Facebook Ads For Ecommerce And Dropshipping

In this tutorial, I’m going to be showing you everything that you need to know about Facebook ads for dropshipping and e-commerce. I’ll be sharing the exact strategy that I’ve personally used on my stores to scale brand new products to over six figures in sales in just a few months. This strategy is super valuable and you can use it for any physical product whether you’re a brand, whether you’re a drop shipper, the strategy is the same.

Before we get started, I just want to show you a little bit of proof that I do know what I’m talking about and that I have tested a lot of this stuff myself before sharing it with you. This is a relatively new ad account, it was started in July for a brand new store so it was a new store in a new pixel, and since then we’ve spent over $400,000 on ads and we’ve achieved a return on ad spend of 1.92. That’s not that great, but it was still profitable for this store and it was a little bit higher than 1.92 because a lot of these conversions didn’t track properly.

That’s just one of my ad accounts. In total, I’ve probably spent about a million dollars on Facebook Ads testing a lot of stuff. In this article, I’m going to be sharing what I’ve learned, what works for me, and what I’ve determined to be the best blueprint to launch and scalar product using Facebook Ads.

Let’s get right into it 

1. The Basics

First off, a couple of basic things that you need to set up before we can even start.

Pixel Installed and Page Created

You need to have your pixel installed on your store and your page created for your store. You can use a brand new pixel, that’s fine, but just make sure that you install the pixel right away just so we can start collecting data right from the start. And obviously, you want to have a page because you need a page to advertise from.

Customize Your Column Set

Add VC, ATC, IC, PUR columns to keep track of your entire funnel as well as CPC and CPM

Another thing you want to do right from the start is customizing your column set on ads manager because by default, it’s not optimized for e-commerce. Just to show you what I mean with the columns. This is by default what the columns would look like on your ads manager and this is the performance column set made by Facebook 

It has a lot of the stuff that you need to see, so you can see your result which is usually the number of purchases, your cost per result, your amount spent, and all that. But you don’t have all the information that you could be looking at and using to evaluate the performance of your campaigns.

Now, in comparison, I actually pulled up the column set that I like to use on my ads manager and you can just copy mine, and then just click columns, customize columns, and you can add all these columns, and you’ll have the exact same column set as me.

This column set might seem a little bit overwhelming at first, and if you don’t know what these things mean, it can be confusing but this actually helps to have all this pulled up. 

The first thing that I like to add is the CPM column, and this is basically how much you’re paying for a thousand impressions. And this will depend on your targeting and also on your video ad or whatever ad you’re using, how engaging that is. It’s a good metric to keep track of because if you see your CPM skyrocketing, that can indicate that maybe your ads have been seen too many times, or your targeting is off. It’s an important metric to keep track of and you definitely want to pull that up on your column set.

Another thing that I like pulling up on my column set is the: 

• Website content views: When people get targeted by your ads, the first step is for them to view your website’s content. This column tells you how many people actually view your content for the amount you paid.
• Website add to cart 
• Websites check out initiated
• Website purchases

What this does is it basically gives you an overview of the whole funnel on your website. Out of the people who viewed your content, so many are going to Add to Cart. You can see about 15% of people added to cart, and then from there on, you can see 66% of people initiated checkout, and then from there, 50% of people actually bought the product. You can actually keep track of your whole funnel straight from the ads manager and look at different campaigns and compare the funnel and you can basically troubleshoot your campaigns this way. So it’s really useful to have these columns pulled up.

• Cost per link click: This is an easy metric to keep track of if you already have some data on your site. For example, if you know that on average each visitor will bring you $1.5 in revenue, and you know that you need at least a 2.0 on ad spend, you would be looking at a $0.75 cent cost per click in order to be profitable.

Ads Manager Is Set Up In Folders, Campaign Defines The Objective, Ad Set Defines The Targeting, and The Budget

Campaigns > Adsets>Ads

Once you’ve set up your column set there are a few more things you need to know about Facebook Ads before you start advertising. A lot of you might already know this, but I’m assuming that a lot of people reading this article are going to be beginners and this is important to understand

The first thing is that the ads manager is set up in folders, the top level is a campaign, and then you have ad sets within that campaign, and then within ad sets, you have multiple ads. And then the campaign determines the objective.

