In episode 117 of The E-Comm Show, host Andrew Maff explores the myriad of Facebook Ad audiences that e-commerce sellers should test. He delves into the specifics, from Video Viewer lookalikes to various population percentages for visitors, purchasers, and email lists. Andrew also highlights the untapped potential of Pinterest advertising, emphasizing its capacity to expedite seller growth. He sheds light on the platform's evolution and urges sellers to test its ad platform before it reaches the saturation level of Facebook.
Furthermore, Andrew discusses the importance of creating an omnichannel experience in e-commerce. This approach not only boosts brand awareness but also enhances customer comfort with their purchases. Additionally, he reveals strategies for increasing Facebook followers without direct payment. Andrew focuses on designing ads that serve dual purposes: achieving primary goals while simultaneously bolstering follower growth.
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Andrew Maff
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This is my public service announcement of go try Pinterest ads I'm your host, Andrew Maffetone. And today I'm going to be hammering through Facebook advertising audiences e commerce sellers should be testing. It's a bit of a long title, so I'd write it down. So I've had this issue more and more recently where we'll test a bunch of different audiences. Typically, some one percenters and ecommerce sellers will start to say like, well, now what we're out of audiences, what other platforms should we use? Well, the other platforms you should use are for different podcasts, but you can almost never run out of Facebook ad audiences. So if you don't know what I'm talking about, you're not currently running ads on Facebook. Sorry, this episode may not be for you. So here's a, I don't even know how to start here. So okay, so we had the, we're gonna hammer through local x, okay, so we're just gonna, we're gonna ease into this. So I always suggest local likes, I don't like custom audiences, I don't find that doing interest based targeting works as well as I would like it to on Facebook. And if I can give Facebook information for my audience, I think that it's much more beneficial, because you're basically kind of giving Facebook a hint at what you're looking for. So got a few things. So ideally, you're running videos. So if you're running video ads, you have the ability to create an audience that is people who viewed that video, or all your videos, or certain videos or anything like that, up to 25% 50% 75%. And then I think 100% or 90%, somewhere in there, you can create audiences for all those and then you can create look alikes. For every single one of those. Most of the time I had the most success with 50% and up depends on how long some of your videos are. But 50% of the time they watch more than half your video, as long as your video is not three seconds long, then I find that that audience is actually a good enough audience that they've shown enough interest. So Facebook will obviously take that over lookalike of website visitors. super common, super obvious. When you're creating your retargeting ads, you don't want to I suggest breaking them into week. Timelines may depend on your product line. But if you have them, there'll be seven day 14 day 21. Day so on. And I would always suggest trying a look alike of each of those really 100 Day audience look alike is probably going to 180 day look like it's going to work just fine as well, because you're giving Facebook enough data there to really work with and your seven day audience versus your you know, 170/9 day is not gonna be that different. The other thing I do is I break it down by category. So if you have a multiple different categories with a product line, so worked with the seller several times who does a lot of different OEM, aftermarket Apple accessories, so like iPhones and watches and Macbooks, and things like that. And they're all like cases. So she actually segments her audience by all people who are interested in iPhone stuff, all people who are interested in Apple watch stuff, and you can create, you can create look alikes of those visitors. So everyone who has looked at an Apple iPhone case within the past 180 days and make an audience of that. And then the ad that you're gonna run there is obviously going to be more relevant to an iPhone because you obviously want to target iPhones there. So breaking it down by category, sometimes even by specific product works really well and also as long as you're getting enough traffic there. And then you can also do that with blog posts. So if you have blog posts that are relevant certain things will be blog posts that are relevant to an iPhone or a watch or computer then you can obviously segment those audiences into those as well. So look like across the board, purchasers or converters, so people who have purchased with you recently or past 180 days is fantastic because that's literally your ideal customer. And converters could be people who signed up for a newsletter maybe have not converted yet, but all those can obviously be someone that you want to create an audience as well. Then engagers so people who have engaged with your, any of your Facebook ads or any of your Facebook posts, you can do the same thing with Instagram. So people who have engaged with you recently, so then that way, you can actually touch on people who look similar to people that are already interested in your posts. And then we have sales, same thing, Facebook and Instagram ads. So yeah, so usually, I'll run through all those, we'll hammer out a bunch of those, we'll test the ones that are working, we'll leave them running, we'll increase the budget. And then after a while, they're kind of like, okay, let's start new audiences. But that's just the 1%. Now you got to do 2%, and then 3%, and then 4%. And if you just counted, I probably did, I just should have counted these. But there's probably like 15 of these, which means as soon as you do 2%, and I got 30, as soon as you got to 3%. Now, yeah, 45. So there's a lot of lookalike audiences that you can create. And you always need to try those two, three and 4%. It's very possible that the 