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Best Practices: Introducing New Ads to Your Campaigns

DimNiko | Tips From a FB Rep

Is it better to add new ads to existing campaigns? But then the campaign goes back to the learning phase.

Is it better to create a new campaign for testing creatives? But then the best performing audiences can overlap and it will be difficult to scale.

I think all of you have these questions and answers in mind when thinking about introducing new ads to a stable campaign structure.

I recently had a very interesting discussion with a Facebook representative on this matter and would like to share my findings with you.

Of course I won’t give you a strict guideline of testing new creatives because every account differs but I will share with you the information I got from Facebook which helps me understand the algorithm a bit better. 

There will also be a very interesting tip on how to restart a learning for a specific video – so stay tuned!

How to Add a New Creative Into An Existing Campaign

Let’s say we have 1 top performing prospecting campaign with 5 different ads inside. Each ad has the same video and 5 different copies.

But at some point we see that the CTR starts to die and we want to refresh the ads with new videos. We don’t want to turn all of the old ads off since we don’t know the results of the new videos.

But if we just create new ads in the same campaign there’s a big chance that the new ads won’t start spending since the old ads have more engagement and the algorithm already learnt a lot about the ad.

So why does this happen?

Whenever you add a new video, Facebook identifies it is a specific creative. So, for example, if you’re using this video in different ads and even different campaigns, the algorithm consolidates all the learning around this video together.

And when you add an absolutely new video, Facebook doesn’t know anything about it so it prefers to spend the budget on the familiar video already.

So the first tip I got from the Facebook representative was to create a small testing campaign with the new video. This way the algorithm will start the learning process and gather more information about this specific new video.

After several days you will be able to introduce this new video to the existing campaign. And since Facebook will already be familiar with this video, it will start separating the traffic between the videos.

Read More: 5 Best Practices for Ecommerce Facebook Ad Creatives

How to Split Test an Old Creative Vs. New Creative

Let’s imagine another situation. You’ve been running the same campaign for weeks but now you would like to create a new campaign with different targeting (let’s say targeting another GEO) and you would like to introduce the old video together with the new video in the campaign.

Whenever you upload both of them, though they are new ads, still the algorithm starts sending much more traffic to the old video.

How can we avoid this? This tip really helped me a lot.

You need to change the thumbnail of the old video! 

Whenever you change the thumbnail, Facebook starts looking at this video as an absolutely new video.

Read More: What Creative Works Best In In-stream Video Ad Placement?

So if you want to create an A/B test with an old and a new video from scratch, just change the thumbnail of the old video and both of them will have the same chances to compete.

I found this information really interesting and helpful. 

To sum up when you’re planning a creative testing, think carefully whether in this specific test you want the Facebook algorithm to work based on the previous knowledge or not. Now you also know how to trick it and start the learning from scratch. 

If you want to know about other strategies we’re using while testing

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

Thanks!

Maryana from DimNiko

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Case Study: Why You Need to Be On the Same Page As Your Client

DimNiko | Strategy

We recently started working with a new client from the Fitness niche. He is the face of the brand and is selling online courses to a very specific audience: 30-50 years old men with children, interested in motorcycles and cars, from the working class, who are looking for a way to make their lives healthier and their bodies better looking.

Our Original Strategy

The client has spent a lot of time structuring the funnel flow and right now it looks ideal to him. He is driving the future customers into a survey where they answer all the main questions about their lifestyle but the main dealbreaker is the question: “How much money are you willing to spend on your fitness program each month?”

And based on the amount the client either sends them to a page with a selection of low priced programs (from $40 to $60) or sends them to a high ticket lead page. The future customer leaves all the details and waits for a call from the sales man who ideally closes the lead for a high priced individual program (from $1200 to $2800).

When we onboarded this client this is how the Top of the Funnel flow looked like. The main obstacle we were facing is taking under consideration the revenue coming from the high ticket leads. Since it is a whole process, we wouldn’t see the revenue coming from high ticket leads straight away in Ads Manager so it was very difficult to optimize the campaigns. 

But since the client told us that the closure rate is quite high we continued pushing the TOF campaigns based on the amount of high ticket leads that we were getting since the revenue coming from these individual programs is much higher than the revenue coming from the cheap programs.

For the retargeting traffic though we were driving customers only to the low ticket programs since ideally the leads would be closed on the phone. And we saw that both Middle and Bottom of Funnel were performing quite well but we couldn’t start scaling them because there was not enough audience in the Top of the Funnel for the low priced programs.

Getting On the Same Foot

The client wasn’t that satisfied with the performance of the Top of the Funnel traffic so we hopped on a call with him to discuss our steps moving forward.

Our main point was that we were getting a decent amount of high ticket leads through our Top of Funnel traffic which ideally would be the main percentage of the revenue so it made total sense from our side to continue pushing the survey and getting more and more leads.

But the client told us that his main goal is to increase the amount of low priced programs sold and ideally exclude the high ticket leads at all because the main goal of the business is to get passive income without having to deal with calls, sales and so on.

Of course in terms of revenue at the moment this approach doesn’t make much sense but it is very important sometimes to look at the business from your client’s point of view and start adjusting your campaigns not just in order to increase the profitability right now but to reach much bigger goals in the future.

Building The New Strategy

So we started working on an absolutely different strategy and flow for the customers. We decided to separate the low priced programs from the survey and create additional landing pages for them with an option to purchase the programs straight away. 

