Over the last few months I’ve been extremely busy starting some new stores. It would be great to achieve 7 figures in 58 days with all my stores, but in reality, this is not the case. It takes time, energy and money to get any new store off the ground.
The screenshots below are taken from a few of my new stores, the numbers are not as impressive, but are here to show you that in reality things do start slow, you don’t need big budgets to get started and good results are definitely achievable, if you set your mind to it.
All my stores are within different niches, selling completely different products. There is however one thing they do have in common, what is it? My Facebook ads scaling methodology! My new stores are starting to sell thousands of products using my scaling methodology, which you’re about to discover within this case study! I'll also be covering my methodology in more depth at a live event private mastermind in LA on 19-21 August 2016.
Does it take money to make money?
From a paid advertising point of view, the quick answer is yes! But the correct answer is no, assuming your advertising is working, and you're making more money than you’re spending, and have a clear ROI that results in a positive bank balance. Who doesn’t want that right?
If you're looking for a free traffic strategy that gets you customers for next to nothing, then this case study is probably not for you. On the other hand, if you understand that advertising costs money, up to a point, read on my friend.
You have two advertising problems: Conversion and Scaling!
So what kind of issues do you really have? I know the answer, because I’ve had the very same problems in the past!
The biggest challenge most marketers face is traffic and conversion: putting it another way, you're not making enough money from your marketing efforts in a specific time period!
Scaling is really about getting more traffic....but converting traffic...It’s about getting far greater reach into the right target market (your ideal customer) in the quickest time possible, whilst keeping your customer acquisition costs low (CPA), therefore resulting in a higher profit margin. So in a sense, you have a traffic → conversion → traffic issue!
Make sense?
...the main problems, which I see most, is marketers aren't getting the conversions or they are unable to scale winning campaigns quickly to get greater reach and get their offer in front of the right people en masse...Hopefully my case study will dispel some myths and help you with give some much needed answers and hopefully address the problems you may be facing.
Is this a scam, some passing fad or secret software that gives you x-ray vision?
First up! This case study is about a methodology, I’ve developed whilst spending my own hard earned cash. It’s not a fad, tactic, software or something I stumbled upon, whilst eating special mushrooms, and it’s definitely no secret! I’m an average guy, just like you...I don’t have x-ray vision, or some kind of superpower! I wish!
Here’s a screenshot of my results. I don’t normally post things like this. It was my good friend, John, who suggested I share my results, because he believes it would motivate others on their own journey and inspire them to keep going and to never give up. From 7 May through to 30 June I generated 61,969 orders and made $3,125,641.84 in revenue selling t-shirts.
Is t-shirt marketing dead? Is the market saturated? My answer to those questions is a BIG fat NO! In fact, what I’m about to share works in any niche, with any product...I know because I use the same methodology in many different niches, with very different products!
...and before I get into my case study...let me just say, this is not a magic bullet system. There are far too many ludicrous and quite frankly B.S internet marketing tactics out there, which I personally can’t stand. Making money involves some type of marketing! Yep promoting your business. Good old fashioned advertising. I choose to use the Facebook platform to advertise my business, and my business just happens to be an online ecommerce store, selling physical products.
In June 2016 my ecommerce store generated over 3 million dollars from using a unique scaling methodology. Better yet, this methodology did this in just 58 days, and from a single Shopify ecommerce store selling t-shirts. You see, this promotion had a deadline for a specific yearly event! I started advertising using my proprietary methodology on 7 May 2016.
My methodology in a nutshell
- Planning
- Offers
- Targeting
- Campaign Structure
- Optimization
- Scaling
My overall plan was to have a large launch with several dozen designs to a specific but very large niche audience with a highly engaging time sensitive and motivational offer (for example Father's Day). My store isn’t completely seasonal, but specific events happen throughout the year, for which I can plan a time sensitive, promotional campaign. Want to learn my cutting edge methodology? Join me on a free training webinar here!
