Posted on Leave a comment

How To Calculate Your Conversion Rate On Facebook To Know Your KPI

DimNiko | How To Calculate Your Conversion Rate On Facebook To Know Your KPI

Lots of times clients don’t know what is the realistic KPI they need to follow when they are observing FB ads.

They are still comparing results to what was happening in their account 1 or 2 years ago.

And they want the same performance no matter what TODAY.

Read more:

But the issue here is:

1 – FB is more expensive than it was 6 months ago, 12 months, or 2 years ago

2 – Lots of conversions is not visible after iOS14 changes in FB analytics, so maybe 10-50% of sales are missing

3 – There are a lot more competitors nowadays who are fighting for the clicks

4 – Buyers today are not like they were 1 or 2 years ago. They are more aware of how the ads are working so it’s harder and harder to make them buy

5 – Product offers are in average made bad, so clients get very bad conversions on their website

Now, as many clients don’t know all this and how it affects the performance for which we (Media Buyers) are responsible, there is a lack of ‘communication’ between us.

And this communication is the foundation for the expectation on both sides.

When I am analyzing the new accounts or the accounts that are not working, I first calculate the average % conversion from clicks to purchases in their ad account for the last 30 days.

If I see more than 1000 clicks to their website, then I can already see a little of what is going on and my analysis can already tell me what can be the possible cause of the performance.

Is it the creativity, the offer, the audience, or something else?

I will give you an example here:

One of our clients wants the CPA at $25-30 for the product that costs $50 on their website.

Based on lots of campaign tests, we see that the average CPA we can get no matter what type of ad creatives and formats we test is $56 on average.

The average CPC is $1.56.

When I calculate the % of conversion compared to clicks, I see it is 2.8%. 

How do I calculate this?

I sum the number of conversions by 100 and divide by the number of clicks sent to the offer.

So it means for 100 link clicks less than 3 people will buy their product.


So $158 divided by 3 people is $56, and that is what they see as the average CPA in their account.

Now to make their offer to work under their KPI, their average CPA needs to be 2x cheaper. 🙂

So how to achieve this?

As their creatives are very engaging (lots of likes and comments), we know the creatives are not the issue.

As their targeted country is the US, we know that CPC $15.6 on average is very standard and that it is hard to get any lower for this type of audience.

So creatives and audiences are out.

What is still in?

The offer and the data that is missing in FB analytics.

As we see in their website that around 20% of conversions are missing and FB is their main traffic source, we know that we need to get 30% better conversion on their landing page to help this client to be profitable.

So the first step is to explain to the customer that 20% of data on average is missing so he/she knows that the actual CPA is lower than what they see in the FB manager.

The second step is to suggest to them to work on a better offer and a better product page.

And that is crucial! 

Usually, this is the breaker in our performance and then we can say how good we are!

And what should they do?

We suggest they create a bundle offer that can increase the AOV so that they can pay more for the cost of FB. (Mark will be very happy when they read this right?)

If their offer was one product for the $50 sale price, we suggest then making a specific landing page where they present buy 2 and get 1 free package for $99. 

With this, they can maybe then afford to have $56 CPA in FB, and with 20% data missing that would be around $40-45.

Can this be profitable for them?

I guess still no, but if they increase the conversion on their website by 1-2%, this can be a huge spike.

Their average conversion will then drop to around $20-25.

And this will probably be very profitable for them, especially if they add on top of that some custom add-on, like a product upsell or cross-sale.

***

I hope you see the thinking behind this so you understand how important it is to know the right KPI you’re following in your FB manager.

At the end of the day, the metrics don’t lie.

And you need to know exactly how to calculate your metrics and measure them correctly.

It will help you to sell more at the right costs of Facebook ads, so you can achieve the profitability you deserve. 🙂

Posted on Leave a comment

How To Lower CPA Strategically In Your Account

DimNiko | How To Lower ROAS Strategically In Your Account

Often media buyers or clients complain about high CPA in their accounts.

They say that they tried everything but their CPA just can’t go where their KPI is.

And usually, their KPI is not a good representation of the performance in their FB Ad account. 

Some clients who don’t know a lot about the FB game now, want the same results as 1 or 2 years ago.

Yeah right… Mission impossible if they don’t work on a higher AOV (average order value) as a mission #1.

Then when I do the analyses of their accounts, I see that there is 80% of their campaigns active above the KPI they should follow.

Sometimes all you need to do is to lower the average CPA you are following when you are optimizing all your campaigns.

If your target CPA is $20 and CPA 3, then you can’t have 80% of campaigns open with an average CPA of $25.