We don’t have any results yet but based on the results we’re getting for the retargeting traffic I’m sure we will manage to improve the prospecting traffic this way as well. 

We have 5 different programs that can be considered as 5 different products so the variety of audiences and ads that can be set up is enormous which will make it much easier to optimize and scale.

Since there is no product cost for the low priced programs, our breakeven point is a ROAS of 1.0. We can start scaling if we’re over this point and there are no actual limits because there can be no stock issues or shipping fees. 

And this path will make the client more satisfied than focusing on the high ticket leads and will grow his business much faster because this product is much more scalable.

But the key takeaway from this case study is that it’s much more important to listen to your clients needs because maybe from a media buying perspective it’s much more efficient to advertise one product but from the business owner point of view another.  

If you want to start working with an agency that actually listens to your needs

Book a call below:

https://dimniko.com/msp-apply

Thanks!

Maryana from DimNiko

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

DimNIko | Pinterest

Ok, this is the second article on Pinterest ads strategy I did for a client of ours.

If you haven’t read Part 1, here is the link ⇒ 
https://dimniko.com/blog/how-i-scaled-pinterest-ads-from-0-to-300k-in-revenue-in-less-than-21-days-part-1/

So let’s go now into the data, how to optimize campaigns, and how to scale them.

Pinterest Reps

Before that, let me just say a few things about our Pinterest reps. In Part 1 I said how very happy I am with my reps, now the situation changed. After 30 days and after 3 calls with rep 1 and rep 2, rep 2 sent me an email that now I will get a new rep.

On Pinterest they have different teams of reps based on the country where the majority of your clients are coming from. As this client I’m doing Pinterest ads is from the US, they signed me now to the US team.

Now rep 3 wanted to schedule an introduction call again. We went through the same stuff we did with rep 1 and 2, and most questions I had on pixel and event attribution were not explained and just skipped.

He said that he is only the ‘introduction’ guy, and that in a short amount of time I will get a rep 4, who will help me with these questions and more details about campaign optimization.

So few questions I had about agency accounts and pixels are still not being answered, and it’s been more than 2 months now. But ok, I get it… It’s Covid lockdown, it’s the beginning of Christmas time, and we’re not big spenders yet for them, so we have time to wait. 🙂

Update: Just yesterday rep 3 sent me an email that we don’t need another introduction call, and that rep 4 will now try to answer all my questions.

So let’s wait and see what will happen. Maybe rep 5 will now jump in and ask me again of what I already solved by myself till this day.

But anyway, let’s go now into more important stuff – Data & Optimization.

Data & Optimization

So as I explained the structure of my tested campaigns in article 1, what I did next is I waited 3 days. Then I turned off the majority of campaigns as numbers were crazy.

After my second call with rep 2 from AU (by the way, she was the best so far), I decided to switch the attribution window from 30 to 7 days. I wanted to see the closest results we get in Shopify or Google Analytics.

It’s still 7 days but this is the best we can do, as Pinterest is just an introduction site for your products, and the majority of these audiences are just browsing around and will not purchase on day 1. When they will see the same ad after 4 days on FB, and if they will make a purchase, Pinterest will take the credit for that sale. And also the FB.

From what rep 2 told me and how I saw the first data, I decided that I will not touch campaigns for the first 7 days. 

You will see many campaign’s data getting better after days go by, because of their different attribution windows.

Then when day 7 came, I started optimizing. I was killing whole campaigns above my KPI, and killing ad sets and interests/keywords in active campaigns that showed bad performance.

In week 2 and 3 I also started to check 7/14/30 days data and optimize the worst performers compared to a 7 day period. There will be a big difference between 30d and 7d, so always check also 30d data. Pinterest conversion has a big late attribution, also if you set up for a 7 day window. So don’t kill too fast at the beginning and wait for a little more time if you have a budget.

If results are not near your KPI in the first 7 days, then kill fast and don’t wait. If your KPI is $20 CPA, I would kill all campaigns that have CPA $30 or more.

I experienced that CPA will 2 or 3 times drop after 14-30 days, but this is just the product I am advertising. Probably with other products is a different game and you have to figure it out how your account works with your products.

Scaling

Let’s get into Scaling. Scaling is very simple on Pinterest.

You select good working campaigns, go to adset level, select adset and click EDIT BUDGETS. Then you put how much you want to increase or decrease the budget.

Recommendation from our rep 2 was 20% is the safest way, and also to never go more than double up. So pretty same scenario as with FB here.

Depends on how good my campaign is performing, that’s how much I will increase or decrease budgets. I like how you can do this in Pinterest, because you can select all ad sets and then select 3 ways:

  1. Set budget to (amount)
  2. Increase budget  (amount or percentage)
  3. Decrease budget  (amount or percentage)

You can also put a safety amount per ad group, so they won’t spend more than you want. And this is pretty much how you do it.

I tried scaling also 3x on my top performers and it worked.

So from Day 1 to day 21 all I was doing is killing campaigns above KPI in the last 7 days, and scaling every 2-3 days the ones that performed well.

I also checked how CPA changes from week 2 and 3, and also made correct adjustments on how much budget I will put on.

At the same time I duplicated best performing creatives and tried different very broad and also to combine smaller interests. And one more thing here with interests – don’t forget about RETARGETING!!!

Half of the sales came in this account because of my retargeting strategy. Specially existing buyers retargeting and page viewers in the last 30 days.

