What I’ve learnt after spending
5.6 Lakh INR on Facebook Ads

Do you have an eCommerce store? Where are you spending your marketing budget? What kind of ROI (Return on Investment) are you generating? Are you using Facebook Ads to grow your eCommerce sales? Are you happy with the return?

Let me share a few practical insights that can help you get most out of Facebook ads and get more return out of your Facebook Ad Budget.

What you are going to learn here, is priceless information, drilled down from our practical hands-on experiences, while managing Facebook Ads for eCommerce clients from all over the world. So take a notebook and let’s get started.

From 28th Oct to 6th May, I spent 561016.53 INR on Facebook Ads. That ended up resulting in 33,70,386.66 INR in-store revenue.

I made a lot of mistakes and has been able to turn them back as winner.

In short Facebook ads is just a traffic source. You need to culture your traffic and refine things like you do for other marketing activities.

But I also discovered what a winning Facebook ad looks like while learning tricks that helped skyrocket our client’s sale.

In this article, I’ll cover the biggest discoveries I have made.

INDEX

Understand Acronyms
Stress very much on proper pixel and catalog setup
Keep one/two backup ad accounts
Shift your focus from CPA to AOV, User Experience and Customer Satisfaction
Focus on appropriate optimization event
Understand supply and demand
Test cold ad campaigns by not excluding past customers

Test different remarketing windows with different offers
Setup Website Traffic campaign for retargeting as well
Always cross sell your products to your existing buyers. (Bonus tip inside)
Segment your audiences to create better lookalike audience (Bonus: how to create audience using utm tracking)
Start focusing on manual bid
What’s next?

UNDERSTAND ACRONYMS

Below I will list various acronyms popularly used while running Facebook ads. Please refer to this list to understand their meanings

VC – ViewContent (This event fires when someone view product page of an ecom site/keypage in a normal website, if the pixel events are setup properly)
ATC – Add To Cart (This event fires when someone adds a product to cart inside an ecom site. If the pixel events are set properly)
PPE – Page Post Engagement. (This is a type of campaign objective FB has inside ads manager, that brings in engagement in terms of like, reactions, comments, share etc for the post you select)

VV – Video Views (This stands for Video views campaign objective)
CPA – Cost per Acquisition (Same as Cost per Purchase OR CPP)
AOV – Average order value (Average order value of your store)

STRESS VERY MUCH ON PROPER PIXEL AND CATALOG SETUP

If you are marketing through Facebook then setting up appropriate pixel events based on your goals is a must!!

For an ecommerce website pixel events like viewcontent, add to cart, initiate checkout and purchase with dynamic product related parameters are required to understand traffic and ads performance.

Without appropriate pixel and catalog setup, you won’t be able to run dynamic product ads for remarketing/cross selling or even top of the funnel dynamic ads.

If you are using shopify then I would recommend using Trackify (paid app) or default pixel installation process.

If you are using woocommerce then official Facebook plugin https://woocommerce.com/Facebook will help you to sort out the pixel events.

If you are using any custom website then use google tag manager to get it sorted. You would require to implement data layer to pass data between google tag manager and website backend.

KEEP ONE/ TWO BACKUP AD ACCOUNTS

Due to the rise of aliexpress dropshippers and fraudulent ad buyers, Facebook often shuts down ad account without any appropriate explanation. You will get back your ad account after a week of appeal but a week without cash flow can be a disaster for a business.

Now if you are generating most of your revenue (near about 95%+) through Facebook ads, you can go out of business overnight. Hence always create a backup ad account under same business manager account and share your old ad account pixel to it so that you can still access old pixel’s data.

If you are unable to create ad account under same business manager account then create separate ad account with entirely new pixel code. Please make sure to install two Facebook pixel with appropriate setup.

For Shopify, this can be done using Trackify or it needs to be done using Google Tag Manager.

In above screenshots, you will notice that we faced similar issues on the start of month April and we have managed to recover using 2 other ad accounts.

SHIFT YOUR FOCUS FROM CPA TO AOV,
USER EXPERIENCE AND CUSTOMER SATISFACTION

Facebook ad platform is probably the most easiest platform to get started and also the most complex system to handle. As it is very easy to get started, more and more advertisers will join in future and competition will rise FAST.

What happens when competition increases? Facebook ad works on the basis of auction system. So when demand increases and supply becomes constant then cost for ad delivery will also increase. Which means CPA will definitely increase month after month or may be year after year. But we can’t complain about it. We need to fix things where we can.

What can we fix?

