My wife & I had our first product launch - GREAT Start on FB. How to keep it going? (27)
Interesting! It seems like you've tested pretty extensively so far. Gonna throw in a bunch of extra questions that may help with troubleshooting:
What bid strategies did you test?
Budgets in relation to bid strategies (bid cap/cost target) + target CPA/product cost?
Audience sizes?
Interest targeting?
Have you made any significant changes to the
Have you tried FB's "Test and Learn"?
Did retargeting work well?
How well do you know your demographics and psychographics? I.e. Do you know who your ideal customer is and what their emotional triggers are?
What's your competition up to and have you tried being a copycat?
Sometimes it's also just the store's copy and your angles that can make or break it.
1. Haven't tested anything other than bid for conversions.
2. 1% LLA is 2,000,000. 1-2% is 2,000,000. 2-5% 6,000,000. Open = FB doesn't tell me but this is all women aged 20-55. So a lot.
3. Haven't done interest stuff. I have this idea that any kind of targeting is just repeating the work the FB pixel is already doing. Why bother? Maybe that's a wrong attitude. Additionally this isn't an "enthusiast" kinda group. Not an obvious interest to go after besides African American demo.
4. Been split testing a higher product price & bundled approach on
5. "Test & Learn" - have not tried. Though when I'm split-testing images/text I use FB's split testing feature.
6. Haven't gotten into retargeting. I know Google has already told us we can't retarget as the product type is considered very personal.
7. Yes we do. It's a very emotional product and the opposite of a impulse buy. My wife dealt with a problem for years until she found this solution. Most of our customers have tried other various products to fix this issue, which most have failed, so a challenge is probably getting them to say "ok I'll try this *again*". Many of our reviews are like "I wish I knew about this 10 years ago" kinda thing. We believe our very emotional testimonials are part of what is working when more straightforward ad copy failed to get a reaction. A copy expert friend of mine said this is a textbook case of how storytelling can be gold. Demos are primarily black women (studies have shown black/mixed women are much more prone to this issue) of many ages but typically above 25. Women silently suffer from this issue as it is not something they wanna talk about, and after years of losing this battle it creates depression, anxiety, low self-confidence. On the grand scheme, our ads get fairly low likes/shares/comments because it is a private product, but people are quietly buying all along.
8. Our competitors are basically Amazon-only stores. Some non-Amazon stores have tried FB, but nothing stuck. I have adspy and researched this topic extensively, but not much to copy off of. I'm considering doing a downloadable ebook funnel approach, but outta the gate this was working so I scrapped the idea for now. It's a disavantage to not be able to copy, but it's also an advantage because the people in this market are being lazy about the marketing just hoping for search traffic on Amazon instead of GOING and GETTING the buyers. Nobody is really building a brand, just Amazon rankings.
While our store's copy, price, review count etc. are always on my radar, the topic of this post is just about how it all started so well and then slowly & steadily died out with very observable metrics on FB. Why? Given the size of audiences at play, it seems so unlikely that the audience is "exhausted" from our ad. I don't even know why our ad frequency creeps up to 1.5. There's millions in our audience.
Another random tidbit, but this FB campaign has fueled 10-20 Amazon sales per day for us even though we don't link out to it directly or even rank for anything on Amazon but our brand name (really new there). Our Google Webmaster tools account just shows ballooning impressions for our brand name (and nothing else).
Lots of people clearly are heading to Amazon or Google and researching us that way instead of directly converting.
My wife has been super responsive to comments & replying quickly to any questions. She's also active on the social account doing shares (mainly IG, but she duplicates the posts to FB). As far as I can tell, we have good standing with FB in terms of page quality score. This is Whitehat too if it wasn't obvious already.
Looking at your timespan / audience size / quality LLA I can't imagine your target group is already tired of your ads honestly. Try to run you ads/setup with the winning ads on different accounts. We see very random behaviour on accounts, even fresh ones outperform "solid" accounts sometimes.....
