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Tag: Facebook Ads

Our Number 1 Winning Strategy: Test Everything

Some people make it seem like that creating viral content is a science. I think there’s some data analytics to it but it’s not entirely science.

In my opinion creating viral content means putting a ton of content out for your audience, studying consumption based on user behavior, and trying to replicate that again in the next piece of content.

It may sound like bit of a science, but the root of all viral content comes down to just pure testing.

These days I spend a lot of time and money running ads for our e-commerce store. The key to running ads right is to test everything; creatives, targeting, copywriting and all permutations of all variants.

In the end, I keep the ones that work, and stop the ones that don’t.

Product video ads aren’t much different either. I believe that before the consumers have received and used the product first hand, the product is only as good as it’s creative.

Sometimes we take segments of what works within multiple creatives and stitch together to make what now works as a whole.

In the end, for me, it’s just testing, looking at results, and improving based on the data.

The Right Way to Talk to AI Support to Lift Limitations

A few days ago, I spoke about the visa restrictions on the internet. I also wrote a bit about how you can circumvent those. Today, I’m going to write about a certain kind of visa restriction that I often face.

Large platforms treat users from different countries differently. They do that to apparently keep their platform “safe”. To keep the platform safe, they look at the data they have on each country, the amount of spam/scam etc happening from each country or region and then develop rules to treat each user accordingly. In theory, this means it’s harder to use these platforms from Pakistan than it is from US even if all you’re trying to do is use the platform the right way.

One such restriction that I’ve always seen happen is completely losing access to account. For example in the past, I’ve lost access to my Facebook personal account and Facebook ad accounts. Google Adsense is also more likely to get disabled in Pakistan than in US. There’s always the option to appeal for both these platforms but appeal often results in nothing.

A friend of mine devised a strategy to deal with these appeals. His theory is that all account closures happen with no human intervention. The decisions are completely taken by the machines. He also believes, and I agree, that in most cases the appeal process also happens without any human intervention. So how can you convince a machine into accepting your appeal?

My friend uses emotional signals to deal with this. If you’re apologetic or regretful in your tone of appeal, your appeal is never going to get accepted. You’re guilty and you’re showing it in your tone. Instead, my friend is angry, distressed and disappointed when he’s appealing; and I’ve seen it first hand that the appeal is much more likely to work.

Retargeting Campaigns – What I Do With Them

I had a really busy day today. We successfully launched phase 1 of scaling for our new store. I also started retargeting campaigns today. For those who don’t know, retargeting is simply reaching back to the potential customers who showed some sort of intent to purchase your products.

Generally, I like to run 5-6 types of retargeting ad-sets including retargeting those who visited the product page, added the product to cart, initiated check-out, watched at least 75% of our video ad, and top 25% of the users by time-spent.

Recovering abandoned carts, and potential customers with intent is incredibly important. You’ve often spent 90% of your budget already to capture their intent, you just need spend 10% more to capture the sale.

I prefer running retargeting ads with photo creatives. Although I run almost all other ads with video creatives. Since the retargeting user group have already seen video ads, they just need to be reminded again about a product with a photo. This has provably worked for me and I’ve had tons of data to support this argument.

Happy retargeting!

Why Lifetime Value (LTV) Is a Survival Game

As the ad costs to drive sales keep going higher, at some point you’ve to understand and work on the lifetime value of your customer. Otherwise, you’ll not stay competitive and will be crushed away.

You pay Facebook or other platforms a certain amount to display your ads to people who are interested in a certain “interest or a keyword”. At some point you realize that the cost per acquisition has gotten so high that after paying for acquisition cost, cost of goods sold, and other infrastructure costs such as fee for shopify/server and other plugins etc, you’re losing money.

Sometimes after optimizations of all kinds on the ad level as well as on the landing page, you’ll realize that you’re still losing money. How can that happen? How could your competitors by bidding so high? How can their business model work if they are spending higher than you to acquire customer. The simple answer lies in LTV: Lifetime value. And LTV should always be higher than CPA (cost per acquisition).

If your business model is designed such that you acquire a customer who would pay you once only, your revenue model is limiting you to compete. The reason why that happens is because your competitors are now betting on the lifetime value of a customer. They are interested in recurring purchases, subscriptions, and in summary to acquire user once, and monetize him again and again.

Other buyers of ads are bidding higher in order to purchase data that they can use later to either bring the bids lower, or use it elsewhere to generate revenue.

