E-commerce + driving traffic

[hughjasle]

I was under the impression that you posted an ad and bought data before you even set up a store

That was true, however I only did that at first when I was transitioning from affiliate offers to ecommerce. I had never run any of my own products so that was my way of dipping my toes in the water since at that point, I really only knew how to run ads, I didn't know how to set up a store at all or really set up any sort of lander that wasn't ripped off and tweaked from another affiliate really. I was mostly curious at that time how ecommerce ads performed. Having run lots of ads for affiliate products I already had something to compare it to. When I saw that it was getting lots of shares/likes and positive comments, I was shocked and knew there was something to this as pretty much any affiliate offer gets all the opposite attention lol.

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"?

I kind of answered that question above so I'm gonna change your question to the inevitable next question, to save us both time, which would be:

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

I would say it's worth ordering if you are break even or better. Even a bit under break even. The trick here will be knowing your skills and comfort levels. Maybe to start you need a product that you already KNOW is gonna make you $xyz as soon as it comes in without having to figure out how to optimize or make better funnels. Maybe you already know how to do a lot of that and have $$ in the bank to take bigger risks and grab a product that was only break even, but optimize it so well that you are now very profitable.

 

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[Tweeve11]

Ahh okay okay. I think that makes a lot more sense. Just start with the landers and see what if i can get some sales...

Im pretty sure I've got what I need now...

I wont post back until ive run some ads!

Thanks so much man.

 

[LPPC]

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

Thanks brother! I have a lot to learn

Hmm, let me guess: if the user has spent x amount of time on the site then that means that they are interested and you can give them a discount coupon to push them over the edge? That's the first thing I thought about.

Would love some reading material about these more in-depth topics, if there are any..

 

[Tweeve11]

So just launched both of my campaigns on adespresso. I set everything up with $50 a day budgets for each campaign... The whole time i had been thinking of the daily budget for each campaign as the actaul ad budget. Obviously wasnt true, and adespresso split my ads up like 24 times based on what i chose so the most expensive daily budget i have on any given ad is only like $3. That was a mistake...

 

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[Paul Thomas]

Hey - this is great and I'm taking the same route!

Have you had this issue with setting up multiple ads on facebook? I'm getting almost all activity through one ad, and nothing through my other 5 which are different images... this is just the first day of the campaign with a limit of $20/day for this ad set

@hughjasle @LPPC

 

[hughjasle]

Have you had this issue with setting up multiple ads on facebook? I'm getting almost all activity through one ad, and nothing through my other 5 which are different images

There is nothing wrong there. That's how FB works. It'll send all your traffic to the top ad(s) in each adset. Or at least to the ones they think are the best.

If you want equal distribution between multiple ads like you have, you need to set up each ad in it's own adset.

 

[Tweeve11]

So this is my adespresso dashboard as of right now. Its been running right at about 20 hours now. Im not sure why my top campaign isnt spending more of its budget. I have Auto Optimization running on it, and Im wondering if this may be why this is happening?

I have pretty decent likes, but not a lot of shares or comments. I had one add to cart, but no sales. I dont really feel like i have spent enough to see any real data yet though...

 

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[MitchC]

Nice job starting, you won't be able to stop now

Just my advice here before you maybe waste any more money. Turn the PPE ad off, very rarely do the people who like or comment buy, turn audience network off, those clicks are just like accidental app clicks and stuff. Also everyone can see your product in those pictures, not sure if you want that. If you click to see who liked your posts on Facebook, you can invite them to like your page.

How much are you selling for and what does it cost?

 

[Tweeve11]

Ok you confirmed what i was thinking on that. That was switched off. I just dont understand why my other one is spending so little? I was under the impression that facebook would do its best to spend all of my daily budget

 

[MitchC]

Ok you confirmed what i was thinking on that. That was switched off. I just dont understand why my other one is spending so little? I was under the impression that facebook would do its best to spend all of my daily budget

Whats the relevance score?

 

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[Paul Thomas]

Nice job starting, you won't be able to stop now

Just my advice here before you maybe waste any more money. Turn the PPE ad off, very rarely do the people who like or comment buy, turn audience network off, those clicks are just like accidental app clicks and stuff. Also everyone can see your product in those pictures, not sure if you want that. If you click to see who liked your posts on Facebook, you can invite them to like your page.

