Facebook + Shopify + Personalized Goods! (8)
Hello fellow STMers,
This is going to be yet another follow-along journey for FB ads +
My name is Ravi, and I just joined relatively recently but have been lurking for a bit. To give you a bit of background my partner and I run a 7-figure ecommerce company, which has been going well to say the least but has hit a bit of a ceiling. We currently sell most of our products entirely on major marketplaces and have found that we’ve hit a plateau in this area as we’ve saturated the sales for all the relevant long-tail queries on all our products. Our company is a bit unique as we sit squarely in the gifting space + personalization space. Anyways, we haven’t really dabbled with any PPC outside of on the marketplaces and I think it’s truly the next step in our journey to really scale this thing into overdrive, (at the very least test all our options and see what happens!).
So today I present to you a follow along in which I plan to be 100% transparent. I plan to provide and show all you guys everything, the website, the products, all of my copy etc...
Why am I doing this?
Well for starters I believe in giving transparency I will get the most help I can from others and it will help me stay 100% accountable to my actions. And, of course….all of our products are completely manufactured and engraved by us right here in our warehouse, through laser machines and a 3D printing lab. We also dropship and everything right here from our own facility. So, again to be completely transparent one of our motivations here is to prove this type of print-on-demand marketing for our unique products (that you can’t find anywhere else) works! And if it does, the possibilities are endless…its like becoming a Teespring of sorts... in theory you could go out and make niche sites for every single thing yourself, but id rather also start working with other affiliates and marketers to provide the necessary backend infrastructure for them to be successful. Its another one of the “pivots” we’ve been looking at to get to the next level, and we currently have a
Anyways, that’s mainly a discussion for another time so let’s get into it!
The Site:
We typically sell engraved icons across a variety of “gifting” products. What we’ve noticed from our own sales is that interest groups or “niches” will be frequently purchase the same icon across multiple different products. The cross-sell opportunities are there and we’ve seen it. The idea here is to build a Shopify site around a niche and use FB ads to drill down and target those specific people. Our first niche is gifts for Welders, all of these products HAVE demand in theory because we have real actual sales of them daily in different marketplaces. So, with that assumption…
Here is the website: https://www.welderswag.com/
Theme: Simple (with some slight modifications)
Branding/Assets: All of the product images are our own, all the banners and logos were simply created using Fivverr or made by us in Canva just so we have something ready to go for testing, if things go well we can change all this later down the line for a more complete brand-building
Apps:
Countdown Cart by Beeketing - Countdown Timer, Stock Countdown & Social Proof
Email Pop-ups with Exit Intent, Abandoned Cart Rescue & Coupons - by Gather (we are only using this for an exit intent popup for e-mail capture, the idea is to leave the buying experience as frictionless as possible for the those who funnel directly into the product page)
Free Trust Badge by Hektor (Shopify trust badges inserted into the product page)
Product Personalizer (this is used for the personalization part of the product page you can view here: https://www.welderswag.com/products/welder-keychain for example)
Inspectlet (to record and analyze real time user sessions, since we have another unique layer going on here (personalization) that isn’t really flushed out with best practices, we’ll have to build that piece as we go and optimize, optimize, optimize)
AdEspresso (for managing all our campaigns and split testing)
The Ads:
Our initial testing plan is to do the following-
Focus on the top 3 selling products this week:
- https://www.welderswag.com/products/welder-keychain
- https://www.welderswag.com/products/...leather-koozie
- https://www.welderswag.com/products/...oden-cufflinks
We plan to have a single ad account for this store, and run 1 campaign per product.
Each campaign will have 3-4 ad sets all initially targeting USA geo first with the same creative/ad copy.
Each ad-set will be targeting different interests.
We are looking for our audience to be in the 500k-2million range so we have some room to scale out any winning campaigns.
We’ll set each of ours ads to $10/day and run for 48 hours and check the results, the ones that have potential we will duplicate the ad set and increase budget by 20%. We’ll analyze both the winners and losers but turn off anything that very clearly failed.
I actually had a question around the scaling/duplicating of the ad set and increasing the budget. If lets say you duplicated an original $10/day ad set and increased the budget, and after a few days THAT ad set is now performing really well…do you again duplicate the original adset and increase the budget 40%? Do you duplicate the 20% increased adset and scale up? I guess my question is whether you end up with a ton of duplicated ad sets all targeting the same audience aren’t you going to be bidding against yourself? And obviously it must not be easy to manage such a large number of adsets…
All of the ads are single image and we are goal tracking the Purchase pixel and targeting Desktop Newsfeed placement.
