and 2 sets of copy.

That's 24 "different" combos that all need budget.

As @hughjasle can confirm, its about testing an optimizing. Kill what doesn't work and add budget to what's working.

 

[LPPC]

@eTox
Thank you for the suggestion, I'm definitely going to check it out. I have to watch out for too much information and not enough action though

@IGP

Thank you. This is my current (available for improvements) plan:
I'm going to spend 80$ in total and I will devide this into 3 different ads.

Ad A 20$--》
-click to websites objective
-facebook pixel set up
-manual CPC bidding
-interest: tight interest list
- age 18-35 since I saw an ad of my competitor who targeted to this demo
- target to males since my logic convinces me that targeting to only males will give me much better ROI.
-i will split ad A into A1 and A2. A1 will be mobile ads and A2 will be desktop. I want to see which one gives better ROI. So I will divide ad A into 2 parts of 10$ spend each.

So I was wondering if I should split this 10$ into 3 duplicates of 3.333$ each and see which ones performs better?


ad B 20$--》
-conversion ad objective.
-age : 18-35
- interest list: highly targeted
-placement: i will do mobile or desktop ad, depending on which one performed better in ad A.

Ad C 40$--》
-i will either choose conversions or click to website objective, based on which one performed better earlier.
- i will target very broadly, so no interest list targeting
- age: based on the data of ad A and B.
I will split test this age group into a range of 5 years.
so for example:
Ad C1: age 18-23
Ad C2: age 23- 28
etc

Ad C will show me whether I can have a big audience (because of no interest targeting) and also have good ROI.

What is your opinion? Any advice is greatly appreciated.

edit: I will target to whole US (?) and I will use 1 video ad for testing whether this product is worth pursuing.

 

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[IGP]

@eTox
Thank you for the suggestion, I'm definitely going to check it out. I have to watch out for too much information and not enough action though

@IGP

Thank you. This is my current (available for improvements) plan:
I'm going to spend 80$ in total and I will devide this into 3 different ads.

Ad A 20$--》
-click to websites objective
-facebook pixel set up
-manual CPC bidding
-interest: tight interest list
- age 18-35 since I saw an ad of my competitor who targeted to this demo
- target to males since my logic convinces me that targeting to only males will give me much better ROI.
-i will split ad A into A1 and A2. A1 will be mobile ads and A2 will be desktop. I want to see which one gives better ROI. So I will divide ad A into 2 parts of 10$ spend each.

So I was wondering if I should split this 10$ into 3 duplicates of 3.333$ each and see which ones performs better?


ad B 20$--》
-conversion ad objective.
-age : 18-35
- interest list: highly targeted
-placement: i will do mobile or desktop ad, depending on which one performed better in ad A.

Ad C 40$--》
-i will either choose conversions or click to website objective, based on which one performed better earlier.
- i will target very broadly, so no interest list targeting
- age: based on the data of ad A and B.
I will split test this age group into a range of 5 years.
so for example:
Ad C1: age 18-23
Ad C2: age 23- 28
etc

Ad C will show me whether I can have a big audience (because of no interest targeting) and also have good ROI.

What is your opinion? Any advice is greatly appreciated.

The only way to know is to test it. So, just do it.

Personally, I don't think you need to duplicate the ad sets right off the bat. If you do, don't split the budget. Instead run them all at $10.

The goal is to GET DATA! Find out what works and what doesn't and then move in that direction.

 

[hughjasle]

Right now I have found a product I'm going to run an ad for soon.

So do you already have the product? Is this a campaign you are doing to unload product or just test the waters? If you already have the product you'll want to be more aggressive (ie: Spend more).

You have a very small budget, is your product low priced? Ideally you'd be able to spend 3x your b/e CPA cost on each variable. This can get expensive VERY fast so make sure the rest of your back-end is set up to properly obtain data, if not, you'll waste $$.

• Site loads fine (2-3second load time max)
• works on mobile/desktop
• have variations of the funnel (and can track how each does)
• have the FB pixel installed on each step of your funnel(Landing page>add to cart>Checkout>TY, etc.)
• Google analytics installed properly for ecommerce with shopify.
• Google Analytics set up with event goals to better track all the variations and various steps on your funnel

Yea lots of work, but this is your future, your job, your life. Do it right. Don't look for shortcuts. It pays to be the guy who does it all right and spends a lot compared to the guy who gets lucky only spending very little.