How much are you selling for and what does it cost?

Is this always the case? Ive heard in some T-Shirt and Apparel Ecommerce Groups that the PPE ad is always the way to start off a campaign.

 

[Tweeve11]

I cant get it to show up... Ive played with my colums in Admanager and ive exported to excel and it wont show in adespresso either...

sO i dont know.. lol

 

[MitchC]

Is this always the case? Ive heard in some T-Shirt and Apparel Ecommerce Groups that the PPE ad is always the way to start off a campaign.

You can test but I mean look as his results

 

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[IGP]

Is this always the case? Ive heard in some T-Shirt and Apparel Ecommerce Groups that the PPE ad is always the way to start off a campaign.

No, it's not. Here is a campaign I launched before I went to the beach last weekend.
http://imgur.com/NeQXL8x

As you can see one of the PPE ads has had by far the most purchases.

The 3 inactive ones I turned off this morning before I came home as the ROI wasn't there.

 

[Tweeve11]

Went ahead and tweaked my campaign and launched again. I decided to take off the optimization as well as set the bidding at maximum. I read somewhere that @hughjasle does that to get max exposure, and i think i understand the idea. You spend more to get to the top, but assuming you have a good product, it will pay off. We will see...

I have set the campaign at 100 a day budget, but i have something like 240 ads total. Im wondering when you guys all talk about budget, do you mean per ad or per campaign?

Really enjoying taking this action. I definitely feel like I am learning. I have forayed into Facebook Ads before, but always have been pretty lost. This is the first time I've had the aha moments and started to understand things. Maybe thats because i used Adespresso. I did like it quite a bit, but im also a complete newb, so im not sure how it stacks up against Power Editor when you really get going...

Thanks a lot @hughjasle and @IGP for helping out thus far...

 

[IGP]

Went ahead and tweaked my campaign and launched again. I decided to take off the optimization as well as set the bidding at maximum. I read somewhere that @hughjasle does that to get max exposure, and i think i understand the idea. You spend more to get to the top, but assuming you have a good product, it will pay off. We will see...

I have set the campaign at 100 a day budget, but i have something like 240 ads total. Im wondering when you guys all talk about budget, do you mean per ad or per campaign?

Really enjoying taking this action. I definitely feel like I am learning. I have forayed into Facebook Ads before, but always have been pretty lost. This is the first time I've had the aha moments and started to understand things. Maybe thats because i used Adespresso. I did like it quite a bit, but im also a complete newb, so im not sure how it stacks up against Power Editor when you really get going...

Thanks a lot @hughjasle and @IGP for helping out thus far...

With 240 ads you're going to need a significant budget. Personally, I dont think u need that many.

In my example above, I knew I wanted this test to run for 5 days (while I was at the beach) and I figured $40-$50/day test budget was a good starting point.

So, I created 3 PPE Adsets, 3 WC conversion Adsets (6 total) and pointed them all at the SAME ad for maximum exposure and social signals.

I gave each adset a $7/day budget ($42/day total).

After 5 days, 1 was profitable, 2 were real close and 3 were not close. I killed the 3 that weren't close. I haven't even added upsells/downsells etc. yet. So these will be humming along nicely in a week or two.

Don't make it rocket science. Figure out how much you want to spend to test a product and then work backwards.

 

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[hughjasle]

i have something like 240 ads total

Are those 240 ads unique ads? Since you are using adesspresso I'm assuming they are, and thus I'll second what @IGP said:

I dont think u need that many.

I'll even say that's too many, unless you are just trying to learn ad basics and know that you are gonna spend a lot of money, but that's the price to pay to really learn what kinds of ads are best. No other way around learning that really.

240 duplicate ads (same ad ID) are just fine as that social proof will be shared between all 240 ads (since it's just the same ad). I do that. But 240 uniques, that's a lot. You will either have to cut a ton of them way too early or just go with whichever appears to be doing best after a short period of time. Otherwise cutting after just over a 3xCPA on each ad will cost you an insane amount of money. Even at a low $3 CPA, you'll be spending over $2k to get the bare minimum amount of data.

