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E-COMMERCE
Let’s take over this Q4. A 5.15X ROAS Case Study
We’re looking forward to spending another Q4 with you fellow marketers! We’re so happy, in fact, that we’ve brought you another post to help you crush it!
Besides, a case study to start the week with a good source of inspiration.
How top e-commerces prepare themselves for Q4
There’s something in the air. Like in Lord of The Rings, when you see hordes of orcs preparing to overthrow humanity. Only it’s not orcs… It’s hordes of marketers preparing to take over Q4 in 2019!
For many businesses, Q4 is the difference between an “ok year” and an unbelievable one. So, it’s a good idea to start preparing early. If you haven’t started yet, here comes Depesh Mandalia to the rescue.
He brought us 9 steps to prepare for Q4:
- Product and resource planning: Stock, suppliers, logistics, margins etc – get all this nailed down early.
- Bottom up improvements: Start with the low hanging fruit by improving bottom of the funnel metrics.
- Increasing positive platform signals: Start working to lower the CPM and increase the ROAS right now.
- Creative diversity: Angles and creatives are the barrier to scaling. Start producing them.
- Content strategy for lower CPMs: Set up a content strategy to lower your CPMs and promote traffic expansion.
- Expanding Traffic sources: Facebook isn’t the only wave you should surf. Pinterest and Google, for example, are two traffic sources you could leverage.
- Build the thirst: Get your audience thirsty before you scale.
- Account stability: Nothing worse than having flaws in your ad account: The secret to scaling and staying positive is keeping your garden free from weeds. The process is hard initially, but maintenance keeps the pests away…
- Scaling: Before hitting the accelerator, Depesh suggests checking out his Core-4 score system (we featured it Friday). If everything is in place, you’re ready to take over.
Finish line.
Not ready to think about the holiday season yet? Shame on you.
$200k in ad spend – Over $1M in revenue
Stepan Hlinka shared a detailed case study about an e-commerce store in the bedding niche. The shop sold mattresses, blankets and pillows, with a $101 AOV (Average order value). Targeting: Worldwide.
The case study also includes some key details (social media stats and advertising stats) as well as all the audiences targeted etc. But we will limit to reporting the juice here:
Promotional Calendar
The shop had several products and bundles to sell, so they rotated these offers to create different promos. This made them have real scarcity, and low supply usually equals high demand.
According to Stepan, this was key to scaling the business. So, if you have a large number of items and can create different offers around them, go for it!
Cold traffic campaigns
- Objective: Conversion campaigns optimized for Purchase.
- Audiences: They went with Lookalikes Audiences. They checked the top performing countries in Google Analytics and created LLAs for each of these countries.
The size of the LLA would depend on the country’s size. However, ideally you want to go for an audience size of 1M. So, they tested 25 LLAs with $25 daily budget. (It’s not specified, but we guess it’s $25 per different audience aka ad set).
- Copy: For cold audiences, long form copy worked the best. Test different angles and find the best ones. Once you see a performance drop, refresh the ad with new angles and copy.
- Creative: 2 videos and 1 image.
Remarketing Campaigns
- Objective: Conversion, Traffic and Reach.
- Audiences: You should leverage all assets to follow up your audience. Don’t limit your retargeting to product page visitors or ATCs. Instead, target them all: Product Visitors, Store Visitors, Email List, Page Engagers, Video Watchers, Instagram Engagers, etc. Also, hit different time windows: 30 days, 90 days, 180 days.
Make sure to always exclude the audiences from each other to avoid overlapping.
- Abandoned cart retargeting sequences: They created a separate Facebook campaign for abandoned carts using the email sequence run.
- Ad copy: For warm audiences, short form copy worked better, plus you can be more direct with the sale. You can use discount, FOMO or customer testimonials as angles.
- Creatives: Here you should use many different creatives so you don’t bore your audience. Interestingly, images worked really well for the retargeting.
Here we are. With this strategy Stepan achieved an average $17.28 CPP, totaling 10K purchases. The result? $1M in revenue and a 5.15 ROAS.
Sounds sweet eh? So, if you’re curious and want to see more, check Stepan’s post here.
SPONSORED
All about Google Ads in 2019 with Jim Banks, a marketer for 20+ years
Good way to start the week, don’t you think? Listen to an industry veteran go through what works in 2019 on the world’s biggest ad network and tell some of his funniest stories after 20+ years in the industry.
That’s what this episode featuring Jim Banks is all about. With so much industry experience, from before Google even launched AdWords, it’s clear that everyone has at least a thing or two to learn from him and we’re super glad he accepted our invitation.
We talk to Jim about:
- His past in the digital marketing space.
- The missed chances in these 20 years of being a marketer.
- What makes Google Ads a no-brainer today, even though FB Ads has more “hype” in our industry right now.
- What is the biggest mistake he sees marketers make in Google Ads.
- What’s the key thing he does much more in his campaigns in 2019 than ever before.
- Hilarious stories from conferences and speaking at conferences.
- Jim’s biggest, most costly mistake.
Listen on Apple Podcasts/iTunes.
Don’t forget to like and subscribe!
BOT MARKETING
Lead scoring and Google sheets integration
Do you have a lead qualification process in place to identify your most valuable bot subscribers?