...and as I eluded to earlier, this is a methodology that I’ve come up with personally, and yes it’s cost me a great deal of money to figure out Facebook advertising, and I’m going to share with you, what I’ve discovered by way of spending my own money testing differing objectives, offers and scaling methods, but before I do, let me introduce myself.
Who am I and why listen to me?
My name is Thomas Bartke, I’m 53 years old, and before venturing into online marketing back in December 2013, I worked as a music editor in the film industry. I’ve been credited for my involvement in many films including Austin Powers, amongst many others.
I’ve been working with Facebook ads since I started with t-shirt marketing and Teespring in December 2013. In that time, I’ve tested countless niches with very limited success. It wasn’t until I started doing name shirts that I started to see some good success, but this didn’t last long. I’ve also tried several professional niches with many t-shirt designs, with up and down roller coaster success. My big breakthrough with Teespring was with my Pi-Day shirt design in March 2015, where I sold over 11,000 of in 6 weeks. It was right after this success, that I decided to start my own Shopify store.
Just like magic...B.S!
Full disclosure and to be completely honest, I’ve had more failures than I care to admit, but for the sake of completeness and to give you a full picture of my success, I’d rather you get to see both sides of the coin. I struggled from day one with Facebook advertising and trying to sell my t-shirt designs. Until March 2015, I didn’t earn enough to support my family and I had to hold down a full time job too. It was only in March 2015, that I actually decided to work on my online ecommerce business full-time.
You see, I’m no different from you. I definitely don’t have any superpowers, or know any magic tricks, although I do possess some skills, one being I’m kind of stubborn, if you can call that a skill, what I mean is, I don’t give up easily...Now that you know my super power, shall we get started?
I’ve been running Facebook advertising since December 2013 and in that time I’ve spent thousands and thousands on Facebook advertising, but just like most marketers I didn't start with an endless pot of cash to use for advertising. I started out with a very small budget in the beginning, and every time I ran an ad, Facebook would share something with me... some invaluable information through my reports, and very quickly I learnt to interpret that information and I started to see patterns emerge.
It's not all rainbows and pink fluffy unicorns
It sucks, when you're spending money on advertising, and seeing little, to no return, at times, it feels like you're burning cash, it just seems to disappear up in smoke, and the only thing you get is a report telling you how much you’ve spent and paid to Facebook for the privilege. It’s soul destroying, very frustrating and it leaves you wondering what the hell happened.
I don’t have x-ray vision, I don’t see anything different from any other Facebook marketer, but what I have learnt is how to use the data to my advantage. If there’s one takeaway you glean from this case study, I want you to understand this, advertising is really testing...testing different things, recording the outcome and then making informed changes and then running another test (another advert), but using the data in the reports to your advantage.
When you run your next ad campaign you're looking to find out quickly, did that tweak produce a negative or positive result? Even negative results provide valuable data that you should learn from! If you're not analysing your reports, then you’ll waste a great deal of money and time on things that clearly don’t work! Would you like some personal help? then click here!
One thing I can tell you about Facebook and it’s advertising platform is this...it’s forever changing! The algorithm is always being adjusted. But, in my opinion, if you know the fundamentals of advertising, and start to understand the metrics within the reported data, it will set you apart from the other 95% of marketers in your niche market!
So I can hear you thinking...Ok, I get it Thomas, but what was your biggest discovery you learnt from your data?
Well there’s too many to list, but I’ll share the biggest ones which are by far the ones that I can positively say have given me the biggest wins in the last few months, but before I share anything more, let me get one thing off my chest!
If one more person asks me to share my secret sauce, I’ll scream, I swear I will. There is no such thing. I’ve always analysed my data. It’s one of the reasons why I developed my own Shopify software app, Trackify, as I needed a way to use the data to my advantage and start to manage the Facebook pixel, along with creating audiences, segmented audiences, and then advertising to those audiences with very specific remarketing campaigns. I suppose you could say, I do this a little differently to other marketers, and this has helped me greatly, but it’s not the focus of this case study or what’s been the main catalyst for my most recent success!
