In today’s episode you’ll learn:
- How to identify the perfect retargeting time frame
- What the customer feedback tool is, and how to manage your ranking so you aren’t penalised by Facebook
- Unlimited creative inspiration with Swipe Files and a trick to keeping an eye on your competition!
Where to find the tools I talk about on the show:
Customer Feedback Tool Checker
https://www.facebook.com/ads/customer_feedback/
Facebook Ads Library
Transcript:
Hello and welcome to the bright minds of e-commerce podcast. I’m Dahna, founder of bright red marketing, your e-commerce advertising specialists. Now we’re going to do something a little bit different today because I know so many of you have been asking about the Facebook ads side of things. Obviously that’s what we specialise in, but our interview structure to date has been eCommerce store owner /marketing experts. So we’re going to try and mix things up a little bit and see if everyone likes it. So this is probably not the episode for you if you’re currently driving, walking along the beach, you know, half listening. This is definitely the kind of episode where you’ll want to be right in front of your computer. So let’s get into it. Welcome to episode six.
So we’re going to go through I think three or four different strategies and tools that Facebook have given us access to that most people don’t know about. If you are well experienced in Facebook ads, I would still hazard a guess that at least one or two of these you will not have heard of before. So let’s get straight into it. So the first one, how many of you wonder how long you should set your retargeting ads for? If you are like 99.9% of people that we speak to, it’s the biggest question that we get asked. How do you determine how long that retargeting timeframe should be? Now we have some clients who specify that they only want to retarget for a couple of days because they don’t want to appear too salesy and we have other clients that really want to kind of leverage that length of period. You know that length of time as much as possible and we run, you know 30 60 day retargeting campaigns because their products are a bit more expensive and they need, you know, a little bit longer education process. But if you really want to know exactly how long you should be running those ads, there’s a trick for you. So in your Facebook ads manager, and this is going to be where it’s really important that you’re in front of a computer right now, you are going to open up your Facebook ads manager, top left hand corner, you’re going to go to analytics.
You’ll then be prompted with a page to select your business. Now I have five or six different options that I have because we manage so many different accounts, but you just let your business manager, you’ll then be given a list with all of the pages and pixels you have access to. So on mine, I have to scroll, yours might be on that initial window, but you’re gonna find your pixel. It’s now going to bring up with this really incredible dashboard that a lot of people have never seen before. So Facebook gives some really cool data, some really good information based on what that pixel is tracking. So it can be really handy to kind of compare this data to say your Shopify dashboard, just to see how much data Facebook’s picking up. So it’s a pretty easy way to identify if there’s any miscommunication between that pixel and what’s actually happening on your site. Now once you’ve finished having a look at this page and feel free to come back on the left hand side, you’ll see activity with a little dropdown arrow. If you click on that, it’s going to bring up another long list of options. And about halfway down there’s one called funnels. So I want you to click on that and then it’s going to open another window. And I’m going a little bit fast for you here.
Again, this is why you’re in front of a computer. Feel free to pause me and you know, catch up where you are. So once you’ve selected that funnels that brings up this next window, there’s a should be a little green button in the middle that says create funnel. Once you’ve done that, it’s going to bring up a couple of different options. So you’re firstly going to select event and you’re going to start typing in the term session. And so basically what we’re doing here is we’re finding out between when someone ended a session on your website to coming back and purchase what was that length of time. So once you’ve selected session end, there should be a little plus just to the right of where it says session end.
Click on that and we’re going to add purchase. Now this whole page of data and information is going to be really useful to you. But specifically what we’re looking for is to scroll to the very bottom of that page and you’ll get some data that says top 25% top 50% top 75% and how long it’s taking them to complete that purchase. So this is the information that’s really helpful for you so that you can determine exactly how long you need to be running your retargeting campaigns for. So if you’ve got a really low value, low margin product and you really don’t want to spend a lot of money convincing people to come back and buy, you could almost spend all of your retargeting budget on that top 50% of people, you know, those are the people that you know, didn’t require as much convincing. It didn’t require as much thought process. If you’ve got a product that’s got a lot higher margins or you’ve got a really long and a really high client lifetime values or people buy from you repeatedly and it really is worth the extra effort and the extra money to get everybody to buy, you know, you can kind of go with that top 75% timeframe. So we’ve got some clients that, you know, 75% of their purchases are happening in under a week. So we know that realistically we don’t need to spend too much time, you know, running a 30 day retargeting campaign, you know, seven to 10 days is probably more than enough. We’ve got other clients that it takes three and a half weeks for that 50% people to buy. So we know that it’s more about that longterm engagement and education strategy rather than trying to get them in a quick and dirty three day, 50% off retargeting campaign, which I don’t suggest anyway. So, you know, take some time to look through this data.