You need to kill all campaigns that in the last 7 or 14 days are above $20.

And launch new ones with the best creatives you can get.

I try to set up 2 different KPIs in my client’s account.

One I always follow when I optimize my prospecting campaigns, and the other is just for retargeting.

So if the overall KPI that the client gives me is $20 CPA, then I know I need prospecting campaigns to optimize on average at $25.

My retargeting campaigns then need to work from $15-18. If possible even lower.

If my prospecting vs retargeting ratio is 70:30, then I know exactly how many campaigns I need at a certain spend per day, to feed this ratio.

And my average CPA when you look both together is $20, then I also know how much I can push TOFs if BOF+MOF are performing at a certain CPA.

At the end of the day, it is all about calculations.

What is CPC, what is a conversion on the landing page, and what is CPA?

Based on that I can plan how many campaigns, what spend, and what revenue we can expect.

When you look at this more in-depth, you will see that all you need to do daily is to control the average cost per purchase or ROI based on the KPI you set up.

And kill campaigns as quickly as you launch new ones!

By this, I mean daily. Or at least every 2 days.

If you are struggling with CPA.

Calculate your CPA and then test, test, and test.

At the end of the day, 80 will fail but 20 will work.

So work on the 20 that is near your target KPI for cold and warm traffic.

Simple as that. 🙂

Posted on Leave a comment

Facebook’s Carousel Catalog Feed System is on Fire

DimNiko | Facebook’s Carousel Catalog Feed System is on Fire

Lately, I’ve been testing Catalog Sale campaigns for both prospecting and retargeting audiences. 

70% of the time, they work superbly on retargeting, especially on PV3-30 and ATC+IC7 or 30.

90% of the time, they work if the product is good and you have a lot of variations. Or if your store has hundreds of products relating to the main product your customer just bought. They work even better on retention campaigns. 

Read More: Built-In Solutions to Customize Your Catalog Sales Ads

Retention Audiences 

For those who don’t know, Retention = Customers who bought from your brand 1, 2, 3, or 4+ times.

You can create one specific campaign and put these 4 audience segments into 4 ad sets. It works like crazy! 

Prospecting Audiences

Only 30% of Catalog Sale campaigns I would say will work on cold prospecting audiences. 

But as always, it might be a larger % if you test a lot and if you know what you are doing.

For those who don’t know, Prospecting = Audiences that don’t know your product(s).

Success


After testing dozens of accounts with Catalog Sales campaigns, I can easily predict how successful my CS campaigns will be.

The success of these campaigns will reflect many things. But here are a few:

  • How many products you have in your store
  • How great images/videos you have for your products
  • How your products are sorted
  • How special and unique are your products
  • How good ad copy and/or discounts you have
  • and more.

Action Steps

If you have hundreds of products in your store, you need to follow these 3 steps:

STEP 1 – Sort products by category, vibe, or angle, and create several collections on your website with cool names

STEP 2 – Go into Commerce Manager in FB and create several Product Sets based on your collections

STEP 3 – Go into Commerce Manager in FB and create one Product Sets with all products you have and put filter ‘available’ just to be sure

Then you need to start TESTING.

Retargeting System

First, set up the retargeting campaigns and figure out what ‘product sets’ and formats are working in your store.

You can test the ‘All products’ set on all retargeting segments, and you can test ‘specific collections’ sets based on visitors who browsed specific web pages or collection pages on your website.

Under format, you can test Single Image or Video, Carousel, and a Collection.

In the beginning, put all 3 in each ad set to see which format across all testing will be the winner.

These are very simple basics that will add lots of sales to your cart easily.


Prospecting

Then you have cold traffic or prospecting testing.

Same thing. First test ‘all products’ set and then test all ‘collections sets’ in all 3 formats.

Test first on fairly broad audiences to see what catches attention and brings conversions under your KPI.

After you see what ‘collection’ and ‘format’ outperform others, you can start optimizing campaigns and launch more testing campaigns.

The scaling process here is by launching tons of interests in all kinds of combinations.

Test LLAs and test Interests.

Optimization  

Then after 7-14 days analyze results and go into the optimization process.

Your goal is to have one collection ‘set’ and one ‘format’ that works well on as many campaigns as possible.


For one client I run half of the prospecting campaigns with catalog sales.

Only CAROUSELS because they work like crazy.

When campaigns stop performing, I change the filter in ‘product set’ to get more or fewer products.

Sometimes I also change the collection set with new creatives or add some new products IN.

Conclusion 

I see in this account I manage and spend 15k per day, I can push my catalog sales from $300 – $1k easily. Same on retargeting.

