Are you frustrated of running Facebook Ads that don’t work?

As the ecommerce industry is growing faster than ever, specifically dropshipping, I have seen a lot of people wasting money on Facebook Ads, simply because they don’t know how to run them properly and profitably.

If you want to take your business further, keep reading. This article may even save you hundreds of hours per month!

Take note, in this article, I won’t be wasting your time (and mine) talking about how to set-up your Facebook business manager.

Instead, I will be talking about what you need to do when you already have an ad account, and you’re ready to send out traffic to your store.

After reading this article, you will no longer waste your time and money doing random things without systems in place.

Another note: most of what you’ll learn here are some exclusive of the SDS course – and some even more exclusive stuff! Here they are…

What You Will Learn In This Article:

🚨 The Structure of a Facebook Ads Campaign

💥 Facebook Pixel

🧠 Algorithm

💎 Custom Audiences and Interests Targeting

🏃‍♂️ How to Set Up Facebook Ads Campaigns

🌎 Targeting Options – A Comprehensive Guide

✍ How to Create the Perfect Ad

📖 How to Spy on Your Competitors

🎁 A Bonus Section for Scaling

The main advantage of Facebook Ads is its ability to scale, the minimum amount of work needed once it’s set up, and the consistency of income.

Once you read through this article, you’ll be able to do just that.

So if any of these interests you, then keep reading.

You might find just what you need.

Quick Warning: This is gonna be a really long but valuable article.

So ready your cup of coffee and sip through it slowly, while we discuss – in detail – what you need to know to profitably test, scale and optimize your ads.

Structure of a Facebook Ads Campaign

There are 3 levels in a Facebook Ads campaign…

The Campaign Level

This is the level where you get to choose an objective.

The objective will tell Facebook what the ultimate goal of your advertising campaign is – then optimizes your campaign delivery for your preferred results.

Simply said, your objective is the action you want people to take when they see your ads.

Want them to like, comment or share your post?  Page Post Engagement Objective.

Have a video and you just want them to view it (maybe for retargeting purposes)?  Video Views Objective.

Want them to view your website and maybe purchase something? Conversion Objective.

The list goes on – but as far as everybody knows, these 3 are the MAIN objectives everyone MUST use for a dropshipping business.

Quick tip: If you don’t know this already, do not set the campaign objectives as store visits. The “store” in the store visit objective means a physical store, not your online website. So unless you have a physical store, and you want people to go there, you wouldn’t want to use this objective.

The Ad Set Level

Let’s assume we’re on the ad set level of a conversion campaign. (as it’s the necessary objective if you want to sell something – which, of course, you do.)

In this level, you get to choose a more specific goal for your campaign.

There are a few options you can choose from, but the ones I use most of the time are add to carts, initiate checkouts and purchases. (this is where the Facebook pixel comes to play – we’ll cover this later).

But it doesn’t stop there.

In this level, you will also be setting up your budget and schedule, determine your targeting, your bidding and more. (I’ll be discussing these below.)

The Ad Level

This is the part where you’re actually gonna make the ad that your audience will see on Facebook – the front end.

Here’s where you’ll…

• Customize the ad format
• Choose the kind of CTA that fits your ad
• Plug your creatives, copy, link and etc.

Quick Note: In the ad level, when you’re running a page post engagement campaign, always turn ON the Facebook pixel tracker. It’s somehow always “turned off” as a default.

What Is the Facebook Pixel?

Before we get to the lean meat of this article, let me discuss one last thing.

What the Facebook Pixel is and what it does.

Why do we have to go through this?

Well, you see, I believe that if you know the basics, the core and/or the fundamentals of a certain subject, you’ll “surprisingly” find it easier to solve bigger problems, than when you don’t.

Problems like how to test products profitably (or at least breakeven), optimizing your ads (to the highest possible ROAS) and scaling them while having consistent results – when you know the fundamentals, you’ll know how to solve or go through these challenges.

Without the basic knowledge, people will only be wasting time and money and eventually find yourself scratching your head trying to figure out how to make things work. In the worst-case scenario, they’ll probably even quit as well.

