E-commerce Success: 4x ROI with Smart Facebook Ads

Hey guys, hope you’re doing well! I wanted to share some really great news and an exciting case study from our recent Facebook ads workshop. It’s always so rewarding to see my students take what they’ve learned and run with it, and this story is a perfect example of that.

We had Jenny from Pop and Dangle attend one of my workshops a little while ago. Since then, she’s been doing some ongoing coaching with me to make sure she’s on track with her campaigns and has a solid understanding of what’s happening with her e-commerce store. I’m so pleased to say that with a little bit of further testing and some key changes, she’s not only gotten her first sales ever from her website, but she’s gotten five of them—all from her Facebook ads!

It’s really incredible to see results come in so quickly, and I couldn’t wait to share this with you all. I think it’s a great lesson for anyone out there who’s running ads and feeling a bit lost.

From Clicks to Customers: The Initial Stumble

After our workshop, Jenny was super enthusiastic and she launched a lot of different campaigns, trying lots of different things. In fact, a few of the campaigns we set up during the workshop never actually launched, which was a real shame. But she went through on her own and set up more campaigns later. And this is where a very common mistake came in: she was running them for link clicks rather than website purchases.

This is one of the most frequent errors I see, especially with new e-commerce store owners. You see, the aim of the game is whatever you want in your business. That’s the objective you should be starting with. If you want sales, you need to tell Facebook to optimize your campaigns for sales. If you tell Facebook you want clicks, it’s going to find you the cheapest clicks possible. It’s going to find people who are most likely to click on a link, but not necessarily people who are in a purchasing mindset.

As a result, Jenny was getting lots and lots of clicks on her old traffic campaigns, but they weren’t getting any purchases through. In a coaching session, we sat down and talked about this. I said, “Hey, you really want purchases, right? That is the aim of the game.” So, my highly recommended advice was to focus on that with her campaigns.

This isn’t to say that traffic is bad. Traffic campaigns can be good once you’ve grown your brand, you’ve gotten sales coming through, and you’re starting to bring in some revenue. At that point, a traffic campaign can be a great way to supplement what you’re already doing. It can bring in new people who might not be ready to buy from you right now, but would be interested in your brand and want to do some shopping later on. But for a business just starting out, or for anyone whose primary goal is sales, you need to start with purchases and then maybe move on to traffic in the future.

The Turnaround: Focusing on the Right Goal

So, we launched a brand new campaign together, and this time, the objective was set to purchases. I’m so thrilled to share the fantastic results we’ve seen.

The new campaign has had about $100 spent and, as I mentioned, it has gotten in five purchases. Let’s look at the numbers in a little more detail. It’s gotten 190 clicks, which, to be honest, is fewer clicks than her previous traffic campaigns were getting. But here’s the thing: these clicks were valuable. These were clicks from people who were much more likely to buy.

When we look at the other e-commerce figures, we can see that we had about $463 in revenue come through from this campaign. That puts her at a cost of about $20 per purchase, which is a fantastic number for her industry. Even better, that’s a 4.29x return on ad spend (ROAS). In other words, for every single dollar she spent on ads, she was getting $4.29 back. That is an incredible result, especially for a business in its early stages. Furthermore, this campaign is getting about a 3% conversion rate, which means that 3% of the people who click the link on the Facebook ads are then going on to purchase.

My advice to Jenny was simple: “Keep this going, keep it going! It is really fantastic to see these results coming in, and you want to keep that momentum.”

The Next Steps: Optimizing for Longevity

During our recent coaching session, we had a bit of extra time and talked about the next steps. I definitely think that getting some more creatives in place would be a great idea. Facebook had given all the budget to just one ad in the campaign—that one ad was getting a majority of the sales and a majority of the budget. Out of the hundred dollars that’s been spent, this single ad got $94 of it. The other ads in the campaign had a measly $10 and $1, respectively.

This is a very common scenario with Facebook’s algorithm, which will often see one ad working straight out of the gate and then give it almost all the budget. But this is not what you want when you’re first launching campaigns. You want to see: does this offer work better than this offer? Does this video work better than that image? You want to have a bit more control so that the budget is split 50/50.