They are all less fragile about budgets than regular campaigns with images or videos.

At one point all my cold traffic was based on catalog sales and CPA was ½ cheaper than with regular conversion campaigns.

So I suggest you start finding out how you can add CATALOG SALES campaigns to your account right now.

If you are not using them, you’re leaving lots of advertising $$$ on the table. 🙂

Posted on

A Simple But Powerful Strategy to Make Your Products More Profitable

DimNiko Marketing | Make Your Products More Profitable
DMINIKO_RESOURCES-BLOG

A Simple But Powerful Strategy to Make Your Products More Profitable

Today I’m going to provide a different mindset. 

Take it as you will. 

Sometimes you just can’t see a different way to make your ads more profitable. 

You’re doing the same thing day in and day out. 

You’re used to it. 

You need to STOP what you’re doing and follow what I’m about to share.. 

Especially if you’re promoting multiple products that are mediocre. 

Use a One Product Mentality… 

Read More: Why Your ROAS Going Down While Scaling Can Be More Profitable

Focus on only one product during this test. 

This will help you understand how much it really takes to get a true winner. 

Some winners are just not ‘big big’ winners. 

But, we can make them pretty ‘cool’ winners 

A ‘cool’ winner for me is a B or C type winner. It’s doing okay, but hard to scale quickly. 

If you have 5-10 ‘cool’ winners, they can bring in the same revenue or more as one very ‘big big’

But you need to understand the concept of ‘one product’ mentality. 

If it will work for one product, then you can apply this strategy to all your products. 

PREPARATION

Overview your account for the last 90 days.

Pick one product that you see is outperforming all the others.

Here we aren’t looking for type A winners, but the ones that are always somehow around breakeven or 10% above.


Select 2 or 3 of the best creatives you have data for, where you see that CPC is below average, where CTR is more than 1.0, and where CPA is under your KPI (or breakeven).

Focus on this product and follow ROUND 1 – 7 as explained below.

Round 1 – Create 10 test campaigns.

Each campaign will have 3 adsets and one top creative you selected.


Dupe the creative so you have 2 for each adset and change the thumbnail.


So it’s one creative with 2 different thumbnails.


Upload a good pic for thumbnails if you can’t get it from the video.


On adset level, try all kinds of interests that you might think of. 


Think about your product and very obscure and usual buyers.


Do Google research. Find magazines, websites, online stores, etc. 

Make a list of different interests and then put them into adsets.

Only one interest per adset!

Don’t do LLAs yet, just interests.


Create 10 campaigns with just one pretty broad interest per adset.


Now duplicate all these test campaigns and test NARROW down interests.


Pick a more broad niche and narrow down with combined magazines, tv shows, websites, celebrities interests.

Try to get 10 campaigns with all sorts of interests narrowed down.


Put all campaigns budget to $20-40 if top 5 countries, and $10-20 if EUR and others.


Wait 3 days.


On day 3 select all campaigns and go to ADSET LEVEL. 


Turn off all interests where you see ROAS below your KPI.

Wait 2-5 more days.


Turn off all interests where you see ROAS below your KPI.

Go to ads level and turn off all ads with ROAS below your KPI.

SCALE budget 20-30% on best performing campaigns where ROAS is above your KPI.


You need to kill all campaigns with zero purchase and 2x your KPI spend!!!


Don’t wait for a miracle!

Check campaigns every 2-3 days and scale the budget by 20-30%.

If you see awesome performance, scale by 50% or 100%.



Round 2 – If you got at least 5 of 20 campaigns with ROAS better than your KPI (or breakeven), this is a success.

Work on them and slowly scale them.

At the same time repeat Phase one with no.2 creative of your winning product.

Dupe all 10 or 20 of your test campaigns and change ID to second best creative.

Round 3 – Now dupe all again and test ID no.3!

After all these tests, you will have at least 10 campaigns that will have ROAS above your KPI.

And you can find them in 7-10 days if you follow the above steps.


Round 4 – After you see success in one product, do the same thing for PRODUCT 2, PRODUCT 3 and PRODUCT 4.

Replicate the process of ROUND 2-4.

Round 5 – Dupe all successful campaigns and try CAROUSEL ADS!

Compare results with solo ads IDs.

Round 6 – Dupe again all best performers and try COLLECTION ADS!

Compare results with solo ads IDs and Carousel ads.

Round 7 – Scale what is working and create more INTERESTS campaigns.


If enough sales now, start testing PUR 30 LLA 1-2 OR 1-3%.

