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Tag: Facebook advertising

Diagnosing Your Sales Funnel

I received an email from a reader who needed some advice regarding the diagnosis of sales funnel. I’m going to keep this short as I’m busy with launching some more campaigns right now, but I hope that I leave some value here.

There’s no rocket science here. The first thing for you to do is to be aware of all the steps that your potential customer is going to take in order to purchase something. Starting off from seeing your ad on Facebook or other platforms, watching/engaging with it, clicking on it to reach your landing page, reading the product description, adding the product to cart, initiating checkout, adding shipping/payment info, and eventually committing a purchase. These are the steps that the customer goes through in most of my advertising. It can be different for everyone.

The second thing for you to do is to find where the breakage is. If you’re failing to see results, you need to identify the point where something is going wrong. If you’re doing video ads and have good watch time, your creative and your targeting should be okay. So you’ve diagnosed this step of the funnel and should move forward. If you have a good CTR (1%+ for Facebook), it means your ad copy was convincing and the customer is interested in knowing more about your product.

If your bounce rate is low and your time on site high, it means your landing page was engaging and informative. If over 10% of the people on your LP add the product to their cart, it means your ATC button placement, color etc is good. If over half of those who added the product to cart then initiate check-out, it means your cart page is not broken and created as it should. If over half of those who initiated check-out, purchase the product, congratulations you’ve made it.

Key metrics that I really like to focus on: average video views in seconds: 10 seconds or more. Average video views in percentage 25% or more. CTR minimum 1%, ideally 2%+. ATC rate, I like it over 10%. Initiate check out rate, I prefer having over 5% and conversion rate should ideally be 2.5% or more. Below are the today’s stats for one of my stores

I hope you find this useful.

This Seems Relevant Today

This could have been me had I stopped yesterday which by the way I wanted to.

This is me instead because I hung around longer.

I spent the past couple of days trying to optimize a new product launch. All metrics looked great. Every step of the funnel just as I wanted. I had low CPM, high CTR, low CPC, low CPATC, low CPIC, but.. also low conversion rate. For those who don’t know what am I talking about, I had low cost for everything, but the number of users purchasing were also low which was something I really didn’t expect to happen.

Due to this my cost per acquisition was higher than where I wanted it to be. Instead of making money, I was losing money until I launched the retargeting campaign.

For those who don’t know, retargeting is reaching warm audience or potential customers again. People who showed purchase intent but didn’t purchase. My retargeting campaign brought me really cheap sales. So cheap that it offset all the loss that other campaigns caused. Not just that, it turned the overall campaign around and made the product launch profitable.

This showcases two things. 1) Retargeting is really really powerful. 2) When you’re thinking of giving up, hang around just a little bit longer.

Using Case Studies For Marketing

One of the things that people tell me is that when they run ads they get a lot of irrelevant traffic or leads although they are confident that their targeting is accurate. When you’re selecting a large interest with an audience size in millions, you’re obviously going to reach many irrelevant people just because of the sheer size of the audience.

One of the things that we do to improve this traffic quality as well as our conversion is to do case studies on the pain points and their solutions. For example, if you’re trying to sell a SaaS subscription, instead of trying to reach your potential customers directly with the ad of your product, you should do an ad of the case study.

If your product is an e-commerce product discovery tool, you should do a case study about “how a store owner made $37,000 with this product discovery strategy”. Once you run an ad for this case study, you’ll be able to collect very relevant clicks. You can then retarget this traffic with your product ad. You could also create a lookalike of this case study audience, and then run your product ad for them.

The more expensive your product is, the more number of case studies I recommend you to do.

Why Should You Always Duplicate Your Ads

If you’re familiar with Facebook advertising, you may have seen that some people always run multiple copies of the same ads in an ad-set. Those unfamiliar with this strategy always wonder, why would someone create 2 identical copies of the same ad and place them in an ad-set. Here’s the reason why.

When you target a large audience (for example 1 million to 100 million) which Facebook also encourages you to do so, not every person in your audience (interest/behavior) is going to be identical.