4% won't work as well as the 1%. But you'd be surprised how many times I've actually come across purchasers at a 1% that work really well and a 4%. That don't but a 4% of these website visitors, that works really well in a 1%. That doesn't. So sometimes it just kind of depends on the algorithm and depends on your audience. It never hurts to test it. If you're worried about trying a 4% or even higher, just reduce that budget, give Facebook just enough room to try and test it. But that's exactly what I would do so much all the audiences I want to listed. Because we're going to talk about the benefits of using Pinterest. So recently, I've started to dive more and more into Pinterest advertising. And one of the things that well, let me back it up. So years ago, I worked with a seller who was the only one at the time now there's a ton of them. But this was right around when Pinterest had just started coming out. And I had the benefit of always being in the back end of their stuff. And we were running reports and everything. And one of the things I had noticed about them that we were unaware of because we weren't helping them with social media at the time. Their social media traffic was 65% Pinterest, these guys were doing. At the time, I want to say close to 20 million a year, I think from what I can remember, they were heavy in the beauty market, obviously. So that caters to Pinterest a lot more but 65% from an app from platform that not a lot of people were using. And in the past two months, I think this is over the summer, maybe in June or July, when Pinterest basically agreed with Shopify to fix all the sales channels issues that they had. And since then, the advertising approach and the way that you can actually connect everything is wildly easier. And Pinterest ads or stupid cheap right now. I know from off top my head someone I'm working with right now their cost per click is like six cents. And the ROI is like I think last week we were at like it's almost a 6x or something like that. But the conversion tracking is all fixed. They used to have so many issues with it. But now I can get all my metrics inside the Pinterest platform without any trouble. The Shopify connection is great. And then really the other thing I wanted to say is the the conversion rate is very low. So you're driving a lot of traffic. But the benefit is is because you're using such a visual piece when you're doing Pinterest. Obviously they have retargeting. You can do all that stuff as well but you have such a visual piece when you're doing Pinterest that nine times out of 10 They're probably knowing what they're clicking over to and they may not purchase right away because they were on Pinterest and they were making a board for whatever reason. But if they clicked over they already know what kind of product is and there's so much traffic it's six cents right now a cost per click which is nuts that it makes me want to just like drop everything and go do another another store but six cents a click if you have enough retargeting setup so if you're doing your Google Display ads or ad roll or you're doing obviously Facebook and Instagram or you're retargeting on Twitter, obviously back on Pinterest or anything like that, it's going to work so well for you. This is my public service announcement of go try Pinterest ads, they're not paying me to do this be nice if they did if they're listening and want to send me you know, some referral money I'll take it but please just go try Pinterest ads I promised you they're gonna work if you're having issues with them, or you need help setting them up. Just shoot me a message and I'd be happy to walk you through them because I want someone to come on the show and be like, oh fuck you were right I'm going to piss off Amazon sellers again. So yesterday's episode was interesting, and I got some odd feedback from it and someone wanted a little bit more detail. in that whole omni channel approach thing that I mentioned, so I'm actually gonna dive back into this. So the omni channel approach I was I was referring to was bait Well, if you didn't listen to yesterday's episode, go listen to it and then come back. But I will also give you a brief overview of what I had mentioned was adding different marketplace buttons onto a product page, and the benefits and cons of that. So I'm going to kind of get a little bit deeper into that today. So omni channel approach basically means mate, keeping your brand consistent, and everything across the board. And that means all everywhere that you could possibly buy your product. This also includes brick and mortar, but for now I'm sticking to ecommerce, Walmart, eBay jet, if you can still sell there and no, I don't work with them anymore. Wayfair, Overstock anywhere that you're selling your product images need to look the same, your product titles need to be the same, your practice descriptions, and everything needs to be as remotely close to possible that they can be I know each of these marketplaces has different rules or whatever, but you know what I mean. So keep the branding consistent, keep the brand voice consistent, you're gonna see improved conversion rates on all marketplaces. And the reason is, because if someone comes to your website, and they're really interested in purchasing, and if you keep hearing like clapping, if you watch this on YouTube, you'll see I'm a very animated like, kind of all over the place. And I'm sorry that I'm clapping on the microphone, but you'll see that your conversion rates will improve across the board. And the reason is, is that everyone will who come to your website will see your brand and get familiar with your brand. feel right. So the brand voice, the brand, aesthetics, the overall branding, and they're like, this is a great product. I don't know if I want to wait two weeks to get it or I don't know what your shipping policy is, or for whatever reason, then they leave, then they come across your product again, on eBay, I go, Okay, I know this is their product. The issue is a lot of people have knockoffs. There's things like that, you have those whole problems. So if you can keep your branding consistent, you can keep the knockoffs pretty much at bay to a certain extent, and people will