And so, we've come to the end of the Cookbook!
In this last section, we'll look at the big, bold world out there beyond Facebook for traffic generation.
Going beyond Facebook is a great thing to do if you have an existing store that's working on FB - particularly if you want to reduce your risk from account bans and so on - but it's also a solid plan even early in a store's life.
With more and more people jumping on the Facebook/dropshipping bandwagon, you can get a lot of advantages out of taking the road less traveled - so even if you're starting, consider if a different approach to traffic generation is the one for you.
There are two parts to this last section: paid traffic and organic traffic.
Organic vs Paid
All traffic generation methods break down into either "organic" or "paid" traffic.
Essentially, either you're incentivising someone to send you visitors whom you hope to convert, or you're investing time in attracting those visitors from "free" sources. Note that "free" sources aren't actually free - you're just not paying directly for the traffic, instead paying in time and costs of content generation and outreach.
Both have advantages and disadvantages. If you're buying traffic you're reducing your profit margins, but you're also trading time for money which can allow you to test much faster and scale much faster too. On the other hand, organic traffic is slower and can be very hard to scale, but it tends to last longer, send higher-quality leads, and of course doesn't cost anything but time. Organic traffic also tends to require you to be more comfortable with talking to potential customers, which is both an advantage and a disadvantage.
Both paid and organic traffic have plenty of under-used pockets of profit, so don't think that either one of them is the secret sauce! Choose an approach that works well for your store and your personal skillset.
Paid Traffic
With paid traffic of any kind, you really need to bear split-testing in mind. Try anything from pop ads to YouTube - but do so in a systematic way backed by statistical significance math.
All kinds of weird paid traffic sources can work. But equally, most of them won't work for you. Thorough testing and open-mindedness is the key to finding hidden pockets of profit for your store in paid traffic.
Adwords And Other Search
There's only one other source of paid traffic on the scale of Facebook, and it's Adwords. The Google giant can easily support a multi-million-dollar store solo - if you can crack the code.
Usually Adwords Search will perform better than Display, and I'd strongly recommend you try Search first and Display cautiously if at all. Higher-ticket items tend to work better on Adwords, because of the click costs. And you'll do well with items that clearly fill a specific need, as it's a platform driven by high purchase intent.
Adwords Shopping is also very worth a try. It can work on lower-ticket items - around the $20 range - and works based on your product feeds. However, don't think it's a fire-and-forget option: you will have to do a lot of optimisation on individual items, devices, and other parameters. In a lot of ways it feels quite a bit like a RON POP campaign, and may work well for you if you're used to that traffic source.
This is actually such a big topic that I'll be posting a separate mini-guide, with the assistance of STM mods Matuloo and Shishev, who have used Adwords to great effect on ecomm sites before.
Don't forget about other search engines, either. The volume might be too small, but it's worth testing a buy on Bing, for example.
YouTube Paid
Oh no, wait. There's one more source of massive quantities of traffic, and it's YouTube.
Paid ads on YouTube tend to work out pretty expensive, and they're very hit-or-miss: prepare to spend a lot of time testing. Don't assume that you also need to spend a lot of money on production, though! You can make mobile phone videos work really well on YT - but you've got to be aware that you're aiming for a very different look and feel to a commercial ad. Think authentic, think viral, and think unexpected - or unexpectedly obvious. Very simple things that clearly communicate can work surprisingly well.
YouTube's payment model means that for preroll ads (which are probably what you'll want to hit), you want to qualify prospects very rapidly, then sell them hard in the rest of the ad. Don't be afraid to make looooong preroll ads - you want people clicking through when they're absolutely ready to buy. If you're not already aware of them, look into Video Sales Letters (VSLs) before you start creating.
Unlike regular ads, video ads let you tell exactly when viewers are dropping off, so use that information aggressively. Keep a close eye on your viewing time graphs and adjust your edit appropriately to fix the points where you lose your viewer. If you can keep a substantial proportion of your viewership watching for 5 minutes or so you've got a very good chance at a sale.
Other paid traffic
Most other classic STM sources of traffic don't work brilliantly for ecommerce.
Obviously display ads have their problems in general right now. They can work for some products if you can get really good, tight targeting, but most of the time there you'll want to move rapidly to a site media buy (below).
Pop traffic isn't something I've heard about a lot of people using for ecommerce. It's extremely high-interruption, so you'll need very, very qualified traffic and a HELL of a grabby headline for it to work at all. Not impossible, but definitely Hard Mode.
Adult traffic is obviously only useful for a few types of product - sex toys, porn and related things, plus sometimes muscle/fitness/attractiveness-related stuff. It's a very off-the-wall pick, but it's cheap, plentiful traffic. If you think you could make it work, it might be worth a small test buy - but again, you'll need a brilliant ad.
Paid Reddit Ads
This one's a bit of a dark horse.
Reddit ads used to be the best-kept secret in the ecommerce world. A number of people built functioning businesses purely off appropriately-targeted ads on Reddit, and they did rather well.
Then Reddit made some changes - notably, they hiked the cost of their ads up through the roof, and changed their targeting so that you couldn't display ads only on interest-specific subreddits, but instead would target users "with an interest" in that topic. Profits crashed, people complained a lot.
And recently they've changed things again. The pricing structure has changed (yay!) but the interest target hasn't (boo!).
How good a purchase does that make Reddit ads now? Unknown. The site's an almost unparalleled source of high-quality clicks from interested users - up there with FB and Adwords - if they have a large group of people who might like your stuff. But recent Reddit advertising changes have been disasters, and there's no clear evidence they've managed to balance value for themselves and value for their advertisers yet.
Worth testing - I'm testing buys on there myself. And keep an eye on Reddit: they're still searching around for profitability, so their ad model is likely to change rapidly and possibly offer sudden, massive profit possibilities.
Site Media Buys
This is a hugely underused approach for unusual or specific offers.
In brief: find a popular site in the niche you're targeting (news, forum or similar) and privately buy ad space there.
Often smaller forums or sites will have their own private ad buy systems, and those can be absolute goldmines. Failing that, contact and negotiate with the site owner. (In fact, once you've verified their traffic converts, it's often worth contacting them privately to arrange a better deal even if they have an ad buy system in place.)
You can often get very, very high-quality traffic this way, quite frequently at below-market prices. It's something I'd advise looking into for almost any niche-focused ecommerce store.
Influencer purchase
Finally, you can pay influencers to mention your product.
This covers everything from YouTubers who do pay-to-play reviews through Instagrammers through bloggers to people with large email lists.
Paid influencer shoutouts can work very well, but be aware that it can be very hard to ascertain their value in advance, and a lot of them overcharge. However, a lot of others undercharge too. Shopping around, keeping a close eye on what's working, precise tracking and never getting into a situation where one influencer has to work for your brand are all vital here.
By and large influencer mentions are not going to be a straightforward go-to-a-website-and-pay thing: you'll need to network, talk to individual influencers, and see what deals you can strike. There are some sites offering straight buys for influencer shoutouts, but I'd be cautious of them - anyone on those sites is likely to be doing a lot of shoutouts, devaluing each individual one. That's not to say you can't get a good deal there, but do your due dilligence thoroughly before committing.
Any other paid traffic sources you'd recommend? Any questions or comments? Post 'em below!