Let’s say you want website conversions that are set at the campaign level. And then your ad sets define the targeting and the budget. It’s just a really important thing to understand just so you’re not confused when you go through the ads manager that’s how it’s set up.

Bidding System

Facebook Ads doesn’t provide consistent results because there are a lot of external factors. It depends on how many people are targeting the same audience as you. If there are a lot of people who are targeting the same audience, the CPM for that audience which is the (cost per thousand impressions) is going to be a lot higher. And if you target an audience that no one wants to target, that’s why if you target worldwide, for example, you’ll get cheap traffic. That’s because no one wants to target that audience because they don’t actually make any purchases. But if you target the United States for example, which is an audience that spends a lot online, and that is known to purchase a lot of things, the CPM is going to be a lot higher because there are a lot of people targeting that audience for the reasons I just mentioned.

2. Audience Research

Once you’ve got the basics down, the next step is to do some audience research so that you know who to target when you start running ads.

Facebook Lets You Target By Interests And Behaviors. 

Interests are not always relevant, and this is an important thing that you need to know. And one way that you can better understand interests is by seeing what interests Facebook has actually tagged you with.

If you go to this Facebook ads preferences, it’ll give you a list of the interests that Facebook has tagged you with, and this is interesting to get a feel for how relevant these interests actually are. 

This is my Facebook account here, and as you can see these are the interests that it tagged me with

A lot of these are relevant, and some of these just aren’t relevant at all. Check those out for yourself, see what you’re tagged with, and it’ll give you a feel for why Facebook interests aren’t always necessarily accurate.

One way that you can fight these interests not always being the most relevant is with “Flex targeting”. If you were trying to target golf enthusiasts, you could start off by targeting just the Tiger Woods interest. A lot of people know who Tiger Woods is. Tiger Woods would give you nongolfers, it would be a completely nonrelevant audience maybe you have a little bit more golfers than usual, but it would just be a broad general audience.

If you wanted to narrow it down to casual golfers, you could flex target both Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson, it means that your audience would need to match a Tiger Woods interest but also much a Phil Mickelson interest. By doing that, now you know that you have people who are definitely more interested in golfing than just the average person who knows who Tiger Woods is.

But now if you want to go really specific, and you want to target people who are golf enthusiasts, you can actually stack all three. People who know Tiger Woods, who know Phil Mickelson, and who also know who Bubba Watson is. And the way that they put it is a golf enthusiast would know who Bubba Watson is, but no one else would.

Just to show you this example in practice. I actually went ahead and create a new ad set, and as you can see right now I’m just targeting Tiger Woods in the United States. 18 and 65+

As you can see, our potential reach right now is 5.7 million. So we have a broad audience and most of these people would probably be nongolfers because just because you know Tiger Woods doesn’t mean that you’re a golfer.

If we wanted to narrow it down to fit, we could go “narrow audience’ and then add Phil Mickelson

Now, it must match Tiger Woods and must also match Phil Mickelson. Now you can see our audience went from like 5 million to 270,000. Now we have a much more narrow audience of people. And these are probably casual golfers if they’re interested in both these athletes. If you wanted to narrow down even more to golf enthusiasts, you can further once more and then you can type Bubba Watson.

As you can see our audience went down to 65,000 people 

People who are interested in Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, and Bubba Watson, it’s a good chance that they’re golf enthusiasts. That’s how, flex targeting works, and that’s how you can stack interest to get a very targeted audience.

You want to do some audience research right off the bat to find some interest that you can start targeting when you’re launching your campaigns.

There are two main methods I like to use:

• Common sense: For example, if you’re selling makeup, don’t go and target men. You’ll probably have a much higher cost to deliver those ads. If you’re selling makeup, target women. If you’re selling like skiing gear, target northern countries. You can use your common sense just to know who your audience is.
• Use audience insights to find interests to target: Another great way to find out potential audience to target is using audience insights. To get to the audience insights tool, all you need to do is just go to your ads manager, click the menu, and then right under the plan thumbnail, you have the audience insights.