As for the ad:

If this is your first ad, go and find ads that are successful. Lots of them. See what they have in common and copy their methods. These are ads that typically have LOTS of good comments social proof etc.

Put a link in the description, respond to all comments, make sure the ad pulls in their attention/interest then tell them what to do.

for the structure of the of the campaign: I split between PPE, website clicks, and website conversions typically. PPE can sometime out perform the others, but mainly i run it just to get lots of comments/likes etc. on my ads faster. The CTW and the WC campaigns, you just want to see which converts best and cut the other.

In each of those campaigns I'd do as many ad sets as seems reasonable to my budget and split my audience targeting among them. M/F, desktop, RHS, Mobile IOS, Mobile Android,Age 20-29,30-39, etc. Interest 1, interest 2, etc. As you can see, you can REALLY split these up so no audience overlaps and after X spend on each you'll know who your key audience is and can narrow it down further etc etc.

Then for the actual ad, only have 1-4 unique ads. Make each ad duplicated 4x. So if you have 1 ad, dup it so you now have 4 or 5 of the same ad in each adset. If you have 4 unique ads, that would be 16 to 20 ads in each of those adsets.

In the end you can end up having something like 3 campaigns, 70 total adsets, and like 1k ads.

Obviously this is just an example. There is no cookie cutter template for ads or campaigns. YMMV.

 

[TheTruth]

@hughjasle is a VERY good friend of mine and the advice he just gave you is worth a million bucks. Please do not take it lightly.

Let's see you crush this

So do you already have the product? Is this a campaign you are doing to unload product or just test the waters? If you already have the product you'll want to be more aggressive (ie: Spend more).

You have a very small budget, is your product low priced? Ideally you'd be able to spend 3x your b/e CPA cost on each variable. This can get expensive VERY fast so make sure the rest of your back-end is set up to properly obtain data, if not, you'll waste $$.

• Site loads fine (2-3second load time max)
• works on mobile/desktop
• have variations of the funnel (and can track how each does)
• have the FB pixel installed on each step of your funnel(Landing page>add to cart>Checkout>TY, etc.)
• Google analytics installed properly for ecommerce with shopify.
• Google Analytics set up with event goals to better track all the variations and various steps on your funnel

Yea lots of work, but this is your future, your job, your life. Do it right. Don't look for shortcuts. It pays to be the guy who does it all right and spends a lot compared to the guy who gets lucky only spending very little.

As for the ad:

If this is your first ad, go and find ads that are successful. Lots of them. See what they have in common and copy their methods. These are ads that typically have LOTS of good comments social proof etc.

Put a link in the description, respond to all comments, make sure the ad pulls in their attention/interest then tell them what to do.

for the structure of the of the campaign: I split between PPE, website clicks, and website conversions typically. PPE can sometime out perform the others, but mainly i run it just to get lots of comments/likes etc. on my ads faster. The CTW and the WC campaigns, you just want to see which converts best and cut the other.

In each of those campaigns I'd do as many ad sets as seems reasonable to my budget and split my audience targeting among them. M/F, desktop, RHS, Mobile IOS, Mobile Android,Age 20-29,30-39, etc. Interest 1, interest 2, etc. As you can see, you can REALLY split these up so no audience overlaps and after X spend on each you'll know who your key audience is and can narrow it down further etc etc.

Then for the actual ad, only have 1-4 unique ads. Make each ad duplicated 4x. So if you have 1 ad, dup it so you now have 4 or 5 of the same ad in each adset. If you have 4 unique ads, that would be 16 to 20 ads in each of those adsets.

In the end you can end up having something like 3 campaigns, 70 total adsets, and like 1k ads.

Obviously this is just an example. There is no cookie cutter template for ads or campaigns. YMMV.

 

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[hughjasle]

@hughjasle is a VERY good friend of mine

And that's @TheTruth !

