Facebook™ Ads are not magic, they’re media. A media placement tool to be exact. 

You can get amazing results with Facebook™ Ads, but you can also flush a lot of money down the drain. 

We have some clients who generate 20+ return on ad spend (ROAS) month on month. While we have audited some accounts (we do this as a free service for potential clients) and they aren’t even breaking even. Ouch. 

So why do some Facebook™ Ad accounts do well, and some don’t? 

We like to look at it holistically. There are a lot of moving parts that all need to work together to ensure Facebook™ Ads success. These are the 5 pillars we use for Facebook™ Ads success. 

5 Pillars of Facebook Ads Success: 

1. The Product

The product that you advertise to sell on Facebook™ is critical. You need to have a fantastic product that people actually want. Sounds obvious right? But you’d be surprised how often people try to sell absolute crap.

You also need to have a healthy gross profit margin and a reasonable minimum order value. Facebook™ ads will rarely work for a $5 product or a product that only has 20% gross profit margin. We like to work with clients who have an:

• 80% gross profit margin and
• $80 minimum order value.

Why? Facebook™ Ads aren’t free. You need to have a healthy margin in order to be able to invest in the growth drivers of your business.

2. The Funnel

The second pillar to Facebook™ Ads Success is the funnel. This is how the campaigns and ad sets are setup. It’s the optimisation method, targeting and placement that is used. 

Basically a funnel is the journey your customers take to go from not knowing you exist, to purchasing from you. They start at the top and end up at the bottom, and there are many steps in between.

You can deep dive into our advertising funnel here. 

People make the mistake of setting up a few campaigns that send their ads to their target audience based on interests, geographics and demographics. But this is just the top of the funnel. They leave a lot of money on the table by not having a follow-up sequence, which is the rest of the funnel. You read more about this here. 

The other mistake people make here is they don’t let the algorithm do its job. The algorithm exists to show the most relevant ads to the right audience. If you try to control or manipulate who sees what too much you will interfere with the algorithm and it won’t be able to do its job.

3. The Creative

The next pillar to running successful Facebook™ Ads is the ads themselves. And there are a few elements we’re going to look at here. 

• Thumb stopping visual. The visual you use, whether that be an image or a video, needs to be thumb-stopping. Meaning you capture peoples’ attention and get them to stop scrolling through their newsfeed. 
• Copy that converts. The copy, or the words you use to convey your message, needs to align with your target audience and entice them to take action. 
• The type of creative. People often ask us whether they should be using an image, a video, a slideshow or a carousel to get the best results. And the answer is yes. See your audience will like to consume media in different ways. Some will like still images, some will prefer video. You need to test and measure all the options that Facebook™ give you and see which one performs the best. And this testing and measuring never stops. 
• The right message at the right phase of the funnel. You don’t ask someone to marry you on the first date. What you say is important, but when you say it is critical. This is explained in detail here.

What you say, how you say it and where you say it is super important.

4. The Destination 

The website that you are sending traffic needs to be ready for that traffic. The ads’ job is to get traffic to your website. Your websites’ job is to convert traffic to a sale. 

Facebook™ bots read the content of the website you are sending people to, to see if it’s consistent to your ad, relevant to your audience and doesn’t violate Facebook™’s terms of use.  Not only that, but your potential customer makes a decision on whether to stay and look around, or leave, based on what they see.

If you drive traffic to a site that is not ready for the traffic it’s like turning taps on and not having any buckets in place to catch the water. 

5. The Data

From the moment you start running ads you are collecting data. If your ads aren’t converting to sales you can analyse that data and make decisions about what to test and measure. If your ads are converting to sales you can analyse the data and learn how to make them even better. 

The data will tell you what’s working and what’s not.

The data will tell you if there are holes in your website. The data will tell you if your creative sucks. The data will tell you if you are targeting the wrong audience. 

You need to have patience in order to collect data. You need to test and measure. 

A final word

There is success to be had with Facebook™ Ads but Facebook™ Ads aren’t a silver bullet or magic wand. It can sometimes take a little while to get all the elements working together, especially if your business is new to online advertising, you’ve been doing it ineffectively or you haven’t made many sales yet, but once you crack the code, it’s worth it. 

Want to learn more? 

• Join our free Facebook Group for lots of free trainings and more great info.
• Want to deep dive into learning how to set these kinds of ads up for yourself? Check out our education program eComm Ignitor.
• Or if you want someone to do it for you, get in touch. We provide a done-for-you service to our clients.

Written by Megan Winter

Megan is an award-winning marketer and has worked with some of the fastest-growing eCommerce brands in the world.

Megan loves helping ethically-produced, heart-centred, soul-driven online store owners to make more income and achieve more impact. 

I recently purchased some coffee pods from this company. 