Besides that I can only emphasize that testing new angels/images/videos should never stop.... but yeah, that's kickin' in an open door you already been through couple of times hehe.
Lots of people have been complaining about this recently. I've been seeing it for years on various traffic sources even though it may not be the same thing, at least it has the same symptoms. On Microsoft and google for example I've noticed for years now that placement in the first day or two of a new campaign is always great because the algo wants to know how well your setup will do with its best quality traffic. Then, on the third or 4rth day it goes to crap because they put you in the same kennel with everyone else who isn't bidding high enough to beat out the bigger dogs. This is mostly speculation about this phenomena with respect to seeing it on facebook's platform but I've had support people from both google and microsoft tell me this is why it happens like this so I can only infer that it is also happening with facebook since over the years all of the ad buying platforms seem pick up similar features and mimic each other's algo changes.
Ive also hit the AA demo for years and a few 100k's in spend with various ecom stuff even though recently I've moved away because creatives fatigue very fast with just the female AA demo and facebook at the time wasn't very good at finding similar demos in other countries so I could scale properly without so much of the fatigue. Feel free to message me, happy to talk shop and specifics with the AA demo and marketing tactics.
Yep, this is very unlikely to be audience exhaustion given the sizes. It sounds like this is just confused algos and they're not as smart as people make them out to be most of the time. I also heard some complaints from friends running agencies experiencing this with their clients, but only a few cases.
The reason I asked regarding your store and/or other stuff is because it's not always the traffic source at fault. I always see campaigns as a combination of good TS management, good angles and good funnels.
But your replies did reveal some potential ideas that can be tested imo, if you're up for some further experimentation (and able to spend more). Plus I don't give up until a mystery has been resolved heheh
I agree that restricting the targeting in anyway isn't recommended, but I've seen interests and tight targeting far outperform broad/open camps. It really depends on what you're pushing, how and to whom.
Here's a vague hypothesis and rough ideas that may help you gain insights with those tricky algos if you're willing to test further (it's what I would try).
"It's a very emotional product and the opposite of a impulse buy. "
"Women silently suffer from this issue as it is not something they wanna talk about"
"On the grand scheme, our ads get fairly low likes/shares/comments because it is a private product"
As you said your angles are then spot on. Ad testing approach spot on, store spot on, audiences spot on. You are doing everything right yet the algos aren't complying at all.
But then again those 3 lines above can mean FB isn't able to find/target buyers properly as the data isn't there or the algos just get confused after the learning phase. Especially since you mentioned you've got virtually no direct competition on FB? If that's true then all the more reason to keep testing, you have an open playing field and you can check off competition as not being a saturation problem.
"Another random tidbit, but this FB campaign has fueled 10-20 Amazon sales per day for us even though we don't link out to it directly or even rank for anything on Amazon but our brand name (really new there)."
I'd try the following to see how the CPA fluctuates after a while:
You've likely been running lowest cost conversion campaigns (e.g. formerly autobidding). This can get the CPMs and CPAs up high after a while in some cases when you bump the budgets up. Play around with bidding strategies, they may help you keep a consistent CPA, worth testing.
- Try target cost. This gives you some cost predictability but it may never get you cheaper results from what I've noticed
- Try cost cap. This can net you the cheapest results first and then you can raise the cap to slowly find the limits of the audiences. I.e. when they stop converting well.
- Bid cap I don't like. It can get you similar results to cost cap but it takes a micromanagement. I.e. you bid $15 but if the algo sees the next bunch of events would cost $16 it won't try to get them -> budget not spent.
- Min. ROAS Control. Definitely try this but be careful with the minimum/maximum ROAS. I'd test ROAS that's a bit lower than your, say, average profitable camps. Just start low and work your way up but never set the bid too high. Also the conversion windows matter here so match the ROAS bid on that.
Try "Test and Learn" and throw campaigns against each other with some of the different bidding strategies. These tests are done at the campaign level and it's where they split up the audiences randomly - may provide insights into how the algo's behaving.
