Introduction: The More Frequent the Ads, the More Frequent the Sales

We’ve mentioned in previous posts that customers online need to see your ads multiple times before there are convinced your products are the solution to their problems.  We’ve referenced the number “7” in previous articles for the number of times a customer notices your ads before seriously considering buying and boosting your sales.

Where does the “rule of 7” come from in marketing??  Is it true?  How does it apply to ecommerce?

This post explores the significance of the “Rules of 7” and how it can be applied to drive traffic to your store, increase your sales, and offer a clearer framework for your marketing strategy!

“Rule of 7” – Half-Myth, Half-Truth

For history buffs, it’s interesting to note that the “rule of 7” came from 1930s Hollywood movie execs.  Their marketing research showed moviegoers, on average, needed to see a movie poster 7 times before buying tickets. 

So, while the “rule of 7” holds weight in that regard, online shopping and ecommerce are a far different animal from 1930s America!  Customer tastes have changed, the medium of advertising has changed, and so effective promotional methods have evolved, as well.

At the same time, the concept that customers usually need multiple exposures to your ads before purchasing is undeniably true.  The more times potential customers see your ads, the more likely they are to buy from your store, on average.  This could mean seeing a mobile ad, Facebook ad, and your inclusion on the Google search engine – or some other combination of media exposure.  Regardless, it’s best to picture that your ads become part of the “mental steps” a customer takes when picking what to purchase.

Overall, the “rule of 3s” may apply better to the Internet age.  After three or more exposures to your advertisements, customers become acutely aware of your brand, and the majority begin considering your products a viable solution to their problems.  Increased sales will follow!

Standing Out in a Flood of Information

The difficulty of the ecommerce ecosystem is how customers are flooded with ads and information constantly.  this flood of information means your name and brand needs to pop up multiple times, ideally in varying formats, before the customer begins to consider your products as a viable solution to their problem. 

To maximize the results of your marketing campaign, you cannot just put the same ads in the same place over and over.  Depending on customer, you need to communicate in different mediums with different approaches.  For example, maybe you start with a Facebook informational ad campaign, collecting some user emails through retargeting software.  You use the data collected from the first ad campaign to specifically retarget the customer with a different ad that more directly responds to their interests.  Finally, you send the customer an email with a special “first time user” deal.  After that, you hopefully have pushed the customer along the sales funnel to the point they regularly visit your site for good deals.  Over time, you become a regular step in their “mental process” for buying new products.

The “Rule of 7” Re-Enforces the Importance of Ad Retargeting

We have spoken a lot about ad retargeting here at Ad360 – and for good reason. It is mind-boggling the number of good companies, selling great products, that shoot themselves in the foot by not taking advantage of retargeting.  After one view, chances are the customer totally forgets the name of your business… but the captured data doesn’t forget!  From there, you can continue to fine-tune your message, catering to the user at each step of their mental process until they feel comfortable making a purchase from your site.

Conclusion: Tailoring your Ads to Respect the “Rule of 7”

Switching up your ad banners and promotional outreach at every step of the customer’s mental process can be difficult by yourself.  One false move, and they may jump off the wagon, ignoring your future customer outreach efforts.

If you feel you could use some support staying on track with your customers until they finally purchase from your store, try a free demo by Ad360 today!  We provide best-in-class ad retargeting services, empowering your business to boost sales through media exposure across all devices,  social media, and  search engine.  Your customers will be impressed with the variety of outreach, and you can control every campaign under one roof – Ad360. 😊

Introduction: A Dollar Spent, 10 Dollars Earned

Return on Ads Spent (ROAS) is a key metric for companies advertising online.  Businesses may have budgets of different sizes, but many of the core elements of running the campaign remain the same.

Successfully setting a daily Facebook ad budget, testing different ad sets, and engaging the target audience multiple times are all key to growing your Shopify sales.  A little marketing planning can go a long way here, so make sure to have a blueprint in place before you begin!

Setting a Daily Budget

First off, Facebook ads provides an option of setting a “daily” or “lifetime” budget – we’d opt for the daily budget while starting out.  It provides a chance for more flexibility as the promotional campaign developers.

An amazing feature of Facebook ads is that Shopify businesses do not have to “break the bank” to reach their audience – even $10/day is enough to have your ads be sent out across the 2.7 billion Facebook users!  If you consider yourself a “Small-to-Medium” sized store at the moment, aim for a daily budget between $10-30.  Your ads will be seen, and the data collected from their performance metrics will be invaluable in how you further develop the campaign.

Test Ad Sets before scaling up

When framing your Facebook ad campaign, remember it’s not just one ad banner you are sending out your entire audience!  Remember from our post on Facebook custom audiences that effective Facebook ad campaigns segment their audiences based on key factors (e.g. – demographics, location, interest).  For each custom Facebook audience, you likely will roll out a different “ad set.” 

Each ad set is specifically targeted to one of your custom audiences, and from there, you can try different versions of the ad as a form of A/B testing.  For example, you may have three ad sets prepped for three distinct custom audiences.  Within each ad set, you roll out two versions to see which one better drives engagement and boost traffic to your store!