With that said, let us begin . . .

The Facebook Pixel

The Facebook Pixel is an analytics tool and a piece of code for your website that lets you track conversions, optimize ads based on the collected data and build targeted audiences for your advertising campaigns.

It works by placing and triggering cookies to track users’ movements as they interact with your website and your Facebook ads.

With that said, here’s…

What the Facebook Pixel Can Do:

1. Track Conversions

The Facebook pixel allows you to monitor how many people interacted with your website after viewing your ads.

When someone visits your website and takes an action (e.g. adds to cart, initiates checkout, or buying something), the Facebook pixel is triggered and reports this action.

This would then lead to the second part of what the pixel can do, creating a custom audience.

2. Create Custom Audiences

This is probably everyone’s favorite part. This is extremely important.

Once you have enough traffic going to your store everyday, and you’ve already set your Facebook pixel on your website, what you’ll do now is utilize that traffic.

How?

By creating your custom audiences.

The Facebook Pixel allows you to easily create custom audiences of users who have visited and/or taken specific actions on your website. (e.g. visited your website, visited it for at least 10 seconds, filled out a sign-up form, etc.)

Once you have a custom audience built, you can then create the most powerful targeting tool Facebook has.

Facebook’s algorithm has a close relationship with the Facebook pixel. To create this audience, Facebook’s algorithm uses this pixel’s data to analyze thousands of characteristics your custom audience has.

Facebook then creates a larger audience that shares many of those characteristics…

…the lookalike audience.

Now that we’ve covered that, there’s one more thing you can do with your custom audience.

After this, it’s time to talk about the nitty gritty of this article.

3. Retargeting – Making Sure You Target The Right Poeple

Having a retargeting campaign is a must.

When done right, you can have a ROAS that can reach more than 5x. Heck even 10x is possible.

You see, most of the time, it just takes a few reminders for a customer to get familiar enough with you, your products and your brand for them to take the next step and buy.

Study shows that people hardly buy a product on the first website visit. This is why the Facebook Pixel becomes even more useful. You can use it to retarget people that have visited your website and remind them who you are.

You can solve this problem by following up with your prospects (potential customers) who were so close to buying one of your products. You can also retarget people who bought your product from the past (say that product lasts for only 3 months, you can remind those people to buy from you once again.)

Just keep in mind that in the end, what your prospects need is a nudge to go back to your website and complete that long-lost sale.

What you can do is offer them an incentive such as free shipping or a discount so that they overcome the challenge that has led them to forget about the shopping cart. It’s up to you.

Just be creative.

Facebook Pixel Helper

If you’re not already using the chome plugin, the Facebook Pixel Helper, I urge you to do so. It’s a FREE plugin that allows you to troubleshoot your pixel implementation to see what’s working and what’s not – and more. (You’ll also be able to see the sites that have installed the Facebook pixel).

The last step to installing the Facebook pixel is to verify it is working.

To verify the pixel is working, visit the pages where the pixel is installed. Open the Conversion Tracking tab in Facebook Ads Manager. Your pixel status should report ‘Active’ and the Activity chart should confirm your conversion traffic.

If the status remains unverified and Activity is empty your pixel may not be installed properly. Go to Google or ask Facebook for help and do your due diligence.

Now that we’ve got that covered up, it’s time for the most important sections of this article…

The Facebook Algorithm

A lot of people doing Facebook Ads don’t really understand what Facebook wants.

So let’s explain it in this section.

The Facebook algorithm is a machine learning technology that Facebook uses to automatically optimize your ads, as the account’s data grows, to the goals you set it with.

Facebook’s algorithm works in a similar way an auction does. It determines the best ads to show the best specific audiences.

What’s The Auction About?

To explain further, the auction is about getting—what Facebook thinks—the best people to show your ad to.

Facebook’s concerned with 2 things:

• Helping advertisers reach and get results from people in their target audiences.
• Providing positive and relevant experiences Facebook’s users.

What they then do is hold auctions in which both interests are represented.

