Why You're Not Getting New Customers On Meta and How to Fix It

(00:00)

They were spending all this money, they were getting a really great ROAS and they just felt like business was not growing, they weren’t getting new customers, their returning customer rate was really high. We changed these three things and they were up 150 % in sales in their worst month. So these things really can make a massive difference.

Dahna Borg (00:18)

Hi and welcome to the Bright Minds of Ecommerce podcast. I’m Dahna founder of Bright Red Marketing and I created this podcast because I wanted to bring you the best advice from Australian experts in eCommerce and eCommerce store owners. If you’re wanting relatable stories and actionable advice, as well as the latest Facebook advertising strategies, you’re in the right place. So let’s get into today’s episode.

(00:38)

Hi, and welcome to the Bright Minds of eCommerce podcast. Well, today you’re here with just me. I started this podcast a little while ago with the idea of giving you the best information from the best experts and eCommerce store owners, but we are the meta ads experts. So we found that the podcast was missing something, which was, you know, talk about meta ads. So I was going to do a planning episode, but I decided that this time we’re actually going to dive straight in to the juicy stuff. So.

We’re going to talk today about why you’re not getting brand new customers from your meta ads, because this seems to be a problem that a lot of people are facing at the moment. It seems to be coming up a lot in our audits when we’re talking to people and it’s something that some really, really basic settings in meta and one small creative shift can make such a massive difference to whether you’re actually acquiring new customers from your meta ads. So we’re going to get into it. So there are three things that I see in and audit, which is what we do with any potential new customer that are stopping your ability to get new clients. One of our biggest clients at the moment actually came to us because of this problem. They were spending all this money, they were getting a really great ROAS and they just felt like business was not growing, they weren’t getting new customers, their returning customer rate was really high. We changed these three things and they were up 150 % in sales in their worst month. So these things really can make a massive difference. So this is definitely going to be one of those episodes you want to have either your notepad ready or you want to be in front of your computer ready to actually do these things as we go. So if you’re in the same boat and you feel like you’re spending money, you feel like you’re just getting sales from your existing customers, this one is for you. So you will know by the end of this how to check these things. So basically, Meta is really good at giving you exactly what you ask for. They’re also going to do it in the laziest way possible. If they can find a lower hanging fruit, if they can find an easier win, if they can find someone that is going to buy from you the cheapest, they’re going to do that. Now that sounds good in theory.

except that the people that are most likely to buy from you and the cheapest people to get to buy from you again are your existing customers. Now, a lot of people at the moment are talking about your Advantage Plus and, just let Meta do all the hard work. And that’s great. If Meta is getting you new customers, but it’s not for a lot of people and it’s not because they’ve got these things set up incorrectly. So Meta will spend all your budget on all customers if you let it.

It will show ads to people who already know you if you let it. And at the of the day, warm traffic is going to convert a whole lot better than cold traffic. So Meta is just doing its cheeky little thing. It’s like, I’ll do what I can.

So to fix this, there’s three things that we need to do and one and two are very, very closely related. So the first one is to set up your audience segments. Now this is done in your business settings, in your audience settings. This is done in your advertiser settings. So you go to advertiser settings.

There is an option in there called audience segments. Now there was a lot of talk about this when it first came out. There was a lot of, you know, go set this up and it’s great. No one really understood it the moment it was released. And a lot of people have set theirs up incorrectly, poorly, or even not at had a couple of clients come to us from other agencies and they’ve been set up horrendously. So the thing with audience segments, and it goes back to the thing I said before around meta will give you what you ask it for. And it’s going to do that in the laziest way possible. So with your audience segments, you are able to define an engaged audience and your existing customers. Now, if you are not clear about an engaged customer versus an existing customer, if there is any overlap wiggle room, meta is going to take that wiggle room and absolutely run with it.

So you’re going to be really, really clear. So for the purpose of this exercise, your engaged audience is anyone that has interacted with your business and not purchased. It’s really, really important that you do not put anything in that audience segment that could contain someone that has purchased from you. So what I mean by that is don’t upload your email list. There are people in your email list who have purchased before. So if you put that in there and go, these people have only ever engaged.