This tool basically lets you create saved audiences and just explore different audiences based on the data that Facebook has publicly. Just to give you an example and how I would use this. Let’s say you’re trying to sell women’s leggings. What I would probably do to start off is I would think who’s the biggest competitor in women’s leggings?. What you’re trying to do is find data on who you should be targeting

Let’s say you’re selling women’s leggings, I’d say Lululemon is one of the biggest competitors. What you can do is you can go to the interests and type in Lululemon

Not every company is going to be in these interests. You need to have a relatively big company. You need to look at your big competitors, the major competitors because your direct dropshipping competitors won’t be listed as interests.

If you’re planning on selling to more countries you could add them. Like the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, that’s usually the four biggest countries you’d be selling to. This audience is people in these four countries from 18 to no max on the age and who are interested in Lululemon

Click all these tabs to get information about this audience

First off, what this tells us is that it’s 82% women, 19% men. If you’re selling leggings, your biggest market definitely going to be women. You could have probably figured that out by yourself. Relationship, status, all this stuff I don’t pay that much attention to. It is useful if you’re trying to optimize your ads. I’m at a high level but what I like using it just the page likes tab, this will just give you a bunch of interests to target. If you just go to a page like, scroll down, you can press “see more” and this will just give you a massive list of interests that you could target based on the affinity

Affinity means is how likely is your target audience going to be in interest, versus, any other audience on Facebook. For example, that page right there (Eat to perform), they have an audience of 350,000 people who like Lululemon out of 1.3 million, so it’s telling you that that page right there shares a lot of the same audience as Lululemon. All these pages share the same audience as Lululemon. These are all potential interests that you could target with Facebook.

You could literally test all these interests one by one and see which one’s working. If you’ve already been running ads for the store, and you already have people who are liking your page on Facebook you can actually select your page and it’ll give you these same affinity groups for your page

This data will be even better as long as you have like over 5,000-page likes, you’ll leave it to get some affinity groups that you could target but that’s only if you already have data, if you don’t, the best way is probably just to go off your competitor’s data.

3. Split Testing Creatives

Once you’ve done your audience research, the next step is to do some split testing for your creatives to find your winning ad. This is a step that a lot of people skip but it’s really important and it can be the day between your campaign being successful or failing. What you want to do is usually start off with at least three ads and split test them to find out which one’s doing the best, and then you’re just going to use that one ad for the majority of your campaigns until that ad stops performing.

Target Your Buyer Demographics Worldwide To Get Social Proof And Data For Each Ad. 

The way that I like to set up my split tests is I actually have just one ad set for each ad, one ad set with one ad in each ad set, and I’ll target a broad demographic worldwide. Let’s say I’m selling a broad product that applies to everyone, has a mass appeal, I’ll usually just target everyone 18 to 65+ worldwide. Pay per engagement and just one ad in each ad set, and then I’ll have a $10 budget per ad set and I’ll have that for each ad. And then I’ll leave it running for a little bit. You don’t need a big budget for these ads because since you’re targeting the worldwide, PPE, you’re going to get a ton of engagement really cheap. So this is great, first of all, for social proof, it’s great to start getting data about who’s responding most to your ad, and most importantly, it’s great to find out which one of your ads will perform the best in the auction.

Look At Cost Per Engagement and Cost Per Add To Cart To Determine Your Best Creative and Kill Other Ad Sets

How you can determine which one of your ads is the best, you can look at the cost per engagement. Since that’s the objective of the campaign so you can see which one is bringing an engagement at a cheaper cost, that’s usually a sign that it’s probably a better ad. And you can also look at the cost per add to cart, so if you have an ad that’s getting a ton of engagement but no one’s actually adding the stuff to cart, maybe your ad isn’t good at selling the product. It’s just good at being seen it a lot. You need to factor in both your cost per engagement and your cost per add to cart.

If you have some purchases, you can also go off of that, but at a $10 worldwide PPE campaign, you probably won’t get any sales, you probably will just get a lot of add-to-carts.