How I started and scaled my advertising campaigns to 7 figures in revenue
As you can see from the screenshot, I started with my new promotion and ad campaign on 7 May 2016. I launched my first design to a specific interest of 7.5M people, and I segmented this group of people, by age ranges into 3 ad-sets. My result was 43 tracked sales at $6.49 CPA (cost per acquisition).
At this point I decided to launch more designs to specific interests. I grouped 6 designs, and tested these as different ad creatives. My ad spend was $18,717 and this generated $93,516.73 in revenue from these engaging offers.
It’s important that you understand how important testing different offers and products are to the same audiences, it could be the difference between making a killing and losing your shirt, excuse the pun!
Do your conversions suck, are you hoping Facebook will optimize for better results?
There are 3 areas to look at when you're having issues with conversions. Let me address the 3 biggest areas that can make or break a campaign. I'm going to be covering this and more on a free training webinar, click here to join!
- Offer
- Targeting
- Scaling
The offer is the most important of the 3 and should be your main focus. If you have a terrible offer, it doesn’t matter how good your targeting is, you can’t scale crap, no matter what optimization methods you adopt, you simply can’t scale from poor results. So please stop thinking Facebook will eventually optimize a poor performing offer just because you are using a conversion pixel. At the end of the day, you can’t optimize a poor performing offer with terrible engagement. It just isn't going to happen!
So how do you fix it?
Engaging Offers
Your product offer has to be engaging to your target audience. It’s definitely not rocket science, and anyone can learn this stuff, just like I have.
So why is an engagement offer so important? For 3 very good reasons:
- An engaging offer results in cheaper CPC and CPM (cost per click and cost per thousand impressions).
- You’ll win more auctions! If you're using manual bidding, and you’re bidding the same (at times less) as other marketers, having engagement will become a deciding factor in winning an auction, and even if, other marketers are bidding higher than you, they’ll lose.
- Your conversion rate will be higher and your CPA lower (cost to acquire a customer).
I’d say that’s 3 perfectly goods reasons, wouldn't you?
There is a formula for this, I call it the ‘RPE’ Formula:
- Relevance
- Positivity
- Engagement
..and I have a checklist that helps me create highly engaging product offers. Your offer must:
Be of interest to your target audience *Relevance
Be in demand (emotional want/need/desire/passion *Positive)
Solve a problem or provide a fix (addiction) or be cool
Be irresistible (right price = high perceived value)
Be unique (don’t follow the crowd)
Be fit for purpose (high quality/delivers on its promise)
Provide longevity (evergreen)
Have a good profit margin (and allow for sales promotions)
Be shareable (like, comment, tag, is seriously cool = *Engagement)
How to hit a home run?
Both relevance and engagement are key, but you should also consider the positive emotional aspect of your product offer. First up, Facebook dislikes negative style advertising, so you should stay clear of negative style images and copy. What Facebook loves most is a combination of emotional positivity, relevance and engagement.
It goes without saying, if you can tap into the emotional triggers of your ideal target customer, and make an offer that gets an emotional response, which definitely addresses a positive reaction, and meets your ideal customer’s wants, needs, desires or passion, then you're more likely to hit the homerun you’re looking for right out of the park!
As I said, using this formula will help you, and will definitely increase your conversions, win more traffic and enable you to scale your ad campaigns for greater reach!
Let’s scale some more!
Ok, in week 2-3 of the campaign I started to scale out for greater reach by adding 6 additional designs and scaling out into 4 additional audience groups. I then relaunched gender split campaigns to my audience group.
Result: total impressions: 24,982,590, with a total ad spend of $96,041, resulting in a total revenue of $481,635.55
Things started getting interesting in week 4-5 of the ad campaign and my scaling continued. I added 10 more designs, add 6 additional audience groups. I increased my daily budget to $12k on a single campaign, and the result?
Total impressions over 61M, with a total ad spend of $287k, generating a revenue total of $1.2M in just 30 days from the start of the campaign. Yeah! My hard work was paying off!
After 30 days, I needed a new goal. In May I had great results, but it was time to raise the bar even higher. I set my sights on reaching a 100k day! Yep, no point holding back at this point.