In simple words, in your case, your ad is shown to the people Facebook believes is worthy of watching it.

In the user’s case, your ad is shown to them if Facebook believes it is worth to be put in their faces.

Capisce?

So How Do I Win the Auction?

An ad wins the auction when it has the highest total value.

An ad’s total value consists of 3 key factors to determine auction success: bidding, estimated action rate, and the ad’s quality and relevance (also known as user value).

In a simple formula:

Advertiser’s Value + User’s Value = Total Value.

Let’s break that down.

[(Bidding)(Estimated Action Rates)] + [(Ad Quality)(Relevance)] = Total Value.

Get these things right and you’ll get more quality prospects to look at your ads, and eventually buy.

Notice how there are 2 faces for Facebook’s algorithm? One for the users and another one for the advertisers.

Don’t get me wrong though, they’re the same thing (and they’re connected in one way or another as stated on the formula above), but I’m breaking it down because I’ll only be explaining on the eyes of the advertisers, and not the users.

So here’s the thing…

Facebook Knows Everyone

You want to target the people who can actually spend a lot of money on your store?

Facebook knows who they are.

We’re giving them all that data back.

Advertisers and users alike.

From users: Likes, interests, home life details, income and job, purchase behaviors, etc.

From advertisers: Every one of us that ran a campaign, selling the stuff on our stores, generating leads, etc.

Facebook’s gathering data from all of us.

Facebook takes the purchase value of every person you’re advertising to and makes a very nice estimation and understanding of what each of them is worth.

They know who buys a lot.

They know Mr. Smith who just throws in his credit card but NEVER buy.

Facebook knows all of them.

So it’s in our best interest to utilize it… How?

By creating content that resonates well with what Facebook wants… a good user experience – positive feedback on your ads.

As a general rule:

Facebook’s algorithm doesn’t give the highest priority to the highest bid or the highest ad spend (though they do play a role on the quality of traffic you get) because Facebook prioritizes something else… a good user experience.

Facebook’s is all about delivering relevant and meaningful content to its audience.

If it sees that the audience’s feedback on your ad is negative (reporting your ad, hiding it, sorting it as spam, not engaging with it, etc.) It decreases your ad’s relevance score, which in return increases your CPM, CPC, CPA, etc.

This means that in order for you to run effective ads, make sure that it is relevant to your audience (well targeted until you scale) and you have the best products.

Disclaimer: Only the Facebook folks know for sure what the algorithm does. This is not exact science and is based on observation, what Facebook shows and what a lot of experts in the field say about it.

Quick side note: If you want to know the lessons James learned from spending thousands on Facebook Ads, then you should join his email list by clicking this entire side note.

Setting Up Facebook Ads Campaigns (SDS version)

In the SDS course, James shows you how he sets up his Facebook Ads campaigns.

But first I need to be very clear that this is not the only way to do it.

All I’m saying is that, if you’re not already familiar with the platform, I recommend you start with his framework.

Over time, you will develop your own ways and systems for how to do this, but for now, you can follow his framework.

Let’s begin.

Campaign Settings

Let’s assume I’m running a new campaign for a dog collar.

When you create a new campaign, you’re gonna have to choose an objective.

Let’s focus on the main objective first when selling stuff with Facebook Ads… the conversions objective.

Ad Set Settings

First, make sure you name your ad sets specifically.

When you’re running 50+ ad sets in a campaign, you’ll have a hard time finding out what’s inside the ad set if you don’t name it well. So create a naming convention that states everything inside the ad set, with the least amount of characters possible. (Make sure you understand it as well.) The ad set name must be descriptive with your plans, the audiences you use, the placement, etc.

Second, choose the conversion type.

As stated earlier, there are three different conversion types that James recommends or suggests you test. These are the add to cart, initiate checkout and purchases conversions optimization.

If you’ve done Instagram Shoutouts, or at the very least, gathered some data to around 100 purchases, then follow what James does. 👇

Use the purchase conversion.

Based on some extensive testing he’s been doing, the purchase conversion almost always works best whether it’s a new campaign or it’s a campaign that’s already running.

