March 28, 2024
Over $500K spent on facebook ads. 4 Lessons Learned

Over $500K spent on Facebook Ads: 4 Lessons Learned

This post will be extremely helpful to you if you want to achieve massive growth in your Subscription Box Business Using Facebook Ads.

I recently took a look at our Facebook Ads manager and I saw that we have now spent over $500K on Facebook ads.

That $500K spend has been very successful for us as it has returned millions of dollars in sales.

Despite recent challenges such as IOS updates Facebook still drives a massive proportion of our sales and our growth.

We will be doubling down further with Facebook in 2022 and will be spending a lot more money with them because it works.

The best thing about spending $500K with them is we have gathered an enormous amount of knowledge about what works and what doesn’t work.

I decided to write this article because I want to share this knowledge with this group so you can make 2022 the best year so far in your Subscription Box Business.

Please see below for 4 key things I have learned from spending over $500K on Facebook ads.

1. The Creative

These days the creative accounts for a massive amount of your success when it comes to Facebook ads. This is because the algorithm is smarter than ever and it does a lot of the heavy lifting for you (If you let it)

One of the biggest levers for success you can pull is in regards to your creative. The platform is packed with more advertises than ever and competition is bigger than ever, so your ads have to stand out.

If you your creative is poor it won’t resonate with your audience, and you will have a very poor CTR (Click Through Rate) mix that with higher CPMS and it leaves you with a very high cost per acquisition.

So how do you improve your creatives for a Subscription Box Business?

The first thing you need to do is take advantage of the recent changes in Facebook in regards to the amount of text you can place in images. A few months ago you could only place 20% of text in images now you can put as much as you want.

This has been a complete game changer for us and we really take advantage of this now. If you look at any of our recent ads you will see the images are full of colourful text .

The text will advertise the offer we are currently running. This is very effective for placements, such as Instagram where the ad copy may not be so easy to see. Now those users can see the offer in the image and it makes a massive difference to the CTR and the overall performance on those placements.

The next thing you can do Is get professional pictures for your creatives. It makes a big difference. (Unless you are running some user generated content which can also work)

Find a photographer to take loads of pictures of different boxes which you can use for many different ads. Then ensure all creatives are extremely colourful. Everything you do should be focused on grabbing attention on the Newsfeed.

In regards to videos the same logic applies. If you are making box opening videos on your phone play around with adding colourful text to the videos advertising the offer. Facebook allows you to do it in ads manager.

If you have a very good offer this will work well for the placements where the copy isn’t easy to see. The offer will pop up on the screen, it will be obvious to the user and then they can click over to the website.

If you struggle with making Facebook creative the best thing you can do for your business is start working with a graphic designer. Poor creative means poor results when it comes to ads so it is 100% worth the investment.

2. Can’t scale?

One of the biggest problems people have when it comes to Facebook ads is increasing their budgets and getting things to remain profitable. At low spend they can get people signed up on budget, no problem, but as soon as they try to increase spend the acquisition cost gets very expensive.

There are many things behind this and I will probably write a separate post about it one day, but a lot of the time it has little to do with your ads and more to do with your conversion rate on your website.

Let me explain what I mean.

If your conversion rate is under 2% on your website you will find it very difficult to scale. The reason why you will find it very difficult to scale is because your website just doesn’t convert that well.

At a lower spend Facebook is going after the low hanging fruit who want to buy your box. Then when you increase spend Facebook now has to start going “out of market” to find more customers for you.

If your website doesn’t convert well those people will come over and bounce straight off your site without signing up as their purchase intent is a lot lower.

That’s why it is absolutely critical that your website has a conversion rate, which is at least 2%.

You should be tracking your conversion rate using google analytics and optimising it as much as possible to improve it.

I have a few articles about Subscription Box website optimization on my blog if you search for them you will find them and they will help you.

The main thing to remember is though if your site converts under 2% you may get away with lower spend. If you want to spend more and get more people signed up it has to convert at a minimum of 2% or your cost will go through the roof.

3. Retargeting / Follow up

A large proportion of people who head over to your website from Facebook ads will not purchase from you straight away. This can be down to a number of reasons. Maybe they need to consider your product a bit more or maybe they are not in a convenient place to make the purchase.

It is your job as a marketer and business owner to follow up with those people, fight their objectives and remind them to purchase your Subscription Box.

 • Site visits 30 days no purchase

• Watched 50% of your videos no purchase

• Visited your FB page 30 days no purchase

• Visited your IG page 30 days no purchase

Then ensure your retargeting ads are completely different to your cold traffic ads. If you are lazy and run the exact same ads you can expect performance to be poor. When somebody sees your retargeting ads they are at a different point in their journey and are already familiar with your business so at that point you need to fight some sales objections in the copy to get them over the line.

4. Campaign Structure.

Structuring your campaigns correctly is very important and if you fail to do this, your results will be poor. I have said this many times, but people still have trouble doing it.

You need to have a minimum of 4 ads per ad set.

This is because the algorithm works way better when it has variation to test.

The best way to do it is normally 2 images and 2 videos. This is because Facebook knows which users respond better to which and if you leave one of them out you may be missing a lot of users who will sign up to your box.

At lower spend you also do not need to worry so much about auction overlap as unless you have a really small audience it will not affect performance that much at all. So if you get to the point where you are going to add more campaigns to increase spend just do it and see how it performs.

I see a lot of people holding back when it comes to this because they think their ad sets will be competing with each other and it will destroy performance. In my experience this is unlikely to happen and the only thing you are doing is holding yourself back by not doing it and getting more people signed up.

I hope you found this article helpful. We will be spending a lot more money on Facebook this year and I will share more information throughout the year. I already have loads of other helpful articles on my blog which you should check out if you want to learn how to run Facebook ads successfully for your Subscription Box. If you have any questions about Facebook ads or Subscription Boxes in general please let me know. Have a great day.

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