Then you can also try whatever interests you can come up with or even just the AA demo + age groups, see how the algo behaves when restricted.
Since the potential customers of your product are shy why not test that eBook approach? Maybe even try advertorial style articles that educate people and presell them before slapping the product page in front of them. E.g. educational video on said subject with broad targeting -> retarget with eBook or advertorial/article that pitches the product with your best angles.
Another idea would be to try to get a hold of an FB rep over the phone, not chat, and explain everything as you've put it in this thread. They may provide some further insights into what to test and how to structure your camps so that the algos catch up.
Thanks everyone who has contributed so far! Some great questions & discussion already.
Something I forgot to mention, but I have experienced it quite a bit -- end of quarter CPA raises due to other big agencies/brands/etc. trying to spend up their quarterly budgets. Additionally, I've also heard FB recalibrates audiences/algos frequently at the end of the quarter making results even less predictable.
Given the above 2 factors along with all the other potential issues, I am going to sit back and take a few days to regroup before Q3 begins on July 1.
After reading through responses a couple times, here's the main points I'm gathering:
1. There's a ton of unknown factors that make up FB's black box. FB can be genius. And FB can be stupid. I have to continually test it all to know where my stuff stands in the larger scheme. I may just be getting the short end of the stick momentarily on what would otherwise be a solid campaign.
True story: at my old company we were part of an exlusive group of high-level performance advertisers on Google with massive budgets ($100MM+/year), so we had a dedicated team of like 5 people always all over our campaigns & giving us "cutting edge" machine learning and optimizations nobody else can get. They'd pitch us the newest & best machine learning techniques they had, we'd throw $50k at it testing, then come back with horrible results a F'ing monkey could've beat. The next year they pitch us the same thing with a different name to it, and then admit to us that the last time we tested it the algorithm was "brand new" and it's been made 100x better since our previous testing (hmmm...you sure didn't pitch it that way?). We'd test it again. It sucked again. And this is 2018. I think companies like to just have sexy "machine learning" in their stack so they can say they have it. It's made me pretty jaded towards any machine learning/algo claims. I know this stuff can work, but it also can not work and blow $$$ for stupid reasons. For what it's worth, for all the sexy pitches Google made us, we did better with manual CPC & our custom-built bidding tool over all of their stuff & we dominated our space (insurance lead-gen). We'd split-test the machine-learning tools against our own manual bid stuff and our own stuff would just keep winning. I find that pretty remarkable. Some of your comments make me feel FB is no exception to this phenomena either. Just a behind-the-scenes look at the shit-show some of these algorithms can be, because as an average advertiser you have an expectation that these algos are standardized, optimized, & razor-sharp. Not true. Machine learning algos are just a function of whoever built them. People. With motives. With imperfections. If the newest sexy machine learning algo screws up and loses people money, oh well it's not their $$. You'll get little sympathy about it.
As an advertiser and an analytical person who has spent TOO much time chasing the whats and whys of algorithmic decisions by these companies, this point is INCREDIBLY frustrating and deflating at times. I've pretty much just raised the white flag these days and focused on creative & things I can control.
Simple example in our campaign right now: Like I mentioned this product is mostly an AA product. Our winning image is of a black couple. I could totally see FB just not grasping that part that well and still serving it to a ton of different ethnicities. Something you think is bonehead simple because you just know a ton about it, algorithms can take a long time to or never figure out. Sometimes.
Another simple example, I can easily observe with my 2 eyeballs mornings and evenings are best for our campaign. What does FB do? Spend evenly all day with more in the afternoon hours. They don't get it.
2. It hasn't been hounded quite as much, but I think continuing adjustments to creative types is on my shortlist of to-dos.
Our winning image is a black couple looking happy. How to expand?
-Make an image with half the image being the product & other half being the couple.
-Make a before/after photo.
-Make a video instead of photo. Just a happy person or something.
-Picture of JUST the product. No couple.
-Picture of someone holding the product instead of couple.