Today we setup the first product campaign for Cufflinks:
Ad Copy:
Demographics:
USA
Male&Female
No Age Restriction
Welder Apprentice 3,763 people
Or Welder Fitter 54,644 people
Or Welder Helper 13,130 people
Or Welder Operator 18,720 people
Or Welder-Assembler 3,323 people
Or Welder-Fabricator 195,259 people
Or Welding Technician
Interests:
And 4 sets are split testing against 4 interests:
American Welding Society 518,910 people
Welder 5,063,140 people
Welding 29,647,260 people
Weldporn 488,170 people
-----
I will update when we create the ads for the additional 2 products.
PS – If anyone is in the Washington DC/DMV area and wants to meetup and grab a drink that’s where our startup is located 😊
PPS- I JUST bought a house in the Pattaya/BKK area and will be out there starting next month, love to meet some fellow entrepreneurs, I literally know absolutely no one there so hit me up if you know of any good meetups or want to chill!
See you, Space Cowboys!
Solid setup and strategy, good luck!
Thanks for sharing this here.
Look like you've been doing well, getting to 7 figures.
Very interesting to see how much you can specialise in a niche.
Also wondering how many welders would wear cufflinks, as you would need a specific type of (dress) shirt to wear these.
Would be great to see what the results are.
As a side note, do yo do any corporate sales yet? Seems like the ideal set up for companies that are looking for unique products with their brand.
In any case, good luck with this and thanks for sharing.
Thanks all!
Yeah unfortunately one of the difficulties with the gifting market is we often see that its friends of the recipient or wives that are driving a lot of the purchasing. So perhaps targeting Welders to buy cufflinks (or any of these products) for themselves isn't the ideal approach, we will see with some testing.
@pekadis we do in fact! Its been driven purely from word of mouth, however. The corporate buyers for internal gifting/promotional goods at larger companies are actually very difficult to reach (and its often not very clear who these people even are within separate functions of the same company). We actually did a lot of research into this and theres already this sort of cottage industry with a closed network, that's primarily driving the market...which actually is a great opportunity for a startup to disrupt! It's just not our core business and we didn't have the resources to chase after it while bootstrapping. One really cool company in this space doing something new is called Alyce (https://www.americaninno.com/boston/...wered-gifting/), definitely worth a read...
What we ended up trying to validate was more of a spin-off idea (https://www.thebigspool.com/) where we essentially generate password protected
But one step at a time, I think once we validate whether or not theres potential with the micro-brand strategy, we might also concurrently test this idea with PPC as it certainly has the potential for a better LTV with higher AOV....
Tomorrow ill post the results of the first ad-sets but generally speaking doesn't look too great 
, I think a lot of the audiences were too narrow, working on doing a broader set for the next 2 products.
Thanks for the link - interesting read.
There's a lot you can do with personalised products.
I don't know the market well enough to know which companies are working on this, but this could work for Youtube personalities as well.
I would also get in touch with marketing agencies, logo designers etc. Let them create the logo / corporate identity and have them sell your products to the SMB / start up.
Just a few additional ideas to test.
Hmm def some good food for thought, thanks pekadis!
Reaching out to influencers is def something we always wanted to do, might as well do it now 
Here are the results of the first ads for the cufflinks:
Analysis: As you can see, CTR was either non-existent or abysmal. Right off the bat we made a few mistakes while learning AdEspresso. For one thing, when we set the budget at $10/day it split the daily budget across all 4 ads and we only caught it several hours later and changed it. We also were learning just how exactly AdEspresso as a tool allows you to split test the audiences you set-up. We ended up spending close to around $40 before we turned it off as it didn’t look like it was going anywhere…mainly around a few problems we have conjectured:
- Our audience sizes right off the bat in this split test were way too small, all of our clicks came from the smallest ad audience of only ~1,000 people, and none of the other ads except ‘3- Welding’ even fit our original criteria of 500-2M which would be a good range allowing us to scale if the test proved profitable.