Mendo goes, well, great, I’ll make them buy they’ve already bought from you before. Same with your existing customers. That one’s a little less delicate, I would say, because if you put something in there that’s wrong, Mendo knows it’s your existing customer anyway. So we want to be really, really clear and really specific, and you want to flesh those out as much as possible. So if you have a wholesale list, if you have an offline list of people that have bought from you, if you were on a different platform before you moved to Shopify, make sure you’re adding those people in as well. So we want your existing customer list to be as fleshed out as humanly possible. And the same with your engaged audience list as well. Now I have seen quite a few accounts where the engaged list won’t let you add certain things. It won’t let you add like your Instagram engaged, or it won’t let you add certain things. So just flesh that one out as much as possible.

Now what this does is it says to Metta, this is people that have never bought from me before. These are my engaged audience and this is my existing customers. Now Metta knows what it’s dealing with. Is it still going to do the thing where it’s going to try and get the learning fruit? Absolutely. But now that Metta knows what is what, you will then have control with some of these things I’m going to show you in a second. So it’s really, really important that realistically anyone spending ads make sure you have your audience segments set up. So just to clarify, just in case you got lost, it is in your advertiser settings and that is under audience segments. Really, really important that you get that set up. So once that is done, what you can do, and unfortunately it’s not instant, you will have to come back to this next thing later. But when you are in your ads manager, there is the breakdown tool. Now the breakdown tool is fabulous. It allows you to break down your ads by age, gender, demographic, what platform they’re using. And that’s a really high level analytic tool to allow you to get a further insight into your customers. We’ve been able to save customers lots of money using this. They’re targeting the wrong age bracket. They’re spending too much on certain placements or platforms. It’s a really, really great tool to get yourself familiar with. Or even if you’ve got someone running your ads to see what’s happening. Because oftentimes that’s somewhere that some really quick wins to improve your results can be found. But there is one in there that allows you to use that information we’ve just set up in our audience segments and see where Meta is spending your money in your campaigns, at an ad level, at an audience level, and it is absolutely game changing. When you’re in your ads manager, there is the breakdown tool and under the breakdown tool, there is one called audience segments. Now I do recommend you give this at least a week or two for it to populate.

If you’ve just set up your audience segments for the first time, and then you try and check this tool, it’s not going to have anything of interest in there for you. But what is fascinating is, especially if you are using Advantage Plus or someone’s managing your ads and they’re using Advantage Plus, is the split in which your budget is being spent. Now, we would hope, and I say hope, because in an ideal world, we would hope that your meta ads are spending either proportionately for new customers, engaged and existing, or it’s heavily weighted for new customers, a little bit less on engaged and the least on your existing customers. Unfortunately, that is not the case. It is often the case. It is sometimes the case, but it is one of those things that it is imperative that you keep an eye on and imperative that you check because what does happen is it will spend your entire budget on existing customers. It will spend two thirds of your budget on your engaged audience. And then we wonder why you’re really struggling to grow your business. We wonder why you are struggling to get new customers. We’re wondering why your business is not growing, even though your OAS looks okay. Because at the end of the day, your OAS is always going to look great if your existing customers are buying from your ads.

But a role of asset looks great is not the be all and end all. At the end of the day, we need your business to be growing. We need your business to be profitable. if you’re spending all of your money getting existing customers, eventually your business will die because new customers are the lifeblood of any business. So it’s really, really important that we are prioritizing getting new client acquisition. And this tool allows us to see where that spend is actually going. Because as much as Meta and the quote unquote gurus are telling us to use Advantage Plus and just leave it, just let it run, do its thing, that is not always the best thing for your business. So using this tool allows you to be really, really clear on where that money is going so that you can make adjustments if necessary. So this is where we’ve seen a lot of successful clients that were struggling to get new customers because usually in that scenario, what’s happening?

Is most of their budget is being spent on that sort of bottom end of the funnel. So we used to call it your middle of funnel, your bottom of funnel. We still do. A lot of people are not calling it that anymore because they’re all in the advantage plus world now. But if you are spending all your money on those people, a very, expensive exercise and a very, expensive exercise at not bringing in fresh revenue. So what you’re going to do is you’re going to break that down and see where your money is being spent.