-Different photos of other people. Hot women? Ugly women?
-Catering photos to ethnicity & age targeting.
....the list goes on....forever.
3. To sum it all up...Keep launching. Keep testing. Try try try. It'll come around. My priorities right now are 40% creative testing, 40% audiences/LLAs/interests/demos testing, 20% bidding type testing.
Definitely keep testing mate. Angles/creatives/audiences are probably the best option to focus on, this has to work out at some point.
Let us know how it goes.
Launched a new blitz of stuff with only my winning ad. By now it's been about a week without these ads up, so if there was any potential of the audience being saturated (unlikely), they've had a week off & should gain a little more appetite.
Here's the main items I've been testing:
1. Adset audience combos of AA (AA + other narrowing interest) - 7 interest combos in total along with 1% LLA as a control. All audiences negative'd out 1% LLA to reduce audience overlap.
2. "Cost cap" conversion targeting
3. NOT new creatives
Looking & hoping for the return of positive metrics of the past, but unfortunately not getting them.
The "cost cap" conversion setting has heavily throttled my ads. Each adset has a budget of $75, so I'm budgeted to spend like $600 today, but it's been 5 hours and I've only spent $30 total and got 1 conversion.
Either "cost cap" starts really slow OR FB has no confidence in getting me conversions at $25 CPA (even though they gave it to me hundreds of them at like $20 2 weeks ago).
CTRs have not returned to their previous 9% range. Everything is at like 4%. "OPEN" targeting where I specify nothing has the highest CTR at 5.75%. CPCs have been a little bit nicer, but I assume that is just cost cap trying to do its thing. I am inclined to wait this out a bit, but when campaigns worked in the past, they worked right away. Wondering how much time I need to waste seeing these ads not perform before I kill it.
This ad account is just a different being now it feels like. My next test will probably be to duplicate the winning ad over to 2-3 new ad accounts. Kinda concerned this raises flags or something on FB's side though.
For no reason in particular, interested in recreating my LLAs somehow.
Next up too is just totally different angles. Again.
Re cost cap I'd do 1-2 ad sets with higher budget to see if that unplugs things but if it doesn't just drop it. I.e. if your cost cap is $25 I'd do at least a 5 times higher budget - over $125 and so on. I think you'd even need budgets in the ranges of $180-$200 per ad set so the learning phase can grab more conversions in the next few days, it seems to be suffocating right now.
It could be audience overlap, can you check what's happening under Delivery Insights for your currently active ad sets?
Audience saturation is OK I think.
Overlap is fine too.
But competition is worrying and that may just be the problem.
From FB's KB:
For example, if our delivery system was pacing your bid down to get you more results and then competition increased, you may see an increased cost per result. This is because, when competition increased, we may've had to start entering your full bid into auctions. However, if we were already entering your full bid into auctions and competition increased, you may see less delivery rather than cost increases. This is because we can't increase your bid to try to win these more competitive auctions, and thus can't show your ads as much.
- Testing LLAs extensively as you said
- Entering bidding wars and waiting out the learning phases with every test
- Brand new angles
- Entirely switching the marketing approach to a not so typical direct-response style one. Vids, funnels, ebooks, articles, dedicated sales pages, mail lists and so on.
Keep it up buddy. Love your tenacity and the way you detail your results. Onwards and upwards from here on. Good work.
Now that you have a semi-consistent winner, I would test CBO's to scale. Also, consider more video and maybe content from influencers. Im sure you likely feel that this particular product doesn't lend itself well to video, but as you can see from your current winner, the video doesn't have to do much beside show that real people use/enjoy it. Hell, even slideshows from local models/influencers holding the product does a lot.
This looks like a great journey. I will definitely be following this thread.
Great stuff @pentas!
So it did turn out it was down to just testing more stuff and getting good ads/creatives out there and just generally sticking to it.
In regards to scaling you can do tons of stuff. CBO and throwing winning ads/ad sets into new camps, splitting winning segments, gradually increasing budgets vs duplicating ad sets, smashing high budgets right out the bat etc. IG, influencers, Google?, Pinterest?, mail blasts
One for the newsletter!
