Have a small e-commerce ad budget and wondering how to get the best return on your ad spend possible?
If you answered yes, you’re in the right place…
keep reading!
In this case study,
- I’ll walk you through how I achieved a 4x return on ad spend for an e-commerce client using Facebook Ads and Google Adwords.
- I’ll also share 5 major lessons I learned from the whole experience you can take and put into action this week.
Let’s get started…
Goals
Let me start by laying out the goals and challenges of this client project.
Then I’ll get into what I did and the results.
Sound good?
Good.
The goal of this client is probably familiar to most of you who have an e-commerce store or e-commerce client…
They wanted to increase the sales of their physical product using digital marketing.
Thankfully, their product fits a need in the market and solved a very specific pain point for people in the home decor space.
That made things a little easier.
Challenges
There were some challenges that I had to overcome with this client…
1. I had no experience at the time we worked with this client in advertising physical products online.
Sure, I’d learned and studied how to do it…
I had lots of ideas of what I could try
and I had listened to tons of podcasts that talked about e-commerce advertising…
But now it was time to do the work.
It was time to get my hands dirty.
2. The client was not set up to advertise online.
Before hiring our agency, this client grew in two ways…
Organically and by boosting their Facebook page posts.
Which are both good strategies if you’re properly set up for success…
This client was not.
They were shooting from the hip because they didn’t have any way to track or collect data on their website.
They didn’t have a Facebook Pixel or Google Analytics installed…
Which meant that they were spending money without knowing exactly what was converting best
Advertising on Facebook without a Facebook Pixel is like driving a car without a speedometer, you can do it… but it’s not a good idea.
This client also didn’t have foundational advertising pieces in place, like a product catalog.
A product catalog is essential for running paid traffic to an e-commerce store and must be set up (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED).
3. The client didn’t have any e-commerce tracking.
There is this amazing free tool everyone needs to get on their website called Google Analytics.
For those of you who don’t know, it’s a piece of code you put on your website that allows you to see all kinds of information about who visits your website and what they do when they get there.
Super powerful, small thing, you should do right now if you haven’t yet.
Google Analytics also allows you to set up something called Ecommerce Tracking…
Which should be standard for all e-commerce stores.
E-commerce tracking allows you to see how many people buy on your store, how much they spent, where they came from, and so much more…
This client didn’t have any of that.
4. I had never used Squarespace in my life!
This client was using Squarespace to host their store.
I’d built my own e-commerce store before, but that was on Shopify (a platform I highly recommend).
Squarespace was a whole new world for me that I had to take the time to explore and get to know.
I love learning, so I didn’t mind…
But it was challenging when I knew the chips were down and we wanted to produce results.
Strategy
Ah, we finally get to the fun part, right?
What did I do with the goal and all the challenges for this e-commerce client?
Let me show you.
Let’s take this step by step…
Here’s the overview:
- Create ad accounts on Facebook Business Manager and Google Adwords.
- Set up all the tracking codes and product catalogs.
- Use Facebook Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences (more on this below).
- Start a Facebook Video View Campaign.
- Create a Google Branding Campaign.
- Build a Facebook Conversion Campaign.
- Test, Learn, Adjust, Repeat.
Alright, let’s break these down…
1. Creating ad accounts for Facebook and Google.
Because this client didn’t have any Facebook or Google assets before working with us I set them up through our agency management accounts.
For Facebook, I requested admin access to their Facebook page and created a new Facebook Pixel just for them in our Business Manager Account.
For Google, I created an Adwords account for them under our management account.
We also had to create a Google Analytics account for this client because they didn’t have one set up before working with us (major key people!).
Once these accounts were created and set up for the client’s business I moved on to step two…
2. Installing all the tracking codes, pixels, and product catalog.
This step took some time.
I had to learn how the Squarespace platform worked.
I watched videos and read support forums.
Eventually, I got all the codes and the pixel installed correctly so that it was showing actions.