So first thing when you start ads on Pinterest, go to your Shopify or Woo or Kajabi or whatever, and export your buyers emails!

Then import them and create a custom audience. And, create LLAs or AALs 2-10% with this audience. Also 3/7/14/30d audiences of website visitors.

Then use them in different combinations of campaigns and creatives for your best ROI.

***
At this point (after 2 months), I spent on this account around $80k on Pinterest ads, and attributed to more than $800k of revenue.

Average ROAS for the last 30 days is 10.5, and average CPA is below $7.

Success? 

We would need to turn all FB advertising off to see actual success, but I believe we’re doing pretty awesome stuff here.

So if you’re into FB (or if you want to combine it with Pinterest) and scale big (yes over $500k per month too), we can do it for you.

If you’re spending at least 1k a day on FB ads, book a call with us here  ==> https://dimniko.com/msp-apply

Let’s see if we’re the right fit so we can start working on your account.

Have a great day and Happy NY 2021!

Matej 

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How IOS14 Might Affect Your Facebook Ads and Ecommerce Brand

DimNiko | IOS14

Hi Everyone, it’s Monika here from the DimNiko Team.

One of the biggest questions and concerns going into 2021 is Apple’s latest iOS14 update and its effect on the advertisers. 

With the looming worry, our team wanted to put together some information to help you navigate through the upcoming changes. 

Let’s jump into it.. 

Why Is This Update Super Important for Facebook and Any Other Platform? 

Apple has announced changes with iOS 14 that will provide an opt-in for users to choose whether to allow third-party sites to track their user data. Basically giving a choice for users to allow third-party sites to track their online activities across browsers and devices.

This will affect how Facebook receives and processes conversion events from the pixel and therefore ads personalisation and performance reporting will be limited. 

As well as that their AI which has been helping (or not) advertisers to get the best traffic simply won’t work. 

We’re still learning and trying to understand how this will exactly affect Ad buying and it’s performance, but we are confident that Facebook and Instagram will remain the best advertising channels for acquiring new customers and scaling brands.

Expected and Most Important Limitations

  • There will be only 8 standard pixel events to optimise for per domain (Landing Page View, Add to Cart, Initiated Checkout, Lead….). 
  • Delayed reporting (data may be delayed up to 3 days)
  • Facebook will use statistical modelling and report estimated Results
  • Reporting breakdowns will be limited, such age, gender, placement, region
  • Attribution window changes, Only 1 day click, 7 day click, 1 day click and 1 day view and 7 days click and 1 day view will be available.  
  • Targeting limitations, smaller audience sizes expected 
  • Audience Network will probably be the most affected placement as it relies the most on App advertising. 

How Will The IOS14 Update Affect Your Ecom Brand?

It is hard to tell just yet. 

We have no way of knowing how this will actually impact our ad campaigns and performance. 

The information is continuously changing, as well how third party platforms, and users react and respond.

It may make it extremely hard on new advertisers to compete with bigger brands, or could mean the opposite and help small businesses with less amount of pixel data.

What we know for sure is that advertisers need to relearn the trends and strategies that were helping them achieve results and set KPI’s. 

Without the reporting breakdown and with delayed attribution, analysing the data, the traffic and performance will be less accurate and much harder. 

This will make personalised marketing much more challenging and will require more work especially with smaller, less accurate audience pools to target and retarget.

Brands will need to know more about their buyers, and rely more on backend marketing for retargeting. 

It will change user behaviors and only time will tell how many of them will actually opt out of tracking and how users will appreciate retargeting offers. 

Overall, the art of media buying will be the essence for success. 

What You Can Do To Prepare For The Update

There are a couple things that Facebook suggest to do in order to be prepared for the changes and avoid any disruption of the campaigns. 

  1. Update to Facebook’s SDK for iOS 14 version 8.1 if you have a business app 
  2. Verify your website’s domain
  3. Set up Conversion API
  4. Turn on Auto-Advanced Matching in Ads Manager

As only 8 standard pixel events will be available to choose from to optimise your campaigns for, and possibly get reporting data on, we highly recommend to review any custom pixel events you may have on your website and conversion funnels. 

Overall I think there is no reason to panic. 

For sure there will be change which is not expected and not welcomed. But, we don’t know what the actual impact will be until these implications are set live. 

Let’s not forget that Facebook has over 2.7 billion active users leaving it to be the best advertising platform to find new customers. 

And most importantly good products and services will always sell.

So, if you’re a brand owner worried about these changes here’s the TLDR:

  • Work on your funnels and setup a thorough backend 
  • Optimise for user experience
  • Prioritize customer service
  • Make sure you have organic engagement 
  • And, above all else, ensure your product / service is high-quality. 

And while you’re working on your brand, Facebook will for sure find a way to keep its advertisers and continue to monetise their user base via advertising. They are a business after all. 

So, if you’re still worried about how IOS14 will affect your brand, working with an Agency who lives and breathes Facebook Ads will help set you up for success when this update is implemented. 

Book a call below:

https://dimniko.com/msp-apply

Regards,

Monika

DimNiko Team 

More information on iOS14:

https://www.facebook.com/business/help/126789292407737?id=428636648170202

https://www.facebook.com/business/help/331612538028890?id=428636648170202

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Think You’re Ready to Scale? Check These Metrics First!