You know, work out what your strategy is with your business and work out how you best want to represent yourself from a retargeting strategy, none of our clients at the moment are doing retargeting discounts. It’s definitely not a necessity. A lot of businesses do think that it’s a necessity, but it really isn’t. So just keep an eye on that. You know, if you can offer a discount and that’s part of what you want to do, awesome, you will get a slightly better return. But just make sure that that return is matched by a higher return on ad spend at the end of the day. So that is my trick on how to determine how long your retargeting ads should be running for. So the next thing that I want to walk you through is called the customer feedback tool.
Now finding the link to this one is a little bit of a nightmare. So I will link it in the show notes. But if you do a Google search, we’ve got a blog post on this entire topic. So it’s linked in there. It’s a, it’s a little bit of a tricky one to find, but link is in the show notes. So the customer feedback tool is a really, really handy resource that Facebook has developed and it essentially is how happy are your customers. Now if you’ve got a ranking between four and five brilliant. Facebook’s happy, wonderful. If you are like the person who emailed me last week whose shipping times have been severely impacted by the, the Corona virus, his current score was a 1.3 which basically means that Facebook really doesn’t wanna you know, run your ads anymore. So it’s one of those things where if everything is good, it’s great. If the numbers start to drop, Facebook will actually start to disable your ad account and they start to look at things like penalising how often people are seeing your ads. So it’s a really, really important number to have a look up. If you are just starting out, if you are a little bit smaller, you don’t have that, you know the sales traction just yet, you might not have a number.
So it’s the kind of thing that as you’re growing and scaling you really need to keep an eye on. And so my couple of tips with this one is one, keep an eye on it. If it starts to drop, you know that something’s impacted. Maybe you’ve just moved to a new shipping supplier and maybe you’re trying a different packaging. You know there’s so many different you know, factors. But the, the two big takeaways are just keep an eye on it. And also if you are having any delays with shipping, if you’ve got warehouse problems, if your stock is held up in China because of an outbreak or Chinese new year, all those sorts of things that can have an impact. There is a little section on one of the pages that says set delivery time. So basically what that means is if you have a longer delivery time, even for instance, if you’re handmade. So if you’re making products, you know, they take three or four weeks to make and then get delivered, you can actually set that delivery time.
Because what that means is that Facebook won’t show their survey to your customers until after that timeframe. So Facebook I think by default does it after about a week, maybe two. So if your product takes three weeks for you to even make it, Facebook will be sending out that survey before people have received your product and the chances of you getting a lower score are much higher. So it’s the kind of tool you really want to be aware of and keep an eye on as you’re growing and as you do become a bigger company, you just want to make sure that it’s just something that you check, you know, once a month, maybe once a quarter if you’re pretty confident. But it’s definitely something to keep an eye on because once it gets really low, it’s hard to get back up. So once it starts dropping under that four, that’s really when you want to start making moves to get it a little bit high. Um, so my last tip for you in this first little Facebook tips episode is a little bit two part. So the first, it’s sort of about stalking your competition, but I don’t like to call it stalking. I like to call it getting inspiration from. And to be fair, we do this with all of our clients. We do a lot of research, but because we have clients across a really broad range of industries, it’s just a really good tool for us to have and to use so that we can get inspiration, stay on top of what everyone else is doing and make sure that we can kind of keep those creative juices flowing. So what we like to do is to create a swipe file.
So you’ll often see ads from Facebook ads, gurus all around the world being like, here’s my swipe file. And it’s a PDF of ads that ran five years ago. So what I really recommend you do is you make your own swipe file that’s completely relevant to your business, your industry, and your audience. Most importantly. So what we like to do is we create a Trello board and we’ve got ours separated into client industries cause we’ve got a couple of different industries across e-commerce that we focus in. And then we’ve got sections just for copy. We like videos, we liked those sorts of things. So it’s not necessarily about stalking your competition actually. It’s definitely not about stalking your competition and recreating their ads.