This is where a split test comes in. It’s a very simple thing to set up. With your ad selected, you can click the A/B test option, and Meta has a wizard that will walk you through it. I always tell my students to focus on testing the creative because it is the fastest thing to see if it’s the creative or the offer that is the issue. The wizard will also ask you to determine the “winner” based on a specific metric. Since Jenny is focused on sales, I recommended that cost per purchase would be a good key metric to focus her split test on.

It’s also important to name your creative test. In Meta’s section where you can see all your tests, they will all be called “creative test.” So, I recommended something like “Offer Testing” along with a date so that you can easily see what it is later. The wizard will set the test to run for a certain amount of time, and I often expand that out to at least a week at minimum. The tool also gives you the option to end the test early if a winner is found, but I often just say, “Let it run.” I want to see if it’s still performing well at the end of the full timeframe.

The final step is to make sure you’ve got a new ad that you would be happy to run with. The wizard will create a new “test ad set” within the campaign, and you just need to make sure you go in and fix any issues and finalize the new ad creative. This process basically goes, “Alright, both of these ads have the same budget. We’re going to separate this so that the audience is not the same people. We’re going to be splitting that audience in half, audience A and audience B, and we’re going to run these to see if one works better than the other with the same budget.” This is a crucial step for optimizing your campaigns over the long term.

The Power of Automation: Emails to Close the Deal

We also had a bit of extra time to talk about something that’s often overlooked: email automation. This is a huge benefit for business owners, especially if you don’t have any emails in place. Automations mean that when a certain action happens, it’s going to trigger a series of emails in a flow.

A good example is abandoned cart emails, which only apply to e-commerce. Another is welcoming new subscribers who have signed up to a pop-up or a newsletter on your website.

Jenny had already drafted her emails, which was fantastic. So we just went through the automation flows in Shopify, talked about how to set them up, the timeframes between emails, and then we went through and activated and published the entire automation.

Now, if somebody subscribes to email marketing from any channel—a pop-up on her website, a newsletter, or even in person at a market—it’s going to start sending through a sequence of emails. Jenny has four emails in her flow:

1. “Welcome to Dangle Diaries”
2. Wait 48 hours
3. “The heart behind Pop and Dangle”
4. Wait another 48 hours
5. “Your earring collections needs these”
6. Wait five more days
7. The last email with an offer: “Just in case you forgot, free earrings are still yours”

She’s got some lovely offers, like free pearl studs if you place an order over a certain amount. These are things you can set up in about an hour. The real work is in writing the emails, but email automation is such an important part of your digital marketing that’s often overlooked.

Think about it this way: you’re paying money to send people to your website. But what happens if they don’t buy? You want to be able to send them a follow-up email. You want to be able to try and close that deal with a series of emails. This also works for service industries; you can have pop-ups on your site that nurture people to a free discovery call or to book a service. It’s a key part of your marketing funnel.

Well Done, Jenny!

I am so happy to see that we were able to help Jenny and Pop and Dangle. She has taken all the learnings from the workshop and our coaching sessions and applied them perfectly, resulting in a fantastic four times return on her campaign within the first 30 days of launching. It’s really awesome to see, and I thought I’d share it with you all just to share the good news.

It also serves as an encouragement to you guys. If you haven’t already, I’d love for you to reach out and book in a free call with me. I’d love to help you out with my coaching services to make sure that you’re on track and getting the results that you are hoping for. It’s always helpful to have somebody just look over your stuff. Honestly, Jenny did a lot of this stuff herself, so all I had to do was just go over it with her, say “Yep, you’ve done everything right,” and then switch on and activate the automation. And she was away laughing!

I want to end this by saying good job, Jenny! Well done. You’re doing such great work, and we’re really excited to see the results going forward. For anyone watching, please go check out https://www.popanddangle.com.au. They are fantastic, and buy some earrings—they’re really cool! Support a local business and go buy a pair. You might even get one free. How good is that?

Thank you so much, Jenny, for letting me continue to help going forward, and everyone else, thanks so much for watching. Take care!