 

[Tweeve11]

Yup, After work today, i was able to really investigate the campaign, and i found exactly what you guys were saying. I had 4 unique images and i was cross-referencing (i dont think thats the right word?) that with age, and placement, and so on. Thats what got me to 240. I just clicked as many things to compare as i could until i had reached the max number.

So then today I went in and found that A very very small amount of those ads were actually producing anything. I haven't even had any sales. I have only gotten add to carts, so for the sake of learning, I've just treated that as the purchase, and hoped that if i targeted based on that metric, well enough, that it would lead to sales. I basically went and looked at everything that was actually converting, and once killing what wasn't converting, i was left with 4 total ads lol

I optimized and tweaked and ran again with a $40 budget for the day. Hoping to get some real purchases! Either way, I'm happy to have paid as much as i have for the amount I've learned. Its been great to actually have the aha moments that just weren't happening before because I wasn't taking the necessary action to produce them. Now, I'm thinking all day about how to get more money to test more products and run more ads!

 

[Paul Thomas]

Are your shopify pages just pure stock with product pages including just 1-2 pictures of the product and a few bullet points? What's shipping/taxes look like?

 

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[Tweeve11]

Yea i mean its literally just thrown together. I probably spent a few hours total making it look better then just white backgrounds, but its certainly nothing nice or fancy. I know in time i will have to focus more but i just wanted to get started.

I actually just got my first sale!! Now, i don't want to celebrate prematurely, because i had two phantom campaigns appear out of nowhere on my ads manager (I've been running thru Adespresso, so i just logged in to facebook to compare and they were there) and spent a lot of money. Im not sure if the sale came from these phantom ads or from my Adespresso ads. If it came from my re-optimized Adespresso ads, then great! If it came from one of these phantom ads, which just spent a lot more, and that's why i got the sale, then that's not really as big of an achievement. I opened support tickets with both Facebook and Adespresso. I'm pretty sure it wasn't my fault so really hoping for a positive resolution there.

If i can manage to get that solved and taken care of, then i will have just sold my first product online! I'm sure its not much at all, and it will have cost me roughly $150 to do so (like $300 if this facebook blunder is my fault), but I am proud to check that off my list. As someone that has been very stagnant for very long, this is great to finally feel like i have worked and it has paid off with result. I have done it, and know how to keep doing it. As long as i keep repeating, I WILL eventually get to success.

Just a quick last question for the night, but does it matter how and when I refund the order? The only reason i could think that refunding right after they buy, would give a bad feeling to the customer, which wouldn't be ideal. Didnt know if you guys wait 12 hours or something. I also am wondering how i notify them? Is it built into shopify, or do i need to get an ad on to send email's or notifications of their refund and why they were refunded?

Thanks so much guys. I really am so thankful for all the help and advice you all have provided me. Ill probably make a progress thread soon. I kind of high jacked @LPPC's thread... lol my bad man!

 

[hughjasle]

Just a quick last question for the night, but does it matter how and when I refund the order? The only reason i could think that refunding right after they buy, would give a bad feeling to the customer, which wouldn't be ideal. Didnt know if you guys wait 12 hours or something. I also am wondering how i notify them? Is it built into shopify, or do i need to get an ad on to send email's or notifications of their refund and why they were refunded?

Doesn't matter when you do it, just don't drag it out. I'd just refund them all at the end of each day or something like that. And yes it's built into shopify. Just click the refund button and done.

 

[LPPC]

probably make a progress thread soon. I kind of high jacked @LPPC's thread... lol my bad man!

No problem mate, I'm glad you are learning. I actually felt like people, me included, hijacked the @hughjasle thread. That's one of the reasons I decided to create my own thread

I am learning from your questions and the wonderful help here, so keep engaging!

 

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[Paul Thomas]

Question for @Tweeve11 @LPPC :

Purely our of curiousity since I'm a noob to fb marketing myself - where did you hear about Adspresso (i knew they had tutorials but not campaign execution), and/or why are you using it over the regular facebook ads interface?

 

[Tweeve11]

Awesome. Customer refunded. Still waiting to hear back from Facebook. I have spoken with Adespresso. They asked for more info which i provided. Still hoping for a positive resolution...

As far as Adespresso, I really am not even sure where I heard about it. I have done quite a bit of analysis paralysis over the last 3 years or so, and over the course of reading and researching and learning, I was just familiar with it. I had done Facebook ads before out of the Ads Manager, and I really liked the differences that Adespresso had. I was able to build my campaigns easier as well as split and track.