Focus heavily on ad design and videos.
Keep a close eye on your ad comments. If possible please reply to them within one hour. If you are getting bad comments then reply and hide them.
DO NOT DELETE COMMENTS. Deleting comments send a notification to users which is not good and they might shift their energy to trolling your business.
Become more authentic to consumers. Your ad image and your end product must be same. This is an ongoing issue every ecommerce site is facing.
Focus on organic engagement more (This can be very tough and please be familiar with latest rules about it)

Introduce funnels where user have to purchase more than a certain amount to enjoy benefits such as free shipping, discount coupons etc. (Remember the coupons from Myntra? Enjoy 35% off when you buy more than 4000 INR worth item)
Analyze customer satisfaction score on a regular basis. Here you can get them https://www.Facebook.com/ads/customer_feedback/. I will cover more about it below.
Identify the complaints and incorporate them into your business fast.
Start interacting with your buyers personally and make your product packaging GREAT!! While interacting personally, ask them to leave a review about your brand in Google and Facebook both.

Facebook is a great free/paid tool to promote your business. But it comes up with a great cost. It is very easier for consumers to rate about your business in this platform and as Facebook must retain their user base so they will definitely penalize you very hard ( CPM will start rising, Reach will become slower, Engagement will drop, CPA will rise, Ad costs will be rising furiously) if your business is not providing great products or service to consumers.

Here is the reference from Facebook about this >> https://www.Facebook.com/business/help/108127923199330.

If you are legitimate business with great product and support then you don’t have to worry about it. But if you are just getting started, you must stress about below factors.

FOCUS ON APPROPRIATE OPTIMIZATION EVENT

Facebook is being used by a variety of people. As a business owner, you need to understand the different types of user behavior and browsing habits people exhibit on Facebook without being judgemental.

We can categorize people according to their browsing pattern on Facebook as follows:

People who are fond of liking and sharing posts on Facebook. Generally they ignore and skip the ads unless the ad is extremely creative in which case their action will be limited to like and share the ad.

People who consume a lot of videos. The will watch the video ad and move on to the next video.

People who love to click on links just to see what’s in there. In most cases they won’t even spend more than a few second on the content and simply move on to the next interesting links.

People who spend their time browsing ecommerce websites. They go through a lot of products and keep adding whatever they like to their cart. Most of the items they will never buy and generally they won’t purchase anything at the end end of their browsing session. To them cart page equals to a wish list page.
People who genuinely see Facebook as an information exchange platform and spend quality time on it. They believe in value exchange. These are the people who will take action on your ads as per their requirement. They display a high tendency to become your brand ambassador. Not only they will buy your product/service but they will honestly share their feedback. This behavior can make or break your brand depending on the value and quality you serve to your customers.

Now having so many different types of people on their platform, Facebook also have different optimization goals (Campaign Objectives) as well, such as :

Optimize for like and shares
Optimize for video views
Optimize for link click
Optimize for view content/ATC
Optimize for ATC
Optimize for purchase

laptop-nature-grass-outdoor-people-field-1271156-pxhere.com

With above 2 lists, you can probably relate how Facebook delivers your ad based on your optimization goal. So always analyze and optimize for an event which can lead to true business goals.

All the optimization goals are important but they need to be applied to different areas of the user journey. Below I’m attaching a sample user journey and optimization goals I normally do.

Target User Condition	Optimization Event	Creatives I Prefer
Cold Customers	Purchase	Banner / Carousel / Square Video (Less than a Minute)
Those who have visited site	Link clicks (Optimized for landing page views)	Dynamic catalog / single banner ad / carousel with showcasing reviews / video about product USP and how it is helping customer
Those who have visited site and also viewed products	Video Views & Instagram Story Ads (Build custom audience of 95%+ video viewers from these videos and build lookalike from it)	Vertical Video / Video Based Carousels
Those who have viewed products	Dynamic retargeting conversion campaigns	Dynamic catalog
Those who have added to cart	Dynamic retargeting conversion campaign	Dynamic catalog
Those who have bought	Page post engagement campaigns	Thank you video / Basic Square Image based post (No links in ad/post)
Those who have bought	Cross sell conversion campaign after few days	Dynamic catalog
Who have bought from cross sell campaigns	Link click campaigns	Banner / Carousel

UNDERSTAND SUPPLY AND DEMAND

Facebook is a people’s platform so understanding people and basics of marketing are necessary. People’s need always changes based on trend and season.

It’s very easy to sell nightwear (This is not typical bra/panty/vest) in summer than winter. Similarly it’s very easy to sell sweaters in winter than summer. Now if someone still wants to sell nightwear in winter then the business have to provide some deep incentive to users or pay very high to acquire users.

Below – We were paying upto 3000 INR CPA in winter where as in summer we are now paying 40 INR. Although conversion rate of site is still the same.

But did we shutdown all the ads in winter? NO! Entire winter, we dedicated all of our budget in gathering data points and started building valuable custom audiences which really paid off in summer. Later I will cover more about different type of custom audiences and why they are necessary.