Then I got this ad in my Facebook newsfeed:

This ad is encouraging me to purchase. There are 2 reasons why this is not great:

1. I just purchased, so this just seems like a waste of money.
2. They are offering a discount in their ad. If I just paid full price I’d be super annoyed.

When running ads of any kind, you want to match your messaging to where people are in their buying journey and what stage they are at in the eComm funnel.

What is the eComm Funnel?

This funnel is the journey your customers take to go from not knowing you exist, to purchasing from you. They start at the top and end up at the bottom, and there are many steps in between.

The eComm Funnel looks like this:

The messaging people receive at each phase of the funnel is super duper important. The messaging for a coffee pod company throughout the funnel may look like this:

1. Awareness – “we sell coffee pods”
2. Interest – “we sell nespresso compatible, biodegradable coffee pods”
3. Education – “our coffee pods are filled with coffee roasted by unicorns”
4. Decision – “the starter kit would be perfect for you as it includes a selection of our most popular coffees for you to try”
5. Action – “we have a money back guarantee”
6. Loyalty – “do you need more coffee?”
7. Advocacy – “do your friends like coffee?”

It’s essential that you deliver the right message at the right time.

• You don’t ask someone who is in the awareness phase “would you like to buy?”
• You don’t tell someone who is in the action phase “hey, we sell coffee”
• And you definitely don’t tell someone who has just purchased and paid full price “hey, we sell coffee, here’s a discount”

Facebook Ads are great because you can control what message people see, depending on where they are in the buying cycle.

So, what’s wrong with this ad? 

I would love to help this company with their Facebook ads as they have all the right ingredients for a very successful Facebook ads strategy:

• Great product
• Great website
• Great content

If I was running their ads I would:

• exclude people who’ve purchased from their sales based ads
• setup ad campaigns to deliver ads to people who have viewed the product, but haven’t added to cart yet
• setup an ad campaign to deliver ads to people who have added to cart, but haven’t purchased yet
• setup an ad campaign that only goes to people have purchased with a thank-you ad
• setup an ad campaign for 30 days post-purchase with a reminder to purchase again. Because coffee is a consumable.

How do you deliver ads with the right message, to the right people?

STEP 1 – Firstly, we need to identify where people are at in the funnel.

You need to have the Facebook pixel installed and setup correctly. The Facebook pixel is a free piece of code that allows you to create audiences based on your website visitors behaviour. If setup correctly, each time someone takes an action an event is triggered and Facebook puts that person into an audience.

The Facebook events for a coffee pod company throughout the funnel may look like this:

1. Awareness – someone visits the site and the “pageview” event is triggered
2. Interest – they check out a product and the “viewcontent” event is triggered
3. Education – they explore the product page and find out more. If this info is on your product page an event
4. Decision – they add a product to cart and the “addtocart” event is triggered
5. Action – they check out and the “purchase” event is triggered
6. Loyalty – they purchase more than once and the “purchase” event is triggered multiple times, over time
7. Advocacy – their friends’ become aware and start back at the beginning where the “pageview” event is triggered

You can install the free tool, Facebook Pixel Helper, to see which events are being triggered.

It will look like this:

Awareness

Someone visits the site and the “pageview” event is triggered. You can create an audience of all the people who’ve visited your website for up to 180 days.

Interest and Education

Someone checks out a product and the “viewcontent” event is triggered. 

Decision

They then add a product to cart and the “addtocart” event is triggered

Action

They check out and the “purchase” event is triggered. 

This looks the same for Loyalty as the “purchase” event is triggered again. 

Each time an event is triggered, Facebook puts that person into an audience.

We use the pixel events to setup audiences for each phase.

STEP 2 – Setup ad campaigns based on the audiences 

Once you have your audiences setup you can then create ad campaigns that include and exclude certain audiences based.

Identify what action you want people to take at each stage of the funnel: 

1. Awareness – visit the home page
2. Interest – visit a product page
3. Education – explore the product page, or other information based pages such as FAQ’s, shipping info, about us, etc.
4. Decision – add a product to cart
5. Action – visit the thank you for purchasing page
6. Loyalty – visit the thank you page again
7. Advocacy – their friends check out the website

Identify who you want to target at each stage of the funnel:

1. Awareness – who you think your customer is, excluding anyone who has been to your website before. You do this using Facebook’s extensive targeting options. 
2. Interest & Education – anyone who has been to your home page, but hasn’t visited a product page yet. So anyone who has visited your website excluding “ViewContent”
3. Decision – anyone who has visited a product page, but hasn’t added to cart yet. So “ViewContent” excluding “AddtoCart”
4. Action – anyone who has added to cart, but hasn’t checked out yet. So “AddtoCart” excluding “Purchase”
5. Loyalty – anyone who has purchased more than x days ago. So “Purchase” in the last 180 days excluding “Purchase” in the last 3o days, for example.
6. Advocacy – friends of those who’ve purchased.

