Once your ads are live and you have access to your dashboard, you’ll start to see results come in.
Firstly, it’s important to remember that the first month of any ad campaign is the first real chance to ‘dip your toe in the water’. We’re seeing for the first time how your target audiences will respond to your ads, your brand and the products. It’s all about testing and learning! We will gather invaluable data and insights such as; which audiences respond best, which creatives resonate and which products are selling from the ads.
Once we have this information, we can stop doing what’s not working so well and push harder on what is performing best. Because of this, naturally, the cost to get a result initially is going to be a little higher, as we learn. Once we double down on what is proven to work, you’ll start seeing much better returns on your ad spend.
There’s a few things worth us mentioning as you pour over your initial results:
Facebook and Instagram ads specific
(Wherever Facebook is mentioned here, we are referring to the Facebook ads platform where Facebook and Instagram ads are ran) In the first 1-2 months, it’s important for us to gather as much data as we can:
- The Facebook algorithm needs data to understand who is most likely to click an ad and then purchase something. Typically Facebook needs 50 purchases before it has enough data to properly start refining the targeting algorithm.
- In the first weeks of the ads going live, Facebook might not have this information yet, meaning we’re doing a little more speculating and testing around who might be interested in your products and ads. Over time, we’re feeding more data into Facebook, allowing the algorithm to better understand who’s interested in your products and who’s not, meaning we get better at finding the right people and get better results.
- The speed this happens will depend on a few things:
- How long the Facebook pixel has been installed: If you’re just starting out and only recently installed the Facebook pixel, it will take longer to collect the necessary data.
- What your current sales rate through the website is: If you have recently launched your store, it will naturally take time to make the first few sales. You may also have other issues to fix that may impact your sales rate such as the website speed, checkout processes and broken links or user journeys.
- Your price point: If you have a popular, more mainstream product at a lower price point (e.g. £10 to £60), you would expect to make more sales quicker than if you are selling more niche items at a much higher price point e.g. £500+ fashion items. It is common that the higher the item value, the longer it can take for Facebook to get to the magic 50 purchases it needs to inform the algorithm.
This is all to be expected and perfectly normal. It’s why you hear of lots of ecommerce businesses successfully using Facebook & Instagram advertising but why you might not yet see the results you were hoping for in month one. By persevering, letting brillea introduce more tests and giving the Facebook algorithm more time and data to start working its magic, you’ll see better results over time.
Google specific
As with Facebook, it’s important to give Google a little bit of time and data before drawing conclusions and changing things. How well your ads perform on Google Search is directly correlated to a metric known as your ‘Quality Score’, where Google evaluates things like ad relevance, engaging copy and the website that the ad leads to.
Here are some things that may impact the quality of your ads and therefore how many sales you might make;
- A website that loads slowly, meaning people who click don’t stick around
- A very high product price, meaning users may be unlikely to make their purchase on their first visit
- Very broad, generic keywords
- Search volumes that are lower than we’d expected, due to world events
It takes some time for Google to tell us how we’re performing on these measures, so we need to wait a little before we can make optimisations to address any improvements that need to be made. Over time we will also refine the keywords being used, use ‘negative keywords’ to avoid targeting people who definitely aren’t relevant and test better and more persuasive ad copy.
We wish there was a short cut for this; to get to great results straight away. But this is kind of a necessary, sometimes annoying, stage to go through before campaigns start working to their full capacity. However everyone has to go through this and your perseverance will be rewarded, when we get there, it’s worth the wait!