@shishev
It was just end-of-quarter weirdness paired with ads that didn't have a discussion/engagement focus going on. I think I just found a better ad + engaging comments made the difference. Audience adjustments didn't do much & cost-cap bidding type made things more stable (won't really say if cost cap has been a good or bad thing).
Good suggestions on FB scaling. Once new product rolls in my first step will be to just up the budgets n see what happens. I'm purposely throttling stuff right now as we're waiting on another big shipment & we'd run out if I zoomed it today.
I'm enjoying providing updates to everyone reading this thread. I don't have many marketing contacts I speak to daily so I'm loving detailing the operations with this group....even just writing stuff out organizes my own thoughts!
Here's the game plan & state of operations for sources outside of FB. I'll provide updates to all this as well periodically.
Other Traffic Sources
Influencers:
We've ran 2 tests on this and broke even on it. They were cheap IG influencers so like $200 per post. But with a good following we vetted. We are eyeing some YouTube video reviewers in the black beauty niche currently. Lot pricier than an IG post though. This one influencer wants $4500 for the video, we're trying to walk her down to $3500 and we'll do it!
I feel like I need some kinda tool to better vet followings etc. I hopped on a phone call with Upfluence (they're a tool that will dissect & analyze any influencer on various platforms and tell you engagement/followers/ages/geos/etc.). Seems really useful for influencer feedback, but it's like $6k per year (billed yearly) so hesitant to pull trigger. Know of any cheaper solutions?
Google:
We're on Google already and this is losing money, which has annoyed me from the start. People are typing in a keyword that precisely describes our product. What we are. Going to same page our FB people are (our product page with lots of details/reviews/doctor reccs/etc.). And the conversion rate sucks. Even with our Google Shopping ads the CV isn't that good. Our CPAs have never been on target. From what I can see, the intent on the keywords just isn't high enough. People are using Google for informational research rather than actually shopping in our niche. We're also doing paid ads on Amazon and what is wild is like Amazon has 10x the conversion rate for the EXACT SAME keyword that will suck in Google. People search for info on Google & they search for products on Amazon.
Given this, there's truly a GIANT group of keywords that are information-searching more than product searching. Like people typing in symptoms, signs, treatment, of X etc. I plan on capturing these people's emails with a ebook styled approach. I want to dominate this space. Tons of international volume too.
Women's Health Clinics:
My wife has been contacted by a couple women's health clinics who would like to get samples of our product to try out. The brick & mortar approach is there too. Doctors actually want to recommend our brand! This seems like slow growth, but very valuable & difficult for others to replicate. Could be a source of some of our best lifelong customers.
So these clinics have had us make little "sample" packs they can give out for free. 5 pills per pack. I am thinking of double-using these as an opportunity to run $1 Trials + S&H or something on FB. Allow other people to see the benefit for cheap, then decide to order more on their own.
International:
I ran an international test for our product to check out interest in other countries....and they loved it too...especially places like Nigeria, Jamaica, Bahamas, Ghana, etc. Funny our campaigns cost like as low as .01 cent per click in places like Jamaica! The less access you have to a doctor, the even more beneficial our simple product is. So figuring out logistics on 3rd tier countries is a big boom for value cuz there's like no competition at all. We'd be THE thing. The challenge is payment processing & shipping. Our checkout abandon rate is very high in these geos. But getting people to checkout is extremely cheap. There's interest here.
Those Awesome Funny YouTube Commercials Everyone Sees:
When you see a really good 2 minute ad on Youtube about a product and it just feels PERFECT. We wanted to do one. We did a demo call with the company who is known to make some of the best viral YT ads. They wanted like 3-500k for the ad. Yeaaaaaaa little ahead of our budget. We'll be back in 2 years.