STEP 3 – Setup ads for your campaigns

Once you’ve done this you setup different ads with different messages for each phase of the funnel.

So the ad I saw, after purchasing, would be great in the Awareness phase (minus the discount).

Here are some examples of ads that’d be relevant to each phase of the funnel from a a client I adore, Munchkin and Bear: 

Awareness: 

Interest & Education:

Decision:

Action: 

Want to learn more? 

• Join our free Facebook Group for lots of free trainings and more great info. 
• Want to deep dive into learning how to set these kinds of ads up for yourself? Check out our education program eComm Ignitor. 
• Or if you want someone to do it for you, get in touch. We provide a done-for-you service to our clients. 

PS – I love Pod Co’s values, website and customer service. If you’re from Pod Co, reach out, I’d love to chat about how we could slay your Facebook Ads. 

Written by Megan Winter

Megan is an award-winning marketer and has worked with some of the fastest-growing eCommerce brands in the world.

Megan loves helping ethically-produced, heart-centred, soul-driven online store owners to make more income and achieve more impact. 

There’s been a lot of chat about Facebook Ads not working anymore.

And in a way that’s true. Facebook Ads don’t work in the same way as they used to. The saying “if you’ve always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got” is sooooo not true when in comes to Facebook Ads. 

The game hasn’t changed, but the rules have. 

Check out the ROAS column. ROAS is short for Return On Ad Spend.

Campaign one’s ROAS is 1.54. Meaning for every dollar spent on Facebook Ads they made $1.54 in sales on their website. It also spent just over $4k, which is most of the entire budget. It only generated $6,456.42 in sales.

This in isolation is a very average result. When you take into account cost of goods sold on the product they are not even covering costs.

However, sadly, this is where most people stop. They (of their agency) get an average result like this, they stop and they say Facebook Ads don’t work for them.

Now, look at the next 3 campaigns. Together, they spent around $1,500 and made nearly $40,000! That’s an average of 26x ROAS. Campaign 1 in isolation equals a very unsatisfied client. Campaign 1+2+3+4 = a very happy client.

Campaigns 2, 3 and 4 are retargeting campaigns. And this is where the magic happens.

Campaign 1 targets cold traffic; people who have never heard of the brand before. This campaign is designed to introduce people to the brand and let them know it exists. Now, you know that people rarely make a purchase in this phase. They don’t go from not knowing you exist to giving you their credit card within one touchpoint. People need to have multiple touchpoints and get to know, like and trust your brand. You don’t ask someone to marry you on the first date, after all!

Campaigns 2, 3 and 4 are retargeting campaigns and they follow up people who have shown interest but didn’t purchase, in Campaign 1. This is where we educate people on your product, we give them compelling reasons to get to know, like and trust you. We get them to desire your product — and ultimately purchase your product.

Imagine if we’d stopped at Campaign 1, as most people do. All that money left on the table!

We have some seriously powerful retargeting options with Facebook Ads. Facebook Ads are a tool and like any tool, the results will vary depending on the users’ ability to understand and use the tool.

So, how do you stop leaving money on the table and start getting results from Facebook Ads?

STEP 1: Firstly you need to have a good product! Seems like a no brainer, but you simply cannot make any media work sustainably with a pile of sh…

STEP 2: You need to have a website that converts. No point in running traffic to a website that isn’t ready for it. It’d be like turning on a tap and having no buckets in place to capture the water — or at least having very leaky buckets.

STEP 3: Then you need to know your audience and have super clear and clever messaging. Having good creative is a critical element in a successful ad campaign.

STEP 4: Next you need to use the magic of retargeting. You can only do this if you have the Facebook pixel installed. The Facebook pixel is a free piece of code that you install into your website and it allows you to track and retarget visitors based on actions they make on your site. The Facebook pixel itself doesn’t do the work, you still need to setup audiences and campaigns BUT it’s not possible without the pixel in place. Even if you aren’t running Facebook Ads now, you should install the pixel so it can collect the data for when you are ready to scale.

STEP 5: Test, measure and refine everything! We have an unprecedented ability to micro analyse the results of every audience, objective and creative.

Make sure you aren’t leaving money on the table when it comes to Facebook Ads. Success is possible!

Want to learn more? 

• Join our free Facebook Group for lots of free trainings and more great info. 
• Want to deep dive into learning how to set these kinds of ads up for yourself? Check out our education program eComm Ignitor. 
• Or if you want someone to do it for you, get in touch. We provide a done-for-you service to our clients. 

Written by Megan Winter

Megan is an award-winning marketer and has worked with some of the fastest-growing eCommerce brands in the world.

Megan loves helping ethically-produced, heart-centred, soul-driven online store owners to make more income and achieve more impact.