DimNiko | Analytics

Profitably scaling campaigns is probably the main hurdle that every business that wants to grow has to clear. It’s one thing to spend $200 a day and stay in business, quite another to achieve the same returns spending $2000 or $4000. Here I’m going to take you through the metrics you need to pay attention to, the ‘early warning signs’ of a bad campaign, the key indicators of potential and the techniques for managing spend so you don’t empty your wallet chasing a unicorn. 

How People Are Reacting To Your Ads

First, you need to know how users are reacting to your ads: are they visually appealing? Do they give enough information? Are they attractive propositions? The base metric for this is the CTR (link click-through rate). This shows what percentage of impressions result in a successful click. CTR is a great early indicator of the success of your ads, but be careful: a higher number doesn’t automatically mean your ads are kicking ass, just that they are engaging with users. 

The distinction? The purchase conversion rate from those clicks. It would be far better to have a CTR of 1% and a conversion rate from those clicks of 5% than a CTR of 5% and a conversion rate of 1%. Trying to scale with such a minuscule rate of conversions is going to cost a fortune, and in the initial phases you are likely to see a drop in both CTR and the conversion rate from clicks anyway. Audience quality matters. So does website quality. A low conversion rate from clicks indicates several things, but the most likely are that your website does a bad job of completing the customer journey and that the audience you are delivering to the site is of a low quality. 

Audience Quality and Ad Effect

This takes us to the second ‘early warning’ sign of your campaigns – the Add to Cart and Initiate Checkout metrics. These are useful as they can give an idea of audience quality and how effective your ads are before purchases start coming in. If users are converting well on these events it indicates a level of intent that goes beyond merely browsing. Furthermore, if users are adding to cart at a high rate but not following through with the purchase it may indicate an interruption or roadblock in the customer journey at either the cart or the checkout. The average cart abandonment rate for ecommerce is around 68%, so if your numbers are regularly exceeding this it may be time to analyse the final stages of your customer journey more closely. Maybe you’re charging too much for shipping or maybe you don’t have the right payment methods available? Keep an eye on these metrics as indicators of audience and website quality alongside the purchase conversion rate.  

Cost Per Acquisition & Return on Ad Spend

Finally, we get to the meat: Cost per Acquisition and Return on Ad Spend (CPA and ROAS). Cost per Acquisition – how much you have to spend to make a sale – is probably your second-most-important metric, although this can depend on whether you have a single fixed product or sell multiple products which vary in price. Using your Average Order Value (AOV) as a guide, you can calculate what sort of CPA you need to break even and how much you need to spend to consider your campaigns worth your while. ROAS is the most popular metric – and for good reason! This is the return on your investment in one number. 1.5 means you get 50% of your investment back on top of the original amount, 2 means you’ve doubled the money spent and so on. It is the main reflection of the overall health of your campaigns. 

The above metrics are the big boys when it comes to scaling. Keeping them within acceptable ranges while you increase spend is how you scale. Inevitably, an increase in spend is accompanied by bloating in some metrics – notably CPA – and contraction in others – like ROAS. It’s important to see consistent results at least 15-20% ahead of your breakeven numbers for around 48 hours before you begin scaling, and try not to increase the budget by more than 25% each time. This will provide you with a good ‘buffer’ to absorb the initial loss of efficiency and will prevent Facebook from spitting out all of your cash in a matter of hours. Another handy trick is to implement a cost control on your bidding strategy. Once you have audiences and creatives that you know work, and are ready to increase spend, begin with a cost control of 3 times your expected CPA. Once you see regular results coming in, slowly bring it down until you reach around 1.5 times your ideal CPA. This allows you to scale campaigns – especially CBO campaigns – without the worry that you’ll check your ads manager in a couple of hours and see a catastrophic overspend on clearly failing ad sets. 

Audience Size & Quality

Two final metrics to consider are the Cost per Mille (CPM) – the cost per thousand impressions and Frequency. CPM varies depending on the value of the audience, its size and the quality and relevance of your ads. If your ads are solid but you’re seeing high CPMs, remember that this could indicate a smaller audience and therefore a limited scope for scaling your campaigns. A high CPM audience which converts at precisely the same rate as a low CPM audience will naturally have higher CPAs, so you will be able to piece this together from the metrics above – but looking to the future it’s important to know the value that Facebook places on your audiences before you start throwing money at them. CPM can grow very quickly if the audiences you are trying to reach are already saturated or if more advertisers are using the platform for a sales event like Black Friday or Cyber Monday. 

Frequency is the average number of times each person sees your ad. If this number is too high (normally more than 3) then it’s possible that you’re saturating this audience and risk exhausting it if you spend more aggressively. 

So there you have it. These are the metrics to watch to determine your ad quality, audience quality and potential and whether you’re scaling or slipping. If you want to chat and see if we can help grow your business, you can click below and see if you qualify for a call! 

https://dimniko.com/msp-apply

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Ecommerce Store Owners: Take This Advice Into 2021 and You Will Set Yourself Up for Success.

The year is finally coming to an end and for most of us it is a big relief. If you are an Ecommerce store owner however, that feeling of relief might not be here yet, as you now have to worry about your strategy and game plan for the new year!

With a rocky year behind us and many unpredictable things happening, here are a few things that you can focus on to make sure you set yourself up for success in 2021.

Increase Your AOV (Average Order Value)

Your online store’s AOV is one of the most important metrics that you should look at when you want to grow a successful brand and become more profitable. When you increase your AOV, you increase your return on investment and your return on ad spend, and you ultimately get the most out of every customer. This will also mean that acquiring customers become cheaper as they end up spending more money in your store.