 

[LPPC]

@hughjasle

Golden! Thank you very much, greatly appreciated. Repped +

I am actually just testing the waters to see if this product is worth spending time and energy on. I should have been more clear. BUT I will surely use the information you gave me when I'm at that stadium. So I will use my own simplified template for now, unless you think I should change it ( I do for example many interests in one ad version, so really tight targeting for ad A and B).

I'm thinking about how expensive I should advertise the product for. My competition sells it from $50 up to $60 dollars. My version of this product is the same, but it only looks different. In your own thread you told me to try to sell it more expensive than my competition and if it doesn't sell, I should lower the price. I am going to follow your advice and test that.

So for now , as stated in my previous post, I'm going to split my budget of $80 into ad A of $20, B of $20 and C of $40.
The major difference between ad A and B is the objective. With already having this difference in one of the variables of the ad, can I also ad the variable of the price?
So for example Ad A lists the product price for $65 and ad B for $55. Ad B also has a different objective.

We also have to keep in mind that with a budget of $20 dollars, a cpc of lets say 0.30 and a conversion rate of 2%, I should get 1 sale with a budget of $20 per ad. Will this even get me good data on the price of the product?

A lot to think about for me right now.

Thank you!


@TheTruth

Hughjasle has already helped me tremendously with responding very well to my questions. I always take his advice very seriously

 

[hughjasle]

We also have to keep in mind that with a budget of $20 dollars, a cpc of lets say 0.30 and a conversion rate of 2%, I should get 1 sale with a budget of $20 per ad. Will this even get me good data on the price of the product?

You are assuming too much. Wont know your CPA or CR till you start to run. I have costs all over. From $.03 to $2 per click, both are profitable. Same with CR. From 1% to 8%. Those are the things you are looking to find out in this test. What are your base numbers. Just know that if it's profitable or close to it, you can work on it and most likely half it from wherever you are started at once you start really running and have the data and tools to properly optimize.

 

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[Insaint]

The major difference between ad A and B is the objective. With already having this difference in one of the variables of the ad, can I also ad the variable of the price?

No, only test one variable at a time if you can help it.

We also have to keep in mind that with a budget of $20 dollars, a cpc of lets say 0.30 and a conversion rate of 2%, I should get 1 sale with a budget of $20 per ad. Will this even get me good data on the price of the product?

Like hughjasle said, you're assuming too much. But even if all those numbers were correct you would still have a 25% chance of not getting a sale with $20 ad spend (67 clicks, 98% chance of not getting a sale each click -> 0.98^67=25.8%). So you could dismiss a perfectly fine ad, just because your budget was too small.

 

[LPPC]

@hughjasle and @Insaint

Thank you! You guys are absolutely right, I am assuming too much and thinking too far ahead. Also having a too small budget to test the things that are important makes me shoot myself in the foot. I have decided to spend more if necessary and test the product with a high price and lower it when necessary.

I just have to start running the ad. I have almost everything set up ( facebook pixel and google analytics for example) and the next major things is to install a screen recording software and to find the interest list. After that I'm going to run the ad.

 

[MitchC]

Id just like to suggest an alternative view on this, mostly pricing. I have no where near the experience Hugh has I actually started 2 weeks or so ago thanks to his thread, but this isn't really my advice anyway it's Gary Halberts.

The method or reasoning I went with was Gary halberts from one of his letters. This is for direct mail so it's a bit different but you can apply the same logic, especially on a tight budget. He said something like this:

When testing a product you want to do it once and do it right. Test the hottest list, with the best ad, the best price you can do, then from there you expand. Jack up the price till it stops converting, try broader audiences etc.

I made the mistake on my first product of trying to start the price high, with a broad audience etc like you would want to do if you had the campaign already working, then I was like why isn't this converting, maybe I need to drop the price, maybe I need to spend more so it can find the right people etc, what I should have done and did do after that was make the product as cheap as possible, target the most specific audience I could, if I couldn't get sales from that, then I knew pretty quickly I never would.

 

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[hughjasle]

When testing a product you want to do it once and do it right. Test the hottest list, with the best ad, the best price you can do, then from there you expand. Jack up the price till it stops converting, try broader audiences etc.