- It looks as though the options to target this niche might not be broad enough to even create a scalable campaign. The difference in purchasing on Amazon for example is coming in with a specific intent to buy for a particular occasion or holiday (Fathers day for ex), rather than a spontaneous impulse buy on Facebook. It possible that this type of niche would work if the ads were pegged to certain holiday events, something to test but I think the average audience on this of the welders themselves is skewing to a much older demographic and one that isn’t going to buy these particular products (keychains, leather koozies etc.…) simply because these products aren’t that interesting...(something else to test)
- Some things to note in the original adset is that all of the ads were Desktop Newsfeed only and were Optimized for ‘Purchases’ and paying for ‘Impressions’. We didn’t have any Mobile and our
Shopify website was literally brand new. I have read that putting an optimization pixel for Purchases on a brand-new site with no sales is pretty ineffective as its doing offsite optimization on 0 data as it leaves the walled garden. One thing we would like to try is first optimizing for clicks and paying for clicks to see what happens until we begin to get enough sales to change the Optimization for purchase conversion.
Generally speaking, I think our ad-copy and product page setup are okay but the aforementioned 3 things need to be tested and/or changed. That being said we launched the other 2 adsets yesterday and will run the tests for a 2-3 days to see what happens.
Leather Koozies:
This ad/copy is split test across 3 different audiences:
- Detailed Targeting(1):
- Behavior(1) Engaged Shoppers AND Interests (1) Welding
- Audience Size: 680k
- Detailed Targeting(2):
- Behavior(1) Gift shoppers AND Interests(2) Welding or Welder
- Audience Size: 1.4M
- Detailed Targeting(3):
- Behavior(1) Home furnishing and accessories AND Interests(1) Welding
- Audience Size: 5.2M
As you can see the audience sizes are now more in line with our original criteria. We have also duplicated these ads and have one split test against Desktop placement Optimizing for clicks and Paying for clicks. And have also duplicated those ads and to split test against Desktop vs. Mobile placement Optimizing for clicks and Paying for clicks. We will run these for a few days and see what information we glean.
Keychains:
This ad/copy is split test across 2 different audiences:
- Detailed Targeting(1):
- Behavior(1) Purchase Type: Home Office AND Interests (1) Welding
- Audience Size: 300k
- Detailed Targeting(2):
- Behavior(1) Engaged Shoppers AND Interests(1) Welding
- Audience Size: 680k
Again, we have duplicated these ads and have one split test against Desktop placement Optimizing for clicks and Paying for clicks…and have also duplicated those ads and to split test against Desktop vs. Mobile placement Optimizing for clicks and Paying for clicks. We will run these for a few days and see what information we glean.
Why you don’t run these ads on a look-a-like audience of your previous sales you made? Guess your current database of customers is quite big!
Sent from my iPhone using STM Forums mobile app
Thanks Ravi for starting this follow-along!
Lots of good tips from both sides - very interesting to read.
One thing I'm wondering about: You mentioned having hit a plateau. How are you monetizing your customers on the backend aside from promoting other engraved/customized gifts?
Here are some ideas that can potentially help to break that plateau, using the welding niche as an example:
1)Sell other products that are needed by the target demo. This one is obvious and is probably something you're already doing. For welders: Welding equipment of all sorts, welding courses and books, membership to job sites where people can look for welding-related jobs, etc. Welding forums would be the best place to start this type of research:
http://weldingweb.com/forumdisplay.p...ade-Sell-Forum
http://weldingweb.com/forumdisplay.p...ther-resources
And here's a clickbank welding course and affiliate materials including emails you can plug into your autoresponder - and unlike physical products, selling digital products to an existing customer base costs you nothing:
https://makemoneywelding.com/
https://makemoneywelding.com/affiliates/
Here are some really old but free books from gutenburg that can potentially be given out as gifts - don't know how relevant the info is though:
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/52074
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7969
2)Create some sort of recurring income / subscription program. You must have a lot of different merchandise you can customize with the "welder" theme. Why not offer a subscription program where people can pay a flat monthly fee to receive a surprise gift?
This translates into predictable and recurring income, and moreover, causes compound growth of your monthly income (as every new member will increase the monthly total of your monthly revenue - as long as you have more people joining than unsubscribing).
3)Set up some sort of Buyer's Club or Rewards Program. In welding there are consumable items like nozzles, contact tips, retaining heads and liners that people would need to order again and again. If you can give people a good deal/discount (in exchange for a monthly/quarterly, or annual membership fee) and they make it a habit to order from you regularly, this can again add to recurring income.
Just some ideas based on my recent reading of books and articles on ecom. Hope it helps to spark some ideas at least!
Amy
Home > Paid Traffic Sources > eCommerce