The thing I had the most trouble with is the Purchase conversion event for the Facebook Pixel.
That event is pretty important and it took a while before I got it set up correctly in Squarespace.
After all that, I connected this client’s store feed to Facebook’s Product Catalog tool.
Setting this up allows Facebook to use data about your products from your website to more accurately market those products.
It also allows you to use more product-specific and dynamic types of ads in your campaigns.
Once I knew the catalog was connected and the codes were collecting data I could finally use that data to do some awesome stuff…
3. Creating custom audiences and lookalike audiences.
This is where Facebook really shines as an advertising platform in my opinion.
So, if you’ve never heard of a custom audience or a lookalike audience before let me explain…
A Facebook Custom Audience is kind of like a bucket where you can store pieces of information about a “custom” group of people.
You can make custom audience buckets of your past customers,
of people who visited your website,
and even people who have liked and commented on a post on your Facebook page!
It’s pretty spectacular…
For this client,
I created a custom audience of their current customers,
of people who have engaged with 75% or more of a video on the Facebook page or in an ad,
and of people who visited the website but did not purchase the product.
I also made lookalike audiences using these custom audiences.
A lookalike audience is a group of people who “look like” the people in your custom audience bucket.
So, for example…
I can create a lookalike audience of the current customer list.
Facebook will look at the data I have in the customer bucket and try to find other people on Facebook who are like those customers.
It’s a trade secret on how it all really works, but it does.
And you can imagine how valuable this is…
Now, I can advertise to the people who I know are similar to my client’s current customers,
which means that those people are probably more likely to be interested in what my client sells.
BOOM!
This is so powerful!
So for this client, I created lookalike audiences for their current customers and for people who engaged with 75% or more of a video.
Once I had the custom and lookalike buckets set up, I was ready to fill them with people (aka data).
4. Creating a Facebook video view campaign.
When you run Facebook Ads and are setting up a new campaign, you have a few options for the objective of that campaign.
Take a look…
Some campaign objectives come with specific features…
For example, The Lead generation objective allows you to use something called a Lead Ad…
Which looks like a normal ad, but when people click it, a form appears with their information pre-filled…making it super seamless for them to opt-in and give us their information.
Pretty cool right?
I won’t get into what makes each campaign objective unique in this post.
For now, all you need to know is that I chose to create a video view objective campaign…because we created amazing videos for the client and I wanted to use them to build our custom engagement audiences.
I chose to show these video ads to people who “looked like” past customers…
And who also fit into certain interest and demographic criteria that we thought would resonate with the message of the videos.
These video ads accomplished a couple of things…
One, they “warmed up” the customer lookalike audiences (which means they introduced the brand and the product to the audience).
And two, they grew our custom video engagement audience bucket.
This was awesome because this bucket was filled with people who had watched most of our video and now knew who the brand was.
We knew that they were highly engaged and likely interested in seeing more ads and buying the product.
I let these video ads run continuously and used them as the foundation for what I did next…
5. Creating a Google branding campaign
At this point, I knew people were being introduced to the brand and the product on Facebook…
Which is great, but…
What’s the first thing we do when we want to learn more about something?
We Google it, right?
I wanted to make sure that the client was showing up in the top spot on Google and capturing all those searches for their brand.
So I created what’s called a branding campaign on Google Adwords.
Basically, It’s a search campaign that only targets keywords that include the brand name in it.
This means that if someone saw my Facebook video ad and then went to Google to search the name of the brand they’d see my Google Search ad right at the top… greeting them with a big fat smile and a nice firm handshake…
Okay, not really but you get the picture! 🙂
A branding campaign is an inexpensive but effective way to capture traffic that might otherwise be lost to your competitors.
It’s inexpensive because you only pay when someone clicks your ad.
And it’s effective because it helps with legitimacy and credibility in the audience’s eyes… when people see your brand pop up at the top of Google they’ll feel like you’re everywhere.
