Facebook Paid Ads Results Case Study

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Hi, Everyone...

We have just started another marketing campaign for one of our e-Commerce stores and I want to provide WA members a running report on how our results are looking as a learning tool...

Background

We are running a sales special for novelty items that are on the store... As we built the ad, we wanted to add some elements that we have seen are effective in getting people to click through to the store and then take action to purchase...

Sales Elements

- Scarcity. We are running the ad for a limited period of time, 10 days in this case.

- Free or Savings. For first time buyers, we have added a coupon for a 10% discount on their first order.

- Upsells and Cross Sells. At various places on the site, customers will have the option to purchase related items. This includes on the home page, product page, and on the checkout pages...

- Video. Video ads are more effective so rather than use a slide show, an image, or text only, we did a combination of text and a site promo video...

- Video Thumbnail. We used one that contained key text that normally you would see only after watching the promo video for 5-10 seconds.

- Video Source. We used a video that we uploaded to Facebook rather than pulling it from YouTube or elsewhere. This means that it will run automatically on people's timeline as they scroll through, and facebook also favors this...

- Text for Ad. We kept the text very limited, to the point and under 60 words.

- Special Discounts. We added the special 10% discount to the bottom of the ad, so it is set up as follows from top to bottom: Limited tex on top, the video, and the discount for 1st time buyers...

Audience Targeting

- Focus. We focused on people who have interests in some major military bases in the USA (4 of the biggest).

- Interests.

- We added people who have an interest in Germany.

- We looked for people that are involved in military support organizatons.

- Demographics.

- We refined the age group to the brackets we know will take action based on earlier ads we have run.

- We targeted people interested in International Travel.

- Geographical Focus.

- The areas we included surrounding the bases went out over a 25 mile radious from the center of the military bases.

- We also focused on military members in the geographical areas targeted.

There are a few more interests, demographics, etc. that we added in to the audience as well...

All these provided us a very tight group of people that the ad will be presented to oon their timelines...

Budget

We at first played with the idea of once again starting with $5 as we have been doing, but with the confidence level increasing because of our experiences with past ads and the data collection we decided to raise the stakes...

So we started with $20 USD a day, and our expected reach is anywhere between 2000 to 7000 Facebook members a day. This campaign went active less than 10 hours ago...

Results (10 hours)

So far, we have the following results...

As you can see, in the 10 hours we have reached over 1200 people, of which 59 have engaged - about a 5% rate (it is going up, I am tracking what has happened since this report)


The gender results are following earlier ad campaigns - we purposely added in interests that included military spouses because they shop online more than the actual military members, and predominately they are women (looking at the data, our focus was in target)...

About double the number of women were reached, but 5x clicked through to our site! This tells me we are on track with the target audience. On conversions we will see, because we have to sort out the sales that came from this campaign versus other streams of traffic...

This last piece of information I will share shows the age groups that are viewing the ad. Past ads had shown us that the youngest age group could be eliminated, because the relevance simply was not there for them apparently. Most had never been in Germany...

These results could change over time, but as of now, I am thinking we will drop the 25-34 age group as well...You can see that the follow-through was nil, and this kind of makes sense, few have been on assignment to Germany...

Conclusion

Once I see what the sales are for this ad and compare that to the clicks that we get for the 24 hour period, I will make the changes (age group and maybe even spend) to further enhance the campaign...

Our ad relevance has a score of 8 so far from Facebook, also a good indicator. This means that Facebook sees that the ad and the target group fit together, and I expect that we will improve on the early numbers above as the ad gets out to more interested folks...

This also means that our cost per click will go down. One of our ads went all the way down to .02 cents per view so I am confident that this will be the case, because we refined our currwnt campaign using the knowledge gained from that earlier campaign.

This is yet another way to get traffic. It can ramp up your leads and conversions in any niche, the key is to learn how to use the Facebook Ad Platform, which has a lot of tools to help you...

Cheers!

Dave : )

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Recent Comments

30

WOW. Thanks for the stats. Very interesting and something to certainly think about.

Yes, when the time comes...I would be very careful starting out, many niches are a bit trickier than this one (I know this niche very well)...Cheers! Dave : )

Thanks for sharing Dave. Very informative.

Glad you can use Brendan! Cheers! Dave : )

Nice. I'll check this in full later. Btw, how much do you spend on advertising a month?