Now, depending on your campaign structure, this is going to look wildly different. If you just have one advantage plus campaign running, you want to have a look at it and make sure that the majority of your budget is going to new customers, a little bit less going to engage, a little bit less going to existing customers. If you have a more complex set up, perhaps you are still running sort of a traditional top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel. Again, your top of funnel, you want most of that budget to go to a cold audience. You will never get a top of funnel ever to completely just spend on new people. I don’t know why it doesn’t matter how many exclusions you add. It is just always going to be, well, we just spend a little bit here. We thought you’d like that. So you can never ever get away from that. But what you can do is just make sure that if you are running a traditional top of funnel, you’ve got exclusions. Is it actually working? Is that money going to a cold audience or not? The only way to know that is if you’ve set up your audience segments and then you use this breakdown tool.

If you’re running an advantage class again, we want to see that split. If you’re running a different combination of things again, you just want to make sure that one as a whole, it’s spending enough on your shopper funnel, middle funnel, bottom funnel, but also in the individual campaigns at the individual ad sets, have a look at what it’s doing from an ad level as well. It is really, really fascinating where Meta decides to spend that budget. Now, if you are here, you’re looking at it and you’re going,

Dana, this is horrendous, it’s spending all my money here. It shouldn’t be doing that. Like I really need new customers. There are some things that you can do. So if you are running a what you want to do is add more exclusions. So if you’re finding that your top of funnel is really going after a warm or existing customer, you want to go in and add more exclusions. So maybe you’ve only got a 30 day purchase exclusion in there.

What you might need to do is flesh that out with some 180 days. You might even want to go as far as excluding like social engaged, web traffic, those sorts of things. So at the end of the day, if your top of funnel is not spending just on a new audience and you want it to, because you’ve got other campaigns, exclusions will be your best friend. Now the challenge is if it’s reversed, if you’re doing your middle of funnel and you’re retargeting and they’re spending more on a new audience than existing, which is very unlikely to happen.

But there’s very little you can do about that because there is no audience for new customer. There is only audience for existing or engaged. But what you can do again is just to flesh those audiences out and say, look, maybe I was targeting a 60 day social engaged. Maybe I’m going to make it 180 day social engaged. Give it a little bit more depth to work with. And you might find that that spend changes. Now I will just say this.

With those audience segments, sometimes just changing the audience segments and making sure that they’re set up right is enough to fix this problem. I will say that again. Sometimes just changing the audience segments is enough to fix this problem. As I said before, Meta is very good at doing exactly what you ask it to. If it does not have the right information, it will make bad decisions. So Meta knows that we want new customers.

Sometimes it will do the right thing. So that client that I spoke about earlier that had the 150 % increase in sales year on year, that was the only thing we did to start. That’s it. And that was enough to drastically improve their business. Did it give them the 150 % increase? Absolutely not. But it made an absolutely massive difference seeing what happens when you actually give Meta the right results. So if you take nothing from this episode, please go fix your audience segments because it does just make such a massive difference to getting new customers and for Meta to know exactly what it is that you’re after. So we’ve gone through setting up your audience segments and we’ve gone through that breakdown tool. So the moral of the story with that breakdown tool is it is a tool for you to assess where that budget is going and for you to make decisions. The challenge is if you don’t know that it’s overspending on a warm audience or a existing audience, you can’t do anything about it. If you know that it’s doing that and you know that you need new customers, you can then start to make decisions. You can start to make changes. if you don’t know about it and it’s just spending and you have no idea, there’s nothing you can do to fix that. So being able to have some control and some visibility over what men is actually doing is just so important and just something so many people don’t look at. So I highly recommend go do those things and just keep an eye on them. Because again, these things can be changed and they can be adjusted. Now, the last thing I will say, if you are really struggling to get new customers is to make sure that you have creative made specifically for acquiring new customers. We get very, very sucked in as advertisers, as business owners for making creative that sells.

Now that sounds like a good thing. Why wouldn’t we want to make creative themselves? we have to remember that on the other side of these ads are human beings. And I do feel that with the rise of AI, the rise in create, with the rise in all of this advantage plus, and the changes in meta, we are forgetting who is at the other end of these ads. This is a real person most likely doom scrolling on their phone after a hard day at work. Or is a distraction from a hard day at work. Or a distraction from their life, whatever’s going on. People are on their phones for entertainment, for connection, for an escape. When they are interacting with your ads, especially for the first time, they’re not gonna buy from you because you said, hi, here’s my product, buy it.