To conclude, in this day and age, if your business doesn’t account for the lifetime value of the customer, you’re simply not competitive.

Not Killing A Dying Product In E-Commerce

When scaling a dropshipping Facebook campaign, you will feel at some point that despite all your optimizations, your cost per purchase is now more than what you can afford to pay to run your ads profitably.

Most people at this point believe that the product has saturated. That the product has already been sold, profitably, to most potential buyers and reaching out more potential buyers will not happen profitably.

I believe that more than product saturation, the cause of higher CPP and decline in sales is ad fatigue. Hence, my first course of action in this situation is to create and try more creatives.

Before the buyer has received the product, the product is only as good as it’s creative. Hence changing creative can reduce some of the ad fatigue and may revive the life of your product. It’s not often product saturation, it’s the creative saturation.

The second course of section, after the first one stops working, is to scale down the campaigns and ad-sets. You might want to see what will happen if you consumed lesser budget, and hence lost more bids. By losing more bids, you can have a winning campaign.

Once the scale down stops working too, and you’re sure it’s time to kill your dying product, you can consider moving to manual bids with accelerated delivery.

You can set the maximum amount you’re willing to pay per purchase. If Facebook is unable to get you a sale under that price, no budget will be spent. By enabling accelerated delivery, you’re asking Facebook to spend your budget ASAP as long as it can do so by maintaining the manual bid. This ensures that as soon as there are cheap bids available in the auction, you want to spend all your budget to get them.

If you’re unable to spend any budget at all on manual bids either, you might consider killing your dying product.

I’m interested to know if there are other, smarter ways to delay the death of a dying product. Please let me know in the comments.

The Fast Moving World of Digital Marketing

As I mentioned earlier on this blog, our first e-commerce store was launched in 2016. Our primary customer acquisition strategy since then has been through Facebook ads.

While I had run Facebook ads a long time before, it wasn’t until 2016 that I spent a major budget. Since then, almost everything about the ads has changed. Many new strategies have been introduced and a lot of strategies that I learnt in 2016 are irrelevant.

Case in point, tech moves really really fast. Digital marketing moves even faster. And I’m curious what value could business schools add in your marketing career in this day and age.

It’s likely that my perspective is limited too, since I’ve never been to a business school. But help me understand, do business schools, including international, teach anything about this kind of marketing? If they do, how do the teachings stay relevant since the minimum length of a masters business degree is 1 year. Let’s not even talk about the bachelors degree here. In my opinion 1 year is a long enough time in digital marketing to unlearn everything and learn new things.

In my 15 years of career as digital marketer, I’ve changed my job roles 15 times. If I hadn’t, I would have found myself with no work. My primary source of revenue came from selling ads and our publishing company Socialoholic mastered that area. Only a few years later, we found ourselves buying ads instead. Now all of our revenue comes from buying ads.

In digital marketing, if you’re not pivoting every few months or even weeks, you’re being left behind.

So if you’re looking for a marketing school, let me tell you one. It’s where I went to. It’s called YouTube. The course length varies from 4 days to 4 weeks. And after that, you can get shit done.

Protecting Your Ad Campaigns From Yourself

Lately, I’m writing only about Facebook ads & e-commerce. That’s because since 1st January, we’re busy with the launch of our new store. We took a big part of 2019 off and planned to do some work from 1st January 2020. It has consumed us so far. But today is a good day because today we made it profitable.

In 12 hours, we have done $415 in sales. We’re projecting to close the day at $700.

Our ad spend for today is $154.81 which is about 37% of our gross sales. The net-margins are low right now but since we’re just getting started and the pixel is developing, we’ll see improvements with conversion rates over time. We also haven’t introduced any kind of lookalikes at this point in time.

These aren’t our desired results. We have to make up for the losses incurred with ads in the first 15 days. We need to optimize the ads after removing whatever segments aren’t converting to bring the costs down. We also then need to scale this campaign. If everything goes right, we should be able to do that in the next 7 days.

The reason why I’m not touching the ads right now despite that there’s room for improvement is because campaigns take time to optimize. Many people suggest not to touch your campaigns for 24 hours after you make them. While this could work if your campaign is completely off, I generally suggest 48 hours if there’s some sign of success. And so I’m going to let these go on for at least 48 hours and will not modify them.

After 48 hours, I’ll decide how to modify them by looking at breakdown data.

So if you want your campaigns to work, you need to protect them from yourself. Stay away for 48 hours, be patient. The cash might burn and it is going to hurt you, but the profit lies after that.