That’s a definite no-go. Don’t do that. But it’s more about scrolling your newsfeed and when you find an ad that actually gets your attention grabbing a screenshot of it, or if it’s a video, there’s a tool called Chrome capture where you can actually, you know, do a little mini screen recording, saves it as a gift, and then you can drop the GIF into Trello so that when you’re scrolling you can actually see the videos playing. It’s very cool to look up. So when you see ads that grab your attention, you can kind of create a file of all of the ads that you have responded to or that you think your your customers might have responded to. So when you are going, Oh God, we need to make a new ad, I don’t know what it’s going to be. You can kind of go through that file and go, Oh, there was a really cool office ad that I saw. I’m going to use that to sell my drink bottles because I really liked the way they talked about this. So if you listen to Kate Toons episode on SEO a couple of weeks ago, you know, she was really talking about, you know, getting inspiration and writing product descriptions. But the same thing kind of goes to your ad.
You know, it’s really hard to constantly be coming up with new ad copy and being really creative. So if you see an ad for a desk chair that you really like, and it’s because the desk chair is spinning and there’s some cool flashing going on and a text layout on the video was really cool. There’s no reason that you can’t take a similar concept and apply it to your drink bottle manufacturing. So it’s more about just getting that inspiration of things that are attention grabbing and using that to your advantage. So really that you do create a swipe file and just start using it for reference. The more you fill that up, the more you use it, the more beneficial it becomes. The first hour that you spend doing it, you’ll look at it and be like, this is completely useless. But if you spend, you know, an hour a week, 10 minutes a week, whatever it might be, you might even just screenshot ads when you’re scrolling watching TV at night. You know, the more that you add that to it, the more value it has. And then if you do, you know, get someone on board to look after your ads or you’ve got a team member that’s doing it, it’s a really useful resource to say, look, these are the sorts of ads that we like, this is what we kind of want to replicate.
And the last little trick, I feel like most people know this, but the more I think most people know this, the more I find out that no one really does. So you can actually see what various pages are running as ads. So it is a really good way of kind of sussing out your competition is doing. I have had a couple of stories where people have found out that their competition was stealing their ads and this was how they found out. So if you go to any Facebook page on the right hand side, there’s a little section called page transparency. If you click on that section and then scroll down to that bottom of that pop up window, there is a section that says ads from this page and the bottom right hand corner of that, it says ads library. If you click on that, it’ll bring up a big window showing you all of the ads that that page is currently running.
If there’s no ads in there, and it said there was ads, just try changing the country and there is also a issue, electoral or political filter. Make sure you’re just checking all ads. For some reason, a couple of weeks ago, my computer was filtering straight to the political ads even though I was looking at skincare. So just check those two things if you’re having any issues and it’s a really good way of seeing what your competitors are up to, what other businesses in you know, aligned industries are doing. Again, you know, Facebook ads are evolving so quickly. If you don’t have a lot of time to spend on your ads, if you are one of those people that are trying to, you know, wear 17 different hats and you’ve got an hour a week to do Facebook ads, it’s much better to have a really good swipe file of up to date relevant ads rather than trying to rack your brain and write really great ad copy in five minutes flat. So there sort of my three or four depending on how you want to separate those Facebook tips that every business owner should know and every Facebook managers should know.
If you have any questions, feel free to send me an email and happy to, to answer any of those. And also let me know if you liked the style of episode. If you’ve got something out of it. If you want me to do more of these, please let me know. Otherwise, I feel like I’m talking to myself. So thank you very much for listening to the sixth episode of the bright minds of eCommerce podcast. As always, we’ll have full transcript, show notes and links to those things I was talking about, especially the the customer feedback tool, which is a nightmare to find.
And if you like the show or you liked this episode, I’d love for you to leave a review or you know, share on any of your social platforms and in any Facebook. But thank you very much for listening. We are releasing an episode once a week. The goal is to get them there every Tuesday morning if they get the Tuesday afternoon. I apologise. So thank you very much for listening. I hope you got a lot of it and I will see you guys next week.
