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Scaling an Ad Account to $17,000 / Day While Reducing CPA by 25% for a Coffee Company

DimNiko Marketing | Scaling an Ad Account to $17,000 / Day While Reducing CPA by 25% for a Coffee Company

Today, I wanna share something crazy.

It’s the results from a campaign we ran for one of our premium agency clients, Vitacup.

Vitacup is a company from San Diego, California that make vitamin and superfood infused coffee and tea products.

They were on a mission to grow their company… but they were stuck.

Vitacup were past 7 figures in revenue, but their cost to make a sale was well over $50 and super inconsistent.

Worst of all, they were burning through investor cash fast… with a 3 month payback period on LTV (lifetime value of a customer).

From an ad perspective… they were having issues scaling their account.

The goal was to keep their CPA (cost per acquisition of a customer) under $50 and scale to $140,000 / month.

So – before we started – we did an audit of the account to get clear on the best strategy moving forward… and there was 4 key issues:

The client had way too many different offers & landing pages running at the same time.

It was virtually impossible to know which was working.

As we all know… 80% of sales come from 20% of your marketing efforts – but we didn’t know which 20%.

The conversion value wasn’t set… so the ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) data was irrelevant – making it impossible to optimise.

Next to no lookalike audiences were used… only interest targeting.

Rules were not used in the ad account to optimise the campaigns… and overall – the account lacked structure.

Oh and here’s the crazy part:

Over 400 campaigns were uploaded in the previous month alone.

This was a recurring pattern, where 50 campaigns would be uploaded every few days to try and stop campaigns from dying off.

As you can imagine… that’s a lot of work, it’s super annoying, and most of all… it’s not necessary to get great results.

Now – just to be clear:

This is absolutely no shot at whoever had run this account before… 

It was simply the situation we were in.

We identified the quick wins we could see to help Vitacup dominate and scale as quickly as possible.

Here’s what happened next:

We created 2 landing pages with clear offers and prepared to only run ads to those.

Based on the historical performance of the account, we created a clear & coherent structure for the campaigns to follow.

Here’s what it looked like:

We launched high budget CBO (campaign budget optimisation) campaigns.

Inside them, we used dynamic creatives, so we could test multiple ad images, videos, and versions of ad copy at once.

Spend was at $800 – $1000 / day per campaign with 10 adsets each inside them.

We put the best performing audiences from the past in the adsets… and included Lookalike audiences throughout.

Madgicx was harnessed so we could find new audience pools to further optimise the CPA.

Now – why did we do these things here?

Well firstly, we wanted to cover off a common mistake people make when it comes to scaling ads.

So many media buyers, and companies, struggle with scaling their campaigns.

But one of the easiest ways to scale is simply start your campaigns at a higher budget.

Sounds way too easy – but trust me, it works.

By starting our campaigns at higher budgets, and combining the best audiences and creatives, we were able to reach the 50 conversion per day threshold fast… which stabilised delivery.

Dynamic ad creatives helped with avoiding ad fatigue.

Plus – with the bigger pool of audiences we now had, the ads weren’t fatiguing nearly as fast.

Through the first month of working with Vitacup:

We increased the ad spend by 60%, and reduced the CPA to $33 using rules inside the account.

As we scaled the account – we were able to quickly learn the ad account specific signals.

This helped us know how many conversions to expect each day – so we could set up rules based on how the account performed each day.

For example:

On any given day, if the CPA was under $55 by 8am – we knew we’d have a great day and would scale the account that day.

If it looked bad initially, we would slow the spend and reset it at midnight.

As mentioned, when starting the account, we were spending $800 – $1000 / day.

As results started coming in below KPI, we scaled.

From $2k per day, to $5k and over $9k per day regularly, just using automated rules.

In the second month with Vitacup, we doubled the adspend and kept the CPA around $44.

On the biggest day of spend throughout the campaign, we spent $17,000 at a $39 CPA.

Now, whilst this all sounds great – here’s the truth:

This wasn’t easy.

It’s not as simple as getting all your best audiences and creatives and just launching CBO’s at $1000 / day.

You need to deeply understand your customer.

Know the best ad account structure for your niche and offer.

You must have a proven offer that converts.

And you need to know what campaign structure will work best for your application.

When you nail these 4 things (plus tons more)… you can do amazing things.

Now, if you’re reading this…

And you’d like your company to be the next EPOCH success story – listen up:

We’re currently looking for just 2 new clients to take on this month. 