What to Realistically Expect From Your Drop Shipping Business

If you’ve read this blog before, you may have read some of the content that I’ve already written on dropshipping thus far. While e-commerce and dropshipping are very profitable in general, they are not as simple as most people market them to be.

I wanted to share my experiences with dropshipping so far to give you a more realistic overview of the journey, instead of the flashy end-result that you often see.

We launched our first store in Sept 2016. Our first sale happened in the first week. But it wasn’t until Feb 2017 that we were profitable. So it took us 5 months, 68 unique products in testing, and $10,000 in ad-spend before we figured out how this was going to work.

We targeted primarily english-native markets hence the competition was higher. It was also our first attempt with sales of any kind so we were inexperienced. But collectively we had over 10+ years of experience of running various internet businesses mostly related to content. So we weren’t completely inexperienced either.

From Feb 2017 till May 2017, we had achieved the flashy status that you often hear about. The margins were 40% initially but after scaling, came down to be about 23%.

Since then we’ve launched many stores targeting many different industries but drop shipping as a whole has gotten way more tougher. This is due to the obvious: more competition, higher ad costs, and lesser margins.

But it’s also because that in addition to ads getting more expensive, Facebook ads machine learning has gotten more advanced too. What it means is many marketers are now able to achieve results with little to no targeting options. Many times strategies have gotten as simple as running a broad ad with no targeting.

Since there’s lesser room available to outperform your competition with ad strategies, the competition now lies in creatives and product hunting. If you’re able to create better video ads than your competition, you stand a much higher chance of winning.

Over all, in the next few years, it’s going to be best product/creative takes all kind of game. Facebook ads are going to dumb down to just budgets and optimization goals.

What I’ve written above is related to my e-commerce experience in international and primarily english-speaking markets. Others may have had better or worse performances. In addition, e-commerce in developing and under-developed countries including Pakistan, has much lower competition and related ad-costs.

In summary, Pakistan is a much more potent market for early-stage entrepreneurs for e-commerce. We choose to work in global markets for a bigger scale although it comes with much larger set of challenges.

Visa Restrictions On The Internet

While I acknowledge that internet is the biggest game changer of the human history, it is still not what it was supposed to be or what it can be.

In the offline world, all humans aren’t born equal. They are born in certain conditions where their lives are driven by their socioeconomic circumstances. Their lives are dictated by their place of birth and half of what they can and can’t do is written in the stone. Sure they can break the chains and the barriers to come out stronger but that happens very seldom.

On the internet, everyone has the same opportunities. In theory, though. You could get on YouTube and make a living regardless of where you live. Hundred of millions of people have benefited from such global opportunities that didn’t exist 30 years ago. But these global opportunities are still not provided equally to everyone, although they are marketed as such always.

For example, YouTube first launched their monetization partner program in 2006 for select countries but it wasn’t until 2016 that this program was launched in Pakistan.

Facebook restricts fresh Pakistani ad accounts at Rs 1000/day spend ($6.46 on today’s exchange rate) while a fresh US account is restricted at $50/day spend. Restrictions are lifted more quickly for the developed world, and less quickly for the emerging world. The scrutiny of AI is much harsher for us than it is for the developed world.

In summary, AI is no different than the visa issuing officers that judge us more than our counterparts elsewhere in the world.

On the bright side, in the offline world, if you try hard enough, you can sometimes circumvent these restrictions. You can sometimes emigrate or obtain a better travel document by meeting certain criteria or just by wanting to have it bad enough.

Since internet is almost always better than the offline world in every regard, you can also circumvent a lot of these restrictions if you try hard enough. In fact, on the internet, like everything else, this circumvention is often not as hard as in the offline world.

Perhaps, we’ll talk more of this circumvention in another blog.

Facebook’s Super Lookalike Audiences Using Top Percentile

Super lookalikes isn’t officially a type of audience by Facebook. It’s just a term used by performance marketers to describe lookalikes made using top percentiles of the audience.

This kind of custom and lookalike audience is generally not publicly made available by Facebook but it’s kind of a hidden gem. If you don’t know about lookalike audiences, please check this out. And if you do, read ahead.

This is where you generally create or find your custom and lookalike audiences

But super lookalike audiences are created here.

Using the percentile option under activity in analytics section

You can create a filter to reflect the top percentile of your readers or buyers and save as custom audience

You can then use this custom audience to create lookalikes using the standard way. I call these super lookalikes.

Because results for super lookalikes speak for themselves.