It took me 10 days to hit my new goal... my first 100k day! But there was more to follow, I wasn’t done just yet.
I went on to do 2,520 orders. My audience group size was now at 40 million, I increased my daily budget to $14,500 for this grouped audience, and I started testing some different ad objectives.
I started testing some WCPPATC ads, but overall WCPPLnk ads, were the main campaign structure thus far. (WC=Website Conversion, PP=Photo Post, ATC=Add-To-Cart and Lnk=Link Click campaigns)
The result was a $128,353.10 revenue day! But after reaching this goal, my only focus now was raising the bar again...I said to myself, “let's try for seven $100k days!” A big goal, but why stop?
From 10 June through to 19 June I hit 10x $100k-days in a row! ...and personally I couldn't believe what I’d achieved, I proceeded to pinch myself, re-focus and continue. After all, I was on the home stretch, my promotional deadline was coming along fast, so it was about getting as much reach and sales as possible from my scaling. Still not making much sense? Would you like some personal help?
My ad campaigns ran through to 30 June 2016. Over that time I started to scale my winning offers, I applied my scaling strategies to my grouped audiences. I split my audiences into smaller age ranges, I added additional interests, I rolled out large LAA’s (look-a-like audiences), I increased my budget on each ad-set and I managed and controlled things with manual link click bidding.
In my opinion, this is the best strategy to use, as it allows you to totally control how much you wish to pay for the traffic, along with getting the reach you want...and additionally allows you to adjust things on the fly, without it really affecting conversion, like it does with other ad objectives when you try and scale hard, which just seems to kill a winning campaign.
My final results
From 7 May through to 30 June, I generated 138 million impressions, 1.8 million people visited my store, I received 61,969 orders, my total ad spend was $846,307.03, of which generated a total revenue of $3,125,641.84
Bad tracking and reporting is killing your scaling
As I said before, Facebook will definitely not optimize crappy campaigns, nor will it tell you that, at times, it’s tracking and reporting is way off. One thing I can tell you for sure:
Incorrect sales reporting will guide you to kill winning campaigns. Facebook does not track everything correctly in its reports. Make sure you use Google Analytics and keep an eye on the real transactions that come in from both organic and paid traffic. You don’t want to mistakenly kill your ad campaigns, when they could be working and have a lower CPA than you’re really aware of.
A big fat lie
All fulfilment and print companies want your business, and they’ll just about say anything to get it. In my case, that blip you see in the beginning of June, was a result of my printer not being able to support the number of shirts we were selling, and we had to take our foot of the gas, as we would fall prey to potential cancellation and disputes, as we wouldn’t have been able to fulfil the orders in time for the delivery deadline...and to be honest, I personally didn’t wish to deal with the sheer number of support emails as a result. There is a seasonal and very specific time constraint for our target audience and the products we sell, so we had no choice, we had to find another printer, and quickly, luckily John referred one, and they could deal with the number of t-shirts we were selling daily. So the blip didn’t last too long!
So what’s my biggest takeaway from this entire experience?
Don’t stand by and try and learn this stuff on your own. It could take you weeks, even years to learn, plus the expense of trying all the different things, including all the different ad types, objectives that will definitely affect your results. You have 3 options available to you.
1) Join us on our next free training webinar. There’s a webinar join link here or simply click on the banner on the top right of the page. On our webinars we share what's working right now!
2) Join us at our next live ‘Pixel Mastery Live Event’. Our live events are ‘Mastermind’ style, in that they are 'hands on’ workshops where we educate you and show you exactly what to do. You’ll find the latest live event info here, or simply click the banner in the right upper side of this page.
3) Join us for our private coaching. Having a mentor, to show you the way, and guide you in the most direct and fastest path is the quickest way to learn this stuff. It’s obviously not cheap, but why would it be? You’ll be working personally with us, and we’ll be sharing our 7 figure blueprint to your own personal success. Again you can find the most up to date information here, or simply click the banner in the upper right side of the page.
To your success,