I like that. Trick is knowing what the "best" is when you are fresh. But I like the idea

tnx

 

[Mac]

I'm just a bit confused. If you use a Shopify shell site, how are you able to make different variations of the funnel? Through different product pages? Or do you use some sort of funnel software like ClickFunnels?

 

[hughjasle]

...how are you able to make different variations of the funnel?Through different product pages? Or do you use some sort of funnel software like ClickFunnels?

Yes. Both. As well as other software like VWO.

 

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[LPPC]

@BookwormMitch

valid point, something to really think about! Thanks

 

[Mac]

So far I've had around 9 abandoned carts... which... if they checked out would've gave me a great ROI (even though I'm only in the validation stage). But I've had 0 sales. Would you say that my idea is validated or would you only make that assumption if I turned these into sales? I'm trying to figure out why they aren't checking out (and I sent them 10% discount codes).

What do you guys think?

 

[hughjasle]

So far I've had around 9 abandoned carts

9 abandoned carts, an no checkouts yet.

How much have you spent? What's your cost on the product and what's the price you are selling for?

Also, what's the reception of the ad like on FB? Good comments/shares/likes or bad?

 

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[Mac]

My cost to produce the product is $2, selling it for $10. The ad spend so far has been $66. 3 people have selected a quantity of 2 of the product ($20 each).

So that would mean if all of these people bought (best case scenario) I would only have generated $16 profit. But obviously this is best case scenario with the shell site.

My goal to increase the AOV would be to add more of the product as a discount on ClickFunnels, as well as add to the product line but I just wanted to generate sales through Shopify first. Not sure if you can add an upsell on Shopify though.

The reception on FB has been good, because I've been hitting a pain point. It has around 21 likes. CTR is 4.00 %. Mostly just answering peoples questions and them saying thanks, but not going through to purchase. A few people have pinned it (maybe so they can come back later).

It also has 12 shares.

Thanks for the response btw. @hughjasle

 

[hughjasle]

What do you guys think?

ok well $10 is hard to make work on paid traffic, but not impossible. Not really enough info to know if oyu can make it work yet. That's just the game. It's expensive. Less expensive than ordering $10k of inventory that doesn't move tho.

Possible abandoned cart reasons:
Are you offering free shipping?
What kind of payment methods are you allowing?
Are you showing the price before the checkout or do they have to add to cart to see the final price? (this includes cost of shipping)
Do you inform them how long shipping takes?
Do you give them any reason to buy now? ie sales price ending?

 

[Mac]

ok well $10 is hard to make work on paid traffic, but not impossible. Not really enough info to know if oyu can make it work yet. That's just the game. It's expensive. Less expensive than ordering $10k of inventory that doesn't move tho.

Possible abandoned cart reasons:
Are you offering free shipping?
What kind of payment methods are you allowing?
Are you showing the price before the checkout or do they have to add to cart to see the final price? (this includes cost of shipping)
Do you inform them how long shipping takes?
Do you give them any reason to buy now? ie sales price ending?

1. No.
2. Paypal, Mastercard, VISA, AMEX (Stripe)
3. They see the shipping price after they proceed to checkout (it's $8 extra). That might be the problem.
3. Yes.
4. No, only when I send them a discount that it's ending in 48 hours if they don't claim the 10% off.

 

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[Insaint]

3. They see the shipping price after they proceed to checkout (it's $8 extra). That might be the problem.

I would immediately leave the site if I saw a $8 shipping charge show up on checkout for a $10 product. Try to offer free shipping and charge $15-18 for the product itself (this depends on how often you get people that order multiple products). Or offer free shipping for orders over $20/30/whatever works for you.

 

[hughjasle]

I would immediately leave the site if I saw a $8 shipping charge show up on checkout for a $10 product. Try to offer free shipping and charge $15-18 for the product itself

Additionally you can try the ever popular FREE+SH model. Where the S&H is $9.95.

But like I said, that's just tight margins, esp. on a $2 product.

$2 COGs
$4 Shipping costs
Leaves only $6 for marketing AND profit

But plenty of ppl are making it work

 

[Tweeve11]

Im trying to draw the line between the first initial test phase, the second test phase (once your shopify lander is up?), and then just advertising your product once its sourced.

