It’s a nice statistic to share. We’re pleased with it. We’ll share a few more stats with you throughout this article, to give you an understanding of how this headline figure was achieved.
The platform was Meta. The return was from multiple adverts and campaigns. And we didn’t exactly reinvent the wheel.
How to Advertise on Facebook
Facebook Advertising can be inconsistent from client to client. Even if you employ the same tactics, it doesn’t always guarantee the same results. Like most things, a combination of trial, error and patience is what tends to work.
Time is Money
By outlining a clear strategy at the beginning of the relationship, the client agreed to give us time to meet the objectives and provided us with a budget to begin to make inroads.
Considering the brand did not exist a year or so ago, the initial strategy was focused around brand awareness and driving traffic to the store. In that time, we monitored behaviours and engagement to help understand audiences and advert types as well as keeping an eye on the UX of the Shopify store.
Custom audiences were initially developed based around discussions with the client and educated guesses of interests and other demographics. During this time, we did see some conversions (350), which was nice, considering it was never the key objective.
Through a variety of different campaigns and creatives, we began to collate information which we used to create more custom audiences to market and retarget to. Building and understanding customer profiles would be key, in order to sell the product.
Know Your Facebook Audience
Due to a year of experimentation, one way or another, we had interacted with millions of Facebook and Instagram users. Both the Facebook page and Pixel were gathering data for us to utilise, as was the Shopify store.
Using the Facebook Audiences feature, we created numerous audiences. Some to remarket to (Add to Cart - No purchase etc.) and others to reach Lookalike audiences based on the interactions we’d had.
Having promoted the brand, we now wanted to re-work the creatives, to hit audiences with some refreshed artwork, images and copy, to hopefully increase conversions. Don’t ignore the device (mobile or desktop) your audiences are using and ensure your artwork and the placement of it is fit for purpose.
How to Create a Facebook Ad
If you’re familiar with Facebook Ads Manager, you will know there are a multitude of different adverts you can create. From carousels and videos to singular images and collections, we created adverts of all kinds to test which would convert better.
This time, the strategy was to improve sales. With that in mind, we chose the objective of conversions and customised the following to suit.
- Images: luckily we had been involved with the art-direction of the lifestyle and product images during the brand development stage, so we knew we had plenty of nice imagery to choose from. We opted to use more lifestyle images that showcased the product and withdrew the imagery we’d created promoting the USPs.
- Copy: from simple statements and persuasive use of the brand’s USPs, we tailored the copy of each advert to support the format and entice the consumer.
- Audiences: to give us a broader understanding of the advert we were creating, each Ad Set had a different target audience. Be it a retargeted one or customised one.
- Timescales: we like to allow a week for the learning phase and then usually give it another 3 weeks to perform. Try not to tweak it too often but do monitor how each Ad Set is performing and make adjustments to budgets, audiences or creatives accordingly.
How much do you need to spend on Facebook Advertising?
Establishing a budget at the outset is the key factor. You can then experiment and look to increase your spend as you go based on results.
We’ve always had a set, conservative monthly budget with this particular client. In the beginning, it was stretched across 6 campaigns and 20 different Ad Sets. Over time, we distributed the budget accordingly to make the most of the better performing adverts.
Continuation
Whilst we did introduce over 10 new conversion campaigns, we still kept our best performing traffic and brand awareness adverts running in the background. This was important as it not only reached new customers but generated data for us to continue to retarget them with.
We steadily introduced Sales adverts from August and began to see more interactions and conversions from these sorts of adverts. After deciding to pump the budget into the best performing adverts, as well as making some other tweaks, September saw a spike in sales (243).
October Stats
Historically, the month of October had not been the most popular for purchases of this product but an accumulation of the above saw a return just shy of £55,000 from over 340 purchases. In one month we’d seen nearly as many sales as we did in an entire year. So, we felt the strategy had been worthwhile.
In October we’d hit over 105,000 people with our adverts and made over 280,000 impressions with the lowest purchase cost per conversion averaging at £4.50 with an AOV of £100+. Whereas, in August we saw over 550,000 impressions to 250,000 people but only generated 58 conversions and even less in July (36), largely because the majority of the budget was still in Awareness and Traffic adverts. Switching the objectives, after lots of ground work, seemed to have paid off.
By paying attention to performance and making changes based on data and performance, we saw a surge in sales and now have the challenge of maintaining or bettering this in November (which includes Black Friday)!
Feel free to get in touch, if you have any questions or queries.