RETARGETING

MOF

Make a dynamic campaign for one PRODUCT and put 3-5 images and videos into ads.

Retarget 30 days engagers on FB+IG together.


You can also just dupe the TOFs and retarget with the same ads also FB+IG 7d.


Then create more TOFs for product 2, 3 and 4.


Try also Catalog sales campaigns here.

BOF

Do the same thing for BOF.


Plus Catalog Sale campaigns all product feed or just special sets.


It can perform very well.

NOTE: All retargeting campaigns you need to make on day 1 or 2!!!

Additional Resources

eCommerce Titans Podcast

eCommerce Titans by Dim Niko is the industry-leading podcast that brings together the cutting edge growth strategy, tips, and approaches of 8-9 figure eCommerce Entrepreneurs, Founders, CMOs and CEOs.

EPOCH Facebook Community

A Facebook community for top-level marketers to discuss and share hyper-advanced online marketing strategies. Network and learn from the best in the industry.

Daily Scale Newsletter

The Daily Scale newsletter is delivered directly to your inbox discussing top insights and strategies our agency uses every single day on our 7 figure DTC brands. 

ARE YOU READY TO SCALE YOUR ECOMMERCE BRAND?

Want In On The Juiciest Brand Building Strategies? Subscribe to Our Daily Newsletter

Hong Kong:
Unit 1102
11/F 29 Austin Rd
Tsim Sha Thui KL
Hong Kong

Pretoria:
60 Glenwood Road
The Aviary, First Floor, Office 2
Glenwood
Gauteng - South Africa
0081

Posted on

Don’t Trust Your Facebook Rep, Always Trust the Testing Data

DimNiko Marketing | Always Trust Your Testing Data

Facebook Reps are beneficial to the success of our client’s accounts. 

They warn us on specific changes, latest policy updates, and the structure of our campaigns so they can perform better. 

Sometimes, they even provide the ‘perfect’ testing budgets or how long the campaigns should run for (longer the better). 

Read More: Best Practices When Ads Manager Is Recording The Wrong Data.

Throughout my career as a Facebook Media Buyer, I’ve heard this tip more than 20x from different reps: You need to run your campaigns for 7 days and not touch it! 

For me, this never made sense since all the money that should be profitable was lost in the first 3-4 days if I didn’t touch it. 

Even if the campaign ‘magically’ would turn on the good side, I still wouldn’t be able to break even because of the money lost on day 1-4. 

Of course, there are campaign budgets and the CPA needs to be considered since not all campaigns and accounts will perform the same. 

But, generally speaking, if on day 1-4 I don’t see good results (especially on day 2-3), I will kill the testing campaign regardless of the Facebook Rep. 

I trust my data and I know my process of killing, tweaking, and re-launching test campaigns. This has shown me better results.

Much better than setting the budget and allowing automatic performance to optimize in the next 7 days.

I believe I can compete with any Facebook rep with my testing process since I probably have more ‘hand-on’ experience when it comes to ads. 

But, I’m always open to testing the ‘latest’ suggestions from our new and old reps!

I believe you can’t be a nerdy-greedy human who thinks he knows all about FB ads. 🙂 

As I don’t. 

I’m always open to learn and test new things and recommendations.

However, I know my data and the KPI my clients need to be profitable. 

So I’d prefer to kill the test before it reaches the point of no return. 

Last week, I did a new test. 

I calculated the best testing campaign budget for a specific account, set the structure exactly like the FB rep told me, and put it on auto for 7 days.

After 5 days, I was so curious about what was going on with my ‘big test’, that I checked it and killed the whole campaign immediately.

The budget was $650 per day and my KPI is $25 CPA in this account. 

After around $3k spend, the overall CPA was $45.

So don’t tell me now that FB will optimize the whole campaign magically in the next 2 days and the CPA will drop by $20.

Even if it decreases 2x, it won’t remove the damage that was already done. 

So I killed ‘the big test’ again and said a few bad words in my mind to this rep.

Although the structure she suggested was very interesting and the budget calculation was on point.

She recommended reducing the number of campaigns and combining budgets to get out of the learning phase and use the budget more efficiently. 

This was a recommendation for Prospecting Campaign – (maximum 4 ad sets) 

Ad Set 1 – Broad Audiences 

Ad Set 2 – Lookalike audiences 

Ad Set 3 – Detailed Targeting audiences with Audience expansion on 

Ad Set 4 – Custom Audiences 

To get out of the learning phase, each ad set needs to get at least 50 purchases every 7 days. 