Increasing the AOV can be done in many ways such as upselling, cross-selling or bundling products together. When you increase your average order value you can expect higher cost per acquisitions, but you will most likely outperform your competitors. If you are only selling one product, it is time to look into stocking more products that will possibly compliment what you are currently selling. 

Lifetime Value

We can’t stress enough the importance of lifetime value. Every time you spend money to acquire a new customer, you have the opportunity to impress them with your offering and (hopefully) great customer service, and you could get more purchases from them in the future. This means you can recoup your cost of customer acquisition and overall make more profits.

By focusing on your customer lifetime value (which usually ranges between 12 – 24 months) you will get a clear indication whether you are growing a successful brand. Advertisers often want to focus on ROAS only for overall performance, but by focusing on the ROAS you will only see whether your advertising efforts is efficient, but not whether you are effectively growing a successful brand.

Read More: Community: The Missing Piece of the Growth Puzzle

Storytelling Has Become More Important Than Ever

Storytelling has become more important than ever, especially after a year filled with city or country wide lockdowns and people are actually taking time to sit down and watch branded content

Video views have skyrocketed and responsiveness across the board has also increased. People pay a lot more attention and people are way more open for testing and experimentation. This is why it is important to find new ways to create content cheaper, without letting the quality get worse, and telling your story through this content. You have to put your audience first and you have to shift your own attention to how you can create value for your audience. 

Get the Best Apps for YOUR Online Store

There are many apps that you can use on Shopify (or other Ecommerce platforms) that will help you with your business. We still see a lot of Ecommerce stores not reaching their full potential and sometimes it can be an app that will definitely set you up for success. There are a lot of free apps which are great, but paid versions bring the full potential of these apps and you can treat this as in investment if you are able to benefit from the app. 

The main things you need to ask yourself when choosing an app is:

  • What does your store need outside of Shopify’s features?
  • What would increase your sales?
  • What would make managing your store easier?
  • How much do you want to spend on apps?

One amazing app recommendation which is a must have is ‘Afterpay’, which lets customers instantly purchase a product, and they then pay it off in monthly installments (you instantly get your money though ;)). Afterpay is currently available in Australia, New Zealand, the United States and the United Kingdom

Focus on These 4 Metrics

As we dive into the Facebook ad account, Google Analytics, Shopify Analytics and any other platforms where you can analyse numbers, be careful not to overthink and over analyse. Information overload will make you miss some of the most important metrics and leave you sidetracked. If you focus on these metrics and get them to the best standard that you can, you will set yourself up for success;

  • AOV (Average Order Value)
  • LTV (Lifetime Value)
  • CPA (Cost Per Acquisition)
  • CR (Conversion Rate) 

Read More: What Columns to Look at for Ads Manager Reporting

As you can see the first two metrics were also discussed above – and of course there are other metrics to look at, but the idea here is to focus on these 4 key metrics to the best of your ability and improve them as much as you can, and ultimately the ROI and ROAS will be where you want it to be. 

If your Ecommerce business lacks in one of these above mentioned topics, imagine what a difference it can make if you work on it and improve this to the best of your ability. And what’s even better is that you improve all of these aspects, and you are guaranteed to set yourself up for success in the new year!

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Why eCommerce Sales Tend to Slow Down in January & How You Can Prevent Losses

DimNiko | Sales Decrease

Are you running a business or company and are worried about the reality of business like eCommerce sales tend to slow down in January and how you can prevent your business’s losses by following the effective strategies?

It’s a matter of the fact that eCommerce sales have been observed very low in the months of January – the start of a new year, which ultimately causes losses to many eCommerce businesses. The reasons behind these low sales are many. However, some of the top causes are the buyers needing their surplus cash to pay off their Christmas gifts, people have spent most of their money in December sales when plenty of products are available on offers and discounts. Furthermore, at the end of the year, most of the people pay their taxes, house rents and other types of rents, so they don’t have enough money to spend in January. 

Today’s comprehensive guide is for you and those looking to make fantastic plans to keep their investment profitable among many other businesses and retailers running eCommerce sites or eCommerce businesses. 

Let’s dive into the core of the guide … 

Loyalty Program Launching

It’s a matter of fact that earning the customer’s trust is somewhat hard to earn, and at the same time, rewarding the same customer for you is somewhat easy. It doesn’t matter which specific system you are running. Every system’s strategy remains almost the same as every time you keep gathering information and tracking your customer’s activity while making purchases at your shop (e-commerce store). 

Hence, with the help of already collected data from shopping through discounts, free products, or exclusive offers, you can run a loyalty program by keeping your customers bated and giving you an abated edge. Furthermore, you can also turn these repeat sales into an easy referral opportunity.

Promoting Pop-Up Sales

The second best method to prevent your losses in the months of slow sales is to run pop-up sales that have an effective role in generating more sales for your products or business. It has a great effect on shoppers. So if you are not sure about the sales, which method is going to be making your sales appeal of an international zeitgeist, it’s suggested to run or announce pop-up sales with the help of your social media followers. 

Indeed, even in a month when money/cash is tight, pop-up deals are necessary and can give the ideal shot in the arm for somebody unhappy.