We have a strict criteria for the clients we work with. 

If you fit this, we will scale your company using Facebook & Instagram advertising, to dramatically grow your revenue and create similar results.

If you’re interested in working with us, click here and schedule a call today.

>> https://dimniko.com/msp-apply 

Do not hesitate. These positions will fill up fast.

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Why Your ROAS Going Down While Scaling Can Be More Profitable

DimNiko Marketing | Why Your ROAS Going Down While Scaling Can Be More Profitable

Hey!

I had a call this week with a food company that was hitting a 7x ROAS, which for them was extremely profitable as their breakeven ROAS was just over 2x.

They were doing about $170K in monthly revenue and his problem was ‘SCALING’.

Read More: How We Improved Our Client’s ROAS Using Story Ads

He mentioned to me, “I don’t want my ROAS to go below 5x as I scale up the ad spend and it does that everytime I increase ad spend”

I understand where he is coming from. We spend more on ads we want our ROAS to maintain or improve but that is very rarely the case with most brands.

BUT….

Even with a lower ROAS your brand can be more profitable.

You might think that sounds a little whack but hear me out.

This business owner I was speaking with was spending about $500 a day on Facebook ads with a 7x ROAS. 

I explained to him that even if your ROAS drops to 5x or 4x when you increase the spend you will increase your revenue, your number of customers and your overall profit.

Let’s say he increases his ad spend to $1,000 a day and the ROAS drops to 5x, his daily revenue is now $5,000 instead of the $3,500.

A $1,500 increase in your revenue, with a $500 increase in costs and a reduction in ROAS.

Let’s expand this further to scale.

Let’s say he is spending $5,000 a day and the ROAS drops to 3x.

He would be making $15,000 a day, ad costs would be $5,000 and there has been a significant increase in customers.

Brand owners need to understand that volume of customers is more important to profit vs profit per customer.

For example: You could acquire 1x customer with a $20 profit per customer and total profit would be $20 

OR

You can acquire 100 customers with $10 profit per customer and the total profit would be $1,000.

Even though you are making less profit per customer, because you are acquiring a higher volume of customers you make more profit overall.

I haven’t even mentioned the fact that because you have more customers now you will get more repeat business and overall profit will grow even more on the backend.

In summary, don’t be scared if the ROAS goes down when you scale and understand volume of customers is more important than profit per customer.

Now that you fully understand this concept it is important to note, it is not easy to scale to $5K or $10K a day in ad spend. 

That is why our clients choose to work with us because we have significant experience scaling brands to these levels and beyond.

If you want to have a chat with us to see if we can help you, book a call below: https://dimniko.com/msp-apply

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Squeezing Revenue Out of Q2 eCom Holidays

DimNiko Marketing | Squeezing Revenue Out of Q2 eCom Holidays

Hello everyone,

Q2 has just started!

And let’s be honest, it might not seem as exciting as Q4 or even Q1.. 

But the truth is, there are plenty of opportunities to increase your sales over the months of April, May and June.

Read More: How I Scaled Pinterest Ads From 0 to 300k in Revenue in Less Than 3 Weeks – Part 2

Let’s go over some of the main holidays that are happening over the next quarter and how you can take advantage of them:

The major holiday during this period is probably Easter. Dates vary every year depending on the paschal full moon.

However, it is celebrated around the month of April.

This year, it just passed last week. 

Easter is not known as a big gift-giving type of celebration, but more and more businesses use this event to promote special offers or bundles.

You can push an “Easter basket” bundle offer or even create your own “Find the egg” promo.

It depends on the type of your business. It can be applied to many different products and especially those businesses selling items for kids. This could work really well!

Earth Day, happening on April 22nd

Is a celebration that is hugely growing, as more people are becoming environmentally friendly and conscious about the products they purchase, as well as their origin and manufacture.

If your audience has an eco-friendly lifestyle, this is your holiday! 

You should not miss running a small promo for Earth Day, a sale, or even just an email marketing campaign with a nice reminder of the day that is it and to show that you care!

Mother’s Day

Celebrated on the 9th of May in the USA. Dates vary depending on the country.

It is the main holiday to honour the mother of the family.

It is not only the children who buy gifts for their moms anymore, many husbands also buy gifts for their wives during this day.

Something that can work very well for this day are gift cards!