If your average cost per purchase is $40, the budget she recommends should be at least $286 per ad set ($40 x 50 (purchases) = $2000 (weekly budget) => daily budget $3250/7 = $286 (per ad set, just to get out of the learning phase). 

If you were going to set up all 4 ad sets, the minimum daily budget to get out of the learning phase will be $286 * 4 = $1144 daily budget.

She recommended allocating enough daily budget at the campaign level to get out of the learning phase and to scale. 

For example, if you move forward with the recommendation above, she recommended a daily budget of $1716 for a campaign with 4 ad sets (approximately daily budget of $429 = ($286 x 1.5).

The same recommendations apply to lower-funnel campaigns as well.

Any time you’re setting up a campaign, keep in mind the average cost per conversion (purchase) in the past 30 days and use that cost per conversion to do the math above.

What’s my point of this article?  

Test on your own!

I’m not saying this strategy might not work. I believe that in some accounts where higher CPA or margins are possible, or where branding is more important than conversion, it can work for sure.

We tested this strategy in 4 of our client’s accounts and only one account had decent results.

All other 3 were a big failure.

But maybe it was just the time of the year. 

Or an algo hick-up that ruined the performance.

All a 3rd party FB issue that is hidden from us.

If you did some similar test, please let us know how it goes!

We want to figure out for what type of accounts and/or products this strategy might work well. 

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 successful and awesome day!

Matej 

Posted on

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

Posted on

Secret is Out – Replicate Our Best Performing IDs/Dynamics Campaign Structure

DimNiko | Post ID vs Dynamic Creative

Should I use one or many creatives / IDs or Dynamic in my campaigns?

We hear these two questions over and over again. With old and with new media buyers. What we found out is that both strategies will work.If you have a great product, that your targeted audience wants. And if you optimize campaigns correctly, when you get enough data.

Our recent tests showed that maybe at this point fewer is better than more – on cold traffic, more is better than a few – on retargeting, and IDs work better on short term, and Dynamics better on long term.

Let me explain a little more of our recent testing.

Example 1: Reorganizing a Current Client

We have this client’s account, where we mostly run dynamics on cold and retargeting for the past half of the year.

Budget was around 10k per day on average. We tested new always with $100 or $200, and after a few days and few tweaks performance was optimized. These campaigns performed well for 2-3 months if optimized correctly every day.

Here I mean downscaling and upscaling budget, and turning off and on ad sets + ads based on the last 3-7 days performance.

Structure on retargeting was almost the same as on cold traffic, and each ad set had around 10 images and 3 ad copies.

Then a few months back, we had to change all creatives very fast, and because we had more than 50 campaigns, we decided we were gonna do it with IDs.

We created around 10 different IDs (pics/vids, carousels, collections), and then duplicated all dynamic campaigns, deleted ads in them, and switched dynamics off on ad set level. Then we duplicated new IDs into these empty new campaigns one by one.

We finished the process in 2 days, but if we would go via dynamics, we would need the whole week as we would also need to create ad sets from scratch because of the audiences.

We decided that we are gonna try all campaigns with IDs for a week, to see if they can compete with our previous dynamic campaigns.

To our big surprise, after 5 days when new IDs got enough engagement, we optimized the campaigns heavily and results were great.

We put 1-2 IDs in different combinations on cold traffic, and 3-5 together in retargeting campaigns.

Now after 2 months these campaigns are still working well and they are bringing pretty much the same results as before.

Example 2: Setting Up a New Client

Our new client when he came to us, had only 2 proven IDs that performed well in the past.

He didn’t have any good video creatives, all he had was a bunch of product pics that were not tested. So we selected the best ones and put everything in dynamics on cold and retargeting.

We thought we were gonna make it work but somehow dynamics never worked here.

After one month of testing we gave up, and went testing just IDs. Results were better but still not where we want them to be.

So in month 2 we decided to push only the 2 IDs they performed the best in our dynamic tests, and use dynamic campaigns just on our retargeting.

Strategy became our winning one and we used the same approach in one other account.

Results were great again. So at this point, we like to push a small number of IDs on the front end, and a lot of creatives in dynamics on the backend.

You can also do with lots of IDs on retargeting, but then I would suggest to change copy based on the 3-90d segments.

We also exclude all page viewers, buyers and social media engagers on cold traffic, so we target just fresh visitors. And that is a very simple structure you can replicate and try out!

1 or 2 IDs on cold, 5-10 IDs or Dynamics on retargeting.

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

Let’s see if we’re the right fit.

Let us know what works best for you at this point.

Sharing is caring 🙂

Have a wonderful day,

Matej 

Posted on

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 

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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