£130k Shopify Store – Facebook Ads Breakdown
Many of you have been asking for a Facebook ads breakdown of our (at present) £130k Shopify store.
I’ll get into that in this post for sure 🙂
The corresponding YouTube to this blog post can be found here.
Before I get into the Facebook ads breakdown, I just wanted to talk a bit about capital and fulfilment.
Store Capital
With the kind of store we are doing, we needed a lot of capital to start.
You can see in my last post what sort of costs are involved in running something like this.
On top of all the normal costs of starting up a P.O.D or drop-shipping Shopify store, we had to bulk buy our product.
Luckily, we had some money behind us so could ‘spend ahead’ as it were.
Buying thousands of items from China at once and getting them shipped to the U.K. is not cheap.
You’re talking thousands of pounds at a time.
Before we ran a single ad or made a single sale, we were already well out of pocket.
Costs were mounting up fast…
Pressure was on to make this work!
Fulfilment
On top of capital, we needed warehouse space.
All these boxes of product have to be stored somewhere.
Luckily 2 guys on the team already run a 7 figure jewellery fulfilment store and have a warehouse with fulfilment facilities.
So we kind of ‘tagged’ our business onto this and moved in 😅
On top of storage, there has to be internet, a label printer, and staff to package up the product as orders come in.
Product goes into padded envelopes, pre-paid shipping labels are added then they are put into sacks for dispatch.
Once a day Mon-Fri our parcel service comes in a van to collect everything and take it away.
Already we are outgrowing the space and looking to move into bigger premises this year.
Ok, just wanted to get that bit out of the way before I move into the Facebook ads breakdown 🙂
I’m sorry to say there’s not much to reveal 😂
And it’ll be the same for any store doing big numbers.
A winning product is more important than your ads.
I’ve seen this proved right time, and time, and time again.
We knew we had a winning product.
We’d seen it work and win elsewhere in multiple countries, on multiple stores.
We had over 5000 of them in big boxes sat all around us waiting to go.
When you have a winner like this, doing Facebook ads for it is easy. Honestly.
You don’t have to make it complicated.
What we did….
There were already a TON of video ads for this product online.
Multiple sellers had clearly been making a LOT of money out of it.
Time for us to climb on the back of that, and take our slice 🥳
We found a video ad for this product with massive engagement, up in the millions.
Then, we stole it.
Wait what?
You just ripped the ad from another Facebook page, uploaded it to yours, then started using it in an ad yourself?
Yep. That’s what we did. Call the cops.
Since start we have paid guys on Fiverr to make many other ads for this product.
But, ironically (lol) the one that makes us the most money…
…is the super amateur looking, low-res video ad that we stole in the first place.
If it ain’t broke – don’t fix it.
Facebook Ads Set Up / Process
Like I said earlier, there’s no massive secrets or ‘special sauce’ to reveal here.
I’m not a magician.
When you see ‘gurus’ using this kind of terminology online, always ask yourself why.
Ads aren’t the hard bit. Finding a winner is what you need to concentrate on.
Once you find a winner, the rest falls into place pretty easily.
We started a broad CBO campaign (no interests) M/F age 25+ U.K. traffic only.
That’s literally it.
While Facebook reporting may have gone a bit crazy the last few months since all the iOS14 changes…
…It’s super good at going off on its own and hunting out buyers for you.
We ran this ad for a few days with £50 daily budget.
Sales started coming in, and sacks of product started going out from the warehouse.
Some points :
When we started this was a brand new ‘everything’.
- Brand new Facebook business manager
- New Facebook ads account with new (fresh) payment methods added
- Brand new Paypal account (not even business level at this point)
- Brand new Shopify store with brand new Shopify payments account
- 100% brand new Facebook pixel
You are FINE to get started with ‘brand new everything’.
We were and you will be too. Keep pushing and let metrics optimise themselves.
It takes some time, and some money (at first, you’ll think you are throwing cash away)
Stick to your guns.
If you bow out at this point you will be wasting a lot of time and effort.
Don’t do it!
- All new Facebook campaigns take about a week to optimise fully.
- Once we see campaigns optimise, if ROAS is good, we then duplicate and increase budget.
- Rinse and repeat.
- Keep going while ROAS is in the right place, ad budget and stock allowing.
Whatever a campaign was doing, we generally left it on and running for a week before making any decisions.
In our case, the first £50 campaign was working fine and bringing in a healthy ROAS of in between 2 and 3.
Breakeven ROAS on our winning product was 1.4.
If you don’t know what this means please watch my YouTube on BEPROAS here.
- As a whole, your ads manager and campaigns start optimising way more quickly once you have 100 purchases in total.
