who is this article for?
Anyone who is actively managing, operating, or running an E-commerce store that sells anything online and uses Facebook Ads to do it (along with either Google AdWords or Amazon Marketing).
Why Should you read this article?
I’ve been taught by the world’s best Facebook marketers like Cat Howell and Tom Hiscocks, individuals who spent more than one million dollars per month in ad spend on Facebook. I’m not talking about some mediocre $400 course you buy online and watch videos. I’m talking about being actively taught with live calls, meet-ups, and workshops to grow and perfect our marketing skills for 2+ years. In that time, I’ve been able to grow my agency, Laser Sight Digital, and help countless of businesses along the way.
Let’s jump in.
There are five factors in increasing your ROAS that most marketers don’t actively write about. I’ll discuss each factor from a high-level. These five factors to increase your ROAS for your E-commerce store are:
- Customer avatars
- Rapid fire testing
- Knowing the Facebook algorithm
- Expanding reach with collected data
- Retargeting at BOF (Bottom of Funnel)
1) Custom avatars
The first step you want to do is list all of your potential customers and group them into customer avatars. For example, if I’m selling a course on Facebook Ads, one of my potential customers would be someone who freelances digital marketing. Another customer might be a digital marketing agency owner who wants to keep up-to-date with all the nuisances of Facebook marketing. Once you’ve identified each avatar, it will significantly help your marketing in the next factor, which is Rapid fire testing.
2) Rapid fire testing
This is a term used for testing multiple different audiences and targeting in your initial campaign launch. There is a specific way to do rapid fire testing (testing multiple creatives, turning off ad sets, etc etc), but high level, you want to test out each of the customer avatars you’ve developed to find out which audience reacts to your marketing campaigns. Ideally, you want to be very liberal with your ad spend (but keep within your budget), so you can collect the greatest amount of data in the quickest amount of time. Ultimately, you’ll get back a lot of data of what works and what didn’t work.
3) Knowing the algorithm
To be a successful marketer and really increase those ROAS numbers, you have to know how the algorithm works behind Facebook. For instance, for a conversion campaign, you must have triggered 50 view contents in one week before you optimize for the next step (Add To Cart), and from ATC (Add To Cart), you must have another set of 50-pixel fires until you can optimize for the next stage in the sales process. Why is this important? Often times, we see clients (and other marketers) try and go for the gold right away, but without any visitors or pixel fires to your site, Facebook is going to have a hard time figuring out who your ideal customers are. Therefore, I recommend getting familiar with how the Facebook algorithm works.
4) Expanding the reach
Now that you know how the algorithm works and reacts to all the data collected, you can expand upon your initial findings during your rapid fire testing. By now you should have a lot of data and website visitors to be able to decipher what the next steps are. Using custom audiences, you can create look-alike (LAL) audiences of whomever interacted with your store. For example, if you have had 100 pixel fires for the purchase event, that means you have had 100 customers who have purchased an item on your store. Now you can upload that audience to Facebook and create a LAL audience, which tells Facebook to go out and find those people who “look like” your purchasers and who may have a higher intent to purchase on your store.
5) Retargeting
You ever been shown an ad about an item you JUST saw on their website? Savvy marketers call this retargeting. And Savvy marketers DO retarget. However, there is a clever way of retargeting and I cannot tell you how many times I have seen people not utilize this feature. I’m talking about DPA’s (dynamic product ad). You’ll have to link your stores product catalog to your ad account to do this, but DPA ads are probably the best thing to happen in the E-commerce world for marketers. It allows you to show the exact product (or products) a customer was shopping for.
I didn’t list this as a “factor” but I have one more secret to increasing your ROAS. Evergreen funnels. What are those you may ask? It’s a sales funnel that is evergreen, meaning, it never has to been altered with because it works like clockwork. Ideally, you have a lot of audiences and content at the top of the funnel feeding them to your store and at the bottom, you retarget those who viewed your product and left or who added to cart, but never purchased. If you keep your top of the funnel full and keep driving visitors to your store and have the BOF figured out with proper retargeting, you’ll never have to worry about your ROAS again.