Reinforcing New Year’s Resolutions

As January stays as the month of slow sales in the eCommerce world, your brand or business should develop new resolutions and determinations to reinforce your brand/business. With these new year’s resolutions, you can come up with discounting certain seasonally-oriented items or shining your marketing lens on trendy products reaching your cost-effective but output giving milestones. 

This new year’s resolution for your business or e-commerce store is putting off your site’s SEO refresh with the new year because with the update of the new year; you will have to update and change the old-fashioned styles, product listings, and content updating.

Supplementing Past Purchases

Another best technique to prevent losses in your eCommerce sales or business in the down months of sales is not to waste most of the time on the customer who’s unlikely to get back to your product or business. Here, the better option for you is to focus on the customer who once purchased one product. Then with that product, he also placed additional orders for some other orders relevant or irrelevant to that product. 

So you can offer affordable accessories to your past customers to enhance sales. Furthermore, you can update your product listings and pages with curated lists of add-ons. Hence, when your customer purchases your one product while putting a review or giving feedback on the products in the same listings that he’ll see, his mind will urge him to make another purchase on the relevant product. 

Running Teasers for Products

Setting up and running teasers for your fresh or new products in the dead months of eCommerce sales/businesses is another effective strategy that will help you come up and generate more sales than your competitors. Therefore, it’s recommended for you to load up your social media accounts under your brand/business with teaser videos and snaps that prove very effective for different businesses as different studies have revealed amazing benefits. 

When running teasers for your new year products or old products on a new year with some fresh touch, you can earn maximum profit compared to your other competitor businesses. 

Making Your Product Pages Perfect

Making your product pages perfect by updating them and making the content fully-optimized with catchy and better-looking images, titles, and descriptions as January is considered the only downtime that urges you to make the critical updates to overcome the slow in sales. 

The little effort you’ll make to optimize your product listing will have long-term positive implications for your brand or business or the product you are looking to generate sales or leads for. The more optimized, fresh-looking, visually appealing, and easy to navigate your products are, the higher ranking is guaranteed. This activity will fuel up your online store with serious buyers and ultimately more selling power even in the dead months of sales. This way, you can prevent losses. 

Curtailing Cart Abandonment

Furthermore, in these dead months of eCommerce sales, you can curtail cart abandonment by working on your product listings effectively. Different estimates and studies show that there are many chances to boost your sales up to 70% by just doing little modifications in the abandoned shopping carts on your eCommerce sites or stores. 

Hence, by following the techniques shared above, you can avoid a sales slowdown in January as January is very disturbing and a month of depression for the eCommerce businesses because sales fall abruptly and create a huge vacuum that’s somewhat full of losses to eCommerce businesses. Swallowing and making unique, cost-effective strategies, and the ones to attract the customers, you can generate more and more sales. 

In a Nutshell

So what are you worried about now? Don’t feel panic as you have an effective checklist now to make your eCommerce sales strong by making your site 100% matching the points discussed in this guide. This way, success will be guaranteed for your eCommerce store.

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Are You Spending Too Much On Retargeting?

DimNiko | Spending Too Much

I know. You’re probably thinking ‘Hell no! That’s where my best margins are!’ but hear me out.

I grant you that Facebook’s native reporting, which is pretty reliable, will show much better numbers for your middle and bottom funnel campaigns as long as you’re doing them right. 

But what else are you doing to reach out to your audience? 

How to Reduce Spend on Retargeting

Here, I’m gonna tell you some important ways to wring every last bit of efficiency out of your retargeting so you can free up more spend for prospecting.

If you send emails, make regular social posts, deploy influencers or advertise on other platforms then how can you be sure that the attribution you’re seeing on Facebook really reflects the value of the ad? 

What if they got an email about their abandoned cart, clicked through and purchased. But earlier that same day they were shown one of your retargeting ads, which now scoops up the attribution for that purchase, despite the fact that it was your CRM that did all the work! 

Maybe your retargeting ad collected a whole load of clicks and a good number of conversions but then a perfectly-crafted and timed social post pushed just a few more of the clickers to convert. Your retargeting ads are gathering more attributions that don’t rightfully belong to them! 

Each and every interaction between your brand and your customers and prospective customers represents a marketing effort. 

“But how can we possibly tally these? How can I know whether my retargeting ads are actually generating the revenue they say they are?” I hear you ask.

Read More: How to Build Effective Retargeting Campaigns for Ecommerce Stores

Attribution Model

The first thing to consider is your attribution model. If you are using Google Analytics, for example, and your attribution model is ‘last click’, then 100% of the conversion will be attributed to the final click before purchase. This ignores all of the preceding interactions with the customer. 

What nurtured this lead into a purchase? What other channels influenced their journey?

Each brand is different, has a different purchase consideration time, utilises different channels and speaks to their audience in their own way; so there is no one-size-fits-all model.

There are some pricey tools out there for bespoke cross-channel attribution calculation, but you can get some very useful data with just the attribution models on Google Analytics: 

Time Decay, for example, will give the touchpoints closest in time to the conversion most of the credit. So the first click will be given much less importance than the last. 

Position-Based models will assign a percentage of the credit to the first and last interactions and split the remaining percentage between the interactions that occurred in between. If the customer clicked on a Facebook ad and later googled you and added to cart, then abandoned cart and later converted from an email reminder, Facebook and email would receive equal credit, with the remainder going to paid search.

These are just two of many ways that you can change how you compile data on your cross-channel marketing efforts. It’s important to find the one that best reflects the way in which you interact with your customers and the way in which they interact with you. 