Memorial Day

Happening on the last Monday of May is a federal holiday in the United States for honoring and mourning the military personnel who have died while serving in the United States Armed Forces.

If this is a holiday that is relevant to your ecom brand and decide to create a special promo for it, both ad copy and creatives should reflect appreciation. 

Inspiring quotes and thank you notes can work very well in a special promo for Memorial Day.

Father’s Day

Dates vary based on the country, however in the USA it is celebrated on the 21st of June.

Father’s Day is a day of honoring fatherhood and paternal bonds, as well as the influence of fathers in society.

Same as Mothers Day, Gifts cards or discount codes with ‘Love you Dad, Father, Husband, Amazing Dad, Best Human” theme can work very well on this day.

And these are some of the main holidays and celebrations happening in the next three months.

If you have any questions about any of the above or if you’re interested in working with us to grow your eCommerce brand. Find out if we’re the right fit for you!

Book a call below: https://dimniko.com/msp-apply

Until next time 😉

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How to Build a Monthly IG Plan

DimNiko Marketing | Building IG Monthly Plan

Your IG page can help you get sales just as much as your website. 

It’s common that users, who are your possible future customers – search for brands on Instagram. 

We all know that posting quality content frequently is not easy at all. 

Read more: FACEBOOK VS INSTAGRAM, What is best for your business?

Instagram is a highly creative platform, where you have to follow actual trends in order to keep up with the flow. 

I collected some tips & tricks on how you can organize your efforts while keeping in step with the most relevant trends.

Let’s have a look!

1. Start at the Basics

I suggest spending some hours thinking again about the basics. 

What is your goal with your account? 

Do you want to grow your brand awareness? 

Do you want to sell directly from Instagram? 

Do you want to create a community, which you can grow to a great performing target group? 

If you successfully (re)defined your goal, you made a big step forward in deciding the type of posts you want to create.

2. Planning is Everything

Did you ever feel the “posting-day” stress? 

The feeling when you know that you should post something, but still no idea, no content, no photo… it is really disturbing.

But you also know, that if you want a sustainable & growing IG channel for your brand, you cannot afford inconsequent posting. 

The solution for your problem is called planning. If you take your time, sit down and write your next month’s post plan, your life will be so much easier and relaxed. 

Believe me, relieving this stress will also boost your creativity!

3. Create Thematic Directions


Writing your monthly planning will be way easier if you define 5-6 directions and you just keep on posting them after each other. I collected some options for this: 

  • Brand awareness / Lifestyle: show your product in different situations, tag places, people, pages with a lot of followers (like magazines) It’s key important, to choose such a thematic, which matches your brand quality and core values!
  • Behind the scenes: share some backside information with your followers. Show your warehouse, introduce your people, make a video about how an order is packed, and follow its way until posting…
  • Educational: show how your product is being used. Speak about benefits, and how customers can maximize their user experience with your brand.
  • Tipps&tricks: Share your best insider tips – who could give better suggestions if not the brand itself? Expert advice is always welcomed by followers!
  • Influencer or user-generated content: the real social prof is really convincing. Post happy customers, share influencer posts –  they are very much liked by customers. 
  • Easy and fun: Entertaining content. Share your everyday experience with the product, showing your cat, or dog. Non-promotional content improves the overall brand.
  • Promotional: Sometimes feel free to post about ongoing or upcoming promotions. This will allow your follower base to prepare for shopping! 
  • FAQ: reply to frequently asked questions in a post
  • Contest: start a small sweepstake to get new followers and to grow rapidly! Don’t forget to keep everything legal, and to post the terms of participation.

4. Prepare Labeled Boxes for Your Ideas.

Place a block of post-it on your desk. Write it on a piece of paper when an idea pops. Drop it into the matching thematic box. You don’t need to create the posts right away… your ideas are waiting for you at your next monthly planning session!

5. Create in Advance! 

You can use apps to write and schedule the next month’s posts in advance.

You can plan 1-2-3 posts per week, and you need only to take care of replying to comments and watching your profile grow. 


Planning will help you avoid most of the stress. If you don’t succeed to complete everything on the planned day, just let it go.

Nothing will change, and this will not spoil your long-term success! Just relax and try to enjoy it! 

6. Try to Have Fun – in the end, it’s very important not to take everything too seriously.

To be continued…! 

If you like our ideas, keep on following us for the best ideas and latest trends! 

And if you need some professional support in delivering the best possible ads to your clients, just book your call here https://dimniko.com/msp-apply

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How to Write Great Ad Copy!

