Hi,
I just landed on Dropshipping with Aliexpress + FB Ads but I am having problems to drag traffic into my page with FB Ads, I tried videos, photos, offers, etc, and I've been throwing money, no result, CPC somewhere between $2.5 to $6, and no purchases.
So, I was wondering if the method still works? Is someone who started new stores recently is still making money with this method?
Cheers.
Before you can do anything else, you must determine your primary aim for advertising on Facebook. There are 10 options:
Send people to your site
Increase conversions on your site
Boost your Facebook posts
Promote your page
Get installs of your app
Increase engagement in your app
Reach people near your business
Raise attendance at your event
Get people to claim your offer
Get video views
Some of these objectives clearly don’t apply to ecommerce businesses. You’ll be most successful with one, driving website traffic; two, increasing email signups or purchases on your site; three, broadening the reach of your Facebook posts, which can help you promote products or gain followers; and/or nine, encouraging potential customers to use a coupon code or promotion.
Website conversions may seem like the obvious objective for your campaign. However, defining “conversion” as “purchase” might not be the wisest choice. In addition, Facebook recommends choosing a conversion event that reaches at least 25 conversions per day. If your conversion rate is lower, it’s harder to get accurate data. And if you don’t know who’s converting, what’s driving them, and so on, you’ll struggle to optimise.
Low-friction ads typically perform better. Rather than measuring success by the number of people who buy from you, think about measuring how many people sign up for your mailing list. You can slowly nurture them with drip email marketing campaigns, making their total lifetime value much higher (and increasing the chance they’ll become a customer in the first place).
In fact, the best objective to start with is probably website traffic. When you’re launching your first campaign, neither you nor Facebook has any data on which types of people convert. Casting a wider net and first determining which demographics click to your site gives you valuable information you can then use to target more specific audiences in the future.
Once you choose an objective, Facebook will present you with the optimal ad options. You can have multiple ads under one campaign. The easiest way to think about it is that each campaign represents a specific goal; for example, “Increase Website Traffic.” Ad sets are the next level down: they help you target different audiences. To give you an idea, you might have an ad set targeting 20 to 24-year-old urban men and another ad set targeting 21 to 23-year-old suburban men.
Each ad set contains multiple ads. These tend to look slightly to extremely different in terms of design, color scheme, copy, and so on—for a couple reasons. First, you don’t want to show people the same ads over and over again, as they’ll become desensitized to them. Second, using different ads helps you hone in on the most effective versions.
Facebook marketing: choose your audience
Finding the most effective criteria for your ideal customers isn’t a simple, quick process. It’s reminiscent of the Goldilocks children’s story: you’re going to have to experiment before you find the right fit.
Facebook lets you choose who sees your ads based on these filters:
Location
Age
Gender
Language
Relationship
Education
Work
Ethnic Affinity
Generation
Parents
Politics
Life Events
Interests
Behaviors
Connections
Because you can get so granular, you might be tempted to target extremely specific demographics. But it’s better to start out with a broad audience and refine it based on your results. To give you an idea, imagine you sell upscale athletic gear. Maybe you start with women in their thirties and forties who are interested in fitness. After you’ve run your ads for a few weeks, Facebook shows you that these ads perform best with 35 to 40-year-old women who take zumba, cycling, or barre classes. You’d use that knowledge to tailor your targeting accordingly.
Not sure which filters to start with? Use site analytics to learn more about your current customers, including which searches led them to your site and which locations they’re from. You can also run customer surveys to learn demographic data like age, gender, income, job, and so forth.
Facebook gives you the ability to target custom audiences based on their email address or phone number. This option is incredibly useful for ecommerce retailers: You can retarget former customers using the information they provided on checkout. Simply upload a database of their contact information into Facebook, and the site will find the matching users.
Lookalike audiences are even more powerful. First, you choose a custom audience. This audience could come from your imported contact information, the list of people who have converted on a specific action, or the list of people who have liked your Facebook page. Then, Facebook pulls from demographic data, including age, gender, and location, along with interests and categories, to identify the users who most closely match your custom audience.
In other words, rather than guessing who your next customers will be, you can use this feature to scientifically find them.
Facebook marketing: choose your budget
Since you’re going to be running Facebook ad campaigns for a predetermined period of time, you’ll want to set a lifetime budget. That means if your lifetime budget is $50 and your ad is set to run for five days, Facebook will put $10 per day toward distributing your ad.