TEST COLD AD CAMPAIGNS BY NOT EXCLUDING PAST CUSTOMERS

What I ve learnt after spending 5 6 Lakh INR on Facebook Ads Google Docs (1)

Most of the ad managers will recommend to exclude buyers from your cold customer acquisition campaigns. But I have a different theory here. If your business is legitimate and people love your products then never ever exclude them from cold campaigns. Why? In most cases those buyers leave positive review inside ad comment 😉

Such comments always help other audiences to take decision and make purchase without hesitating for a moment 🙂 In my experience CPA always go down when your buyers are leaving positive feedback on your ads.

P.S Don’t even think about buying comments to your ad posts. Facebook is really smart about your ad post id activities so fake comments can easily be identified by Facebook!

TEST DIFFERENT REMARKETING WINDOWS WITH DIFFERENT OFFERS

In e-commerce, dynamic product remarketing is like free money. ROAS always stay huge on such campaigns. But there is still room to extract more from it.

People those who have visited your products in last 3 days-10 days are much more valuable than those who have visited your products in last 30 days. Why? Consumers will not be waiting to buy a $50 worth item for 30 days. If they need it then they will take action within 2-3 days. So catch the fish when it is ready to take the bait.

Below is the setup I always use based on website activities. Don’t forget to exclude each audience from another if you are providing different incentives/coupons to audiences.

What I ve learnt after spending 5 6 Lakh INR on Facebook Ads Google Docs (2)

SETUP WEBSITE TRAFFIC CAMPAIGN FOR RETARGETING AS WELL

Above I mentioned about retargeting conversion campaign. Now conversion campaign delivers when consumers are much more focused on conversion.

But sometimes just bringing those users back to the website also helps and strengthen the retargeting audience list 🙂

Here is the below setup I always use for ecom sites > dynamic website traffic (landing page views) campaign.

ALWAYS CROSS SELL YOUR PRODUCTS TO YOUR EXISTING BUYERS. (BONUS TIP INSIDE)

It is very easy to sell to your existing buyers than cold customers those who have never bought anything from your store.

Cross sell campaigns are highly effective to understand what type of new products you should focus on. Your existing buyers are your product validator. If you are able to sell good to existing buyers then it will sell a lot to others as well 😉

How to setup automatic cross sell campaign without annoying existing buyers?

While setting up dynamic cross sell campaign, exclude purchasers from last 15 days. By this way your cross sell campaign won’t hit people those who have just bought from your store and yet to get his/her product delivered 🙂

Try customizing this window if you have more faster delivery or if you have many different variations in your store.

Like –

1.Cross sell formal pants to those who have bought shirts from your store.
2.Cross sell socks if someone bought shoes from your store
3.Cross sell watch bands if someone bought watches from your store and many many more variations!!!

SEGMENT YOUR AUDIENCES TO CREATE BETTER LOOKALIKE AUDIENCE (BONUS: HOW TO CREATE AUDIENCE USING UTM TRACKING)

Interest targeting inside Facebook is a great way to start your campaigns but lookalike audience from better quality custom audience is GOLD!!

I will take direct quotes from Facebook

The concept behind this is to refine people based on your website journey. For a typical ecommerce website, people those who are coming back to site OR those who are performing checkout more than twice is much more valuable than those who are just visiting the site even if they are very lesser in terms of number!

What I ve learnt after spending 5 6 Lakh INR on Facebook Ads Google Docs (3)

Still, if we take this advice from this point and start creating lookalike from viewcontent or add to cart data points then we will be missing lot of quality audiences. To avoid this we need to intersect them with the frequency of these behaviors

Like below

Few important seed audience to build from Day 1.

People those who are landing on your site using google adwords campaign
Viewed product page more than or equal to 2
Top 25% Website visit
Performed add to cart more than or equal to 2
Visited checkout page more than or equal to 2
People those who have purchased from you
People those who are clicking on retargeting ads
People those who are clicking on upsell/cross sell ads
Custom audience from any specific top sold product

First 6 audience are really easy to create but how do we create last 3?

For last 3 audiences we need help from UTM tracking and audience based on content_id

How to do it?

Let’s create audience from “People those who are clicking on retargeting ads”

While creating dynamic remarketing campaign, we need to add such tracking code inside ads setup.

How to build these? Head over to https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder/ and enter details like below

After entering the details you will notice that end url is becoming like this https://www.abc.com/?utm_source=%5BRetargeting%5D&utm_medium=%5BFacebook%20Ads%5D Here you need to take “utm_source=%5BRetargeting%5D&utm_medium=%5BFacebook%20Ads%5D” part and paste it in URL parameters section inside ad.

