One of the best ways to get sales fast on your ecommerce or dropship store is to run paid ads to the product pages. I love that free traffic with SEO but I also want some quick wins with sending targeted paid advert traffic to my sales pages to get data faster. This guide will be focusing on the paid advertising and targeting of adverts for ecommerce stores. You will find a lot of value in this guide, Take notes and put an action plan in place to get those sales.
Product & Niche Research
I try to avoid trademarked or licensed products just because the legal headache is just not worth it. Selling in trademarked niches is asking for shut downs of your ad account, your profiles and sometimes even your website. So stay away for these type of products.
Marvel, Star Wars, Pokemon, Harry Potter. Lord of The Rings. Batman. Spiderman. The Hunger Games. Etc etc.
I prefer getting into evergreen niches that are long-term niches. If you want to sell Harry Potter products and make money quickly, then possibly facing legal trouble down the line as you grow your store, then be my guest.
But that is not my style. Building a sustainable long-term business is what i am all about. Churn and burn is such a waste of time.
So make your own decision which side of the fence you sit on, but if you get in trouble because you’re selling in trademarked niches, then I am not responsible for your actions.
Sell at your own risks.
Product research with AliExpress
If you’re already sure of a niche you’d like to get into and want to see if there are a lot of products available to sell, then head over to http://www.aliexpress.com
This is the site I use to sell products from China at a really low cost.
So, let’s say for example that you’re into the dog niche. What you need to do is simply type in “dogs” in the search bar.
Then what you could do next is sort by price, orders, free shipping and 1 piece only.
Ideally, we want to look for products that are under $4, have free shipping, and have a lot of orders from a reputable seller with lots of good feedback.
If you find 10+ products that we could add to the store from AliExpress, then it looks like you have a winning niche. The only step then would be to make sure there’s an audience for it on Facebook (very likely since there’s people who are buying these products online).
Page research on Facebook
We will get into much more extensive research on Facebook in the “Audience Insights” video, but have a quick glance on Facebook and look for pages in your niche.
If you can find 10-20 big pages in your niche (100k+ fans), then looks like you’ve got a potential winning niche with a large passionate audience!
List The Target Product On Your Shopify Store
Adding Products + Theme
How To Add A Product and Collection To Your Store
Once you find products that fit the criteria we covered in the last PDF, head over to Google and look for a higher quality version of the product (bigger size, no watermarks, etc)
Then head over to Shopify and go to add the product: PRODUCTS -> PRODUCTS
Then simply fill out all the details for the product: Name, description, variants (if any), shipping, pricing ($0.01), suggested price ($19.95).
REMEMBER: If the product is below $3-4 on AliExpress, then we will enter 8.0kg for the shipping weight, which is equivalent to $9.95 shipping that we created in the previous shipping module.
To add a collection to your store, head to: PRODUCTS -> COLLECTION The video is pretty self-explanatory on how to add a product to the collection.
How To Add A Theme on Shopify
To select/customize your new theme, head to: ONLINE STORE -> THEMES
Then you can head to the Theme Store to look for a better theme. Once you’ve picked a theme, you can simply customize the theme.
Each theme has its own elements that you can edit, so there’s not much teaching to be made here. It’s basically just a matter of taste and testing based on how you like the look of the theme.
Now you have the research complete and the products and collections setup we move forward. This next section is all about advertising targeting for your products. This is super important because when you get the targeting correct you make more money.
Traffic with Facebook Ads
How To Create The Perfect “Native” FB Ad for E-Commerce
When you first log in to Facebooka Ad Manager, make sure to setup campaigns with ad groups inside them and then the single ads. This will load all your previous ads, campaigns, pages that you had previously on this ad account. If it’s a brand new account, then you won’t have anything to load.
Perfect Ad Type: 800×800 (square image) Photo Ad with Website Conversions
- Make sure you add the conversion pixel into your Shopify store (we show how in the video)
- You will always use the SAME conversion pixel for all your ads for your store
Perfect Ad Image: Image of the product ONLY (no text, no price tag)
Perfect Ad Copy:
Grab Your LIMITED EDITION “product name here” for ONLY $0.01! Not sold in stores. Order yours now! >>> http://www.yourstorelinkhere.com/product-page
Perfect Ad Audience:
USA, Canada, Australia and above 1 million audience
- I usually like to target mostly women, but men do buy also
- Make sure you find at least 50+ interests to target
- The more interests and the bigger your audience, the better
- Take your time and find as many interests as humanly possible, it’s worth it! (can take 1hr+)
Perfect Ad Budget:
$10-15 test budget per day for the first 2 days, then if you see sales after 2 days, then now you know it’s a product that can sell. I’ve found that $5/day budget does not give me enough data to make decisions on whether to continue or stop with the product.
Now it’s just a matter of optimizing and scaling accordingly (we will cover that in the next PDF)
DO NOT:
– use a low quality image
– use a watermarked image
– use a different image than the one you’re using in your store (no misleading images)
– photoshop any fancy images for your ad
– use a re-direct on your link
– use a link to your store homepage, MAKE SURE TO USE A LINK TO YOUR PRODUCT PAGE! – mention shipping on image or text
– mention the words free anywhere
The whole goal of a Native Ad is so that it looks like a normal post on the newsfeed and not an ad. People are self-taught not to click on ads, so we want our ad to look like a normal image on the Facebook newsfeed. Hope that makes sense.