DimNiko Marketing | Writing Ad Copy

Hi All, Monika here from the DimNiko Agency. 

Today I wanted to share with you my process of writing ad copy for a new project or product. 

Read More: Facebook Ad Copy Is Useless In eCommerce Ads

1. Website, Product, Landing Page Analysis. 

The first thing I do is go through the sales funnel where we send traffic to using ads. 

With Facebook advertising, typically our main goal is to find prospective buyers, someone that potentially could be interested in buying the product. We want to get their attention which usually starts with the ad copy. Ithas a huge impact on the user experience throughout the sales funnel. 

You can’t write ad copy without experiencing the funnel and understanding the customer’s journey. 

If you have the opportunity to speak to the brand manager and have their insight on the value proposition, their brand positioning and key benefits and features of the product, it will help you get an idea for angles you can use. 

2. Competitor Analysis.

Competitor analysis not only includes checking out the ads they’re running, but includes the same product analysis, landing pages, website, sales funnels. 

The purpose is not to steal what they are doing, but to be aware. 

Yes it’s a great place to get inspiration, but if you want to be better than them, you will need to come up with something original. 

Plus, you’ll never know if their marketing actually works. 

3. Customer Personas

I usually like to have at least 3 personas. I try to be as detailed as possible. 

To build out the personas you can use Google or Facebook analytic insights, the brand manager or community manager can also help you with that. 

Then best insight comes from asking customers directly in a mini interview. 

Asking questions such: How old are they? What job do they have? What does the product help them do? Did they compare it with other products, brands? What made them buy it? Etc.., These questions will help you understand key motivations and persona characteristics of your buyers. 

4. Have a Plan that Aligns with Your Campaign Strategy

Your plan usually includes specifications of how many ads we will need and what goal each should have. 

For example if we have 1 landing page, we will have to think about how the ads will run. In this instance, prospecting campaigns on TOF targeting cold audiences. These ads will get the attention of the right users and make them click through to the landing page. 

After, we will run MOF ads where we will target users that have already engaged with an ad before but haven’t clicked through to the landing page. Here you want to increase their desire or build more trust.

We also want to have retargeting ads running, where the best strategy is to highlight the offer better, explain why it is better for them to buy this product and choose your brand and get it now.  

With a more complicated sales funnel or lead generation campaign where the customer journey has several steps. The retargeting you usually do, sends the user back to the landing page they opted out or to the next one. Your ad copy needs to reflect that. 

Basically each landing page will need their own set of ad copy and possible further break down into TOF / MOF/ BOF versions.

5. Brainstorm Ideas

Once you have chosen personas and have a detailed list of how many ads you need for your campaigns it’s time to brainstorm ideas. 

My favorite method is to prioritise based on the persona groups and think of 10 angles / ideas that would match those audiences keeping in mind what action I am expecting them to do on the landing page. 

You don’t need to have 3 x 10 ideas, but at least 10 all together. 

These ideas can include whether you want an ad copy including a review, or list benefits, or want to talk about a problem it solves, or pick ingredients and focus the whole selling point on that etc

 It’s important to not create variations of an angle, but really list 10 different ideas. 

6. Draft Copies

I would start choosing the top 3 ideas and work it out, creating 3 – 3 variations each, and if needed create variations for TOF / MOF / BOF as well following the main angle. 

Usually we test an angle only on TOF and if it works we would move it to MOF and BOF or work on the variation. However if you only want to improve MOF, BOF campaign this method works as well. 

Just remember, if something works on warmer audiences, it’s not guaranteed that it will work on cold traffic.

When you finish with your drafts and have a list of ad copies that matches with your initial requirements, I like to go through the whole sales funnel again starting with the ad copies and see if everything makes sense. 

I personally like working on the ad copies first and then send the copies to the production team or to the editors because it’s basically a script for them. This will make their work easier and it will save you time.

In some cases you don’t have an option to create new videos, so before you test the new ad copies check if it works together with the creative assets. 

You really don’t want to upload an ad copy that has nothing to do with the image or video showing. 

7. Test 

It’s time to see which ad angles and variations are going to make it. 

Set up your benchmarks to be sure you send enough impressions to each variation and give the best possible chance to your new ad copies. 

I often see that ad copies are not being recycled or used once it’s proven to be not working, which can be a big mistake as performance will depend on many other factors. 

