Beast Of Ecom
New Contributor
Hey guys,
Ok so before I start going into how I was able to generate over $1M in just 2 months this year and the complete steps I took, I just want to clear that I have been doing dropshipping and Facebook ads for close to 2 years now. No this wasn’t an overnight success, nor was this a 1 hit wonder, but hopefully after reading all of this you will be able to understand the whole process a bit better if you are doing dropshipping right now or been looking at starting.
Dropshipping gets a lot of flame for some reason however it has been the closest thing to Fastlane I have ever experienced and it has honestly changed my life.
The feedback I have had from sharing this has helped a ton of people and I know there are a few hustlers in here doing dropshipping or learning FB ads or have Ecom brands that I know this will help out.
Scroll to the end for verified proof as I know anyone can claim anything these days.
Ok lets get on with it..
At this time (Feb, March) FB was incredibly rocky with the whole Cambridge Analytica, end of month media budget dumping, CPMs did rocket quite a bit. Profit was just shy of 20% but would usually be higher.
Firstly let me teach those who may not be familiar with some of the acronyms I’ve used in this post. I will be making the assumption that you have basic Facebook advertising knowledge so please do forgive me. This will be more of a practical post rather than talking about my backstory etc.
There are 3 things that determine the success of any product you launch when it comes to drop shipping. It’s easily said, yet much harder to execute. Getting these 3 things aligned is the key to scaling a campaign to the crazy numbers you may see around on the internet. The formula is:
Right Product + Right Audience + Right Offer x The Right Scale = BANK
Ok now you have that lets jump into this case study, I’ll go through each section and explain what and how I did it:
The Right Product
Many people look to Aliexpress to dropship products from, which I still do to this day. You can still find great products on Aliexpress to dropship that can still make you a lot of money. The problem is that it is very saturated due to every man and their dog fishing from the same pool of products. The best selling items on Aliexpress generally have been rinsed by another marketer.
The product in this case study hadn’t hit Aliexpress properly yet, it was actually my supplier who suggested the product to me. I had done some research and found it was doing well on Amazon by various vendors, yet only 2-3 Aliexpress suppliers were selling it.
This was my first green light to give it a test. If you find something that is doing well somewhere yet hardly on Aliexpress I would advise digging deeper as you may be on to a golden winner. I like to check websites such as Amazon best sellers, Ebay, Wish, Shutupandtakemymoney, also viral videos of products found on FB then do a cross reference to see whats on Aliexpress with the sales volumes and sellers there.
The Right Audience
I will go into the actual detailed FB ad strategy I done for this later in The Right Scale section but it’s important to touch on this part.
You can have the best product in the world at a ridiculously great price BUT if you can’t put it in front of those who its designed for then you won’t make a penny. A lot of people make this mistake. They assume who would be a good fit for the product and limit to showing it to a certain age group or certain gender particularly when it comes to general products. REMEMBER
Data is KING and the numbers don’t lie
I always like to go as broad as possible while still being IN or RELATED to the niche. For example, lets say I am selling a kitchen gadget that helps slice vegetables. My audiences would look like this:
The Right Offer
This part can be easy to get wrong but it’s important to TEST.. Why?
You could have the same product, same targeting but each advert have a different offer and every single one of them would convert different with that audience. Most people assume that free shipping is always best let me tell you it’s NOT.
The first thing people see is the price, the lower the price the more likely people add to cart, at that point they have made a decision to buy so adding shipping at the checkout (if a reasonable amount) can convert just as well, even better sometimes, than a free shipping product. PLUS if they abandon cart at that point when checking out your retargeting sequence can catch them.
Some example offers:
$19.99 + FREE Shipping or $16.99 + $2.99 shipping or $15.99 + $4.99 Shipping
I initially set the price for this product too low, YES I was getting great conversions and that helps FB and your pixel find more targeted buyers due to the amount of data it’s receiving.
It initially was a FREE shipping offer.. but I tested adding shipping which didn’t hurt conversions at all. After a while of seeing this new pricing strategy hold stable and the engagement or purchases not slowing down at all I increased the base price slightly once again which held well.