And I feel like that’s how a lot of people approach this. Can you get lucky with an ad like that, especially if it’s going to an existing customer? Absolutely. I’ve bought from ads like that. I’m like, yeah, I was out of that. I’ll click on that. I’ll go buy the thing that I need. Is that going to make me buy from someone from the first time I’ve ever interacted with them? Probably not. It might be if I happen to be exactly looking for that thing at that right moment in time, but people buy for so many different reasons.

And I do think that, especially with this Advantage Plus, where everyone’s, know, adding lots of creative, we’re being told to add lots of creative, it’s really imperative that you make ads specifically for a new customer. That you are including things that are a little bit more interesting, a little bit more entertaining, a little bit more educational. You know, people buy from you because you’re going to solve a problem. They’re going to buy from you because you’re fixing something. You’re going to buy from you because they’re obsessed. They love it. And it’s great.

So some examples of this, a restock sale doesn’t work for a new customer. They don’t really care. I will caveat that and say a restock can sometimes work to give you a little bit of that FOMO of like, it was sold out. It must be good. But generally speaking, it’s not your best bet. Having just a straight up picture of the product. The only time that can work is if you’re like fashion and it’s like, that’s really cute. I want to buy the thing.

But essentially what we’re trying to do here is we’re trying to introduce the customer to your product range in a way that’s a little less hard sell and a little more engaging. It’s showcasing beautiful things. It’s solving problems. It’s using more of your like influencer content, creator content. Your user generated content is fabulous here. It’s hi, I’m a normal person. I love this product. Hi, I’m a normal person.

This is this product that I use that solves this great problem for me. So it’s really important to have a diverse range of content, I think is the moral of this story. You cannot just have a bunch of ads that say, here’s my product, you should buy it. It’s very much around building trust, building that connection, building that community and that relationship with people as to why your product.

Other things that can work really well here are like your guarantees and your testimonials and we’re going to give you like a discount for your first order or if you make a first order we’ll give you this little freebie because we’re so grateful for you to be here. So it really is a mix. There is no one perfect ad for a new customer. People buy wide range of reasons. They’ll buy it because it’s pretty and it’s beautiful and they’re impulse buying it. They’ll buy it because you’ve given them a reason to.

They’ll buy it because they believe other people are buying it, which we all do. It sounds ridiculous, but we do in fact all buy things because we think other people are buying them or because we’re really actively solving a problem. So make sure that when you are building out sort of your creative and you are working out what these ads are going to be, especially in an advantage plus where everything is sort of in that same container that you do have some ads in there that are for your cold audience. You have some ads in there that are a little bit more warm and nurturing and like, hey, you’re having to look around, but obviously we didn’t catch your attention enough. Here’s some reasons why. I think people get really stuck with those retargeting ads and your warm nurture ads and they’re just like, did you forget about this? No one forgot about you. They’ve never forgotten about you. They actively chose not to buy from you. You have to find out why they actively chose not to buy from you and sort of work on those reasons. Very rarely did someone abandon cart because they forgot. Something came up, they decided they didn’t actually need it. There wasn’t enough money in the bank. They found something else. You’ve got to convince people that your product is the solution and that your product is the reason, like your product is worth their money. So be really, really careful when you’re making your creative that you are actually thinking through some you know, marketing psychology and some, some reasonings and a really, really great way to work out why someone is willing to buy your product in the first place is to ask. Yes, you can ask send a little survey. Like what was it that made you decide to give us a try? you know, those personalized emails that people send where it’s all plain text, send one of those, you know, we’re so grateful for your purchase. Like our team celebrating, we’re so glad you decided to trust us just out of curiosity.

What was it? You then use that information to make more ads down the line. There are so many different ways of selling your product, of convincing people that your product is the thing that they need. And the best way that you can get that is to actually get it from your customers themselves. So to recap, we want to set up your audience segments. We want to utilize the breakdown tool and make sure that Meadow is spending your budget in the way that we need to.

And we want to make sure you are actually making creative that does target and appeal to a new customer. I hope this has helped because at the end of the day, new customers are where it’s all at. That’s how businesses grow. That’s how businesses scale. That’s how we can move the needle and really start to build really successful businesses. And these three things can make an absolutely massive difference. So thank you for listening and I look forward to seeing you for the next episode.

Dahna Borg (20:43)

Thank you for listening to the Bright Minds of Ecommerce podcast. As always, you can find the show notes on our website at brightredmarketing.com.au. Just look for the podcast page. Thanks for listening.