Show transcript

Hello and welcome to this episode of Online Store Success with me, Jodie Minto. Today, I am going to talk to you about the five most common mistakes I see when people are using Facebook and Instagram ads. Now, I'm one that is all about promoting using paid traffic strategies within your whole eCommerce marketing plan because I know firsthand how quickly they can help you scale your success. However, they are very much a science. There's such a steep learning curve that comes with running ads and managing ads yourself and there's a few pitfalls that I see people fall into time and time again. So today I'm going to take you through what those biggest ones are. 

The very first mistake I see, is setting the wrong objective. So when you are setting up your Facebook or Instagram campaign, one of the first very things it will ask you is what is your objective? Is it traffic? Is it conversion? Is it engagement? Is it page likes? This is where most people get it wrong. It is the most important decision to make and the most important button to click when setting up your ad. Because Facebook algorithm is very smart, if you set your objective at this level of the campaign as traffic, Facebook will show your ad to people it knows are clickers versus people that will click through and then hopefully buy. I know ultimately for eCommerce business owners, our goal is conversions or getting that sale. 

If you're setting up an ad at this level with traffic as your campaign, you will definitely get lots of traffic and you'll probably get quite cheap traffic but what you'll find is you probably will get very few actual purchases or conversions. Now on the flip side, if you were to set that campaign objective as conversions and purchases, you will find you get less traffic from that ad spend however you will hopefully get more conversions or you'll get closer to conversions. So it's very, very important to get this objective question right by hitting the correct button because like I said, Facebook knows the difference between purchasers or converters versus who are clickers. It's all machine learning, it's not a human being sitting there going ‘we know Jodie would actually prefer conversions over traffic so we'll make sure we try and get some’. No no no , it's all bots. It's all this algorithm, it is all automated. So if you want conversions, you have to program it and say I want actual purchases here. Setting the wrong objective will give you very different results. Often I see people who are running traffic ads saying ‘Jodie, what's going wrong with my Facebook ads? I get lots and lots of traffic that no one's buying so now, I feel like there's this bigger problem overall, there's a conversion problem', when in fact, that one switch at the very beginning of the setup is causing all sorts of grief later down the track. Okay, so that was mistake number one, setting the wrong objective for what you really actually want. 

Mistake number two is setting too small a budget and I see this all the time. So people obviously, I mean, I was the same when you're first starting out you're very apprehensive about spending too much within your Facebook ads. It's scary, it's a gamble, it's a risk, we never know whether we're going to get a return on that money. And I totally get that. However, if we know and I know right now for my business iland co. it's costing me anywhere between $25, up to sometimes $100 to get a sale, that's the cost per conversion of getting a sale for me. So I mean, there's different variables around that, some new markets that we're advertising to so I do expect that it will cost me more. But you need to consider your lifetime value of your customers, you also need to consider the cost of the goods sold, whether or not you have enough margin in there to risk you know, and spend that much. However, let's say for argument's sake, my average cost per conversion is $50 per day, and $50 per day is actually pretty good, that's probably I'd be happy with that. It's often a little bit more for me right now, given we're also going into winter, and I sell mostly predominantly summer project products. So $50 is acceptable to me. If I want to make, say, five sales a day, from that particular campaign, I obviously am going to need to make sure I've got enough budget to do that. And if I'm averaging, if I've looked in my Facebook Ads Manager and seen that the average is $50 per conversion on that campaign, I'm going to have to set that budget at $250 a day at least, to try and get those five sales a day. So when I see people go into there and have a look inside of their ads manager and they say, you know, I've been running this ad at $10 a day. And I know again, let's say the $50, for argument's sake is their average conversion. I will say to them, okay, well, no wonder you're not making lots of sales. If you're only spending $10 a day, you're only going to make a sale on say, perhaps day six once once you've already spent that $50. So if you are getting a good result, and you're getting this, this kind of average amount that's workable for you, but your budgets too small, it's going to be a very, very slow, slow road. So if your budget’s too small, it's going to take you six times longer, or however you've divided your budget before you actually get those sales. 

Mistake number three is poor creatives. Now more than ever, our creatives are the most important piece in our Facebook ads. Apart from number one setting that wrong objective, the objective is really, really crucial. But also having really strong creatives is really important. And the reason for that is after all of the iOS changes, we have less visibility around audiences, we have less tracking options and interest settings that we can pinpoint our audiences down. Now more than ever, we're using fairly broad audiences, because so many people have opted out of being tracked, it's very hard to target very specific audience groups. So we have to set the right objective and make sure we've got the right budget, but then have a really strong creative because that will matter more than the audience that you select. Now. I mean, there are some parameters with the audiences that you still need to select things like are you targeting women or men and age brackets and location. And you might want to put in a few different interests, I always go for engaged shoppers, for example. However, we can't get as granular on those audiences as we once could. So we have to make sure that the creative is doing the heavy lifting. And when I say creative, I mean either the photo or the video or the slideshow, and then the message. So mistake number three, having poor creatives is just going to set you up to fail. 

Okay, mistake number four, sending them to a broken website via that ad or sending them to our homepage versus the specific products that you're talking about in the ad. You need to make sure that you're sending them to the product page that you are featuring in your ad to make it as easy as possible for customers to go ahead and then purchase that product. If you're sending them to the wrong collection or a wrong product, the user experience isn't going to be great. They're not going to spend much time digging around looking for what it is that they want. They're going to click off and exit and we don't want that. 

Mistake number five is investing in Facebook and Instagram ads before you've yet got a proven product or a viable product. Often people and I see this a lot with drop shipping businesses where people have not even seen the product that they're selling, they've got some grainy looking photos, and it's coming from the slow boat from overseas. And they just think the missing piece of that whole puzzle around getting more sales is Facebook ads. And often, that's not the case. If you don't have a strong product or a strong offer, if you don't have a viable product that you've seen, that there's a demand for, you're probably just going to waste even more money on Facebook and Instagram ads. So it's really important to know that you've got tested and proven products that people actually want to put money down for. I know this is hard in the very beginning, especially if you're an eCommerce store, because we are hoping that people will want to see it and want to see our product and want to buy our product and use our product. This is often what I say to people when they're very, very first starting out and testing products is that you've got to put that product in front of as many people as possible who are willing to give you money and buy it versus friends and family who might just give you a pat on the back and go it's a great product ‘yeah, go for it’. You want to see if people are willing to put down their hard earned cash and buy that thing from you. And once you've got some sales under your belt and you can say confidently that people do want this thing, then you obviously go and you build the foundations of that business which is something I teach in my program online store success. Once you've got all of those things and those foundations built, you then look at paid traffic ads. So people thinking that the only missing piece of the puzzle is the Facebook ads when they've never really had any sales, traction or sales proof or proof of concept, that is the fifth mistake that I see time and time again. 

If you found these tips helpful, this is a little snippet of what I teach in my coaching program online store success. We are opening up the doors for enrolment very soon. You can see more information about it at my website jodieminto.com under courses. I hope these five common mistakes help you in navigating your Facebook and Instagram ads. And I wish you all the best of success in your eCommerce store. See you in the next episode!