The Right Scale
Scaling is an art when it comes to FB, some people can do it well and other struggle. There are MANY ways to scale a campaign in practice, some ways will work for some people and others just won’t work for you.
Let me explain the two basic different ways to scale and then how I done it for this particular campaign.
The two main ways to scale is VERTICAL and HORIZONTAL.
VERTICAL is simply adding more budget to an adset. If I do this I add approx 20-30% to the budget of an adset bringing in a great ROAS (3 and above is great) every 2-3 days or if the stats look very healthy I’ll straight double it.
Another way to scale vertically is duplicating your good performing adsets to a higher budget and leaving your original one as is. You can do this by duplicating it to another auto bid adset or duplicating it to a MB adset for really power scaling (Do not do MB if you don’t know how to, you can lose a lot of money if not managed correctly).
HORIZONTAL scaling is adding more interests/using different audiences to expand. The BEST way to do this is by using LLA. (Lookalike audiences is where FB creates an audience for you who are more likely to take a certain action based on your pixel data). You can create LLAs off everyone who VC, ATC, IC, Pur & everyone who watched your video to really expand.
Ok so what did I do?
As mentioned in the The Right Audience section I went as broad, yet related as I could. I ALWAYS use WC ads with the Pur objective, reason being I want FB to send me BUYERS not tire kickers. The advert itself was a video.
I like to split the US away from WW in a single adset due to the CPM in the US being kinda high. I also always excluding countries that provide bad traffic E.G India, Pakistan, Peru, Indonesia, etc
My testing adsets looked like this:
After 2-3 days CPPs were sub $5 and ROAS 3-5 across most adsets.. When you see these kind of indicators you are on to a winner so it was time to push it and see how it responded. I then increased the budgets by doubling most of them to see how it responded.
After 2-3 days ROAS and purchases stayed great I knew this was a golden winner. When you know something is a golden winner I try to scale as fast as possible as the hyenas will copy, rip off and steal your whole advert once they see its working so be the lion and get the share, leave the scraps to them!
I duplicated my winning adsets to MB adsets with a budget of $1000 each. I set the MAX bid at approx 3 times the amount of my current auto bid adsets CPPs. For example the CPPs on the auto bids were like $5 so my MAX bid on the MB asset were $15. I keep the auto bid adsets still running.
Once doing this it was time to add in more interests to test and scale to LLAs.
When I scaled to LLAs I like to test US and EEA first and always go with either everyone who viewed 95% of the video or VC as my starting point. I always split up the percentages 1,1-2, 2-3, right up to 10%.
Again I tested these all on auto bid to see how they perform and took the winners to MB asset again with $1000 each adset.
It was then a case of simply rinsing and repeating this process with ATC, IC, Pur LLAs and shutting off the losers and keeping the winners.
To scale further I always like to then breakdown the best performing countries, ages, genders and placements and also do a NO targeting adset which targets the whole world on FB and let the pixel pick out buyers.
Of course the longer the campaign goes on the lower your ROAS will be, there will be a lot of rips off, more competition and your margins will die out. But as long as you got your Lions share is all good.
Retargeting
For ALL of your campaigns you need to retarget. It will be your most highest ROAS campaigns. Here are the ones I ALWAYS do:
I hope this has helped anyone who is doing Shopify drop shipping or looking to get into it. Or maybe you have a brand and ecom store and want to jump into using FB ads to propell your business.
Here is a video of my refreshing my Shopify screen to verify that this is not some fake B.S:
View: https://youtu.be/q3v2eDvNYKo
There is also a video of me actually explaining this whole thing
Ask me any questions you may have and I will answer as many as I can!
Peace !
Ok so before I start going into how I was able to generate over $1M in just 2 months this year and the complete steps I took, I just want to clear that I have been doing dropshipping and Facebook ads for close to 2 years now. No this wasn’t an overnight success, nor was this a 1 hit wonder, but hopefully after reading all of this you will be able to understand the whole process a bit better if you are doing dropshipping right now or been looking at starting.
Dropshipping gets a lot of flame for some reason however it has been the closest thing to Fastlane I have ever experienced and it has honestly changed my life.