I am still in the initial test phase. I thought of a good product a few days ago and i want to test, and see if it is worth pursuing. I know the goal is to spend enough money to get an actual sense of interest, im just getting hung up on the budget for the first phase. I read in the beginning of the thread that you spent $80 to test an add. Was this daily or total? I've got an audience (roughly 4.5 million) and im using adespresso to manage the campaign.

My real goal is to try and emulate what you did as best as possible. I think you hacked out a fantastic way to get into E-commerce and Im looking forward to launching this first test!

 

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[Jake]

Charge $12 + $5 shipping. (You're only out $1 if they take that ) When an item is added you can have a notification saying free shipping when they purchase 2 or more (or x $'s) Should help increase conversions.

Have you tried sending abandoned cart emails?

 

[Mac]

Yeah, I tested the $15 + free shipping model and nobody took it - bounce rate went up by 40%. So I'm going to try Jake's method. I have sent abandoned cart emails with 10% discounts. Nobody took the offer.

 

[LPPC]

Im trying to draw the line between the first initial test phase, the second test phase (once your shopify lander is up?), and then just advertising your product once its sourced.

I am still in the initial test phase. I thought of a good product a few days ago and i want to test, and see if it is worth pursuing. I know the goal is to spend enough money to get an actual sense of interest, im just getting hung up on the budget for the first phase. I read in the beginning of the thread that you spent $80 to test an add. Was this daily or total? I've got an audience (roughly 4.5 million) and im using adespresso to manage the campaign.

My real goal is to try and emulate what you did as best as possible. I think you hacked out a fantastic way to get into E-commerce and Im looking forward to launching this first test!

I'm not sure whether your question was aimed at hugjasle or at me? I'm still a beginner and I'm going to run my first ad probably next week. I'm planning to spend between $80-$100 in total on testing whether this product is worth selling. This could be more, but also less. I guess you will know this when you have spent some dollars on the ad.

Question to you guys: in google analytics and facebook pixel, do you also create a conversion goal for the payment processing page? So that's the page between the "payment information" page and the "thank you" page. The processing of the payment can go wrong and this way you can track the transactions that failed.

I don't want to unnecessarily edit my goal setup since it took a long time to set it up properly

 

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[hughjasle]

in google analytics and facebook pixel, do you also create a conversion goal for the payment processing page? So that's the page between the "payment information" page and the "thank you" page. The processing of the payment can go wrong and this way you can track the transactions that failed.

I don't have a separate page so I can't comment directly, HOWEVER, TRACK EVERYTHING. I have booth google and fb pixels placed on every little step. Go overboard if you want. Can't hurt. There are scripts out there that will pop your pixels after a user has been on your site for over x seconds. Lots of cool things you can do with that

$80 to test an add. Was this daily or total? I've got an audience (roughly 4.5 million) and im using adespresso to manage the campaign.

Man, I've tested so many products now that I couldn't tell you what I've spent on them individually without looking at my books. $80 is enough if you have so many orders and your ROI is shooting through the roof. It's not enough if you have a $100 product and no sales yet. There is no set amount (IMO) to aim for with each product. You are looking for statistical significance. If you spent $800 on a $20 product purchase price and only have 10 sales, I'd drop it. Could you make it work? Most likely, but there are so many better products that are just lower hanging fruit. It really comes down to you and what you are comfortable with and how bad you want each product to work.

 

[Tweeve11]

Yea sorry, I was reading @hughjasle's progress thread in a tab right next to this one and just got mixed up between the two.

I guess i should be more clear. I was under the impression that you posted an ad and bought data before you even set up a store.

Then once you got some data, you would analyze, and if the data was good, you would set up the shopify lander and start testing more in depth and try to get checkouts.

So maybe i shouldn't be asking how much money to spend, rather, at what point did you say "oh okay, this add has gotten enough xyz that im going to test more with a lander"?

Obviously the point that you know the lander is successful is just once you start getting sales.

I totally understand that once the page is up, it is all relative to the product you're selling. Each situation is different and there is no set in stone rule for what is and is not enough.