We pushed on and worked towards this point as quick as spend would allow on a new ads account.
After a week the initial campaign was working great.
ROAS was healthy, everything we’d put in place was working, and all systems were go at the warehouse.
Things were running smoothly.
Time to crank it.
Let’s Scale Up.
- Don’t mess with a working campaign/adset/ad!
- It’s ok to increase/decrease budgets once the campaign is optimised. (about a week)
- Apart from that, don’t touch the campaign.
- Just duplicate your winning campaign(s) and increase budgets on the new ones.
- Keep going as long as ROAS is positive (above your BEPROAS)
- With us, we had to constantly monitor stock levels and make sure
- We didn’t run out
- More product had been ordered and was inbound, so….
- We didn’t run out 😂
A couple of weeks data later, we could see there wasn’t a lot happening with age range 25-39 on our ads.
No bother, this is why we spend money on ads in the first place.
We duplicated the original ad, exactly the same, but adjusted ages to 40+, U.K. only, and tripled the budget.
CPC (cost per click) on the new campaign immediately dived (which is good!)
And, so did our CPP (cost per purchase) – which is also good.
The lower CPP and CPC are, the more clicks and sales we get for our money.
More and more purchases started coming in.
We made a few more duplicates of this campaign with higher budgets.
Note : All these campaigns are super basic with no interests added at all.
And people – this is all we did.
There’s no crazy automation set up, software plugged in, or people monitoring this setup 24-7.
We find what works, duplicate it, and increase budgets.
Leave it alone and let Facebook do its thing.
If you can reduce audience size by sex, age, or location then feel free to try that out in new campaign metrics.
If not, and broad interests are working ok for you – keep going!
I haven’t selected any interests when doing Facebook campaigns for years.
That’s not to say interest campaigns don’t work. I’m not saying that.
We’re just not using them currently on this store.
Broad campaigns are working fine so we are running with them.
Other people might disagree with me, and that’s fine.
They might even have the data to back it up.
That’s cool. Everyone does things different.
Everyone’s ads manager is slightly different.
In my blog posts here, I’m only going to write about what works for me.
I have data to back up what I have been doing for years….and what we are doing with this new store right now.
That’s all I can give you.
I’m not a bullshitter and I won’t bullshit you.
A few weeks after start, to get up to and maintain $4-5k a day sales as I have talked about in my other videos….
All we had running in Facebook Ads were 8 campaigns (all duplicates of the original ad, with different budgets)
…. and one retargeting campaign.
9 campaigns in total.
Here’s £5k sales a day. (well, near enough lol)
This is nothing complicated.
Facebook Ads aren’t difficult when you have a winning product.
Retargeting
We didn’t even make that much effort on our retargeting ad at first either.
Retargeting traffic was sent to exactly the same creative we were already using.
CPC on retargeting was higher, but sales are way more consistent and you can push budgets on these kind of campaigns.
Once you have a lot of traffic running through your store, start increasing daily retargeting budget more and more.
This is top quality warm traffic – it just needs a little extra push to get those credit cards out.
Retargeting campaigns really come into their own when you start pushing high numbers.
You can keep banging budget up more and more.
At this point everything with our campaigns was working out fine.
ROAS would (and always does) go up and down day by day, but the whole ads set up was very low maintenance.
Note : later on we would expand and work much harder on our retargeting campaigns, but more about this in a later blog post.
Can you see what is going on here?
Yes we have other products for sale on our site, but 100% of our paid traffic right now, everything, is all going to the same one ad.
The higher you scale, the more traffic comes in, and the more sales you make.
At this point we were at about £2200-£2400 Facebook ad spend per day.
You can see more about this process by watching this YouTube that I made….
We were literally duping our campaigns, with higher budgets, running them for a week or so so they optimised…
…. then duplicating them again with even higher budgets.
Is ROAS healthy? Then keep pushing budgets and keep pushing your numbers up.
That’s all it takes.
Watch the ROAS, know your numbers, and keep things looping round as you scale up!
Money in. Money out.
Buy product. Pay for ads.
Pay store costs. Handle support.
Keep on top of comment moderation. Pay all your bills ASAP.
Get your processes nailed and automate or outsource as much as you can.
It’ll pay dividends further down the line.
If your product is strong (a proven winner) you should be able to scale up easily.
Which is exactly what we started to do.
We ran into problems along the way, obviously 😇
And I’ll get into them all in my next bog post.
Thanks so much if you read down this far.
Other parts from this series are available here part 1 – part 2 – part 3
The corresponding YouTube to this blog post can be found here.
I put all the YouTubes about this store in a playlist. Click here to watch it.
I’ll see you in part 4. Hope you are all doing good 😎