The feedback I have had from sharing this has helped a ton of people and I know there are a few hustlers in here doing dropshipping or learning FB ads or have Ecom brands that I know this will help out.
Scroll to the end for verified proof as I know anyone can claim anything these days.
Ok lets get on with it..
At this time (Feb, March) FB was incredibly rocky with the whole Cambridge Analytica, end of month media budget dumping, CPMs did rocket quite a bit. Profit was just shy of 20% but would usually be higher.
Firstly let me teach those who may not be familiar with some of the acronyms I’ve used in this post. I will be making the assumption that you have basic Facebook advertising knowledge so please do forgive me. This will be more of a practical post rather than talking about my backstory etc.
- FB = Facebook
- WC - Website Conversion Advert
- VC = View Content
- ATC = Add to Cart
- WW = Worldwide
- US = United States
- IC = Initiate Checkout
- Pur = Purchase
- MB = Manual Bid
- CPM = Cost Per Milli People Reached
- ROAS = Return On Ad Spend
- CPP = Cost Per Purchase
- LLA = Lookalike Audiences
There are 3 things that determine the success of any product you launch when it comes to drop shipping. It’s easily said, yet much harder to execute. Getting these 3 things aligned is the key to scaling a campaign to the crazy numbers you may see around on the internet. The formula is:
Right Product + Right Audience + Right Offer x The Right Scale = BANK
Ok now you have that lets jump into this case study, I’ll go through each section and explain what and how I did it:
The Right Product
Many people look to Aliexpress to dropship products from, which I still do to this day. You can still find great products on Aliexpress to dropship that can still make you a lot of money. The problem is that it is very saturated due to every man and their dog fishing from the same pool of products. The best selling items on Aliexpress generally have been rinsed by another marketer.
The product in this case study hadn’t hit Aliexpress properly yet, it was actually my supplier who suggested the product to me. I had done some research and found it was doing well on Amazon by various vendors, yet only 2-3 Aliexpress suppliers were selling it.
This was my first green light to give it a test. If you find something that is doing well somewhere yet hardly on Aliexpress I would advise digging deeper as you may be on to a golden winner. I like to check websites such as Amazon best sellers, Ebay, Wish, Shutupandtakemymoney, also viral videos of products found on FB then do a cross reference to see whats on Aliexpress with the sales volumes and sellers there.
The Right Audience
I will go into the actual detailed FB ad strategy I done for this later in The Right Scale section but it’s important to touch on this part.
You can have the best product in the world at a ridiculously great price BUT if you can’t put it in front of those who its designed for then you won’t make a penny. A lot of people make this mistake. They assume who would be a good fit for the product and limit to showing it to a certain age group or certain gender particularly when it comes to general products. REMEMBER
Data is KING and the numbers don’t lie
I always like to go as broad as possible while still being IN or RELATED to the niche. For example, lets say I am selling a kitchen gadget that helps slice vegetables. My audiences would look like this:
- 25-65 - (Kitchen)
- 25-65 - (Veganism)
- 25-65 - (Cooking)
- 25-65 - (Recipes)
- 25-65 - (Cooking Brands)
- 25-65 - (Cookbook)
The Right Offer
This part can be easy to get wrong but it’s important to TEST.. Why?
You could have the same product, same targeting but each advert have a different offer and every single one of them would convert different with that audience. Most people assume that free shipping is always best let me tell you it’s NOT.
The first thing people see is the price, the lower the price the more likely people add to cart, at that point they have made a decision to buy so adding shipping at the checkout (if a reasonable amount) can convert just as well, even better sometimes, than a free shipping product. PLUS if they abandon cart at that point when checking out your retargeting sequence can catch them.
Some example offers:
$19.99 + FREE Shipping or $16.99 + $2.99 shipping or $15.99 + $4.99 Shipping
I initially set the price for this product too low, YES I was getting great conversions and that helps FB and your pixel find more targeted buyers due to the amount of data it’s receiving.
It initially was a FREE shipping offer.. but I tested adding shipping which didn’t hurt conversions at all. After a while of seeing this new pricing strategy hold stable and the engagement or purchases not slowing down at all I increased the base price slightly once again which held well.