Read More: How to Build Effective Retargeting Campaigns for Ecommerce Stores

The Hold-Out Test

Another way to determine the true effectiveness of your Facebook and Instagram retargeting would be to run a ‘Hold-Out Test’. This is where you use Facebook’s own A/B testing tools to compare people who saw your Facebook ads to a ‘hold-out’ group of 10% who did not. 

From here you can compare the lift in the rate of conversion between the two groups and decide whether the percentage your retargeting ads achieve is worth the investment. How much of the work is done by the retargeting ads? Do your customers prefer emails, SMS marketing, social posts? Do they like to google the companies they intend to purchase from and take it from there? 

Finally, there are ways that you can arrange your campaigns to complement other channels. Let’s say your remarketing emails achieve an open rate of 25%, and an overall conversion rate of 10%. What about the other 75%? What about the people who opened and didn’t convert? 

If you use Klaviyo, you can link this to your Facebook business manager and use these audiences of lapsed email recipients in their own special retargeting campaigns. If you don’t use Klaviyo, you can still upload customer lists and create the audiences that way. You’re able to address this audience specifically with ads just for them. 

Used together, everything here will give you a much better idea of where every dollar of ad spend goes and will enable you to streamline your retargeting efforts and pump more money into the acquisition of new leads. 

Accurate attribution is absolutely essential for maximising your ROAS and quickly scaling your ad spend. Using these tools and techniques you should test, test, test! There is no textbook for your brand and your growth, so you have to find out for yourself. 

A bit overwhelming? Understandable. Attribution analysis is one of the tougher aspects of media  buying. It takes an instinct developed through a lot of experience to read the data accurately and know what to do with it.

We have the most experienced media buyers out there, managing millions of dollars a month in ad spend and utilising know-how like this to scale eCommerce brands to the moon. 

If you’re spending over $500 a day and want to scale your brand, book a call below!

https://dimniko.com/msp-apply

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How I Scaled Pinterest Ads From 0 to 300k in Revenue in Less Than 21 Days (PART 1)

DimNiko | Pinterest Ads

Ok, this article is going to need 2 parts! 

In Part 1 I will talk about Pinterest platform, how you set ads manager, how you invite media buyers in, how you setup pixel, and how you launch campaigns for the best ROI.

In Part 2 I will tell you how to look at data, how to optimize and how to test aggressively.

The confession I need to make is that 1 month ago I didn’t know anything about Pin ads. After 3 weeks, I guess I know something as I managed to scale our client’s account to 250k in revenue.

Pinterest’s Budget & Conversion Tracking

The budget is only 1k per day! ROI is crazy. Around 8.76 for the last 3 weeks.  And CPA is $6.44.

For same product conversions I get on FB 2x more expensive conversions. But, we need to take into consideration – Pinterest tracks different conversions. Their conversion window can be 30 days after first click, and even if they triggered the sale they won’t take credits. This means you will see no conversions from Pinterest inside Google Analytics, because GA is only seeing 1 day conversion.

Here’s how their conversion tracking works: When somebody sees an add on Pinterest and click, if he or she doesn’t buy immediately, probably conversion will be credited to FB, or YouTube, or IG, Natives, etc, depends on what other channels you are advertising this product.

So this was my first issue and all my worries of what is going on, had been generously explained by my Pinterest rep. Who if I can say, is more much efficient than most of the reps you will get on FB. They just provide better support and that is 100% true. Believe me.

When you start running ads on Pinterest, they will take care for you.

The Client Backstory

But let’s go back to how all started.

I’m running FB ads for this client now for about 8 months. Right now I’m pushing around 15k budgets per day. They are making around 3MM per month in Shopify.

Awesome products, awesome brand, and awesome company.

We suggested we try Pinterest ads and they said yes, let’s see what we can do.

How to Integrate Your Pinterest Account into Your Clients

After we successfully integrated their account into ours, the main issue was how me (and other media buyers) will access their ads. There were few hick-ups but after a few days, we had successfully solved several issues.

To run Pinterest ads through a client’s account, you need to open your Business account. That is very easy – you just log into your personal Pinterest account and create a business account. Then you can ask the client to invite you into their account and set up right access.

Our integration was a little more complex, as we wanted to do it all through our agency account. But it is pretty much the same procedure. Agency needs to invite your business account in, and your client needs to invite the agency in to control their ads.

After integration is completed, you can see clients’ accounts in your Business profile. But, there is a catch. You don’t see it anywhere in the dashboard, so you need to bookmark the link when they make integration.

I won’t go into details here, but I would just say that it is a little weird all this of what you see and what you don’t.

Setting Up the Pinterest Pixel

My next step was to analyze their past ads performance (they tested something half year ago at small budget) and I also had to set up my column preferences in the dashboard.

When you open a fresh dashboard, you will see all kinds of columns there and most of it you don’t need. So I removed almost all except 10 columns that made me see clicks, CPMs, and CPAs.

The next step was to check if the pixel is installed correctly on their website. I added Pinterest Tag Helper (same as FB Tag helper) plugin to my Chrome. Then I went through the purchase funnel and checked if it triggers on steps I want.

We had some issues there and because they are running Shopify, I suggested to install Pinterest add on. You have to manually fix some code here so I suggest talking to your developer as it can get a little complicated.

