Next Wavelength

Full Stack Digital Marketing Agency

Paid Media

5 Tips To Manage Your PPC Campaigns During COVID-19

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COVID-19 has affected customers and businesses in various ways. Customers are buying more of their essentials online while some businesses are scrambling to break even. Altered buyer behavior and current market situations have caused some businesses to end their online PPC campaigns while others are contemplating it. It might turn out to be the wrong move that will cause more harm than good.

Scale Down, But Don’t Kill Your Campaign

Buying habits and priorities have changed for now. If your conversion rates have dipped, take a look at other businesses in your industry. If they are in a similar predicament, reduce your ad spend but do not kill your campaigns completely especially if they were working well. The data will get messed up and you will have to start from scratch to rebuild your targeted audience. 

When you come across logistics issues such as stuck deliveries or trouble restocking the goods, don’t remove your ads entirely. You can pause them for a while and mark them as “currently out of stock”.

Pounce If You Have To

Most people are staying home in isolation and their use of the internet has increased significantly. There is a lot of traffic and huge amounts of wasted potential because businesses are scared to market their offerings.

PPC rates have been fluctuating but right now the cost of ads is low. While the conversion rates are different based on industries, it is still an amazing opportunity for proactive businesses to build their brand. The usual oversaturated market is facing less competition as many marketers and companies have retreated.

After figuring out how the market is evolving, businesses that dare to act now have a potential to grow that should not be squandered. 

Due to uncertain business conditions, there is a window of opportunity now where your competitors are not spending on particular keywords. You can increase rankings for the more competitive and high traffic keywords by spending less and increasing your conversion rate.

Connect With Your Audience

Use emails and go live on your social media accounts and build relations. Being open and wishing good for your consumers health and livelihoods would improve brand image and conversions. 

Pivot slightly and increase your offerings by factoring in certain activities that have been on the rise like homeschooling, working virtually at home offices, social distancing, reconnecting with old friends and family. Mention them when in your ad campaigns too.

Get inspirations from some of the top businesses in the world and how they are conducting themselves during this pandemic.

Change Your Messaging

We are still living in uncertainty. Be considerate of people’s feelings and critically examine the context and tone of your messaging. Mention your services accurately in your ads such as “free home delivery” or “same day delivery”. Avoid showing large gatherings of people. 

You should experiment and run campaigns on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and other social platforms. Find out how people are searching for terms and topics related to the Coronavirus and adapt your marketing to help them in any way you can.

Take Advantage Of Cash Grants

Last but not least, eligible small businesses should take advantage of grants offered by the likes of Facebook and Google in their efforts to support and empower Small Business owners. Besides 

Facebook is offering $100 million in cash credits to support SMBs in 30 countries. To be eligible, you must:

  • Have between 2 and 50 employees
  • Have been in business for over a year
  • Have experienced challenges from COVID-19
  • Be in or near a location where Facebook operates

Similarly, Google will provide ad credits to “Small and medium-sized businesses globally, who have spent with a Google Ads account in ten out of twelve months of 2019, and in January and/or February of this year. Eligible customers are those who advertised directly with us or through a partner, and adhere to our advertising policies.”

Wrap Up

While there is a positive impact amongst local grocery retailers and education industries, some of the most negatively impacted verticals include travel, tourism, leisure, car rentals and alternative medicine. We would advise you to observe the landscape well, gain up to date knowledge before making any big decisions. It is easier to experiment with new pricing and messaging and scale upwards when your PPC campaigns go right – than to completely start from scratch hoping for a miracle.

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6 Advanced Techniques for Scaling Facebook Ads

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A/B test copy. A/B test landing page. A/B test creative. A/B test your campaigns. A/B test. A/B test. 

Aren’t you tired of listening to it?

Yes, A/B test has its place in Facebook advertising but it is not the answer for human existence!

Here are six powerful techniques to help you in scaling your Facebook ads profits.

1. Managing Your Daily Budgets

This is something a lot of Facebook Advertisers struggle with, how do you decide daily budgets?

There’s no doubt Facebook provides high-quality traffic to campaigns with higher daily spends. But if you haven’t tested your audience, creative and copy – the better option is to always start with something like $20 per day. 

Once you have done tests and seen results, you can start scaling your campaigns by setting up higher daily budgets like $100 or $200 per day.

It’s all about providing Facebook with more data, if you can spend more, that does not necessarily mean your ads will start performing better.

Optimize first, then scale.

2. Continuously Fed Lookalike Audience

To scale your campaigns and boost sales, it’s really important to keep your Audiences fresh.

