The Full Story
HERE’s WHAT I’LL COVER:
- This brand’s prior situation, goals, and current situation
- Our full ads strategy breakdown
- Actionable takeaways to help you scale your ads
- Where others go wrong with ads – mistakes to avoid
Backstory:
We started working with this brand in October 2021.
When we initially started talking with them we knew that it could be troublesome scaling our campaigns, since this is a pretty competitive niche in Romania, but we thought we could take advantage of Black Friday and the winter Holidays and profitably scale anyways, even though CPMs + CPCs were going to be through the roof because of so many advertisers bidding on the ad platforms.
We knew this client could have a massive potential during the holiday season, and if we could create a good offer, scaling wouldn’t be hard at all. The ad accounts had a lot of previous data on them so we knew that would come in handy as well.
OUR STRATEGY
We planned a strategy for the first 90 days in which we would test out different audiences, creatives, keyword strategies & bidding strategies.
For this client we had a 2 channel approach:
For Facebook – In the first month we focused only on running Dynamic Product Ads (DPAs) to broad audiences + Lookalikes ( since they already had a lot of data on their website from the past) and tested different general copy lines in our ads. We started off by implementing our standard eCommerce Ad Account structure and then started our testing process.
Once we started getting conversions within our ideal CPA and ROAS, we started scaling based on the following structure:
We started gradually scaling the adsets that we found working, bringing new customers into the business profitably.
Our Exact Facebook Ads Strategy for TOF ( Top Of Funnel) :
Sandbox ABO/CBO campaign → CBO scaling campaigns
This is the ad account structure we implemented for our Top Of Funnel in Facebook. We had a sandbox ABO campaign where we tested lots of different audiences, ad creatives, and ad copies. In each adset, we had 4 – 6 ads testing different creatives and ad copies and we also tried to have different formats within each adset ( Collection Ad, Single Images, Carousels + Videos ) – This helps the Facebook Ads Algorithm show your ads to as many people as possible – the more formats you occupy, the higher the chance you get for being shown in front of as many people as possible.
All of these campaigns were optimized for purchase conversion event. ( This is important to note because we wanted to drive traffic that converts to the website )
Our only goal in the TOF was to find profitable audiences and maintain our breakeven ROAS, which we managed to do successfully. These were the results we got for the month of October 2021:
For cold audiences, we tested 3 types of campaigns – interests, LLA’s, and open targeting.
- with interests, we went with broad toys related audiences (Toys, Puzzle, Arts & Action figure, Model car, Toy store etc.). We kept the targeting very broad targeting all genders and 18 – 65+ years olds.
After running multiple tests, we noticed that the best performing demographic were females in the age range of 22 – 45.
- with LLA’s, since they had a lot of previous customers and a lot of pixel data, our main LLA’s, were created based on that data, such as: Pixel Purchase, IC, ATC, 50%/75%/95% video viewers, people who have watched at least 10 seconds of our video or more, and people who have watched the video entirely.
- with broad, it’s pretty obvious. We kept the targeting open, very broad. We only excluded people that have already bought.
These are the results we’ve gotten in November on Facebook:
Part of our new customer acquisition strategy was to increase the retargeting audiences so that we can retarget people with our retargeting. Not many people will buy from your first ad, that’s why it’s important to have a proper retargeting funnel in place.
Our Facebook Ads Strategy for MOF & BOF:
Here are some of the segmented retargeting audiences we used:
- People who visited the website ( 7D, 14D, 30D, 60D, 180D All Website Visitors)
- People who viewed product pages w/o purchase ( VC 7D, 14D, 30D, 60D, 180D)
- Add to Cart w/o purchase ( ATC 7D, 14D, 30D, 60D, 180D)
- View pages on the website ( PageView 7D, 14D, 30D, 60D, 180D)
- People who visited best selling product pages
- Video viewers 50%/75%/95% (people who watched a specific % of our videos)
- People who watched at least 10 or 15 seconds of our videos
- Overall video viewers audience (seen all of our ad videos)
- Facebook and Instagram engagers ( 7D, 14D, 30D, 60D, 180D)
The main focus with retargeting is segmenting audiences, going more in detail than most do, and showing these users the most relevant content based on their journey.
That’s why we went pretty in depth with it, trying to reach people from lots of different angles.
Many e-commerce brands make the mistake of running very big audiences, such as 90 – 180 day website visitors/adds to cart, integrate a few ads to it and that’s it.
However, the problem with this is that the people that will see these ads, will get tired of seeing the same thing over and over again, which leads them towards feeling negative and not buying at all even if they needed the product.
Lastly, here are the results we got on Facebook in December.
For Google – Still work in progress:
We tried a lot of things in this order:
- General Search Campaigns on General Keywords related to the niche
- Specific Search Campaigns on Specific Product Categories
- General Shopping Campaigns
- Specific Shopping Campaigns on Specific Product Categories
- Youtube Ads Campaigns
- General Display Campaigns
Generally, our SMART Shopping campaign had the best performance so far, although it could have been better if we would have optimized our product feed with the all the product descriptions and GTINs.
In our first month on Google, we just tried to find the most relevant keywords that were generating conversions so that we could double down on them the next month. We had a lot of search campaigns and tested a lot of bidding strategies – We started with Maximize Clicks as first bidding strategies but then later on switched to Maximize conversions towards the end of the month. We had campaigns made on each product category, a SMART Shopping Campaign & a brand Protect Campaign. These were our results for October:
Results November
Results December
Main takeaways from working with this brand?
- Foundations are crucial (product, website, content, social media, social proof, trust, CRO, Email Backend, having good front end offers etc.).
Too many people make the mistake of ignoring these fundamentals and trying to blindly scale, which just burns out their money.
- Keep your Facebook ad audiences broad. Especially after iOS 14, it’s easier for Facebook to optimize if you don’t use as many exclusions.
Combine various audiences together in each funnel stage if necessary. IE: Combine APE15D with WV15D
- Focus on your best-selling products and higher margins products
If you sell lots of products, it doesn’t make sense to try to advertise all of them. Focus on the main best-sellers so that you can get customers into the door and offer complementary products afterward. For this brand we only focused on promoting only the products above a certain value.
- Whenever you see something working, double down on it.
We noticed that Dynamic Product Ads were performing the best for us on Facebook, so we focused on creating lots of ads that were similar to the winning ones.
- Make sure you do everything you can to keep your Facebook ad accounts healthy.
Even if you do everything right, you can still fall under Facebook’s review radar.
When people buy from your Facebook ads, Facebook sometimes will ask your customers how was their experience with your company. And if your shipping times are too long and people still have not received their order until the point Facebook asks for a review, your Customer Feedback Score will plummet.
- Creatives are the most important right now after iOS 14. That’s why we were paying a lot of attention to creating highly converting creatives as we started to scale.
Especially if you are in the scaling process, you need to make sure that you have a great process for creating lots of content in a short period of time.
- Don’t let the frequency get too high on your prospecting campaigns.
Many people that see your TOF ads, will not be interested. When these people see the same ad creatives all over again more of them will tend to hide or dislike your ad, which sends negative signals to Facebook, which can result into higher CPM’s.
That’s why be sure to have new creatives ready.