Once You Have 50-100k Views, Build a 95% Video Viewers Custom Audience To Test LAAs

Once your winning ad starts getting close to 100,000 views which shouldn’t take too long because we’re targeting worldwide so engagement is really cheap, this is when you can build a 95% video viewers custom audience and we’re going to use that to test our first look-alike audiences. 

3. Lookalike Audiences

If you’re unfamiliar with look-alike audiences, they’re simple and they’re useful tools and you should definitely start using them. How they work is that they find the people most similar to a given custom audience. You can use any custom audience. For example, Instagram engagement in the last 30 days, you can use an email list, you can use any action on your pixel, and you can feed that custom audience and Facebook is going to give you back a larger audience that most closely matches the audience that you initially gave it.

If you for example make that custom audience of 95% video viewers from your winning video ad, you’re going to have an audience of people who watched the majority of your video and who were obviously interested in the product to a certain extent. And then now you’re going to give that audience to Facebook and it’s going to give you an audience of people similar to those people. People are likely to watch the majority of your video and be interested in your product.

4. Testing Phase

At this point, you should have already done your audience research, you should have a list of interests that you’re planning on targeting, you should also have already split tested your creatives and found which one of your creatives is performing the best. 

Now, we can enter the testing phase and this is where you’re going to test as much stuff as possible to figure out what’s working and what you should scale.

Start Off By Scaling Horizontally and Creat as Many Different Ad Sets as Possible

When you’re starting out the testing phase, you want to scale horizontally, and what that means is you want to test as many different audiences as possible. Create a ton of different ad sets with different audiences to test and figure out what’s working.

Another thing that you want to keep in mind is that you want to use the same post ID for each one of your video ads so that all the social proof gets added to the same ad rather than creating a new ad every time. Just to show you how you use the same post ID for all your ads. When you’re creating your ad, you don’t want to create it in the ads manager, you want to use an existing post, make the post on your Facebook page beforehand, and then when you’re creating the ad, just go to “use existing post”, and then you select your post

That way, it’ll add up all the engagement to this one post ID, and now when you create a new ad. You can either just copy this post ID or you can just duplicate the one and it’ll use the same post.

Make sure that you’re using the same post. If it’s the same video make sure that it’s all in one post versus a bunch of versions of the same video ads.

Test 95% Viewer LAAs For Top Countries

When I’m starting out the testing phase, I’ll usually test out the 95% of video viewers’ look-alike audiences. We built a 95% video viewers custom audience using the video views we got from targeting worldwide. Now we can use that custom audience, build a look-alike audience and test it for the top country. United States, UK, Canada, and Australia. You want to test all different percents. 2 to 5% and 5 to 10% are usually what I’ll test.

Test Interest Found During Audience Research

Besides the 95% of the video viewers’ look-alike audience, you all want to test all the interests that you found during your audience research. The targeting that I’ll usually use is I’ll start with all countries that I can ship to which is usually the epacket countries.

I’ll have one interest per ad set, so one interest that I identified during the audience research phase, and then the age range and gender also when you identified during audience research, and if you’re not sure, just leave it broad and Facebook will optimize it for you. If your target audience is women and you select both men and women, Facebook will naturally start delivering it to women only because they have smart algorithms and they know who your target audience is. But if you know that it’s just women, you might as well just select women so that you don’t show it to any guys.

You also want to select English as the language just to make sure since we’re targeting all epacket countries. There are some countries where English isn’t the native language, and you want to make sure that they understand your site and can interact with you.

5. Testing Phase (Budget)

I just want to answer a question that I get asked a lot and it’s how much budget should I start off with during the testing phase?.

It doesn’t really matter, you can start with $5 ad sets, $10 ad sets, or $50 ad sets. They all worked fine depending on how fast you’re trying to scale. The main difference is how fast you’re getting data. Because during the testing phase we’re not trying to build these ad sets for the long term, we’re trying to just test and see what’s working. The bigger your budget when you’re starting out is just how much data you’re going to get within a day.