But don’t take this as the holy grail of Facebook Ads.

Feel free to try the others if you like, but if you don’t have much to spend yet, I suggest you use purchase optimization first as well.

Now, with that out of the way, we’ll continue with the most important parts of the ad set level.

The targeting options . . .

Targeting Option #1 – The Strongest Audience

I’m assuming you’ve read the Ultimate Guide to Running Instagram Shoutouts already and have some purchases in your store before testing Facebook Ads.

If you did, the numero uno targeting option is, obviously, the lookalike audience. If you have enough data, these audiences are very powerful, as stated above.

You can make lookalikes based on the different conversion events – ATC, IC, PUR – but do you know the BEST lookalike audience of them all?

While these are extremely important conversion events and you should really just test them all, there’s 1 more thing you should really make lookalikes on.

The most “powerful” of them all…

The customers themselves that you can export from Shopify.

“Wait, isn’t your customers the same with your purchases?”

Not quite.

Your customer list is your lifetime customers. Purchase is limited to 180 days. You have more data with customer lists plus, you get to play with them as well. (filtration)

Targeting Option #2 – The Audience Size

On the ad set level, Facebook shows you, at the right side of the editing area, the estimated audience size of a certain ad set.

When you’re just starting out and you’re testing a new product on a new campaign, your audience size should be between 200k-500k.

You have to make sure that you’re targeting a narrowed enough audience because your campaign doesn’t have enough data to optimize yet.

When your audience size is 1million+, you’re going away too broad and it probably won’t convert.

You have to make sure that you’re hitting your niche exclusively so that you’ll have good responses from your audience and of course, a higher intent to purchase.

“Why care about the response?”

Read this article about the most recent updates Facebook has and you’ll know why. It’s packed with massive value, so you’ll find it very useful.

Targeting Option #3 – The Best Countries to Target

The USA has always been the #1 country to dropship to.

However, we can’t discard other countries just because of this. You might find out that after a week of testing, other countries are converting better. Even statistics says that Australia has the highest conversion rate of all (But this might not apply to you for various reasons).

“So where should I really target?”

My answer to this, again, is to test for yourself. Personally, I find USA as the best (9 out of 10 accounts I have handled is selling in the USA) and James, recommends the USA as well. However, sometimes there’s an advantage of testing out other countries. I usually test Europe, Australia, and Canada together with the USA when scaling or trying out a new niche – so you can do that as well if you have some extra cash to use for testing.

You might find an “untapped potential”.

The choice is yours, but that’s what I’d do.

Other Important Ad Set Settings

There are 5 more things you need to fully understand inside the ad set.

These things are the placement, age and gender, bidding and this little pandora’s box called “expand interest”.

Let’s go over them for a bit.

Expand Interest Box

First off, the little box full of lies, “expand interest” box . . .

Uncheck it.

Unpick it.

Never use it.

I’ve tested it numerous times, on different niches, accounts, and products, and guess what?

It NEVER worked.

This is one area where I don’t Facebook to improve my sales because they’ve proven to NOT do so.

Second . . .

Age and Gender

Keep your ages as broad as possible and leave your gender set to all.

Let me explain the gender part first.

If you set it to either man or woman, you will, in most cases, get worse results.

Let’s say you’re selling clothes for young women, you wouldn’t want to set it to 16-36 and women only. (Trust me, I’ve tried this with a bikini store and a women’s jackets store.)

The reason behind this is because there’s a gender on Facebook called “unknown” for some reason. Facebook doesn’t know if that person’s a man or a woman and so they convert cheaper.

If you miss out on those unknowns, you will lose out as sometimes, they might be heavy buyers.

Now for the age part.

In the SDS course, James recommends having broad age targeting, but I actually do not.

What I do target is the people who are 22+ years old.

What I’ve noticed in some of my ads, and what other experts say is that younger people tend to have a higher cost (since many people are also targeting them) and are less likely to buy.

The main reason why they’re not the best buyers is because young people have a lower purchasing power compared to those who are 25+ or even 22+.

