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Day 21: Do a happy dance and enjoy your first sale!

Chapter 22 by Tim Kock

ecommerce launch quotes

1. Tweet today’s quote →  2. Get to work!

 

Have you gotten a sale yet?! If you did, woohoo!

If you didn’t, there’s still more time to apply everything you’ve learned. Who knows, maybe you’ll get your first sale by the end of the day.

In fact, that’s exactly what happened to Amanda. She was pretty bummed that she didn’t get any sales the whole day.

But just in the nick of time, on the evening of day 21 – someone she had direct messaged on Instagram made a purchase!

Seriously, I can’t make this stuff up. Well… I can. But I’m not.

Today, we’re going to:

  • Evaluate the performance of your first round of Facebook Ads
  • Run your second round of ads, working off the data from the first
  • Keep plugging away at the promotional strategies we’ve discussed throughout these few weeks
  • Celebrate your first sale, or at least all the incredible hard work you’ve put in toward making it soon

This is our last ‘let’s go,’ guys. I’m getting sentimental.

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Look at how your first round performed

The strategy now is to look at our top-performing ad from round one, then build off of that.

I already ruined the surprise by telling you which ad performed best for Amanda. But here are the performance stats:

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analyzing fb ads

(As you can see, Facebook duplicates the Ad Set so that they all have the same name, but you recall that the image of the smiling woman trumped the other 2.)

Looking at the results, you can see that the winning ad only cost her $1.79 per content view, while the worst ad cost $7.55 per content view. Ouch.

Amanda Asks

“How can I tell if my ads performed well?”

My answer: On the surface, you might think that spending $90 to get 28 people to look at your site isn’t so great.

But little did she know, this was actually a pretty decent run.

In fact, after taking a look at the top-performing ad, I had a really good feeling about its potential once she changed a couple things and did some more testing.

So that’s what she set out to do.

Before we discuss some ideas for how to build off round 1, let’s go over how you can dig into your results to get ideas for round 2.

Drill down into performance data

Drill down into performance data

On your ads dashboard, I want to direct your attention to the little dropdown menu that says ‘Breakdown.’ Use this. Use it often.

performance data drilldown

It lets you break down your results into helpful little bites. For example, you can see your results based on:

  • Time: which days got the most clicks. You can use these results to find out when your target audience is most active on Facebook, so you can make sure ads are displaying to them when they’re most likely to engage.

  • Delivery: stats regarding the people who saw your ad (but didn’t necessarily click)
    • Age and gender
    • Country/region they were in
    • Which platform they saw your ad from (in our case, either Facebook or Instagram)
    • Which type of device they used to view your ad (desktop, iPhone, Android, etc.)
    • The time of day they saw, even down to the hour

  • Action: how they interacted with your ad, including:
    • The device they used when they performed the conversion
    • How they interacted (likes, comments, etc)
    • If it was a video, whether it played automatically or if they clicked ‘play’
    • Whether the sound was on or off when the video played
    • If you ran a carousel, engagement on each of the photos

Keep in mind that you can apply multiple breakdowns at once to really dig in there. Just make sure to hit ‘Clear all breakdowns’ if you want to start fresh.

Run Facebook Ads round 2

Now that you’ve looked at a bunch of specifics, you can make changes to lean toward those results.

For example, here are some changes Amanda decided to make based on her results:

  • The vast majority of her clicks came from the US, so she nixed the international targeting
  • She saw a higher proportion of clicks coming from certain states, so she knew to keep those in mind
  • The data confirmed her original guess of 18-35 year olds, so narrowed it down from 18-45
  • She saw that all of her clicks came from mobile, so she could target those users more in the future – this also meant that her store needed to be 100% on point for mobile shoppers

As I mentioned before, she linked to her blanket scarves collection page instead of the product page for the specific scarf in her ad. So I told her to only link to that specific scarf from now on.

Apart from that, I gave her a few more tips:

  • Since the ‘winning photo’ of the smiling woman performed so well, her next campaign should focus on that graphic only – with slight changes to the copy. I also suggested that she put a text overlay on the image to the left of her, since her eyes were looking left. This would direct people’s attention to the offer when they follow her eyes.
  • It looked to me like her ad copy was performing pretty well, so I told her to keep it intact for the most part, but just experiment with making slight changes.
  • Since she had less than 50 ‘events’ (people who Viewed Content), I recommended to run another View Content campaign until she hit that number. This is because Facebook needs the View Content data to perform well on the next conversion goals (Add to Cart and Purchase conversions).
  • For the next campaign, she should try a different kind of offer to get more diverse results. She decided to change her ‘buy one, get one free’ offer to 50% off on blanket scarves.

Keep on learning about Facebook Ads

As I mentioned before, I couldn’t possibly cover everything there is to know about Facebook Ads. If you haven’t taken a look yet, check out this free Facebook advertising ebook from Oberlo.

In particular, you might glean some helpful insights from Chapter 5 about Facebook advertising optimization, as that’s essentially the stage you’re in now.

The important thing to keep in mind is that there’s no single right way to do it – it’s all about tweaking, experimenting, and even having a little fun while you’re at it.

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Day 21 Recap

Today, you:

✓ Explored how your first round of ads performed
✓ Created a new campaign that built off the data and success from round 1
✓ Hopefully celebrated your first sale!

And that’s a wrap, my friend.

It’s been an absolute honor that you’ve followed me along these 21 days, and that you’ve stuck it through until the very end.

I can’t stress enough what an amazing achievement this is! Give yourself a pat on the back… throw yourself a party… have a beer (if that’s what you’re into).

Take a few minutes to put aside your to-do list and any lingering stress you might have. Celebrate yourself and all that you’ve accomplished.

It was quite a roller coaster, huh?

And it will continue to be – for as long as you’re an entrepreneur. If there’s only one thing I can promise you, it’s that.

Are you ready to take everything you’ve learned and multiply it by 100 to reach – and exceed – the goals you set for yourself?

It all comes down to you in the end.

You got this.

P.S. If you found this guide helpful, make sure to share it with other aspiring ecommerce entrepreneurs. Share it on Twitter, Facebook, and post a celebrating image on Instagram: remember the hashtag #oberlo21.