One way to achieve that is by following a strategy we call ‘Continuously Fed Lookalike Audiences’.

Can you imagine the return on your Ad spend if you could only target people who are more likely to convert?

Assuming you’ve already implemented Facebook Pixel on your Landing Page or Website, you can create custom conversions and track everyone who is converting from your ads. You can then create a Lookalike audience of people who are converting and create new Ads from it.

The data will keep getting stronger, as your custom conversions feed your lookalike. This technique is guaranteed to scale your conversions and amplify your ROI.

3. Facebook Automated Rules

Facebook has an automation feature in Ads Manager called ‘Rules‘. Which has different parameters for automating actions like ‘turning on’ or ‘turning off’ a Campaign, an Ad Set or an individual Ad. 

For example, if Cost per Result goes above an amount which is not profitable for your business, Facebook will automatically shut off your ads. 

Automation rules help in minimizing the risks like over-spending on Ads that don’t deliver results without having to monitor your ads all day long. 

You can also set an automation rule to increase your campaign budget and scale if your ads are profitable.

4. Lookalike Audience from Video Engagement

It is a powerful technique where you can really leverage your video marketing.

Facebook allows you to create a custom audience based on video views. For example, people who watched more than 50% of your video.

If people watch your video (or at least 50% of it), there’s a decent chance that they are interested in your offer, or at the very least motivated by your marketing. 

When you build your campaigns based on lookalikes of an already engaged audience, it will have a higher probability of targeting more individuals who are interested in your offerings.

5. Avoid Audience Overlap Between Your Ad Sets

Audiences you create on Facebook can be checked for overlap.

The ‘Audience Overlap’ tool will show what percentage of people are common among the different audiences you have created. If you are not keeping this factor in check, you can count on Facebook doing it for you, as it’s a part of their algorithm. 

Ad Sets with more than 25% of Audience Overlap will have delivery issues. Ads can simply stop showing, or worse, they will end up competing against each other in Facebook auction. 

As if you don’t have enough competition already.

6. LTV (Lifetime Value) Lookalike Audience

Over the years Facebook has been gathering information from their pixels all across the web.

Pixels have gathered up the data for conversion values and revenue tracking for whoever has been using them. 

Facebook can tell how much an individual spends over their ‘lifetime’ with businesses, those who spend more are segmented as ‘high quality’ traffic.

When creating a custom audience from an email list, Facebook also provides an option to add value to each individual, how much they have profited your business. 

That’s why this technique of creating ‘LTV Lookalikes’ is really great for businesses who have a well segmented CRM database. 

By following this technique you will be able to closely align your Lookalike audiences with high value individuals across Facebook.

Wrap Up

These are some of the most powerful techniques that we use in our Facebook advertising. When you start layering these techniques in your campaigns, you will be able to tackle scaling and profitability issues with ease.

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What is the Goal of Your Ad Copy? To Get it Clicked

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The goal of your ad copy is to pre-frame, pre-qualify and pre-sell your ideal customers to click on the ad itself. The goal shouldn’t be to sell – hopefully, you already have your marketing/sales funnel in place which can take care of the actual sales.

Eugene M Schwartz wrote in his book Breakthrough Advertising, “The greatest mistake marketers make is trying to create demand.”

“The power, the force, the overwhelming urge to own that makes advertising work, comes from the market itself, and not from the copy. A copy cannot create the desire for a product. It can only take the hopes, dreams, fears and desires that already exist in the hearts of millions of people and focus those already existing desires onto a particular product. This is the copy writer’s task: not to create this mass desire – but to channel and direct it. Actually, it would be impossible for anyone advertiser to spend enough money to actually create this mass desire. He can only exploit it. And he dies when he tried to run against it.”

What you want to do is to identify who your ideal customer is and delve into the psychology of what motivates them to buy – tap into the demand!

Step 1: Identify one major problem/desire your customers want to resolve for in their lives

You should be spending as much time on researching the problem/desire as you do on solving it – and find the single, biggest and broadest demand in the market with an urgency behind it.

Step 2: What does your product do to resolve this problem/desire?

Think through what your product does and list out all the solutions your product can offer or how it can help fulfill the desires of your customers.

Step 3: Identify the market awareness

There are 5 different levels of market awareness, this will help determine what type of copy you need to use in your ads:

Most Aware:

This market already knows what products are out there to solve the problem or fulfill a desire – and they know what it will cost them to get it. A shampoo or a toothpaste can be a good example here. The best thing to do is to create an ‘offer copy’ for this market, discounts etc.

