Peter Carter has spent millions of dollars on Facebook Ads. In this interview, he shares with us his best strategies to scale ecommerce stores using what he’s learnt over the years.
Q: Pete, let's start with the basics. I'm new to Facebook Ads for e-commerce. Where do I start if I want to acquire customers?
First off, get your messaging and creatives prepared - these are the lifeblood of high-performing campaigns and you need to test things. If you're already up and running with your business and making sales, I always go after the low hanging fruit first and work backwards, up the funnel. So I'd first look at any existing customers we can re-sell to by using pixel-based custom audiences, push segments through from Klaviyo and export your customers from your ecommerce platform as a custom audience.
I would then look at retargeting customers who haven't purchased but have been visiting the store based on their behaviour (viewed/added to cart etc), product by product, and with DPA ads, drilling in to different time frames with different messaging and offers.
I then look at the warm custom audiences, people who have had a touchpoint with the brand - engaged with us on Facebook or Instagram in the last 365 days, watched our videos etc. and serve them some different creatives with different messaging.
Lastly, I go after cold audiences, usually starting with lookalikes of purchasers, value-based pixel events, people who have performed an action twice like added to cart > 2 in the last 30 days and then get everything singing together, nice and organised, knowing exactly what's going on at each funnel stage.
If you're brand new and don't have any data, some well targeted interest-based campaigns with some proper research into brands, magazines, celebrities etc. in the niche. with testing focusing on the right metrics is where I would start.
Q: Which metrics are the most important to focus on for successful Facebook Ads?
On Facebook it's good to understand how the ad and ad set level are performing by checking the CPC and the CTR (this gives an indication of how interested people are to leave Facebook and how much the messaging has resonated with them). Also keeping an eye on the impressions gives an idea of how many people are seeing our ads and how the KPI's (add to carts, purchases) relate to that number. For events happening in our store, we focus on the usual stuff - cost per Add To Cart, Cost Per Purchase, ROAS (the thing everyone goes on about).
There are other things too, but these are a few of the key ones I look at to make decisions across ad set and ad level.
Q: Are there any trends you've noticed or best practices in terms of creatives?
I've seen UGC with good branding over the video leveraging testimonials, main features and benefits of the product, amount of customers etc. in 15 second format (so Facebook can put it in many different places) absolutely killing it across multiple 7 figures of spend lately. In this niche (skincare), this style is outperforming expensive, professional shoots with models - literally filmed on an iPhone then edited by our creative company we use.
Organic looking creatives fit nicely into the newsfeed on Facebook and Instagram and people are more susceptible to pay attention as it doesn't look polished and feel like an advert. The 'Learn More' (soft call to action) is currently outperforming Shop Now for myself and others so these small nudges rather than a 'Shop Now' commitment on the cold level have been working well!
Q: Share a basic Facebook marketing funnel with us in under 5 sentences.
Ads > Pre-sell page > Product Page > Checkout > Upsell and then back to the start, re-selling to existing customers when the time is right. If you can nail that, then you're well on your way by maximising the AOV through the purchase process then focusing on LTV with existing customer ads.
Q: You've told us that even the busiest e-commerce entrepreneur can get their ads management under control in just 30 minutes per day. How so?
Because you can schedule ads ahead of time, it's good to sit down for one day of the week, turn everything off and just focus on scheduling campaigns for the week ahead and really get in the zone. You can do that in a few hours - then, when you follow the right metrics and understand how things work, it can be fast to make decisions. When things are working well, I don't touch them at all for days at a time!
Q: What's the best way for somebody to connect with you to learn more?
I've recorded a free case study showing how I've helped brands go from $17k/month > $500k+ per month in 4 months.
Watch it here: https://rainycityconsulting.com/case-study
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