The Right Scale
Scaling is an art when it comes to FB, some people can do it well and other struggle. There are MANY ways to scale a campaign in practice, some ways will work for some people and others just won’t work for you.
Let me explain the two basic different ways to scale and then how I done it for this particular campaign.
The two main ways to scale is VERTICAL and HORIZONTAL.
VERTICAL is simply adding more budget to an adset. If I do this I add approx 20-30% to the budget of an adset bringing in a great ROAS (3 and above is great) every 2-3 days or if the stats look very healthy I’ll straight double it.
Another way to scale vertically is duplicating your good performing adsets to a higher budget and leaving your original one as is. You can do this by duplicating it to another auto bid adset or duplicating it to a MB adset for really power scaling (Do not do MB if you don’t know how to, you can lose a lot of money if not managed correctly).
HORIZONTAL scaling is adding more interests/using different audiences to expand. The BEST way to do this is by using LLA. (Lookalike audiences is where FB creates an audience for you who are more likely to take a certain action based on your pixel data). You can create LLAs off everyone who VC, ATC, IC, Pur & everyone who watched your video to really expand.
Ok so what did I do?
As mentioned in the The Right Audience section I went as broad, yet related as I could. I ALWAYS use WC ads with the Pur objective, reason being I want FB to send me BUYERS not tire kickers. The advert itself was a video.
I like to split the US away from WW in a single adset due to the CPM in the US being kinda high. I also always excluding countries that provide bad traffic E.G India, Pakistan, Peru, Indonesia, etc
My testing adsets looked like this:
- 25-65 - (Interest 1) - USA
- 25-65 - (Interest 1) - EX USA
- 25-65 - (Interest 2) - USA
- 25-65 - (Interest 2) - EX USA
- 25-65 - (Interest 3) - USA
- 25-65 - (Interest 3) - EX USA
- 25-65 - (Interest 4) - USA
- 25-65 - (Interest 4) - EX USA
After 2-3 days CPPs were sub $5 and ROAS 3-5 across most adsets.. When you see these kind of indicators you are on to a winner so it was time to push it and see how it responded. I then increased the budgets by doubling most of them to see how it responded.
After 2-3 days ROAS and purchases stayed great I knew this was a golden winner. When you know something is a golden winner I try to scale as fast as possible as the hyenas will copy, rip off and steal your whole advert once they see its working so be the lion and get the share, leave the scraps to them!
I duplicated my winning adsets to MB adsets with a budget of $1000 each. I set the MAX bid at approx 3 times the amount of my current auto bid adsets CPPs. For example the CPPs on the auto bids were like $5 so my MAX bid on the MB asset were $15. I keep the auto bid adsets still running.
Once doing this it was time to add in more interests to test and scale to LLAs.
When I scaled to LLAs I like to test US and EEA first and always go with either everyone who viewed 95% of the video or VC as my starting point. I always split up the percentages 1,1-2, 2-3, right up to 10%.
Again I tested these all on auto bid to see how they perform and took the winners to MB asset again with $1000 each adset.
It was then a case of simply rinsing and repeating this process with ATC, IC, Pur LLAs and shutting off the losers and keeping the winners.
To scale further I always like to then breakdown the best performing countries, ages, genders and placements and also do a NO targeting adset which targets the whole world on FB and let the pixel pick out buyers.
Of course the longer the campaign goes on the lower your ROAS will be, there will be a lot of rips off, more competition and your margins will die out. But as long as you got your Lions share is all good.
Retargeting
For ALL of your campaigns you need to retarget. It will be your most highest ROAS campaigns. Here are the ones I ALWAYS do:
- Everyone who VC but did not ATC
- Everyone who ATC but did not Pur
- Everyone who IC but did not Pur
- Everyone who Pur
- Everyone who viewed 95% of video
I hope this has helped anyone who is doing Shopify drop shipping or looking to get into it. Or maybe you have a brand and ecom store and want to jump into using FB ads to propell your business.
Here is a video of my refreshing my Shopify screen to verify that this is not some fake B.S:
There is also a video of me actually explaining this whole thing
Ask me any questions you may have and I will answer as many as I can!
Peace !
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