If you’re selling cheap stuff, then yeah, maybe you could give a try.

But if you’re just starting out?

Might as well target the best buyers first, than lose cash for nothing.

Placement

One of the final things you can do in the ad set level is setting its placements.

You’ve got two basic options.

Numero Uno: You start off broad, you check everything and then you optimize later once you have data.

Numero Dos:  You simply do Facebook/Instagram feed. I often only check those two placements since they’re often the ones that convert best in most cases.

It’s up to you though.

It’s all about test, test, and test.

However, if you don’t have much to spend, as I keep saying earlier, always choose what already works. You don’t have to waste your money “testing”. Others have already done that for you.

Bidding

In this section, you will learn how to use manual bidding properly and understand the principles of each option.

The first thing you should know is that Facebook shows your ads based on an auction format. The costs that you spend to reach a user will depend, at least partly, on the bidding strategy that you use to reach that user. (remember the auction formula above?)

Second, don’t use manual bidding until your metrics are, more or less, stable enough that the values aren’t far from each other.

When you’ve gathered enough data on your product, and everything looks stable, that’s when you should use manual bidding. You need to have enough data first before you can profitably use them.

If you fail to place the right ad bids, two things might happen:

• You’ll pay too much for your ad results.
• Your ads will never get delivered due to low ad bids.

So now that we got that covered, let’s go to the…

Bidding Strategies

There are 3 options for bidding and here’s the explanation for each of them:

Lowest Cost

This option prioritizes getting you as many ad placements as possible at the lowest cost.
If you’re still testing out and gathering data for your ad set, this is what you should be doing. This is how you figure out how much it really costs to have your ads delivered to the right person.

However…

…keep in mind that the audience you’ll have may not be as good as you would have if you’re using the other options.

In this option, Facebook is just getting you placements as long as they’re on the lower end of what you could be paying. The range of users you would get from here the worst to the best.

Once you’ve gathered enough data and stabilized your metrics, you’ll have an estimate on how much each metric costs.

With that said, you should try out the other bidding options for better results.

Lowest cost with a bid cap

Now, this is where the fun starts.

This option makes sure that you’re really keeping things at or below a certain cost.

As the name of this strategy suggests, you can set a bid cap, telling Facebook to not go any higher for any placement on a specific bid.

This can be particularly helpful if you’re on a tight budget, or if you know exactly what number you don’t want to go over.

Keep in mind, the only way for you to know the exact numbers for this is by having tested it first. Meaning you need to go through the first option before doing this.

For example, if you observed, that no conversion is worth more than $4.37, you could set your bid cap at $4.50 in order to prevent your campaigns from costing you more than that.

Quick Note: Facebook won’t run your ad set if you’re being cute and bid too low.

Lowest Cost With Bid Cap – The 2-4X Strategy

Since you’ve made it this far, I’m pretty sure you want to learn more about Facebook Ads. So I’m going to give a little smthin smthin about this option – a “strategy”.

(btw, some experts are using this strategy – so we’re just copying it 🤫.)

Anywho, when setting a bid cap, keep in mind that this is the most you want Facebook to spend for a single event. Since a bid is the most you’ll spend on that single event, you’ll usually spend less than that.

If you have a little bit more cash and you want to test more, bid 3x your average CPA.

The reason behind this is simple.

You’re not the only one running ads. There are millions of other advertisers out there, and they’re using different strategies. Now, the goal for bidding is to get the best people possible (i.e. purchasers). One way you can do that is by bidding more than other advertisers.

Experts have been saying that if you bid 2x or 3x your normal CPA, you get better results.

So I tested it myself.

Different ad accounts, different niches, and different products.

What I did was bid every dollar from the range of 2x to 4x the CPA for each ad set. The result?

Most, if not all, actually did really well and some of them even had better results than those in automatic bidding.

Here’s an example…

Say my product’s average CPA is $5. What I do then is duplicate the best-performing ad set depending on the range of the 2^nd and 4^th multiple of the CPA. In this case, the bid cap should be at $10-$20. I usually go for the middle so I duplicated the ad set 5 times from $13-17 and let it run.