Q&A Sites:
There's a lot of Quora/Yahoo Answers type of questions out there that we have a presence on. We've put some time into answering women's questions in this department. As the problem our product solves in one women have to do lots of online research for, this is just a deep vein of question & answer content online. So we hop on these sites & we just answer the person's question, then casually mention our brand we use to treat the issue. In my research I've noticed there's a lot of medical-oriented Q&A sites that I'd like to get into more. I'm tempted to start a forum of our own with specific focus on issues our customers have. Screw Quora for ads though. I don't know what it is, but that stuff is insanely pricy and never performed that well for me.
Amazon:
Doing 30-50 sales per day on Amazon. As I've mentioned in previous posts, we're growing there unexpectedly. I've watched some Amazon algorithm explanations and they say that if you BRING IN OUTSIDE traffic to Amazon, you'll be rewarded. #1 ranking factor on Amazon is getting Add-To-Carts. Volume. We're bringing in a fair amount due to our branding. Amazon is not the first place I want to send people though, (they aren't our customer, they're Amazons). But regardless there's a ton of people there with high commercial intent you can't ignore. I'm tempted to actually send MORE people there in the short term just to juice Amazon rankings some more. Again, our competitors there are just Amazon-only no-brand competitors. No sites. Just old Amazon rankings. Kinda feels like the rankings are there for the taking if someone wants to start slaying. Plus CPAs are probably way better linking people there instead of our site. Thoughts on this?
Native:
Most of my affiliate experience is in native. Unfortunately this niche product is not a great solution for native. Ecomm on native is kinda hard, and its heavily biased towards offers older white people buy because that is who reads news sites in general. Not our market. Will try it regardless at some point. There's potential on more gossipy sites & WorldStar Hiphop kinda stuff. Got our copywriter making a long-form advertorial now.
Products & Reorders:
Reorders have the potential to completely blow profits out of the water and thus is my most anticipated wildcard of this WHOLE business.
We're at a profit right now on the customer's 1st order. What happens if the person stays with us 5 years because the product works so well?
This particular product we have is a highly-likely reorder kinda product. Our product isn't a cure, it's a treatment and the best thing out there for many women. Once it works for you, you go "damn I need more!" and women who stick with us will order between 3 and 12 bottles per year. I am very excited & closely watching our reorder rate. We've gotten like a dozen reorders,but enough data isn't in yet to conclude that rate of rebill. I think average reorder time frame would be 2-4 months which is longer than this whole case study. Many of our reviews have mentioned "I'll be a lifelong customer!" etc. The sentiment of high reorders is there, we'll see what they actually do though.
We're working on launching another product that will also be beneficial for women and another very likely rebill product. Problem is we gotta throw down like $20k just to get our manufacturer to get started. We want to sell a little more of our core product to gain confidence before such an expansion.
Despite this product being highly likely to reorder, we don't even have a subscription plan setup yet! This is in part because of how much our payment processors DON'T like rebills when they are associated with nutra/supplements. There's some people (maybe some of them on this forum perhaps?!?!?) that have made having a supplement business very tough & scrutinized....they say they've been burned hard before by many rebill supplement companies... So our payment processors need a few months of low-chargeback evidence before they are OK with subscription setups. FWIW, we are not doing payments through
Having Fun:
I've done 9 figures in ad spend for leadgen for previous employers as well as doing my own affiliate stuff the past 5 years. It was fun doing 10,000 leads per day. Hitting big numbers is cool, but there's an entirely different satisfaction in seeing the relief you bring people with a good product. My wife has had multiple women on the phone crying to her saying how thankful they are. Currently the most fun thing to me is figuring out the lifetime value of these people & branding for the future (things I'd rarely ever think of as an affiliate/lead guy). How do we delight these people even more and turn it into a moat for our business?
I think it's a beautiful mix. My wife's knowledge of a detailed problem, dedication to customer service, and my performance skills. I can clearly see nobody knows wtf they're doing with traffic in our niche. Performance marketers can run circles around most of these typical "marketers" at real companies. Our biggest competitor is some VC-backed glitzy company who are doing ads all wrong with expensive agencies. I revel at the idea of kicking their ass & the look on their faces when they find out its a couple with no VC backing!