be a lot more comfortable with the purchase. Now, the thing I mentioned yesterday, the pistol out of people off. So adding a marketplace button to your website is a very interesting approach. And it works for some and not for all, I think that it works much better for people who don't want to deal with operations who maybe are big FBA sellers. And they're okay with shipping from their website or dealing with, you know, sending from other websites or sorry, other marketplaces. But if you don't want to deal with operations, which I don't blame you because I hate operations, then this could be something that you would want to try. So essentially, what we would do is we would take the Add to Cart button on your website, and we would keep it prevalent. And we would keep it away from these buttons. So maybe we would put it below the description or hide it in a tab or something like that. But we would basically have like an also available at and we would have these different buttons with all the logos on them, that would say available to Amazon, Walmart, eBay, jet, etc. And you can actually track these buttons. So if you take, let's say you're running Google ads, and you're running Google Shopping ads, your conversion event is going to be a purchase, obviously, once someone gets to your checkout, but you can actually also do a custom event for once someone clicks something. So when someone clicks a button, and you can actually just have it trigger an event every time someone clicks that button. Now, in that case, Google will count it as a conversion. If you do it on Facebook, Google, Facebook will count as a conversion. The benefit of doing it on Facebook is that if you pick a conversion event to target, let's say it's a purchase on Facebook, you can track other conversions without affecting the algorithm on Google. It's not that easy. But the nice thing with Facebook is you can actually see how many people purchased versus how many people actually went and clicked on the different buttons. And it's kind of a nice way to see like, Okay, how many people am I really losing to these marketplaces. And And again, if you don't want to deal with operations, that can be a big benefit to you. But having that that overall omni channel approach, and really catering to the customer and letting them shop where they're most comfortable, will actually help your brand further on down the line. You're not losing any brand recognition, when they go to Amazon, you're losing their data and you're losing their contact information, which sucks so when you release a new product, you're kind of Sol there, but it is one of those things you kind of have to mull around. But that is essentially the overarching way to do a kind of an omni channel approach. Obviously, you don't have to do those buttons, you can still have an omni channel approach as long as you keep your brand aesthetic, the same across the board. But that would be my suggestion so. So this is how you can increase your followers on Facebook. I know Facebook is a pay to play place and blah, blah, but so you're running ads on Facebook, don't run them to grow followers, run them for conversion, run them to actually make some money. But there's a benefit to that. A lot of people who see your ads who do actually click on them to go purchase or even those who don't Those who enjoy will react. So you know, they'll like it, or they'll smile or laugh or do a heart or whatever they are. And then when they click that, it actually goes into that little number off to the bottom left of that Facebook ad. And what you can do is actually go into your notifications on your Facebook page, see the people who have reacted to your ad, click on that view, all the people who reacted, now you'll see that there's a giant list of everyone who's in interacted with your ad that you can invite, there's an invite button right next to it. So now here's the thing, if you were running an ad long enough, and you're letting it get enough, UGC, there's enough social proof behind it, that's going to get very, very tedious and very annoying. You could have 1000s upon 1000s of people liking and reacting to your social ad. So there's a trick. So I'm going to read this URL to you. But then I'm also going to put it in the show notes for you. And there's other websites that have the same code, but this one is just the one that I use. So this is Alejandro reo, ha.com. So I don't even know who it is. I don't even know how I found it. But maybe he's cool. So Alexandrou, real hud.com/invite-friends-like, that page dash event dash Facebook dash script. I know it's long, it's in the shownotes. But what you do is you'll go there, and actually scroll down. And in there, there's a code into JavaScript code. So what you're gonna do is I do it on Google Chrome, I think it works on other browsers, I'm not really sure. But you'll open up the that Facebook ad reactions, right, and you're gonna want to scroll all the way down and click See More, scroll all the way down, click, click see more. Keep doing that until you get it to show every single one of those people that you can invite, then you're going to take his code, you're gonna go to your browser, you're going to type in JavaScript, colon, and you're going to paste the code that he gives you, you're going to hit Enter, you're gonna wait a little while. Now it may freeze and it will say that this page isn't responding or something like that, just click Wait, then all of a sudden, it's just going to go through and it's going to invite every single one of those people for you, I have made this a daily task for our social media coordinators who now go in and make sure that every single person is invited. And you'd be shocked at how many people would actually brings into the Facebook page. I know a lot of people aren't as big as Facebook as they were once were, but you can retarget that audience, you can obviously go after their friends. There's a ton of other things you can do on that, but I highly suggest check out the show notes. Go to that website, get that code and invite everyone and your lights will skyrocket. No, it doesn't work for Instagram right now. I will let you know when.
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