Though let me remind you that with the different accounts I was handling, each had different results. Some worked really well at 1x CPA, some at 4x CPA. It’s really about the kind of account you have. So just keep testing.

That’s it.

This isn’t an exact science but it does yield good results for me and other people.

Target Cost

Target cost used to be called manual bidding.

Usually, target cost is used when scaling your ad sets. It allows you to take a long-term approach with your Facebook ad campaigns.

I only use this bidding strategy for campaigns that have already proven they can deliver results. This means that I only use it on campaigns that I’ve spent thousands on and is still generating really good ROAS.

The only way to do that is to really have a good ad.

So let’s talk about that.

Ad Settings

So, now that we’ve got the targeting, we’ve done everything with the campaign and ad sets settings, it’s time to look at the actual ads.

The first thing you got to know is that when you make an ad, you don’t have to duplicate it numerous times on different ad sets.

What you do, after finishing an ad, is go to the Facebook post with comments (there’s a dropdown on the upper right side). When the new tab opens, you go to the link, and you’ll see 2 sets of numbers. Copy the one on the right, that’s your Ad Post ID.

Now, when you’re making new ad sets and you want that same ad placed in there, don’t create a new one. Instead, look into the Ad settings and you’ll see 2 options, “create ad” or “use existing post”.

Choose the “use existing post” and enter the ID you copied there.

The reason behind doing this? Simple.

Virality.

When you show the same ad to hundreds of thousands of people and they react, comment and share that ad, you generate something called “social proof”. If you didn’t use the same Post ID, you’ll have different Ads. The likes, comments, and shares would be separated.

Imagine you’re looking at 2 ads, which would you “trust” more?

1. A post with 10 likes, 0 comments, and 0 shares? Or…
2. A post with 100,000 likes, 10,000 comments, and 1,000 shares?

Of course, it’s #2.

When people see those numbers, the ad subconsciously gains their trust and credibility—especially when they see other people saying in the comments how they liked your product and stuff—they would want to purchase it as well.

Important Note: Virality only comes after you’ve spent thousands for an ad. The real question is, how can you spend thousands on an ad and still be profitable with it? The answer is again, simple.

Have a really compelling ad and a winning product.

These 2 are the key ingredients to have profitable marketing. If you miss one out, the other will fall.

Let’s say you have a really good ad. Copy is very compelling. Creative is very attention-grabbing. You put all the right ingredients there and mixed them up properly. However, your product sucks, it costs too much and your landing page looks like a drawing of a 7year old kid.

Who will buy? Nobody.

The same thing with your product. Even if you have the best product in the world, but you don’t know how to sell it, that product is would be useless. If no one can get their hands on the product, what’s the point?

Let’s fix that. 👇

Let’s Learn How to Create A Compelling Ad

So here are the 2 main components of creating compelling ads. The ad copy and the creative.

Let’s talk about it.

Copy

Your goal, as a dropshipper using Facebook Ads, is to, obviously, sell your products.

You can have the fastest site in the world, the best products, the best everything . . .  but if you don’t have a persuasive copy, none of it matters.

In this section, let’s talk about what you have to do to create a compelling copy.

1. Know Your Market

To be honest, this is probably the most important part of writing a good copy.

You can use every fancy trick or “manipulation” tactic in the book, but if you don’t have a deep understanding of your market, you’ll be missing out a lot. (I’m talking thousands of dollars here.)

So what should you do? Research.

This is something most people won’t do and that’s why they fail with dropshipping. They’re too lazy to do the necessary research.

Setting up the store is easy, setting up your business manager is also easy. What’s not easy is learning who your market is, learning what the best products to sell are and knowing which niche is highly profitable to sell to.

Before you can effectively sell something to someone, you must first know who they are and understand why they would buy from you in the first place.