I really think there's something to be said for starting your own journey of this nature instead of doing more churn-and-burn stuff. I want a real business I can sell 5-10 years from now with a loyal backing of customers. This will make me 10x more (especially on the sale) than I'd make just selling more random products.
Many of you are a good clip richer than I am, but I still have enough reserves to go at this for about 2 years without needing to make a dime. Despite not really trying for profit very hard (we want to maximize market share) we made $2k profit yesterday on just 140 sales, so right now we're really on an upper in terms of the emotional roller coaster of owning your own business...I remember this 6 weeks ago we spent all day building multiple FB ad angles (yea we're slow) to just get hammered with horrible CPAs. So after many weeks of buildup & getting prepared, our "big launch moment" we just got slapped in the face with what looked like a product nobody cared about or wanted. That night I told her "I'm running outta bullets" and she cried in frustration. However, during those gut-wrenching failures we found a glimmer of hope, expanded on it, and found success! The way she goes!
TL;DR
TONS of traffic opportunities for this obscure product 0% of you have heard of. Took a lot of work to get to our current position, but we're just getting started babyyyyyy. These weak competitors never faced an STM member before!
Great to see you are doing well. Don't rest on your laurels, I've made that mistake and paid big time with my own '100%' product a few years ago once other dogs realized that they don't have to change anything to rip you off which means the only thing that is truly proprietary is the branding, your testimonials from Dr's and customers, and your amazing customer service/fulfillment(including packaging design!!<- consider this very carefully because packaging for women means more than the actual product imho lol.) Stay hungry and continue to fight like you are always going to be the underdog.
Also, the use of influencers is only to broker the content that they will make with your product so that you can reuse that content in your own marketing. The money you make from the actual influencer post means nothing usually even though the influencer is convinced that you are there to market to her audience when in fact all you really want is a model taking pictures/video while holding/wearing/using the product for your own purposes. For this reason, we only look for influencers who have great content on their page with little to no following...up-and-comers if you will...because they dont value their work enough yet to charge you too much even thought they are good with angles and filters. also, avoid influencers who work with an agency. Avoid them like the plague. 
Some stats from yesterday:
Revenue:
Website Sales: $2,766 (89 orders)
Amazon Sales: $1,299 (52 orders)
Ads:
FB Costs: $754
Amazon Costs: $124
Google Costs: $78
Totals:
Total Revenue: $4065
Cost of Product & Fees: $1232
Ad Costs: $956
Total Costs: $2188
Net Profit: $1877
Margin: 46%
....really happy about these stats! But the party has to come to an end for a while. We've almost ran out of inventory, and our supplier told us there's a delay in incoming product (12,000 bottle order), so I had to pause campaigns today & likely will keep it that way for the next two weeks, which will probably feel like an eternity. BUMMER!
Our leading ad is just cranking out our best CPAs ever. $10 CPA when breakeven CPA is like $26. Again I think having 800+ comments on this ad has made it's lifespan last a lot longer. Interestingly, the ad CTR has HALVED from 9% to 4.5%, BUT our conversion rate has nearly doubled. Less people interested, but they are super pre-qualified once they click over. My theory is the large block of comments & social proof help alleviate doubts.
We've got a couple hundred left in inventory & I'll use this "break" in the FB action to work on other less-developed strategies like maximizing email, ebook CPA approach, retargeting, and traffic leaks from popular content sites that relate to this product. Maybe some organic linkbuilding or something else too.
One challenging area we have right now is the aspect of HIRING. I hate doing it. I don't like releasing control. Nor does my wife. However, many of you know with that attitude you end up being the bottleneck of your own business. We need to grit our teeth and hand over tasks like customer service to someone else. My wife is a customer service hawk, so she is very skeptical of handing it over to someone else. But currently as the "CEO" of this company, she spends nearly all day handling random customer inquiries. It tires her out & it's a bad use of time at this point, so we need to hire someone or smartly outsource this stuff. Any suggestions here?