Before you start working on new ad copies, see if you can test with a different image, different audience, different CTA or just mix and match with another ad copy. 

This will save you time and you will find a winning ad copy much faster!

Hope you enjoyed the read and don’t forget,

If you’re spending over $500 a day and want to scale your brand

Book a call below: https://dimniko.com/msp-apply

Cheers, 
Monika

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How Often Should I Change My Product Offers?

DimNiko Marketing | Changing Product Offers

Hello there! Maryana from DimNiko here.

Last month we hosted a couple of Clubhouse events discussing our experience, tips, and tricks working with our clients. 

Follow @dim.niko on Clubhouse to be the first to know when we’re scheduling a new event.

Read more: How to “Create” a Problem Solving Angle When Your Product Doesn’t Solve a Problem?

There were a couple of questions asked from the audience, I decided to write a post with more detailed answers. 

If these questions are interesting for some, it could also be for others.

So let’s start with the question in the title.

How Often Should I Be Changing My Offer?

In DimNiko, we usually recommend our clients to change an offer once in 2-3 months. 

Every 2-3 months, our media buyers analyze the current offers and come up with suggestions on what can be changed. 

We’ve recently seen huge success when one of our clients implemented our advice. 

We suggested the client change from $52 to $49.99 and it made a huge difference in sales. 

We split tested the price which gave 50% traffic to the current offer and 50% to the new one. We saw results on the second day and the new offer was already knocking it out of the water. 

It is a simple psychological rule of offline marketing, but the magic .99 pricing point works great with online marketing as well. 

The psychology of the customers isn’t changing much when they step out of offline marketing and enter the online world. 

So there are a lot of tricks we can adapt.

We don’t even need to change the offer, rather name it differently or present it under a new sauce.

Here is a scenario, an ad were running with the same headline for 1 month that says “Special March offer”. 

We changed it to “Special April offer” to show the customers the offer is up to date and always changing… even if it’s not. 

Of course, we recommend updating the website and ads for Holiday related offers as well. 

Additional discounts are welcome, but if your business can’t afford it, it doesn’t need to be an actual sale discount.

You can just update the videos with Holiday elements and present them as a Holiday offer. 

The next question we had from Clubhouse was:

What Kind Of Creatives Are We Using For Our Clients In The Beauty Sphere?

Even though the question was very specific we can broaden it to many e-commerce spheres. 

Most of our successful creatives are based on bringing additional value to the customers. 

It could be one of the following:

  • “How to” tutorials
  • User-generated content showing the exact results the product can produce
  • User experience
  • Technical guide for purchasing the products

Of course, we’re constantly testing images VS videos, short videos VS long videos, different formats, and catalogs VS instant experience.

The results differ from client to client but the main rules we usually follow are:

  1. Showing the brand in the first 3 seconds makes your brand recognizable which helps build your community. It can also improve the performance of the retargeting and retention campaigns.
  2. Using more space of Facebook’s inventory (which means creating more square videos and even 3×4). And we also recommend uploading specific content per ad placement. 
  3. User-Generated Content is key! You can add testimonials to your content or actual customer reviews – all this increases the click-through and conversion rates. 

And the last but not the least was the following question:

Is It Important To Build Up A Community And How Does It Influence Paid Advertising?

Let’s take our client in the beauty industry as an example. He has a huge community on Facebook with thousands of followers.

A lot of attention is given to their social media. They initiate different contests, give valuable information, and of course promotions!

So our goal with paid advertising is to bring in first-time customers. During some low seasons, customers were acquired at a breakeven point. The client is unprofitable on the front end but then these customers enter the community.

The quality of information made the customer feels they belong. This makes them returning customer with no additional costs on the backend. 

When they launch promotions in the group, a big part of the sales are coming from returning customers. It helps a lot in increasing the average order value and it pays for the unprofitability of acquiring new customers.

Creating a community is a very valuable addition to paid advertising. And we highly recommend our clients to work on building brand awareness and customer loyalty.

If you want to know answers to other question we face in our daily work,

Book a call here: https://dimniko.com/msp-apply

Thanks!

Maryana from DimNiko

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How To Model Creatives & Dramatically Drop Your CPA

DimNiko | Modeling Creatives

How do you maintain profitability while scaling? 

Everyone wants to double or triple their ad spend and see consistent results BUT very few brands successfully achieve this.