Product Aware:

People are aware of the problem/desire and they know there are products in the market that can solve the problem or fulfill the desire – they just don’t know about your product yet. The copy needs to be educational/informative, explaining the product in the best way possible.

Solution Aware:

Here the market is aware of the problem/desire and they know there is a solution to that, but they don’t know of any products yet. This copy will be focusing on ‘future pacing the solution’ – what will their life be like after having that solution and how they can achieve it with your product.

Problem Aware:

Problem aware as the title suggests, are aware about the problem but they don’t know if there’s even a solution necessarily to solving it yet or solution that can fulfill their desire. Here the copy will lead to the problem itself, outline the solution and conclude with your product.

Unaware:

Unless you’re trying to open a new market, this scenario will probably not apply to you. But the formula applies the same. You need to lead with the message to explain why you think there’s a problem, why the market should care, what the solution is and how your product helps. This is generating demand, and taking Eugene’s advice into account, you will need some serious budget to generate this mass desire.

Step 4: What is the appeal you want to use?

Fear of losing money, greed to earn more money, passion to learn more, skepticism towards a solution they have used before etc. There are several ways you can appeal to the market, once you’ve figured out the pain points you will know the right appeal to make.

Final Thoughts

Here’s the framework to build the best message/copy for your ad.

  • Identify the problem/desire
  • Figure out how your product can provide the solution
  • Find out the market awareness level
  • Make the right appeal

Now create the story that will sell your product!

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How to Test Your Ecommerce Idea Before Investing in it?

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Do you have dozens of ecommerce ideas, but you’re not sure which one will be profitable?

You have done a lot of research on these ideas, maybe even launched a few stores – all in vain? Well, majority of ecommerce businesses end up like this.

They create a bunch of products, they build massive funnels for it, then they try and figure out a way to sell just to find out that it doesn’t – after they’ve spent a ton of money.

Key to making sales is to give a product that people are willing to buy!

These steps will help you to find out whether there’s an actual demand for your idea before you invest in it. Allowing you to put together a product that people will buy.

Although, you do have to invest a little bit of money and a little bit of time to figure it out, but it’s going to be substantially less than the other route that most people end up in.

So how does this work?

Build a Landing Page and Write Your Sales Copy

Assuming you already have your idea of what you’re going to sell.

The first thing you need to do is to create a landing page. There are couple of options here, Leadpages is my favorite.

Next is to create a basic text-based sales copy for your landing page. If you don’t know how to write one, you will need to hire a copywriter to do it for you – I highly recommend that that you hire one.

The right copywriter will create a sales copy which will help you in increasing your conversions (we will get to the conversion part in a bit.)

And if you end up deciding to go with a different ecommerce idea, the copywriter can help you edit the sales copy, so you don’t have to keep repaying to create a new copy all over again.

Create an Opt-in Form

From the landing page you will have an ‘Add to cart’ button which you can either link to a new page or a pop-up window. A pop-up is what I recommend unless you have a good reason to send them to another page.

Once you have this set up, the opt-in form copy will be something around “Please enter your name and email address.”

After filling out the form, they will be re-directed to a page where it will say “Sorry we’re currently out of stock on this product, we’ll let you know once it becomes available.”

Opt-ins vs Ad Spend

So this way you’re not actually selling anything – you’re driving the traffic from the ads to the landing page and then you’re measuring the opt-ins.

Basically, you’re considering every opt-in registration as sales in this scenario – hence the conversions. Let’s say your product was worth $100 and you spent $500 on your ads to get 20 opt-ins.

We know in a 2-step process not everyone is going to buy. Since there’s no way to figure out how many will drop-off, we need to assume every opt-in is a buyer.

If you did 20 sales for $100 a piece you essentially earned $2000 in sales with $4 return on your $1 ad spend ($2000/$500.)

This means you have a profit potential with your ecommerce idea, which is a strong indicator that it makes sense for you to build or invest in the product.

If you didn’t get enough opt-ins to cover your ad spend then you know there’s not enough profit potential and you will need to test a new idea.

Create an Email List

If you decide that you’re going to build a product, once your e-store is setup properly, send out an email to this list saying, ‘we got the product back in stock, visit the store to order’.

Majority of this list will buy – so you didn’t completely waste the initial ad spend.

If you end up going with a different ecommerce idea, you can promote that new product out to the email list, driving them through the top end of your funnel.

If you did 20 sales for $100 a piece you essentially earned $2000 in sales with $4 return on your $1 ad spend.

Either way, you can leverage the email list that you build.

Wrap Up

Majority of your effort is to get the sales copy and landing page built right, and someone to run the ads properly.

Click here to download the funnel model for testing your ecommerce idea.

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