Better to Reach an Audience of 100 10 times than 100,000 people Once

Finally, please note it’s better to concentrate your ad sets to smaller audiences you can reach multiple times, rather than blasting out a single ad to larger audiences.  Marketing research has shown that customers need to see your ads 7-8 times before they consider purchasing something from your store. 

Thus, it’s more efficient to have a small audience you show multiple ads to rather than a broad audience who briefly see your ads only once.  Facebook ads breaks up these factors into awareness, consideration, and conversion.  You may have also heard of concepts such as AIDA (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action) that conceptualize how customers are funneled to drive sales to your store. As you scale up your ads, remember the average customer needs exposure to your store’s promotion multiple times.  Otherwise, your ROAS will suffer.

Conclusion: Who can Help Analyze my Facebook Ad Data?

After running a Facebook ad campaign, setting a daily budget, and releasing your various ad sets, it can feel confusing how to make sense of the data collected – that’s where Ad360 steps in!  We specialize in analyzing your customer data and subsequently optimizing future campaigns.  Better ads mean more sales, so please reach out to try a free demo by Ad360 today!

Custom Audiences = Complexity Explosion

In our previous article reviewing the basics of Facebook Ads, we touched on the importance of building custom audiences with Facebook’s features. 

Age, gender, location, and Interests can all be modified for custom audiences… and… well… the sheer number of combinations that can be made from these factors alone is remarkably complex.  Even the term for its growing sophistication takes your head for a spin… combinatorial explosions.  Sheesh. 

But no worries – this blog post takes a deeper dive into the complexity that comes with building multi-factor custom audiences on Facebook.  While each essential for succeeding with a modest marketing budget on Facebook, so all Shopify business owners, take out a piece of paper and #2 pencil!  This analysis goes “all in” on the complexity of creating custom audiences for Facebook

Why Are Custom Audiences So Important for Facebook Ads?

The first point to note:  you need to build multiple custom audience combinations for marketing success on Facebook.  It’s a response to the sea of 2 billion users out there, being exposed to ad banner after ad banner as they scroll down their news feed. 

Think of it like this – if you had the time and resources to create a unique, tailor-made ad for each individual customer, sales would increase infinitely. So long as the data-gathering methods are clearly stated, consumers vastly prefer customized ads to overly generalized ones. Because you can create up to 500 custom audiences on Meta, we suggest taking full advantage of that by creating more custom audiences, not less.

Now, here’s where the concept of “combinatorial explosions” comes in – curating an individual ad for anything over a few customers is impossible.  That would mean creating a “custom audience” of one, potentially thousands of times over.  What if you are trying to reach a customer base of 50,000?

The Basics of Building Custom Facebook Audiences

After clicking “custom audience” on Facebook ad’s interface, there are four broad categories you can break the “audience factors” into:

Data source

Helps you target potential customers based on how they have engaged with your online store so far.  Have they visited the site already?  Specific web pages?  Have they spent a substantial amount of time browsing?  And are you pulling from web traffic, Facebook page engagement, Instagram, or some other data source?  Remember, these customers may be in varying stages of the “AIDA” framework (awareness, Interest, Desire, Action).  Therefore, breaking down your custom audience by analyzing their story through data points will inform how to further engage them to increase sales.

Demographics

Pretty straightforward – are you aiming for male, female, or nonbinary audiences?  What age brackets?  For example, if you are selling cheap vintage tees with a female cut, you are likely targeting women ages 16-35.  Overall, demographics are a key component of creating effective custom audiences that drive sales.

Location

Aiming to reach the entire USA is far more costly than trying to reach a single state or region.  So, make sure to tinker with different location settings based on your customer data.  If you cast too broad a net, you’ll dilute the ability to keep engaging with that customer base; it will become too cost-prohibitive.

Interests

This is where things get interesting.  Stacking and layering interests is key to creating target audiences.  As you narrow down and tailor each custom audience, you can add interests that create a fuller picture of the users you are trying to reach.  Most importantly, focus on the fact you can target individuals with “Interest A or Interest B,” as well as, “Interest A and also Interest B.”  Both serve very different functions, as explained below!

“Stacking” or “Layering Interests” – Be Specific as Possible to Increase Ad Effectiveness

Specificity is crucial to have your ads compete with larger-budget businesses.  For example, you could adjust the settings to advertise only to males 18-34 on the East Coast who have an expressed interest in sports or sports apparel

Even more, you can “stack” or “layer” interests to bring laser-precision to your custom audiences.  Using the example above, interest stacking could set an audience that shows ads only to males 18-34 on the East Coast, who have an expressed interest in sports/sports apparel or have liked the official NBA, NFL, MLB, or NHL Facebook pages!