Kelly Noble Mirabella shared a video tutorial which helps you assign a score to your bot subscribers based on the actions they take.
For example, you can add points to users’ lead score when they sign up for a webinar or to a particular sequence.
With this system, you can add and update lead score points based on your subscribers actions to separate the most engaging subscribers from the non engagers.
Better leads = Higher conversions = More cheese!
Additionally, she also shared a quick way to use Google sheets integration to update the lead score. This helps you continually track all your Messenger Bot subscribers’ lead scores and check them at a glance on a Google spreadsheet.
Check out her post for more details.
Wanna skip the post and head straight to the video tutorial? Head here instead.
Timestamps:
- Set up lead scoring: 1:15
- Filter Audience by Score: 6:04
- Google Sheets integration & score updates: 7:12
What objectives should you optimize for? Dim Niko’s take
What objective should I choose for my FB ad campaigns? This is a common question many new marketers ask themselves when approaching FB Ads. Sometimes, even seasoned marketers find themselves in a state of confusion over this.
Now, Dimitri Nikolakakis wanted to share his thoughts on this. Obviously everything is backed by an understanding of how the ad platform works.
Starting from the basics, if you want purchases, optimize for purchases, right?
Despite how obvious that sounds, many marketers still optimize their campaigns around different objectives (Video Views, Traffic, etc.) at their top of the funnel. But why would you fill your funnel with traffic that isn’t optimized for purchases? Why are you funneling people that FB tagged as Clickers or Video Viewers? WHY, WE ASK YOU!?
Not optimizing for purchases means that you won’t be ROI-positive in the TOF phase. Not to mention the fact that, if you fill your funnel with traffic that isn’t meant to convert, optimizing it further down the line will be a nightmare.
Dimitri, however, sticks with the “go for the purchase optimization” theory even during the retargeting phase. FB doesn’t just optimize for the user’s characteristics, but also for the time of delivery, placement, delivery device, and location.
So, according to Dim Niko, if you just want sales, forget about all other objectives.
However, as we always say, never take someone’s words as absolute truth, even if they are from a well-known marketer. We’ve all come across case studies with huge ROAS that were using other campaign objectives, including today’s ecomm case study.
It’s good to compare different ideas, but the final answer always comes from the tests and data!
SEO
Bulk review management for GMBs
Finding it tough to manage reviews for your multiple business listings?
Thanks to this update from Google, you can now view, reply to, and flag reviews for multiple listings from a single page.
It is now available in location groups with 500 or fewer locations, although it’s not available for organization accounts.
How does it work?
- Login to your Google My Business account.
- Click on the “Manage reviews” tab on the left side.
- Find all your reviews on a single page.
This will save you tons of time if you’ve been managing multiple business listings or locations, allowing you to find and respond to important reviews quickly and easily.
QUORA
Onboard people-based audiences to Quora Ads manager
Quora has announced an integration with the LiveRamp platform to help you onboard people-based audiences to the Quora Ads Manager.
How does it help?
It enables marketers to onboard segmented audiences to Quora Ads Manager based on offline records in order to reach out and engage with these audiences.
It will also increase match rates for targeting, exclusions and for Lookalikes audiences modeling.
How does it work? All you need to do is activate Quora as a new destination in your LiveRamp Connect account.
Check out more details on the announcement, as well as step-by-step instructions to set up the integration.
This will save you tons of time if you’ve been managing multiple business listings or locations, allowing you to find and respond to important reviews quickly and easily.
TOOLS
A/B test calculator
The Crew came across a handy A/B test calculator which helps you get answers to all your pre and post test analysis questions.
All you gotta do is enter the relevant data about test duration, sample size and variants involved, and it will return results for the estimated conversion rates, confidence level and statistical power involved.
It will help you answer questions such as:
- Does your test variant beat the original?
- Does your test have the necessary sample size?
- Does your test have the necessary duration?
- What is the monetary ROI of the test variant?
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Still driving a Lambo?
Which car are you driving these days? And which one are you using in the backdrop of your FB Ad creatives while selling those courses? *just kidding*
If you’re struggling to add value to those courses, here’s the perfect chance to come up with FB creatives that stand out from your competitors.
Paying homage to the Bugatti EB110 supercar from the early 1990s, Bugatti has announced the launch of The Bugatti Centodieci, the French automaker’s most powerful supercar ever.
Even better, it will only cost around $9M! We’re sure many of you can easily afford that, right? But here’s the catch: They are only making 10 of these.
It’s pure modern-day engineering. It comes with an 8.0-liter W16 engine with 1,600 horsepower and will take you from 0 to 62 miles per hour in just 2.4 seconds!
So, now all the ads showing gurus posing with Lambos are definitely obsolete! You gotta step up your game Tai Lopez!
Are you already reaching for your wallet and checking for change down the back of the sofa? Well, don’t bother. We’re sorry to bring all your hopes and dreams crashing down, but all 10 of these beasts have already been sold.
Though, a glimmer of hope still remains.
The company is also producing 40 of the Bugatti Divo and just one La Voiture Noire, which is the world’s most expensive new car ever at $18.68M.
So, step up your holiday season game this Q4 and we’ll just sit around and wait to see you posing in front of a £19M supercar in one of your ads.