I wasted my money on the first dropshipping campaign. Luckily I had a website with SEO traffic which gave some free money for experiments. The first fail made me to rethink my strategy going blindly and monitoring competitors helped me incredibly. I found a lot of advertising posts with dozens, thousands of likes, and comments. I was crazy.
573K Shares | 103K Comments | 35M Views
Just imagine – 103K comments. Don’t believe, check this out. You can find even more viral ads on my post.
How is it possible to get all these comments? I was searching for answers. One of my findings was, there might be a connection between the number of comments and the profitability of ads. The more comments, the more money was invested in there, the more money was paid out in return.
I realized that many of the comments were made not by the Americans, but mainly by people from countries such as the Philippines, Vietnam, Nigeria, etc. I didn’t quite understand this scheme and found a hint in specialized groups on Facebook.
Preparation before the launch
There are several types of advertising campaigns on Facebook. Each of them has its own tasks. The Facebook algorithm knows the differences between them and works differently for each scenario:
- Engagement targets and adjusts advertising to those people who are more likely to interact with the post (like, comment, share, watch the video). But these people do not follow links to the site and don’t buy usually for some reason.
- Website Clicks/Landing Page Views campaigns are shown to those people who are more likely to go to the website, get acquainted with what is written there, but these people are not always ready to perform the targeted action (registration, subscription, purchase, etc.)
- Website Conversions
Facebook shows ads to those who are more likely to convert on a site – buyers. The site must be installed and configured using a Facebook pixel and its’ standard events.
The pixel sends signals to the Facebook Delivery Sistem on behalf of your website – events. The events help Facebook to optimize advertising campaigns and eventually studies your customers, show ads to those who are more likely to be your targeted audience, who will buy your product and help you get more conversions at a lower price.
A “website conversions” campaign sounds very attractive, but no matter how smart the Facebook pixel is and how great your ads are, people are not in a hurry to buy products seen on advertising that has 10 likes and no comments in the comment section. People love what everyone else wants. It works like a queue: as soon as several people come to the same place, all passing ones begin to stop and also wonder what is there.
So, a few steps on how to make people buy from your Facebook ad:
- Create A Post On The Page.
The post is good that you can publish any picture there: horizontal, square, and even vertical. Also, in the post, you can write the text of any length. There are no restrictions, just ensure that the text in the picture does not exceed 20%. Previously, Facebook rejected ads in which more than 20% of the text now skips, but reduces coverage. A tool that helps to check the image for suitability is the https://www.facebook.com/ads/tools/text_overlay. This post will be used as an advertisement.
- Likes.
We launch an advertising campaign optimized for “Engagement” and select countries such as Nigeria and the Philippines as target countries. You can try others, but these work best for me. Firstly, advertising in these countries is incredibly cheap and secondly, the population of these countries speaks excellent English.
I visited user-profiles and was shocked by the fact that, for example, in Nigeria, almost all posts of people were written in perfect English with American turnovers. In the Philippines, some people write in Filipino, but they often immigrate to different countries, and most also have English language posts. For $10 I usually get 1000-1500 likes posts. Here are the results of one of the advertising campaigns.
Before launching in the Philippines and Nigeria, I tried to launch the “Post Engagement” campaign in the States, but after spending $50, I was not even close to the results shown in the screenshot. Approximately it gave us 300-400 likes.
- Comments to Posts.
Don’t hesitate to leave the firs comment and ask your friends/colleagues to do so. We note each other in the comments to the posts. The highest level is to post real product shots in comments.
Many do not dare to leave the first comment and when they see that someone has commented, they started to notice each other more actively and leave comments. The Crowd psychology – it works, use it for your success. This is another try to investigate the impact of Facebook comments.
After we have scored the right amount of likes and comments, we stop advertising in the Philippines and Nigeria, and we launch advertising optimized for “Website Conversions”.
I believe that you have prepared high-quality photos, designs, and landing pages for launching advertising. Your high-quality product, which you are sure you would use.
- Website conversions.
We choose to optimize for the goal of interest to us (Website conversions, Add-to-cart, Registration) and look at the conversions. I used to teste several different targeting (1 interest-type per ad group) and relocate the daily budget to those groups that bring better ROI.
Summary
I launched about 10 different products. Some were better, some worse. I was profitable on average.
In any case, we must understand that the advertising campaign will not work well forever. Facebook Pixel looks at your targeting and selects the best from it, those who are more likely to convert. People are converting, but they are not infinite and over time your cost per conversion starting to rise. You have to start everything over again and make it all over again.
I did not manage to get the same results more than once. Once I’ve got a cost per conversion two times lower than the previous best price, but after 2 months it also became more expensive.
Most importantly, never give up if the first ad campaigns don’t work for you.
You may get lucky, and the first effort will be ROI positive for you. But, you have to be ready to waste your money trying, correcting your mistakes, and fine-tuning your own path.
I was unprofitable for a long time, but later on several advertising campaigns have paid off for all the previous losses.