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E-COMMERCE
Ecom Side Hustle: Grossing $222.5K with a beard product – $84.7K in ad spend
Here comes Tuesday. And here comes another e-commerce case study from David Schloss, where he started from $0 for his client. Remember, he had another case study we posted on 6th December.
Zero brand, zero data, zero customers. He brought it from $0 to a sweet $222.5K revenue. Three months of split tests. But eventually, the efforts paid off.
It’s a hair and beard care products store. And they sell bundles ranging from $50 to $200 per purchase. And the entire $222.5K of revenue came from 693 purchases, making it an AOV of $321 while having an average of $122 CPA.
They started testing 20 products before settling for the top 10.
The targeting used was obviously men, but David found a hidden gem by targeting the girlfriends and wives of these men with birthday, anniversary, and wedding anniversaries ads saying they should buy these products for their boyfriend, fiance, or husband.
What was the entire ad setup?
1) Ads to individual products listing.
2) Ads to collection pages.
3) Ads to blog posts (hair and beard care tips – 2 posts/month).
4) Retargeting ad to product lists.
5) Retargeting ad to collection pages.
6) Retargeting ad for abandoned carts.
7) Retargeting ad using catalogue sale objective focusing on people who visited product pages, visited the cart, or initiated checkout and didn’t finish the purchase.
They only used video ads, and he again recommends to make 60s videos to split test between Facebook and Instagram.
For the audience, David started very broad and narrowed the audience down, once they had gathered some good data.
A crucial element was to target audiences of the influencers and use the influencers’ names in the Ads. It also helped to create 2 pieces of content every month that people would enjoy and find helpful.
David also revealed the net results: 29% of the revenue, meaning a $64.5K net. Not bad for a side hustle…
If you want to read in detail about this, have a look at his post.
AFFILIATE MARKETING
Finding the right offer and unique angle combo – a guide from IAmAttila
Marketing your products online isn’t getting any easier day by day. With competition growing and more people entering the market, it’s getting tougher to make it worthwhile.
Today, IAmAttila shares another strategy about getting started with “1-product-funnels” from scratch and how to make it work profitably.
First and foremost, you need to come up with products which already have a good market demand. In other words, the offer is more than half the battle for any campaign.
Even though you have niche specific high-quality product, if it doesn’t have a mass market appeal, it is not probably going to be a sure thing. Especially if you don’t already have an established brand.
If you have a Shopify store that’s already generating at least 30% profits after deducting all costs, his unique-angles funnel saw around 80%-120% profit margins. He says “99% of affiliates don’t bother with these angles and the 1% that do this, achieve things that every marketer dreams of.”
The first thing he did was to research the benefits of his products and the target audience who will benefit the most of it. This helped him come up with a variety of audiences for targeting. Next, he created a custom audience on FB using audience insights.
For creatives, he used shocking/bizarre/unbelievable images and/or videos that match up with the angles. He ran website conversion campaigns, optimized for purchases.
Targeting around 5 audiences, using the above mentioned and well researched 1-3 unique angles around them. At $10/day adset on auto-bid, he now had around 6-12 different adsets targeting different audiences, letting it run untouched for around 72 hours.
Scheduling his campaigns for 7AM in the morning, he experienced FB giving impressions a boost and resulted in profit margins above 80%.
The point here is to have a product which solves a pain point, which caters to a market need. Then research about the product to understand the relevant audience and how this product solves their pain points using unique angles.
Analyzing your data, the right way!
Trend analysis is important when you’re running campaigns. The big problem is that the human brain isn’t made for it. When looking at numbers, our brain sees patterns where there are none. The brain simply has a hard time looking at numbers without seeing patterns even if they are made up.
OptimizeSmart took a closer look at how to analyze data trends using Google Analytics and helps you go beyond this typical human flaw.
You already know that you can measure the performance of a marketing channel, campaign, or traffic source over time with the help of GA.
So you have these typical questions you can ask yourself… Are website sales growing? Is the average order value improving? Where should I spend my money to get highest ROI? Which is the most effective marketing channel?
To make sure you get the right answers to these question, it’s important to look exactly at how the data is collected. Any decision made on the basis of corrupted data could prove fatal for your business.
The same thing is true for historical data. The older the data, the more unreliable it becomes. Comparing absolute numbers to the previous year could be like comparing apples to oranges because so much has changed when looking at traffic, competitors and your target market.