In contrast to “stacking,” interest layering more effectively narrows down your target audience. You could set an audience that shows ads only to males 18-34 on the East Coast, who have an expressed interest in sports/sports apparel and also have liked the official NBA, NFL, MLB, or NHL Facebook pages!  Effectively “layering” interests for your custom audiences mean each ad creative will be tailor-made for different segments of your audience.  The more layers, the more precise the audience.  You can also exclude certain segments of these audiences to make the ad campaign’s target outreach even more efficient

Depending on the size of your business, the “sweet spot” may be anywhere from 50,000 to 1 million+  Just remember… the budget goes up the larger audience you have!  On modest marketing budgets, it’s better to reach an audience of 1,000 with multiple ads to drive engagement, rather than reach an audience of 100,000 just once.  The latter will be breezed over by users, driving no traffic nor sales to your store.

Conclusion: Deal Better with the Complexity of Custom Audiences thanks to Automated Software

Figuring out which custom audiences to create, based on which data sources, demographics, locations, and interests, becomes an exercise in compounding complexity.  There are hypothetically hundreds to thousands of effective custom audience combinations for your store, and knowing which ones optimize your store for sales success is a full time job, if even possible.

Therefore, we recommend deploying automated software provided by Ad360 to bring laser-precision to your custom audience curation for Faceboook Ads.  Not only do we specialize in analyzing user data for promotional campaigns, the time saved going through it yourself will be a massive burden lifted from your shoulders. 

Concluding, Ad360 offers a free demo to help optimize your Faceboook ads and custom audience curation. We’ll handle the complexity of combinatorial explosions for you 😊  Cheers, and happy selling!

Simple, Bold Strategies to Boost Sales with Facebook Ads

Introduction – Reach a Sea of Two Billion

While Gen Z may complain that Facebook is “lame” now, or “Meta” as we should be calling now, that is far from the truth when it comes to using Facebook Ad campaigns.  2 billion users is nothing to scoff at, and Facebook has built a remarkable ad platform to help Shopify business owners reach a wider target audience.

This blog post examines how Facebook ads are unique from Google Ads, as well as how targeting potential customers based on interests – rather than preferred keywords – could be the keystone to increasing your sales!

The Basics: Account Setup & Goals

First things first, you need a Facebook business account set up with an ad account in place.  Once you have Pixel (Facebook’s answer to Google Analytics) activated, connect your Shopify store!  You can do so by downloading the “Connect Meta” app on Shopify.

Next up, pick the “goal” of your ad.  If you were in the military, this would act as the primary objective – we’d recommend starting with “boosting traffic” or “conversions” to start, but Meta lists 11 different objectives here.  Depending on where you feel your target customers are in the “sales funnel,” you may want to simply bring awareness, get views, generate leads, or drive engagement.

Target Audiences: Time to Pick your Lane

Perhaps the most important decision for any ad campaign is designating your target audience.  Facebook allows you to segment customers into the following classifications:

1. Age

Self-explanatory.  Are you targeting the Gen Z or old folks?  Picking a specific age demographic usually helps your ad campaigns effectiveness and efficiency in driving sales.

2. Location

Again, straight-forward.  You can narrow down what region of the world you are placing your ads.  With Ad360’s software supporting your Facebook ad campaign, you can narrow down the search to a single city block!

3. Interests

This is where Facebook Ads can differ significantly in their function from Google ads.  Because Facebook collects profile data on all 2 billion+ users, setting customer interests can focus on their hobbies, interest categories, page likes, searchable keywords, Facebook usage, or online buying history. 

Pick hobbies listed on the Facebook Ad dashboard that align with your product (e.g. – a basketball player is targeted with Nike shoes ad).  Interests listed in their “Information about me” (e.g. – a fashion lover is targeted by a vintage clothing site) can also be important to consider when optimizing your ad placements for maximum sales growth!

“Stacking” or “Layering Interests” – Get as Specific as Possible to Increase Ad Effectiveness

Specificity is crucial to have your ads compete with larger-budget businesses.  For example, you could adjust the settings to advertise only to males 18-34 on the East Coast who have an expressed interest in sports or sports apparel

Even more, you can “stack” or “layer” interests to bring laser-precision to your custom audiences.  Using the example above, interest stacking could set an audience that shows ads only to males 18-34 on the East Coast, who have an expressed interest in sports/sports apparel or have liked the official NBA, NFL, MLB, or NHL Facebook pages!

Interest Layering more effectively narrows down your target audience; it could set an audience that shows ads only to males 18-34 on the East Coast, who have an expressed interest in sports/sports apparel and also have liked the official NBA, NFL, MLB, or NHL Facebook pages! 

In short, effectively “layering” interests for your custom audiences mean each ad creative will be tailor-made for different segments of your audience.  The more layers, the more precise the audience.  You can also exclude certain segments of these audiences to make the ad campaign’s target outreach even more efficient.

Conclusion: What to Do if Facebook Ads Feels Too Technical or Overwhelming

In conclusion, there are a lot of moving variables that factor into your Facebook ad campaigns.  Straddling this granular level of detail over several social media platforms can definitely make your head spin.  If you feel you could use some support analyzing and bringing all your different ad channels under one roof, reach out for a free demo by Ad360 today!  We’ll make it our mission to optimize your next Facebook ad campaign for success 😊