(You can also set daily budgets. With this choice, you could choose to spend a given amount on any ad every day for an indefinite length of time.)
Facebook marketing: you’re required to spend at least $5 per day on an ad.
Facebook requires you to spend at least $5 per day on an ad. In other words, if your ad was running for two weeks, your lifetime budget must be equal to or greater than $70.
Wondering how this money is actually spent? Great question. Every time Facebook has an opportunity to show a user an ad, the site holds a live bidding opportunity to figure out which ad to show. If you’ve enabled automatic bidding (which is recommended when you’re starting out), Facebook will choose a bid for you based on your total budget.
Alternatively, you can choose to set manual bids for specific ad sets. For instance, you might tell Facebook that you never want to spend more than $1 showing a specific ad set to your targets. This option is helpful once you’ve calculated the value of the ad—in other words, you know how many people take your ideal action and what that means for your profits.
You also need to pick what you’ll be paying for. There are four main options:
Objective
Clicks
Impressions
Daily Unique Reach
If you choose objective, you’ll be charged for the number of people who complete your goal. Let’s say your objective is video views. Every time a user sees your ad and plays the video, you’ll pay.
Although this seems like an obvious choice, many objectives don’t have matching charge options yet. Pay Per Click (PPC) is the most popular option. You’re likely trying to increase conversions on your site. If you run a PPC ad, you’ll be charged every time a user clicks on the link in your ad, which raises their likelihood of converting.
Impressions help you show your ads to as many eyeballs as possible. It’s the “quantity, not quality” choice and therefore not recommended unless you have an extremely broad, varied audience.
Daily Unique Reach is similar to Cost Per Impressions. Facebook shows your ad to the largest number of users within your selected audience as your budget permits—but no more than once a day. If you’re targeting a small audience, or you’re worried your ad will lose its impact, this option is worth trying.
Facebook also charges advertisers depending on the specific people they’re trying to reach. If you’re targeting an in-demand audience that many other marketers are targeting as well, you’ll pay more. But if you’re going after an audience where few others are competing for ad placement, your costs will be lower. For example, targeting countries like Egypt, Indonesia, Pakistan, or India—will be less expensive than targeting the United States or Canada.
Facebook marketing: choose your type of ad
Facebook gives you different ad type options depending on your objective. Let’s explore the options for your most likely objectives.
If you choose “Clicks to Website,” there are two possible types: a single-image ad (a “Link”) or a multi-image ad (a “Carousel”).
Links are good for displaying one product, while Carousels help you advertise multiple.
If you choose “Website Conversions,” you can also choose between Links and Carousels. There’s also a third option: Canvas. This immersive, full-page ad is exclusively shown to mobile customers.
For those hoping to build their Facebook reach, “Page Post Engagement” is a good option. It lets you show posts from your page to existing customers. Engagement can be measured by likes, comments, shares or photo views. Because Facebook’s algorithm now favors content that people in a user’s network have shared or interacted with, this type of campaign will help you boost your reach among your current audience’s sphere.
Lead ads are yet another Facebook ad type. As the name suggests, these help you collect lead information. A lead ad shows up as a simple form in a consumer’s newsfeed. The consumer fills it out without ever leaving Facebook or clicking to a new page. Because the process is so simple, this approach is often more successful than asking people to fill out forms on your website.
“Offer claims” look like Link Ads. Instead of clicking a CTA and being taken to your site, users will see a “Get offer” CTA that’ll show them a code for the specific promotion you’re advertising.
Facebook marketing: choose your ad placement
There are three potential places for your ads to appear to your audience:
The desktop newsfeed
The desktop right column
The mobile newsfeed
If you choose to put your ads in the mobile or desktop newsfeed, you’ll likely pay more. These ads are more visible to users (after all, they’re showing up with organic posts from your audience’s friends), which means there’s higher competition among advertisers. Higher competition equals higher prices.
Ads in the desktop right column are typically lower-performing and thus cheaper. They tend to look like traditional banner ads, rather than user-generated content.
Typically, mobile ads perform well across the board.
The best way to choose your ad placement? In the beginning, while you’re still refining your design strategy, it may be wise to opt for the desktop right column. As your ad strategy grows more sophisticated, you should consider investing in newsfeed ads. It’s also smart to continually test different placements to identify where you get the biggest bang for your buck.