After the pixel was tracking everything correctly, the next step was to throw some campaigns on the wall and test a few different pins.

Setting Up Pinterest Ad Campaigns

If you don’t know, Pins they call Ad creatives. You can use as many Pins as you want in your campaigns, but the best way is up to 4, according to our Pinterest rep.

We also have few campaigns to this date that has 50 pins, and it converts just OK. So not sure about that. For me if it’s working, I won’t kill it even if the rep says I should do it.

In the stage of starting test campaigns, I created around 10 very different campaigns. Budget for each was $50 and each one had one ad set.

But before that, I also created a few Custom Audiences and AALs. (yes, they don’t call them LLAs, but Actalike audiences)

As our client has more than half of a million emails from their buyers, I gave them instructions on how they can import them to make an Audience.

Then I created 1-10% AALs based on these emails. And I also created 3, 7, 15, 30, 90, 180, and 365d website visitors audiences.

For retargeting purposes. All who viewed their website after they clicked a Pin, will be retargeted with new Pins. So after all this was done, it was time for Phase 1 testing.

Phase 1 Testing

In Phase 1 I just wanted to test different stuff, so I can see what converts and at what CPA. (One note here – Pinterest doesn’t have any conversions, but it calls them Checkouts.)

So I created 10 campaigns with $50, 1 adset. Something as outlined below:

  • CAMPAIGN 1 – INTEREST – KEYWORDS – 40 NICHE KEYWORDS – 3x VIDEO PIN
  • CAMPAIGN 2 – INTEREST – 2x BROAD NICHE KEYWORDS – 3x VIDEO PIN
  • CAMPAIGN 3 – INTEREST – 5x VERY NICHE KEYWORDS – 3x VIDEO PIN
  • CAMPAIGN 4 – INTEREST – 5x BROAD  NICHE KEYWORDS NARROWED DOWN WITH 40 KEYWORDS – 3x VIDEO PIN
  • CAMPAIGN 5 – INTEREST – MANUAL BIDDING TEST – 3x VIDEO PIN
  • CAMPAIGN 6 – INTEREST – AUTO KEYWORD TEST – 3x VIDEO PIN
  • CAMPAIGN 7 – INTEREST – AALs – 1-10% TEST – 3x VIDEO PIN
  • CAMPAIGN 8 – INTEREST – AALs – ALL TOGETHER – 3x VIDEO PIN
  • CAMPAIGN 9 – INTEREST – RETARGETING WEB VISITORS – 40 IMAGE PINS 
  • CAMPAIGN 10 – INTEREST – RETARGETING EMAIL BUYERS AUDIENCE – 3x VIDEO PIN

My main focus here was to see how the account will react to video pins I decided to test, and which audiences will start to perform the best.

Next phase was to start tweaking things (optimization) and to put more campaigns on. As this can be an easy overload for most of you, I will go into that section in my second article.

So stay tuned – coming very soon!

If you’re into FB (or if you want to try Pinterest), we can do it for you.

If you’re spending at least 1k a day, book a call with us here  ==> https://dimniko.com/msp-apply

Let’s see if we’re the right fit.

Hope to see you inside.

Have a wonderful day,

Matej

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

DimNiko | Brand Launch

Where do you start and how do you listen to what your audience is actually saying? And how can you give them what they want?

To put in context, this only covers minor adjustments we did in order to optimize the website, landing page and creatives. This is based on initial testing of campaigns and the product. 

Did you know you can extract direct information just based on the comments on your ads? 

Take Time to Read The Comments

Well we’ve done this and it worked really well with kicking off the brand. We’ve recently launched a supplement brand and within the first day we weren’t getting any conversions from the campaigns.

We started looking at the comments on the ads to figure out what is going on. In fact the problem was right there. The top question overall being asked was “how do I buy?”. Keep in mind this is a country that doesn’t have a ton of experience in com shopping.

We started replying to comments and some sales actually came through. After this the concept was proven and we adjusted the landing page with information on literally a step by step guide on how to shop through Shopify. 

After this on the creatives itself, we added the click here to buy options to the image as well. Another point came across in the comments was that most of the prospecting customers were asking what the price is. This is a bit silly since you want to get them on your website and convert.

Read More: Striking Emotion to Bring in 2MM Revenue

Test Creatives

We decided to add a price to the creatives as well and launched the campaign. 

This made a night and day difference on the ad performance, within the first day we received a ton of sales and we reached our goal for breaking at least even with testing the ad and actually made a little profit.

The weird thing that we started seeing was that the campaigns started underperforming as they continued to run, this might be due to creative fatigue and comments going unanswered. 

The CPC’s on these campaigns were really low and we received a ton of engagement and it started getting hard to respond to all the emails and comments. 

Read More: 5 Best Practices for Ecommerce Facebook Ad Creatives

This is where we decided now is the time to expand and grow in order to be able to work with these customers in an efficient way. 

The only way you can make this happen is to bring someone onboard to handle customer queries and run the social media pages. 

From here we can start focusing our attention on running the ads on Facebook. There is still some research that needs to be done in order to have a scalable concept, what we’ve learned is that you can’t scale right from the start, especially within a market that tends to spend $100 total per day.

The art in the form is to learn your target customer behaviour, know where they are in line with online shopping and the learning curve for them to make the purchase. 

But it comes to show that sometimes listening to your customers and adding a few pointers on a creative can be the difference between ROAs 1.0 and ROAs 10.0.  

And 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