 For example, if you’re starting out with $5 ad sets, that’s fine. You’re just going to wait 4 or 5 days to get enough data to actually make a decision. But if you’re trying to scale aggressively you can start with $50 ad sets and you can see after spending about $25 or your break-even point, you can see already whether or not it’s a good audience to target. I personally always test out with $50 ad sets but you can definitely use $5 ad sets, $10 ad sets, they’re fine. It’s just a matter of how long you’re willing to wait to get the data.

Usually, I say that you need to spend at least $20.00 on ad sets before you can make any statistically significant decision. Even $20 is not a lot to spend but I know that a lot of you have budget constraints so I’m trying to keep it low. Yeah, you need to spend at least $20.00 on an ad set to make a decision.

Use whatever you want, $5, $10, $50 ad sets during the testing phase it doesn’t really matter.

Understand The Ad Set Learning Phase. 50 Conversions Within 7 Days Are Needed To Properly Optimize.

One important thing to understand about Facebook ads is the ad set learning phase. When you create a new ad set, it needs conversion data to optimize within seven days. It has a learning phase that lasts seven days and it needs 50 conversions at least to properly optimize and that’s what’s recommended by Facebook. So if you’re launching $5 ad sets it’s not going to be properly optimized within those seven days because you’re not going to get the 50 conversions needed. For that reason, Facebook actually recommends a bid to the budget ratio of at least 1:10. What this means is that if your average cost per purchase is $15, they recommend that your budget per ad set be at least $150. And they actually say that 1:25 is better. You need to have these larger budget ad sets so that the learning phase can go smoothly and Facebook can get all the conversion information it needs within that learning phase.

That’s why I say $5 $10 $50 ad sets for testing are all fine because regardless they’re all not enough to properly optimize within the learning phase. Once you find winning ad sets, that’s when you want to try to scale them to the point where Facebook can actually properly optimize during the learning phase and spend the budget accurately.

6. Testing Phase (Other Tips)

Keep creating as many new ad sets as possible every day to test new angles and to imitate what’s already working well for you. For example, if you have an interest that you’re targeting and it’s doing really well, it’s getting a lot of sales, you can put that interest into the audience insights tool that I showed you at the start, and find similar interest to target. And if the first interest was working well, similar interests will likely work well too. And the more ad sets you have that are profitable, the more you’re going to be able to scale once we get to the scaling phase.

The goal is to have as many different ad sets as possible that are profitable and that you can scale.

You can also test combining your best interests with engaged shoppers. Engage shoppers is behavior on Facebook for people that have clicked the shop now button on an ad within the last seven days. Usually, it’s a good sign, if people click a lot of ads it means that they’re more engaged, and they’re more likely to buy your product. A lot of people always test with engaged shoppers right from the start. Engage shoppers is something you definitely want to split test.

Larger Audience (5 million+) Tend To Work Best, Gives Some Room For FB To Optimize.

Larger audiences tend to work best because it gives Facebook more room to optimize. If you give it a very narrow audience it doesn’t have a lot of room to optimize and often time if you have a narrow audience the CPMs are going to be much higher because there are more people bidding towards that audience because you’re being picky about who you want to show your ad to, so then naturally there’s going to be more people bidding to that specific audience. When you give it a narrow audience your CPMs are going to be higher and Facebook will have less room to optimize. It can work sometimes for very niche products people like to have a narrow audience and they have great success with it but personally, for my style of dropshipping I like targeting larger audiences, 5 million+ and it just gives room for Facebook to optimize and it’ll do a lot better.

Use Breakdown Tool To Find Winning Audiences Within Broad Audiences (Country, Age & Gender, Platform)

If you’re targeting a broad audience and it’s doing well, you can use the breakdown tool to see if there’s any specific demographic that you could target that would have a much lower cost per purchase

I’m going to show you an example of that right now

For example, this is a broad interest that I was testing targeting all epacket countries, and as you can see the ad was doing well, spent $3,026 to make $7,086. Return on ad spend 1.95 which is pretty good because our breakeven return on ad spend for the stores is about 1.5 

This was profitable. But if I can look more in-depth to find audiences that are converting better within that large audience. What you can do is you can use this breakdown tool here, you can break it down by “delivery”, is what you want to click on, and then you can break it down by all these things

My favorite breakdown is “age and gender”, just to tell you what demographic you should be targeting. We can now sort it by “website purchases”, and let’s see which audience did the most purchases. And as you can see it’s 25 to 34 females and the cost per result is $16.47 instead of $19

As you can see, if we targeted just 25 to 30 females, maybe we’d be able to get a much lower cost per conversion.