One of our clients has been with the Agency for 6 weeks and we have taken them from spending just under $500/ day to $3,000 / day, with the CPA dropping from $50 to $30 in that time period.

I am going to show you a step by step breakdown of the creative changes we implemented on the account to see this result.

Read More: 5 Best Practices for Ecommerce Facebook Ad Creatives

Step 1: I Spoke to The Client & Asked Him What Are the Top 10 Reasons People Buy Your Product.

This allowed me to understand the buyers behaviour of why they want or need the product.

And this helped me map out my creative ideas for the brand.

Step 2: I Stalked the Brands Competition on the Facebook Ads Library and Saved Any Videos / Images I Thought Stood Out as Quality.

Over the years I have also downloaded 1000’s of videos and images and added them into a Google Drive folder breaking them down by niche so I have really amazing creatives to look at when I need to make new ones.

Step 3: I Found 10 Videos I Wanted to Model and Broke Them Down

If you look close enough you will see that every single video ad follows a formula. Often they will include things such as; problems, benefits, features, social proof, reviews, user generated content, showcasing products and a call to action.

For these 10 videos I broke down the structure of it and then made the video ad copy relevant for our client. For example a videos structure might have been this:

Problem > Push Pain Point > Introduce Product / Brand > Benefits > Social Proof > Guarantee > Call To Action

All of these 10 videos were different, had different editing styles and ensured the client had 10 dramatically different styles so we could hopefully see big changes in results.

Step 4: Get a Video Editor to Make the Video

For this part you will show the video editor the original video you want to model, you will give them the video ad copy you want in your video and the footage / photos you want in the video. 

Get them to model the video exactly so the transitions and the editing style is the same, but only this time it has your brands content and messaging within it.

Read More: Why You Need to Start Using UnBoxing Videos to Increase Your Ad Performance

Step 5: Add It Into Your Ads Manager and Wait

Now that you have 10 different videos to launch, add them into campaigns and watch the results improve and your ability to scale occur.

Inside the very first week with the client we saw the CPA drop massively because creative changes allow that to happen. Making small tweaks to targeting or bidding strategies will not get you profitable. Focus on the big levers in your Business.

Hope this helped and you get some great results from it.

If you want me to do an audit of your ad account, your creatives and your website, book a call below and I will show you how to triple your budget while maintaining good results!

Book a call here: https://dimniko.com/msp-apply

Chat soon,

Dan

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What To Do When Running Ads on a New Ad Account

DimNiko | New Ad Account

There can be lots of reasons why you would use a new Facebook Ad Account to run ads. 

You might just be starting out, your account could have been hacked and you opened a new one, your account could have been banned, or maybe another reason. 

One thing is certain: everything will be uncertain.

At DimNiko, we’re used to running ads on new Ad Accounts for all types of reasons.

It can be a daunting task because it’s uncertain how the performance will do. 

And, it’s easy to get lost in the best practices you should follow. 

Since we’re good at this kind of thing, I’ve compiled a list of best practices to help you out…

Budget

Whenever clients ask us what is the perfect daily budget to run ads on we love to give them a target of $1000 (or more). This will provide the most data at a faster speed.

However, with a brand new account you will have to hold back on the temptation to spend too much money from the start. 

Ideally you want to take this down to even a quarter of the amount and spend around $250 / day. 

A good budget distribution split would be 70% for cold traffic, and 30% for warm traffic (retargeting). 

If you want to be even more safe and feel you have audiences to retarget, a 50/50 split can also work for the first couple of days or first week.

Read More: Budget Distribution Between the Funnel Stage

Creatives

When starting on a new Ad Account, creatives is the most important part of the equation. 

Here you want to focus on the known winning creatives and use them as they have worked well in the past. 

This is not the best time to test new creatives that have no previous data and information to fall back on.

Ideally if you had a previous Ad Account, getting post IDs and using them in your new ads is the best way forward. 

This will show you have social proof and engagement which will assist in the slow start of a new ad account. 

If you have to use new creatives because your old ones sucked, then try and choose the best video and best image you have and put them in a small dynamic campaign. 

Try not to use too many creatives. 

Your campaigns should stay on a smaller budget to start off with.

Another important thing to keep in mind is that a good image can convert just as well as a video (although we prefer videos). 

If you find a good converting image creative, start building out a post ID with this image and build that social proof we were talking about.

Read More: Best Practices: Introducing New Ads to Your Campaigns

Retargeting/ Retention

You may find that launching retargeting ads on a new Ad Account might be slower results at first. 