Now when someone clicks on your retargeting ad, the url will look like this https://www.abc.com/?utm_source=%5BRetargeting%5D&utm_medium=%5BFacebook%20Ads%5D. Facebook pixel can identify this url so we need to create custom audience using below settings

BOOOM!!! Now you have identified people those who are clicking on your retargeting ads 🙂

Similar process is applicable for cross sell and upsell campaigns 🙂

How to create custom audience from top sold items?

Head over to custom audience creation module and choose “purchase” as event and then refine by
“content_id”.

How to find content id of your products?

For this I will be taking an example from Flipkart.

Open this url https://www.flipkart.com/lotto-vertigo-running-shoes-men/p/itmf3xxvwbhejugg and fire up your pixel helper and click on it

Now copy that content_id/s and paste it into custom audience section.

Once done you will have quality seed audience from which you can build your lookalikes and run ads 😀

Confused about how to setup appropriate product catalog and different product set for cross sell? Let’s talk

START FOCUSING ON MANUAL BID

I would like to copy the entire point from my FB Ads mentor Depesh Mandalia’s post. This is the best explanation I have seen about auto vs manual bid so far.

“Auto bid always dampens growth when you are about to get serious with your ads.

[P.S Manual bid is recommended when your entire store navigation is proven and you have steady sales using auto bid. Different ads managers might have different opinion about it. But this is my observation only]

Now why it dampens growth?

The autobid is based on winning as many auctions as possible, within your daily budget AND within the pacing constraints.
If FB was autobidding around $5 and winning lots of auctions early in the day, if the pacing algorithm overspent it will pull back your budget by bidding lower, lets say $2.5 to slow budget spend down, meaning your end of day results would not be as good (fewer auction wins and/or lower quality clicks)
You might lose quality auctions late in the day if the auction got its pacing wrong early in the day
This is also why it’s crucial that the pixel is firing correctly AND if your site is down for any reason, you pause your campaign until fixed, as this sends false negative data back to FB.

This is a big reason manual bid is better BUT also a reason why managing your budget is so important too.

How does the auction work?

Effective Bid = Advertiser Bid * eCVR + f(likes, x-outs, and so on)

You control your own bid (or let FB decide), eCVR is the estimated conversion rate of your chosen event and f is the user value calculated by FB where you’re either punished or rewarded for things like engagement, relevance score, landing page, x-outs (ie I don’t want to see this ad) amongst things.”

So what we have learnt from above?

Control your own bid. Once you have a CPA from your auto bid campaign then set up adsets on 1X, 2X, 3X, 4X bid and test. (Suppose CPA = 150 INR then test bid levels at 150 INR, 300 INR, 450 INR, 600 INR etc)
Conversion rate from your ad campaign matters a lot so start working on your landing page or website once you start your ad campaigns and monitor on a day to day basis about conversion rate from that particular adset.
User reaction and ad targeting matters as usual. Keep an eye on below factors

Relevance score (Positive mark on high score)
Like share values (Positive mark on high score)
Comment counts (Positive mark on high score. This valuation is more important than like share counts. So always reply to each comments and moderate comments properly)
How many people are hiding this ad (Negative mark on each score)
How many people are marking it as spam (Negative mark on each score)
Landing page bounce rate (Negative mark on high values)
Time on site (Negative mark on low values)

WHAT’S NEXT?

If you own an eCommerce business or managing ads for an eCommerce business, I hope you won’t wait to implement the insights I shared above. Go, take actions, observe results. Get back to me and let me know whether my insights helped you to get better results. Got stuck? Have more questions? Share with below & we’ll update the documents with updated insights. See you.

Too complicated? No worries. You focus on what you do best to grow your business, let us manage your Facebook Ad Campaigns. Contact us here.

Abhishek-Maity-Business-Manager-at-souravghoshdot-com

Written By: Abhishek Maity

Chief Facebook Ad Strategist, Sourav & Team

DISCLAIMER: The sales figures stated above are my clients’. I have the benefit of doing paid traffic promotion for more than 3 years and I’m fortunate enough to achieve the above results. The average person who follows any ‘how to’ guides get little to no results. I’m using these results and figures for example purposes only. Your results will vary and depend on many factors including but not limited to work experience, ad budget, brand value and work ethics. All business entails risk as well as massive and consistent effort and action. We don’t promise the marketing strategy mentioned above will bring the desired results for you and we take no responsibility for any consequences that may arise from the use of the above material.

NOT FACEBOOK: This site is not a part of the Facebook website or Facebook Inc. Additionally, this site is NOT endorsed by Facebook in any way. FACEBOOK is a trademark of FACEBOOK, Inc.

What I’ve learnt after spending 5.6 Lakh INR on Facebook Ads