We are spending around $100 to $150 a month, nothing really big yet...We will expand into other stores soon, the ROI seems to be OK...Cheers! Dave : )

Nice one. I booked an add just 2 Days ago to get confirm with it and see how it works for me.
I am sure I will us Facebook adds from time to time to promote my page.

Thanks for sharing your experiences
Uta

Wir konnen alle was lernen davon denke ich! Tchuess! Dave : )

Awesome post, thanks for the web hosting name

Not a problem at all M8! Cheers! Dave : )

I really like the professional approach, for one it is a good way to make the campain work the best, on the other hand it is very easy to draw experience from it for future use.

Yes, I am hoping that others will learn from our experiences...I am not sharing everything, but enough so people here can get a good idea of how these things roll...Thanks! Cheers! Dave : )

Thank you for the tip

No problem at all Pablo! Cheers! Dave : )

Great information, Dave. Wish I could do Facebook ads with my main FB account, but I got banned nearly 2 years ago for promoting my email list lead magnet via Facebook ads. I find their TOS very confusing with regards to what's allowed and what's not. Lifetime ban on my account apparently, and they never respond to any emails I send them.

But still very interesting for me to see how the ads pan out for you. I know FB ads are considered more targeted, effective and cheaper than running AdWords campaigns on Google.

Thanks for stopping by Darren...It is a shame that you cannot get started again with Facebook....So far we are OK, you never know though...I will have to make sure I look again at the TOS! Dave : )

Cheers on your success in this great venture!

Thanks, Mike...

I am using our real-life experiences with PPC to bring some real information to members on how all this works...There is training here but sometimes it is good to see actual results as well...

Essentially, everyone can learn as we learn, and I hope this will help as they consider adding PPC to their overall marketing plans for their niche businesses...

Cheers!
Dave : )

Hi Dave, thanks for sharing. This is good stuff! If you don't mind me asking, what platform are you using for e-commerce store?

Hi, Thomas,

We are using a WooCommerce based premium theme that is clean looking and fast loading. It does not have all the bells and whistles that more complex themes have but is easy to work with...

We also have SSL, a dedicated IP, and host 4 level caching and CDN, AWS S3, WPML, etc. so for this store, we can translate between English and German pages and posts...

In general, we are getting more and more organic traffic, and a great deal is from content (blog posts), so to ramp this up and have them work in tandem, we are mixing content and PPC ads...

We also have an integrated bookkeeping system, and because this business is registered in Germany, have some specific plugins that bring us into compliance with their laws...

They all work well with WooCommerce...

The reason we went with WooCommerce over other options such as Shopify, Magento, etc. is that long term we have a lot of flexibility and a lower overall cost as we grow...

Hope this helps!

Cheers!
Dave : )

I'm currently in the process of setting up an e-commerce store. I really need to get off my butt and just open it up especially since I have inventory just sitting doing nothing and I'm paying for Amazon Seller account and Shopify plan and not really using them.

I almost went down the WooCommerce route(even purchased a few extensions), but the more I looked into PCI-DSS compliance the more I didn't like the idea of using WooCommerce.

I looked into "PCI compliant" hosted check out pages, but most of the ones I contacted regarding specific PCI - DSS requirements weren't willing to work with me. Shopify was the only option that I felt comfortable with in that regard.

Yes that is of concern and we use a host that addresses this - they are called SiteGround - very very good...

They cover virtually all the concerns of having an e-commerce store, such as a dedicated IP even though you have a shared plan...

You can do a search and see what all they offer, but I will say that they are right up there at the top...

We have the GoGeek plan, but as we grow will go once again to our own dedicated server (we had one through Hostgator, but were not happy)...

Yeah, I actually brought all of my websites back to WA from Hostgator. Their service has just gone downhill in recent years.

I'll definitely have to look into SiteGround. I've heard of them, but never given them any consideration.

They are top notch and customer service is super. What else I like about them is that through the CPanel we can add in tools like ad/page tracking that we can access all in one place...

Another service is a staging feature...Good if you are adding new features or building a membership site (like we are at the moment - a couple actually hehe)...

I had made a comment earlier on another post about how I felt that SiteRubix was a top hosting service, but for our purpose, SiteGround is better....

I have to say though that Carson and Kyle are stepping up their game since that comment, and there arguments for both being at or near the top!

Cheers!
Dave : )

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