You can also break it down by country which is also interesting. As you can see for this specific ad set Facebook optimized it mainly towards the United Kingdom. It seems like this was the country that was performing the best for us

Now we could go and duplicate this ad set, but target only the United Kingdom and see what happens.

7. Optimization

When you’re in the testing phase, you want to make sure that you’re continually optimizing and killing ad sets that are clearly not providing results to make sure that you’re not wasting money. 

Calculate Your Breakeven Roas. (product sale price/product sale price – product cost)

First off, you want to calculate your break-even return on ad spend and this is a really important metric to know. You can calculate it simply just by doing the product sale price, over the product sale price, and minus the product cost.

If you’re selling something really cheap like this teeth whitening pen here that costs you $1.31 shipped, and you’re selling it for $10 on your store

You can calculate your breakeven roas just by doing 10/(10-1.3)

The sale price, over sale price, minus the product cost, and this will give you your breakeven roas. As you can see the breakeven roas for a cheap product when you have good margins is really low, so all you need is a 1.15 roas to break even with this product.

On the other hand, if you choose something a little bit more expensive and your margins aren’t as good, the break-even roas are going to be a lot higher. For example, this backpack costs $41

Even if you were to sell it for $100 on your site, let’s calculate what the break-even roas would be, so it’d be 100/(100-41)

The breakeven roas as you can see would be 1.7. A lot higher than 1.15. So you need to keep this in mind how much margin you have, and what your break-even roas is? So that you know and you can analyze the performance of your Camping’s.

Look At The Last 5 Days Of Data (including the current day) and Kill Any Ad Set Below Your Breakeven Roas

Once you know what your breakeven Roas is? What you want to do is always look at the last five days of data including your current day and kill any ad set that’s below your breakeven return on ad spend, because you know that, that ad set is losing you money. The reason why I choose to look at the last five days of data is just to factor out variability as much as possible. Because some days your ad set is not going to perform well and some are going to perform really well. So you want to look at at least five days of data just to average it out and get something that’s actually meaningful. Instead of just one bad day then you kill an ad set that could have been really profitable.

Keep An Eye On Higher-level Funnel Actions If You Don’t Have Any Purchases

If you’re testing with $5 ad sets and you don’t have any purchases to evaluate the performance of your ad sets, what you can do is you can just move back one step to the next lowest level of the funnel. If you don’t have any purchases you can move back up to add to carts for example, and you can look at your cost per add to cart compared to your other ad sets and see if it’s at a key performance indicator, or if it’s way too high and it’s not going to be profitable. If you know that your cost per add to cart is way too high you can kill it right away without even having to wait for any purchases.

Even If All Your Cold traffic Campaigns Are Just Breakeven, Your Can Make It Profitable With Retargeting

An important thing to keep in mind is that if your cold traffic campaigns are just breaking even you can still be profitable overall by running retargeting. Don’t worry if you’re just breaking even on your cold traffic campaigns, that’s still good, you’re buying data and you’re getting people to your site and then you can retarget them. You can still be profitable if your cold traffic campaigns are just breaking even.

8. Scaling

The goal is to gradually scale your top-performing ad sets to higher budgets so that Facebook can properly optimize them. Like I mentioned earlier, Facebook recommends a bid to a budget ratio of 1:10, which means that your budget should be at least ten times your average cost per purchase. If your cost per purchase is $15, your ad sets should be at least $150 daily budget. That’s why you want to gradually scale them.