Here are just some of the things you need to know about them:

1. Desires
2. Fears
3. Problems
4. Needs
5. Wants

Now the question is, where do you find this information

Here are some ways:

1. Facebook groups
2. Twitter
3. Reddit
4. Forums
5. Amazon Reviews
6. and many more!

After market research, it’s time to use the knowledge you have about your customers. There are 2 main structures you can use to create copy that sells.

AIDA and PAS.

AIDA

Attention, Interest, Desire, Action (AIDA) is one structures you can follow. Here’s the thing, people buy with emotion and not logic (especially for ecommerce). So write something that would tickle their emotions by bombing them with positive visions and benefits that would subtly persuade them to buy from you.

You know what?

Let me give you an example. Let’s say I’m selling a peeler to busy stay-at-home moms, here’s how the copy would look:

(1) The best-selling kitchen peeler is now back in stock! 😱

(2) 👩‍🍳 LINK

(3) Are you a busy mom?

(4) ✅ Save time in the kitchen, spend time with your family 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦

✅ EFFORTLESSLY peel fruits and veggies 🔪

✅ Surprise your guests with your chef-made meals 💁‍♀️

(5) Want to make this a reality?

(6) Grab yours now before somebody else does! 🔥

(7) 👩‍🍳 LINK

👩‍🍳 LINK

 

HURRY! Limited Stock 👉 [Shop Now]

I know, I know.

It’s really hype. But remember, knowing the target market plays a HUGE role when making copy. Remember, my market for that copy above is for “stay-at-home moms who are busy all day long doing the household chores.” They dig this copy.

Now let’s analyze it!

1. Attention and social proof – back in stock
2. CTA/Action (with or without is fine)
3. Interest and segregation (calling out your target market)
4. Benefits
5. Desire
6. Urgency
7. CTA/Action
8. Well, there’s no “8” in the copy, but do you notice the emojis? They all tell a story. Use them wisely.

This isn’t the best copy but it’s currently how I’d do it if I’d be selling a kitchen peeler to that market. (1 out of 4 copy I’d test)

PAS

Problem Agitation, Solution (PAS) is another structure you can follow.

In my opinion, this is so much better than AIDA.

Why?

Because if you talk about your market’s problems, they have no other choice but read it.

Imagine you have a stomach ache for 2-days straight. You can’t go out of the house, you can’t eat well, you can’t sleep, etc.

What do you think you’d do?

You’d go to google and ask for help. Maybe you’ll see and ad, maybe you’ll see WebMD.

Let’s say you see 2 ads and you open each of them.

The first ad talks about the benefits. It talks about a stronger stomach, a better digestive system and stuff like that. (AIDA)

The second ad talks about a specific problem… your specific problem. It talks about what you’re feeling right now, then it talks how it’ll feel worse if you don’t get it ‘fixed” immediately then at the bottom, it subtly sells to you by showing you how they can help.  (PAS)

Which ad do you think you’d buy from?

The answer is obvious.

3. Call To Action

The last thing your copy must have is a call to action (CTA).

Always have a strong and specific CTA that tells your market to buy NOW.

Tell your market what to do. You won’t believe this, but just by telling (or showing) people to click on a link will, most often than not, increase your CTR.

So don’t shy away from it.

Don’t be afraid of promoting your stuff.

I mean, what’s the point of running Facebook ads, right?

If you attract the right market and sell your stuff right, you’d be helping them if they buy your product. So sell. Tell them to buy, and tell them to buy now, not later.

Creative

Your creative is as important as your copy.

It’s how you get people’s attention and make them read your copy. You can put an arrow pointing on your CTA or a caption saying “Read The Caption 😳😱” or stuff like that.

If you’ve been scrolling down your Facebook feed, which ads do you stop and actually look at?

Most of the time?

I’m guessing It’s those ads with eye-catching, heart-stopping creatives (okay maybe I went a little overboard, but you get the idea).

Quick note: The only time you won’t care much about your creative is when you have a video that demonstrates your product. It sells a lot easier than static images. If you show even the skeptics that your product works the way you say it would, they’d buy – even if the quality sucks.

How To Spy On Your Competitors

There are a lot of ways to spy on your competitors.