It increases trust, which increases brand value and ultimately, revenue.
6. Creating a Facebook conversion campaign
Now, we had a video campaign building up a custom audience on Facebook and a branding campaign capturing search traffic on Google.
The next piece of the system was a Facebook conversion campaign.
For this campaign, I set up ads that targeted people…
- in the customer lookalike audience,
- in the video view engagement audience and,
- who had visited the website but did not purchase.
Each ad was customized to a specific audience.
I had Facebook optimize for website purchase conversions…
Which means that over time Facebook would try and show my ad to people in my audience who would be most likely to purchase.
Facebook is smart and wants to create a good experience for us advertisers and the end-user so they do their best to only show ads that are interesting and relevant to people.
7. Testing, learning, and adjusting.
Over time I’d adjust the budgets and turn off things that didn’t work.
At one point, we even tried to run some YouTube pre-roll ads…
And we learned they were great for branding.
I mean we were getting views for $0.01, which is fantastic in the paid traffic world.
But those YouTube views weren’t turning to sales, so we had to turn off the ads.
I’m not saying YouTube Ads don’t work…
We just didn’t have the right videos and strategy in place to make the tactic work for this client.
The best performing ad was an image carousel ad on Facebook.
It gave a simple description of the benefits of using the product…
and then let the viewer scroll through to the size of the product they wanted.
This type of ad is very interactive and I think we really used it well for this client.
Results
Alright, Let’s talk about some results!
After all this work, here’s what happened…
2.7x ROAS on Facebook
In the span of 1 week, we generated 19 total purchases across two variations of a purchase conversion ad. We spent $265.05 and generated $716.37 in revenue for the company.
Not too bad, huh?
But wait, there’s more!
Remember that branding campaign I set up to capture Google search traffic?
Check this out…
7.38x ROAS on Google Adwords
In the span of that same week, we secured 30 purchases from people who were searching for the brand online. We spent $127 and generated $936.26 in extra revenue!
BOOM!
The success of the branding campaign on Google is why it’s important to have a more holistic approach to paid traffic.
Altogether, in that week, we spent $392.05 to generate $1,652.63 in revenue for the company. A sweet return on ad spends of 4.2x.
Lessons
What should you take from all this?
Here are some ideas…
Make sure the Facebook pixel is properly set up for Facebook and Google.
This was a big lesson. For a while, we were spending money and not seeing any results in the ads manager. It was because I didn’t set up the Pixel properly on Squarespace!
Make sure your product catalogs are ready to rock.
This was a learning process for me because before this client I had no idea that you had to set up a product catalog to run the product carousel ads. Those ads turned out to be very useful in getting results that we did.
Set up a branding campaign.
This was a vital step in the process. You need to be capturing the traffic from people who search for your brand. If your website is not ranking high organically and your spending money to sell a product, you need to set up a branding campaign on Google this week.
YouTube Video Views are good for scale but you need a strategy.
We tried YouTube videos for this client and all we got were inexpensive views. If you are going to use YouTube for video make sure you have a strategy in place and are creating videos relevant to your product and the target audience.
Have a great product.
I’m very fortunate that this client had a product that worked and that people really loved. Having a great product and a great offer is the foundation of success in the world of paid marketing. You could get everything else right, but if your offer sucks you won’t be successful.
Conclusion
Thank you for reading this case study!
I hope you got a lot out of it!
Please learn from my lessons and go out and have your own success!
If you are someone who has just read this and you’re thinking, “Okay this is all great, Peter. But I don’t have time to do all this stuff. I need help or I just need someone to do it for me”.
In the humble words of Sam, the Onion Man from the 2003 live-action Disney hit, Holes…
I can fix that.
Feel free to send me a message and I’ll be happy to answer any questions and see how I may be able to help you out!
Okay, That’s all for this post!
I’ll see you in the next one,
Happy Scaling!
– Peter.