Though when talking about sales cycles and seasonality, it’s important to look at historical data. Most businesses have natural ups and downs over the course of a year.
When taking seasonal swings into account you can understand why f.e. November is always better than August, and by what factor this usually is the case. But don’t make the mistake to look at absolute numbers when comparing your data to the previous year because there are many other factors involved that are often times hard to quantify.
Those are just a few examples OptimizeSmart goes through. You can check their full article for 10 tips on correctly analyzing GA data, including screenshots!
Google Ads – You know you should try them, so here are the mistakes you should avoid
Google Ads are certainly still one of the top traffic sources out there, even with fixed smaller budgets.
However, are your budgets being used effectively? How can you make sure you are not throwing money away?
Here are 5 things that you may want to focus on, for having super effective Google Ad campaigns.
Negative Keyword List: You may have heard about it before or maybe not. However, the thing about building your negative keyword list is that it’s time-consuming and takes a lot of effort. Hence, most marketers tend to get lazy about this.
Doing this is no fun, however, you want to make sure your budget is being used in the best possible manner and not having enough/right negative keywords is one of the biggest reasons for ineffective budget utilization.
For example, you may be running ad campaigns for a brand, selling their products and people may be also looking for jobs at the same company or other stuff which are not the keywords you want to be paying for!
That’s why it’s highly recommended to have a look at your search terms report and add negative search terms to your list of negative keywords. Also, you should add the relevant search terms to your ad groups.
Too Much Automation: Managing ad campaigns on Google can be a grind and drive you crazy, agreed.
Those negative keyword lists, writing new ads, optimization, selecting manual placements etc can be a daunting task.
Eventually, you end up automating everything. Automated bid adjustments. Automated rules. Automated scripts.
While these can be very helpful, they take the learning experience out of Google Ads.
Bidding consistently on high volume keywords: We all love to bid on keywords with high volume to generate more traffic. However, they cost a fortune!
Keywords with super high volume can be intent-less. With broad searches costing around $10-50 per click, they are often saturated with too many big-budget competitors bidding for these keywords. Unless your goal is just brand awareness and you want to reach out to so many people every month, probably not a good idea to go this route.
Instead, you should be searching for keywords that provide a huge bang for the buck.
Budget Management: The Search network is huge. With so many keywords available for targeting… Now, if a single click on a hugely popular keyword costs you $50 and your monthly budget is $500, you will only get about 10 clicks a month.
Sales? With average market conversion rates being around 5%, maybe a single sale in a few months.
Hence, it’s recommended to use all your budget on your best performers. Stop spreading your budget too thin and start focusing on narrower, targeted efforts. Once you are making some solid return out of it, you can increase the budget there.
Once that budget starts to pay off, repeat the process for a second campaign, and a third, and a fourth. Only when you have a big budget you can play around with multiple campaigns at once!
Experiment and test often: Another great way to burn your budget is too much fidgeting, experimenting and testing with the interface.
While split-testing can be beneficial, it can also result in wasted budgets. Small things like testing CTAs or button color is fine, however that may not be a game changer. Testing various ad creatives, various audiences is something which requires bigger budgets.
No point testing a lot if you don’t get at least 1,000 impressions every month, and at least 200 conversions per month.
Google Ads can definitely work, however they can also destroy your budget if not utilized properly. Spend only on successful campaigns, stick to the most profitable keywords and scale them. Add negative keywords on a consistent basis. Stop relying heavily on automation when you’re just learning. Leverage human context on understanding what’s working and what’s not. Don’t bother testing if you don’t have enough impressions!
Speaking of automation done right, check out today’s newsletter sponsor below…
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POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Zuck puts his eyes on blockchain
Is Mark a hodl guy? Kinda… In fact, Facebook is looking to step up its “decentralization” efforts. The social media giant is currently recruiting blockchain engineers and researchers.
The blockchain team is a startup within Facebook, with a vision to make blockchain technology at Facebook scale.
The company already had a dozen people working on blockchain and cryptocurrency tech back in May. And the effort was led by former Messenger lead, David Marcus, who previously held a role as a board member at Coinbase.
Yet, it’s still unclear how Facebook will actually use the blockchain technology. Mark already showed his interests towards cryptocurrencies in the past. However, Facebook, like other companies, will probably use the blockchain technology internally.
So don’t get your rockets out just yet. Plus, FB still has other issues to tend to before… *cough cough*
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