When you place two identical ads in an ad-set you’re hoping that your first copy will be seen by a small pocket of your large audience, and your second copy will be seen by a different small pocket. Based on the performance of the audience in those pockets, Facebook will continue to find similar audience using it’s machine learning capabilities.

It is obvious that one of the pockets of the audience would be superior to the other one and by having multiple copies you’re giving their machine learning a better chance of spending budget in your interest in a more optimal manner.

I found this difficult to convey over the text, but I hope that I’m able to do so. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask in comments.

Here Are My Favorite Resources To Learn Facebook Advertising

I have profitably spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on Facebook ads. I have been doing this heavily since 2016. I could attribute most of my basic learning to Travis’s free resources that he put up on YouTube.

If you’re interested in Facebook advertising, I recommend that you complete these tutorials. You should also go through these.

Travis has been playing this game for over a decade so he’s pretty good at what he does. Much of his content may be dated although still very useful. This is still my favorite resource for getting the basics right.

For intermediate strategies, I’d recommend that you check out Verum. To understand what he’s saying, you need to be well aware of basics. If you’re well aware of the basics, you’d love his content and find it very easy to digest. Otherwise you probably wouldn’t understand much of what he’s saying.

The most advanced players, however, are the AdLeakers. I don’t think there’s any value for anyone here unless he’s already spending a lot of ad budget profitably and wants to further up his game by working on cost reduction strategies to achieve lower cost per acquisitions.

I don’t suggest that you invest in any course if you’re just starting. Investing in the actual ad budget might be a much better idea. But before you even do that, I strongly recommend that you consume Travis’s KingPinning tutorials.

Customer Acquisition During Recession

I saw an interesting video by Garry Tan where he mentioned that startups spend as much as 40% of the funds they raise on Google & Facebook ads. That is a lot. In other words, 40% of all VC money is going to those 2 companies. This is obviously going to reduce in the coming months and so we could expect this to reflect in the earnings of these 2 companies.

During the upcoming recession caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the advice that seems to be coming from everywhere is to have cash runway that lasts 18 months.

In order for this to work, many startups are going to reduce their spending or risk survival. One option that all startups have is to allocate more time and resources to retain more customers instead of acquisition, as the former is often cheaper.

The startups that are going to continue to invest in customer acquisition need to know that the lifetime value of customers would most certainly be lower than what they were accustomed to. Because of this, an immediate recalibration would be required for ROI metrics. Acquiring customers on a better a ROI than before should be the norm for the next few months.

These are difficult times for everyone including us but looking into pandemics of the past suggests that all this should be over soon.

My Ad Account Got Disabled, But I Live On Optimism

Today, an ad-account for one of our e-commerce stores got disabled. There was no violation. It was the same ads that we had been running for 4 weeks. Usually when the ad account gets deactivated, there’s an appeal link. The account is usually sorted in couple of hours. But today, there was no notification or appeal link.

I’ve still appealed through a different support channel, but its not going to resolve in couple of hours but would take longer than that.

Meanwhile, I’ve exported all campaigns to a different ad account. Theres a way to export CSV of campaigns and import to a different ad account. Here’s a walk-through video of how to do it. The process can still be very messy because of custom audiences, and lookalikes. When Facebook deactivates one ad account, it locks everything inside that ad account including all custom audiences and lookalikes. So its not possible to move those if they are owned by a disabled ad account.

I had a shitty day trying to do these manual, hateful tasks. I really had two options. Option # 1 was to basically feel angry at Facebook and stop advertising. Option # 2 was to start-over.

The option # 2 can be interesting because I may be able to make the 2nd ad account deliver profitable campaigns too. In the best case scenario, I may get the first ad account back as well. And in the super optimist world, I’ll have two ad-accounts burning twice the fuel, delivering twice the sales, making twice the profit. I want to think that this will happen. Because without this kind of optimism, it’s hard to want to run a business.