TIPS:
1. Your conversion pixel will not work until it gets its first sale, it will remain red until then. 2. Use the link to your product page for the ad, not the homepage
3. To save time, save your audience that you created (1M+ audience) so that you can easily make more ads in the future without manually typing each interest every time.
4. To save time, you can also DUPLICATE the ad sets! That way, you won’t have to add the conversion pixel, add the audience. All you will have to do is change the “ad” (picture, text, etc) assuming that you are selling a different product for this new ad set.
When you make any changes inside of ads manager, make sure to “Upload Changes”
Audience Insights
Deeper FB Audience Research with Audience Insights
The video is self-explanatory, so I will make this PDF like a step-by-step cheat sheet.
Step 1: Go to https://www.facebook.com/ads/audience_insights
Step 2: Select your locations (USA, Canada, Australia)
Step 3: Select your gender (Women only or Men + Women)
Step 4: Select your age (18-65)
Step 5: Enter a very general niche keyword (ex: Dogs, Horses, Poker, Swimming, etc)
Step 6: Enter a few more keywords off the top off the top of your head that go a bit deeper into your niche research (ex: Border Collie, Bulldog, Petsmart, I Love Dogs, Chihuahua, etc)
Step 7: Once you have a solid 10-20 keywords off the top of your head, head over to the “Page Likes” tab. This is where you’re going to be able to find even deeper keywords that you otherwise wouldn’t have known about.
Step 8: Enter 50-100 more keywords to target in your ads. This will ensure that you get to 1 million audience for your ads, which will make this a much more long-term cash cow for you.
TIP: If you’re unsure if the page name is related to your niche, you can always click it, which will generate a new window showing you how the page looks. You’ll then know for sure if that audience is related to what you’re trying to sell with your ads.
Step 9: Click Save to save your audience. This way, you can easily use that audience in Power Editor, without having to manually enter those 50-100 keywords each time!
And that’s really it people! Super simple. Audience Insights is an amazing tool to help you scale and find a broader audience to target. I push to get as many people as possible until I really really can’t find any other keywords to target.
TIP: Google is your friend. Be creative. If you’re in the Dog Niche for example, keywords you could search for are: different dog breeds, dog magazines, dog brands, dog charities, etc.
Scaling and Split Testing Your Ads
Basic Scaling (Very little risk)
So once you see that your product is selling and that you are still in profit, you can begin slowly increasing your budget by 10% every couple days.
Make sure to constantly keep track each day of your profit with each budget increase.
Once you find your sweet spot for daily budget, you can basically just let it keep running on auto-pilot while keeping the same ad set running (this is why we wanted a 1M+ audience to run ads to).
Intermediate Scaling/Split Testing (A bit more risky)
So after you do your basic scaling and see that it is still working even at higher daily budgets (ex: $25/day is still making you profit), then you can look into more “intermediate scaling”.
What I like to do is separate the original ad into different ad sets. Let’s say the original ad set was:
So what I could do to scale this is to scale just the countries and see which country is buying my stuff.
USA, Canada, Australia
Women, Men
18-65
Interested in: German Shepherds, Chihuahua, Border Collie, I love dogs, dogs are better than cats
USA
Women, Men
18-65
Interested in: German Shepherds, Chihuahua, Border Collie, I love dogs, dogs are better than cats
Canada
Women, Men
18-65
Interested in: German Shepherds, Chihuahua, Border Collie, I love dogs, dogs are better than cats
Australia
Women, Men
18-65
Interested in: German Shepherds, Chihuahua, Border Collie, I love dogs, dogs are better than cats
By doing this, I will have a better idea of which country is more likely to buy.
Here are some of the intermediate ways I scale:
1. Countries (USA vs Canada vs Australia) • Will tell me which country is buying
2. Gender (Men vs Women)
• Tells me which gender more likely to buy
3. Age (Ages grouped by every 5-10 years)
• Tells me which age group is into my product
4. Interest keyword (German Shepherds only for example)
• Tells me which interest keyword is producing BUYERS
Each ad set that I split test will start at a low budget like $1/day. Do this for a few days, then have a look at the numbers.
If the cost per conversion is low (below $3-4 cost per conversion), then increase your budget for that ad set slightly from $1 to $2 for example.
If the cost per conversion is high (above $4) after a few days, or is not producing any sales, then turn off the ad.
If you want to become successful with FB ads and e-commerce, then it will take some micro-managing of each ad set to see which ad sets are working and which aren’t.
Meaning, you will have to look at the cost per conversions of each ad set every couple days to see what’s converting and what isn’t.
Ex: “Okay, so I see that Canada’s cost per conversion is only $1.66 while USA is $7.81. I need to increase the budget for Canada to see what will happen the next few days, and decrease USA’s budget.”
Once you find a winning product, a winning audience, then you’re set. But initially, it will take some monitoring. Don’t get discouraged.
TIP: Remember, for split testing, it is much much easier/faster to just duplicate your ad sets inside of Power Editor so you don’t have to constantly manually enter the pixels, the audiences, the ads, etc.
WARNING: When split testing and scaling, do not increase your budget too fast too quickly, because this will cause your ROI (return on investment) to go down and your cost per conversion to go up. Scale smart, scale slow.
“This is an easy product research guide that you can follow along to and upload products to your store. Once you get that done its all about targeted advertising and optimisation. The real gravy of ecommerce is that sweet spot with ads and sales.”
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