Now with that being said, my opinion is that of a newbie. I know that Power Editor is super powerful and I'm pretty sure (maybe I'm wrong?) can do all the same stuff and more than Adespresso can. But for just getting started, I thought Adespresso was much more visually appealing and therefore easier. There very well may come a time where learning Power Editor becomes mandatory, but for now, Adespresso is definitely getting the job done.

 

[LPPC]

Question for @Tweeve11 @LPPC :

Purely our of curiousity since I'm a noob to fb marketing myself - where did you hear about Adspresso (i knew they had tutorials but not campaign execution), and/or why are you using it over the regular facebook ads interface?

I am not using Adespresso, just power editor

 

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[LPPC]

I am not using Adespresso, just power editor

@hughjasle @eliquid @IGP @Insaint your input and others' input I didn't mention would be greatly appreciated:

I now have access to a Dutch Facebook Ads account, this means that my ad account misses some functionalities like "behavior> purchase behavior" ad targeting. The reason is that EU Law forbids Big Data usage. I want to target the US market.

My question is: how important are these missing features and should I try everything to get hold of an US account or is it something that you don't use anyway?

I am afraid and guessing that facebook is also less able to optimize the campaigns for conversion because they are missing Big Data.

I migt have to spend 500$ or more to get hold of an US account... and maybe Facebook will ban me because they know I use it for a Dutch company.

Looking forward to some advice from experienced advertisers.

 

[eliquid]

@hughjasle @eliquid @IGP @Insaint your input and others' input I didn't mention would be greatly appreciated:

I now have access to a Dutch Facebook Ads account, this means that my ad account misses some functionalities like "behavior> purchase behavior" ad targeting. The reason is that EU Law forbids Big Data usage. I want to target the US market.

My question is: how important are these missing features and should I try everything to get hold of an US account or is it something that you don't use anyway?

I am afraid and guessing that facebook is also less able to optimize the campaigns for conversion because they are missing Big Data.

I migt have to spend 500$ or more to get hold of an US account... and maybe Facebook will ban me because they know I use it for a Dutch company.

Looking forward to some advice from experienced advertisers.

I can honestly tell you I have no clue on EU, Dutch, or that specific situation.

I use that purchase behavior sometimes. Not all the time. I use it for testing. Some tests it works, some it doesn't.

This would be new ground for me though with the whole EU/Dutch thing, so I am not sure I could really give you any good answer on it.

 

[IGP]

@hughjasle @eliquid @IGP @Insaint your input and others' input I didn't mention would be greatly appreciated:

I now have access to a Dutch Facebook Ads account, this means that my ad account misses some functionalities like "behavior> purchase behavior" ad targeting. The reason is that EU Law forbids Big Data usage. I want to target the US market.

My question is: how important are these missing features and should I try everything to get hold of an US account or is it something that you don't use anyway?

I am afraid and guessing that facebook is also less able to optimize the campaigns for conversion because they are missing Big Data.

I migt have to spend 500$ or more to get hold of an US account... and maybe Facebook will ban me because they know I use it for a Dutch company.

Looking forward to some advice from experienced advertisers.

No idea, but just move forward with Interest targeting....

 

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[LPPC]

I can honestly tell you I have no clue on EU, Dutch, or that specific situation.

I use that purchase behavior sometimes. Not all the time. I use it for testing. Some tests it works, some it doesn't.

This would be new ground for me though with the whole EU/Dutch thing, so I am not sure I could really give you any good answer on it.

Thank you What do you mean with testing? Do you also use that feature sometimes when scaling?

@IGP

Thank you! Do you use features like purchase behavior yourself? Are you of the opinion that interest targeting will provide you with the essential targeting options?

Edit: some of the missing options are: automotive, b2b, charitable donations, digital activities, financial, job role, media, purchase behavior, residential profiles

 

[Insaint]

Never seen those options and never missed them either. That doesn't mean they're useless, but I wouldn't waste time on getting an US account (which could land you in hot water).

Just go with interest/demographics based targeting. Use your customer data to create a lookalike audience and see what happens. If you're spending hundreds/day you can start complicating things.