This week the blog is coming from White City Place, which is where our new office is. It’s lovely and sunny and I’m sitting in front of the ‘podcasting pod’ to discuss four of the most common ecommerce pain points when it comes to running paid traffic to your ecommerce brand.
I’m really lucky because I get to audit a lot of ad accounts for brands and businesses, and it’s great to have a chance to go under the hood of Facebook and other paid traffic campaigns, both to see what others are doing and also find ways in which to help!
One thing I’ve noticed is that the same pain points come up again and again for ecommerce entrepreneurs.
Not Knowing If Your Ads are Working
I often get asked ‘How do I know if my ads are working?’ and it’s actually pretty straightforward to know if they are working or not and that is to do with looking for the ‘Return on Adspend Metric’ or ‘ROAS.’ This is a measure of how many times you get your money back after spending it. If your ROAS is £1, then for everyone £1 you’ll spend, you’ll get £1 back which means unless the cost of your product is £0, your ads are not profitable. Depending on margins, a ROAS of 1.42 or more is usually profitable. However, you will also want to think about things like whether your ad campaigns are new (in which case ROAS may be lower than it will eventually be) or whether you are trying to acquire customers who will buy again and again, or just sell a single product and be done with it. Hopefully it’s the former!
How To Get A Stable ROAS
The second issue I often see is a volatile ROAS. You may get a ROAS of 1 one day and 5 the next, at which point people panic and turn their ads off. I’m a real sucker for looking at ads every, ahem, hour to see how they are performing but ultimately you need to look at performance over longer time periods. If you turn ads on and off again all the time, Facebook’s algorithm will never properly kick in.
Am I Sending The Right Emails?
Email marketing is still so important. GDPR means that we have to have re-consent for our lists and everyone is in an email panic. Post-purchase sequence, up sale sequence, abandoned cart sequence and lapsed customer re-engagement sequence are some of the types of automated email that when coupled with a weekly or bi-weekly emails ensure the success of an Ecommerce campaign. Don’t listen to ANYONE who tells you email is not important!
Is My Ad Good Enough?
If you’re talking about one ad, then probably not! My final ecommerce pain point that I see with ecommerce brands is not doing enough testing of creatives or audiences. We have campaigns where we have tested over 400 different creatives and audiences against each other to find winning combinations. It’s also about creative type, particularly on Facebook where for example video ads, carousel ads, video carousel ads, canvas ads and photo ads can all deliver different results for different brands in different funnel positions!
If you’ve got any ecommerce pain points then drop me an email on natasha@natashacourtenaysmith.com, I’d love to hear from you!