It can be disappointing since these campaigns should stand out from the rest. 

This will be the case when your audiences are still too small and the campaigns struggle to spend, or ad frequency shoots through the roof.

A good solution is to combine your Middle of Funnel (Facebook & Instagram engagers, as well as video viewers 25%) and your Bottom of Funnel (retargeting audiences such as Add to Cart 30 days, Viewed Content 30 days, Page Viewers 30 days) into one campaign. 

You will have a higher chance of converting customers. When purchases increase after a week or two, you can split the two parts of the funnel into their own campaigns again. 

You can also add a tension audience into the mix if your audiences are too small and you sell a variety of products. 

If you have a shopify customer list in your custom audiences, you can add the lists into a combination BOF/MOF campaign. 

The TL:DR: 

Start more conservative and keep your money in your pocket. 

As soon as you have winning campaigns, increase the budget slowly and focus on your winning creatives. 

Don’t forget about the power of post IDs and start building them sooner rather than later. 

Lastly, consolidate those retargeting audiences in the beginning and throw in a retention audience in the mix for the best initial results, until you can separate them at a later stage as your budget and traffic increases.

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How a Quiz Campaign Boosted Our Conversion Rate

DimNiko | Quiz

A couple of months ago we launched an Ecom store in South Africa selling supplements. 

Our target audience wanted to buy, but lacked the confidence to follow through with their purchase. 

This has drastically impacted our overall conversion rate over the past few months

It made it impossible to gain stability and predict what will happen from one week to the next. 

Our conversion rate would jump from anywhere from 0.2% to 3% and back to under 1% without us touching the ads or the website. 

Our campaigns had to run on autopilot in order to test this theory. We noticed that our CTR is really high overall compared to accounts we’ve seen. 

Typically you would see well converting campaigns getting 1.5% CTR that would run stable. 

With the South African market almost seems backwards, our CTR on our ads are averaging more than 3%, so how are our ads not converting?

To add a little pain during Q1, the retail market suffers a massive sales slump since families are stocking up on school supplies, paying the annual school fees and shifting their priority towards the essentials. 

Through the past few months we found out through customer enquiries, emails and calling them that it just came down to about three main factors affecting our overall performance. It comes to the conversion rate; trust, knowledge and timing. 

Read More: This is What We’ve Learned from Launching a Brand New E-Commerce Brand and Store in Late 2020!

Trust

In an up and coming industry building trust with your customers is the hardest thing to achieve. 

Most of the feedback we received from past customers was:

  • Some customers were scammed
  • Packages took over a month to arrive
  • Customer service was appalling since the industry hasn’t taken online shopping seriously yet 

So how did we start building trust with our customers?  

We made sure to have daily communication with our customers, via WhatsApp & Email. We followed up on their experience and improved on our service each day.  

The customers that converted had a good experience and will always come back making the LTV a lot more valuable. 

Knowledge 

This is one of the hardest challenges we have been facing recently. 

Since it’s customers’ first time buying online, they have no idea how to use it. 

I personally had to go on a one hour call walking a customer through the online purchasing process. In the end, it was worth it, but this example sums up how serious it actually was. 

This was an unexpected problem, since internationally, online shopping is a second nature. It’s the most convenient way to shop. 

Our current solution is to build a very detailed “how-to” page walking the customers through each and every step. 

Even how to add your banking details since we see the biggest drop off at checkout. 

Timing 

The timing of the month is our saving grace at the moment. There are two pay cycles throughout each month, mid month and end of the month. 

Most of the country still has a set pay day at the end of the month and this is the period where we see a 3%+ conversion rate. 

We scale our ads up during this period in order to catch as many customers as possible. 

During the slow periods of the months where the conversion rate is too unpredictable we shift our focus on the customer journey and improve that since we know the ads do work. 

This has created a big thinking shift for me since everything we do that affects the ad performance is done outside of Media Buying. 

How does a quiz fit into all of this? 

Quiz Campaign

The reason why I mentioned the quiz is that this was a very good method we were testing in order to generate leads. 

We ended up getting conversions through the lead campaign which was a bit strange. 

We decided to launch a quiz conversion campaign and actually started seeing very good results. 

We were still generating cheap leads with better quality traffic and the campaign was basically paying for itself. 

As the quiz campaign actually started optimizing on its own we saw a lot more stable performance from the conversion rate on the website. 