I'll fill everyone in once things are back up and running!
Plenty of services out there but I prefer to find and hire on my own. Just make sure your knowledge-base is all-encompassing and available for whoever you hire. Gorgias.io(
Thanks for the updates @pentas, super motivating! Let us know how things go, let's see another 0 added to those numbers hehe
Regarding outsourcing or hiring I'd definitely write up painstakingly detailed docs describing the entire process – A-Z about the product, customers' most common issues, time to reply, types of replies and even down to your wife's attitude/approach (tonality if over the phone) to customers to try and relay that to an employee or a customer support company to the very last detail.
https://influx.com - These guys are good but can get pricey.
https://www.hiremymom.com - This may come in handy haha.
Hello Pentas,
Not sure if this has been mentioned or not *Too much to read*, but have you tried an educational approach?
Since this worked so well on your wife, maybe layer the ads similar to a funnel: *not sure what you have done so far*
*What it was like for her before you started taking the supplement.
*What it was like during when results started to show up.
*After she got the results she wanted.
I would segment these based on vv i.e. watched x amount then show video 2 etc *I'm sure you know what you are doing here*
Always a good idea to add a few videos off different people highlighting the same as mentioned above, similar to how we see influencers doing it.
Make sure to add exclusions too based on VV as you wouldn't want the person seeing the same add over and over if they have watched x amount.
Also ensure to give a day or 2 prior to showing the next ad to them down the funnel to prevent them from getting annoyed with your brand etc.
Post video testimonials on your page - blog, and show it to people that engaged with the page *some needs to see results first* - target those that have engaged with the page and maybe exclude buyers.
Make sure to re-retarget those that have taken key steps too such as atc etc...
Show them ads again once they have purchased etc after a month *if it's a month's supply*
Do the same with the email marketing side of things, maybe offer a 10% off discount for their name and email so you can market to them on the backend.
You have upsells in place? maybe ask if they would like to subscribe to receive their orders every month for a small discount etc?
Normally most of the profit from supplements come on the second + order.
I had a similar issue with one of our customers and although it would benefit most parents, only those that understood the consequences and benefits bought it so we had to educate the rest which is okay as they make money on the bad and returning customers.
Pentas, I just saw your ad spend above.
Have you done any selling on the back end or returning customers? If the product is good then this part would make a killing which would allow you to scale dramatically on the front end to a break even point and concentrate on the up selling etc of the back end for profits.
@jc71292
We don't have many upsells going on because we don't have many products. We're working on getting a big secondary product, but it takes 12 weeks & $40k to make.
Also with regards to video/segmentation/retargeting etc. I just haven't done any of that. These approaches are great and would work well, but I am getting results I'm happy with right now, so have just been sticking with that. The things you mention probably are going to come into play very soon here as I order another large batch of product and need to get to more like 300-500 sales/day. Any suggestions on most likely to succeed video ads for supplements?
Re:educational approach -- It's a whole different angle to try, and yes that would probably work too. Something to go for *if* the angle I have dies. Our current FB approach doesn't work for Google search, so ebook on for search/GDN is on the menu.
Returning Customers: The product typically takes 3-4 months to use up, so it's too early to judge results. However, we have quite a few people who have already reordered more. Our product is a medical treatment so we expect healthy rebills. I'm very hopeful to see where the reorder stats land.
That's amazing! Congrats. We are starting the same journey with my girl in January 
Originally Posted by diplomat
Interesting follow along and following through with execution.
Congrats to your present milestone and to many more
Awesome work!
Such inventory issues are a good thing to have but try solve those asap and grab as much market as possible quickly.
You could also consider a referral program e.g. https://www.referralcandy.com
I’d be comfortable based on your volume and quality to intro you to the direct merchant processing we use for our US nutra businesses - just PM me in case you still need subscription processing and would like a direct intro.
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