Let’s talk about one. It’s the easiest thing to do.

So here’s what you’ll do:

1. You simply go to Facebook.
2. Search for all your competitors
3. On the left side of their page, you’ll see “Info and Ads”
4. Click it.

Voila.

You found the ads of your competitors. (Take note, some of your competitors are cheap and are spending $5 an ad or sometimes, they actually have no ads running. Well, they’re probably doing Instagram Shoutouts. 😂)

Bonus Section – SDS Scaling Method

In this section, I will tell you how to scale your ads using the Start Dropshipping Stuff method.

But first, here are the things you need to understand…

• Forget step-by-step systems, they only work for optimizing.
• Scale steadily – don’t get too excited and reckless
• Know when to KILL ads and ad sets – and kill them ruthlessly – don’t give “chances”
• Learn how to utilize rules – they’ll come in handy especially when you’re scaling
• Almost always base your decisions on the key metrics (CPA/ROAS and CPC/CTR) of your optimized campaign

Second, the checklist:

• Campaign is optimized to consistently have a ROAS of 2+
• Spent over $2000 on the product
• 3 or more ads proven to do well
• Lots of positive feedback
• No negative feedback (or very little)
• High relevancy scores for the ads
• Someone else who has access to your ad account (for safety purposes)
• Facebook payments
• Shopify (inventory)
• Etc.

Ready?

Set?

Duplicate.

👉 Duplicate your best – winning – ad sets and increase their budget by 0% – 100% – it’s all up to you.

👉 Leave the winning ad sets untouched. Use this as your “insurance” for the other ad sets that won’t do well.

👉 Use at least 4 ads on each ad set – you can also test just 1 ad on 1 ad set to see which ad is doing the best and create similar ads – but always remember the social proof. Don’t mix an ad that’s been running for ages with a new ad.

👉 Break down your ad set settings – placements, age, gender, country, etc.

Example:

Say you have an ad set at $50 a day and it’s doing really good for 5 days or even a week.

✔ Make duplicates on that ad set (you can make 1, 2, 3, 5, 10, 20 depending on the audience and your budget) while ✔ leaving that ad set untouched.

If your audience size is in the hundred thousands, don’t scale too much. If it’s on the millions or tens of millions, then scale it as much as you can until the audience dies off.

Here’s why…

If you only have thousands of people in your audience, your ad sets would easily compete with each other and you might risk your winning ad set/s to lose its momentum and die off.

If you have millions or tens of millions in your audience then it’s a good opportunity for you to scale the SDS way as long as you don’t spend too much to the point that you’d reach everybody in the audience at the same time.

✔ Use at least 4 ads. The reason for having at least 4 ads is for the different types of audiences your ad sets will reach. Ready different angles of copy, ready different creatives – and hope that Facebook optimizes on the right ad on the right audiences.

✔ Break down your ad set settings. Now test the other ad set settings in the same audience (check what worked best while the ad set was on optimization phase and focus on the good results).

Focus on more specific angles on the ad set level. You can…

• Focus on males/females only
• Try out different countries
• Test specific placements
• Test out manual bidding

Follow this method and you’ll be scaling like crazy.

And that’s it. That’s the SDS scaling method.

Final Thoughts:

Let me be honest with you…

If you’re just starting out in the eCommerce world or the “making money online” world, you don’t really need to learn how to “scale” your Facebook ads

That comes after learning the basics and the fundamentals for a strong business.

You need to learn the fundamentals of dropshipping. The fundamentals of copywriting. Facebook ads, sales, and so on.

Platforms change. Technology changes. But human psychology – NEVER.

Always remember, you can’t make a great building on a weak foundation.

This is the same with your skills. If you don’t have them, you won’t succeed. The business that you’re “building”? It will just break down.

So learn the basics first and I promise that you’ll succeed with dropshipping or whatever venture you’ll go out to.

 

If you enjoyed this massive knowledge bomb of an article about Facebook Ads, then click HERE to receive daily emails about how to make money with dropshipping from James Holt, the founder of Start Selling Stuff.