I believe this was due to the interactive nature of the quiz where more “experienced” customers were pulling through to the website. 

We have concluded the test for now while we run our other test. 

Overall, it was positive to see during this period. We received better quality conversions and captured good data to make improvements. 

It is an interesting project to be part of. 

The methods that we learn from this project can be implemented with our clients strategies as well.

But this only works if you have the right agency partnered with you!

If you are spending over $500 a day and you want to scale your brand

Book a call below:

https://dimniko.com/msp-apply

And that’s a wrap! 

I’m Quintin, Media Buyer at DimNiko 

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Testing Results: Lifetime vs Daily CBOs

DimNiko | LFT Campaigns

Here at DimNiko Agency, we do a lot of tests everyday. 

In each test, 50% of the time I try Lifetime budgets vs. Daily budgets 

If I have an account that mainly runs good on daily CBOs, I’ll test every few weeks to see what will happen with LFT campaigns.

Sometimes LFT will over-perform daily budgets, and they won’t.

I saw my first success with LFT around 2017. 

At that time not a lot of people we’re using LFT, but I decided to act on it and I got amazing results.

How I tested LFT vs. Daily is as follows: 

I duped all my best performing campaigns and put them on LFT.

If the CPA dropped by 20% on average, that would be marked as a big success.

I still remember the dropshipping account.

We were getting CPAs under $5 for a product that was selling for $29.99.

Today, the era of under $5 CPA is gone, but LFT campaigns still work pretty well.

The thing is, you never know when LFT campaigns will work, so you need to always test them.

In the past year, LFT success came in a few different waves.

Every 2 months they will outperform daily budgets, and it will last for a week or two.

Sometimes more. Up to a month, maybe two.

But for a week or two CPA will be as much as 10-30% lower on exact same audiences!

And that is a big win for me.

It’s good to test LFT here and there, regardless if you had bad experiences with them in the past.

Big Win Example

My recent big test was a few months ago, where I had a good LFT result in an account. 

I am spending $10-15k per day in this account, and at that time almost 2/3 of all cold traffic campaigns were set on LFT.

Performance was much better across the whole account.

Then over the New Year, daily budget campaigns started to perform much better. So, we turned off a majority of LFT campaigns.

Here and there I still had one or two LFT campaigns left running, but the majority was back to Daily CBOs.

And few LFT cost cap bids that I don’t place in the same bucket.

Why You Need to Test

But for the last test I duped 20 of my best performing daily budget campaigns, and put them on 9k for 30 days. ($300 per day)

I didn’t touch them for 3 days, then I started to slowly optimize the adsets.

After a week, 1/3 of LFT campaigns were switched off, but 2/3 of them were still under my KPI.

Then I was just doing my daily optimization routine across all accounts, and didn’t analyze which is good and why. I just took care of the average account KPI.

After 2 weeks I decided to analyze what happened, and the results were to my big surprise –  exactly the same!

LFT campaigns performed on the same average CPA as my Daily campaigns!

But I could double the spend and get the same results which maybe I wouldn’t if I would put all on daily budgets.

This account runs mostly on a broad audience and very big interests 20+ MM, so no overlapping issues were reported.

At some of my campaigns, I had the exact same audience (3xbroad), but different dynamic or ID creative.

So my recent test showed me again, that all you need to do to have some success in your account, is to TEST. 

LFT vs Daily budget, Cost cap vs Bid cap, CBO vs ABO, and IDs vs Dynamic.

Sometimes general things will work, but the very next day something else you tested will surprise you, and you could scale the account much easier because of your test.

How to Optimize LFT Budget Campaigns

Lot’s of people ask me how to optimize LFT budget campaigns.

I do them exactly as I do my daily budget campaigns. I lower or scale up the budget every 1-2 days.

Sometimes I also do an end date change, but then you need to remember that date and it’s a little harder for me as I have 50-75 campaigns in the account.

Even if I put an end date in my campaign name. 

And the main point is that I didn’t see much of a difference. 

So I like to use more ‘budget changing’ in my LFTs.

Maybe you have another process that works better for you.

If you have, please share it under this post!

Let us know your experience lately if you did some tests.

Also if you have any questions about LFT or Daily budget campaigns, please comment below.

If you want us to run your ad account for the best ROAS, you can book a call with us here  ==> https://dimniko.com/msp-apply

Have a great day,

Matej