If you’re starting out at $5, don’t switch right away to $200 because you have no idea how to perform. What I usually like doing is $5 to $20, and then $20 to $50 if it’s still working well, and then $50 to $200 if it’s still working well, and then $200 is the point where the learning phase will actually be able to optimize properly. $200 budget is a good place to be at. But if you want to take it even further you can actually duplicate your $200 budget and duplicate it to a $500 or more budget and start using manual bidding. This is a lot more advanced, but this is when you can really scale

Just to show you how you can set up manual bidding, you would just duplicate your ad set. You should at least have tried it at $200 with the lowest cost bidding which is the default setting, and if that’s working well that’s when you can even start to consider manual bidding. Don’t jump right into manual bidding like a miracle solution to make your campaigns profitable, you only want to use manual bidding when your campaign is already profitable and you want to scale it to the next level

So then you’ll just duplicate this ad set

Scroll to the bottom where there are the auction settings. When people see manual bidding they’re just referring to the lowest cost with a big cap. Just set a bid cap and start at a big cap of about three times your target cost per purchase. Let’s say your cost per purchase is $15, you could start on a big cap of $45, and then you want to adjust it

Usually, start higher, which is why we’re doing it three times. People recommend two to three times your target cost per purchase. I like to start off at three times, and then you can see how it’s performing, and if it’s delivering conversions at a lower cost than $45, you can actually keep lowering the big cap as much as you can to try to get lower conversions.

This requires a lot of mastery you need to practice it for yourself and play around with a big cap. I don’t recommend using manual bidding if you’re a beginner, but if you’re trying to scale your campaigns, it’s definitely something that you want to play it around with and test.

9. Retargeting

Once you start scaling, and you’re getting consistent traffic to your site every day, you want to launch a retargeting campaign as soon as possible. Because like I mentioned earlier, even if you’re just breaking even with your cold traffic campaigns, you can still be profitable overall with retargeting because the majority of your profits are going to come from retargeting

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution for retargeting funnel and there are a lot of different ways you can set it up based on what you want to show on your audience but this is a basic funnel that you could set up and that usually works pretty well. This is what I used for most of my stores.

Retarget All Funnel Actions

Your retargeting funnel could look like this: 

• VC in the last 7 days (People would read your content in the last seven days excluding people who’ve added to the cart) This would be the top level of the funnel, people who are just aware of your website but they haven’t shown any interest of buying the product yet.
• Add to Cart in the last seven days (excluding people who’ve initiated checkout) This is like a level down and then the same thing initiated checkout in the last seven days excluding people the last seven days. These are the warmest audience, people were ready to buy but they just left their checkout and abandoned it).
• Retarget people who viewed content in the last 30 days. Excluding people who viewed your content in the last seven days just so there’s no overlap, and excluding people who purchased in the last 30 days just to make sure that you’re not targeting people who’ve already bought.
• Target people who viewed 75% of your video ad in the last 30 days. excluding people who’ve already bought in the last 30 days. People who viewed 75% of your ad, they’re already aware of your company, they already know who you are, and it’s much easier to sell them a product, versus, selling it to cold traffic.

Getting Consistent Results

In my experience, the main reason why your return on ad spend drops over time is add fatigue, and there are two reasons:

1. People steal a lot of content and so people will take your content and advertise it to their audience and naturally, there’s going to be some overlap and your audience is just going to see the same creative a lot, and eventually get tired of it and scroll right past it and not react to it anymore.
2. Facebook also doesn’t like you using the same creative over and over again so if it sees that you’ve been using the same ad for a long period of time, it’s naturally going to start throttling the delivery and showing it to less people.

Things you should do:

1. Properly watermark your content. When you make a new video ad always watermark it. And when I say watermark, don’t just put a logo in the top right corner. You want to have about 30% opacity logo right in the center so that people can’t edit it out, and that it’s your content and they know for sure. Properly watermark your content and no one is going to steal it.
2. Continually create new video content. Even if you have one ad that’s doing really well for you right now, don’t just sit on it, prepare the next one. Continually plan your next ads and plan to have new content consistently to fight ad fatigue. Otherwise, I guarantee you that your return on ad spend is going to drop over time and your campaigns are going to stop being profitable.

That is for the complete guide on Facebook ads for e-commerce and dropshipping. I really hope you enjoyed it.