11 Facebook ad tips to use when selling Teespring products

The content below was originally written by Abhishek Agarwal, a Teespring seller and active member of our community. Thanks for sharing these tips Abhishek!

Recently I did some vigorous testing with Facebooks ads to see what works best for me. And I realized that there is nothing with Facebook that will work perfectly all the time.

There are so many variables, some in our control, and some out of our control, that it is almost impossible to really be certain about the outcome.

I want to share a few things that I have noticed. Some of my findings might go against what you have heard from others, and it might be the first time you’re hearing some of these tips.

Please keep in mind that my results are based on the history of my various accounts, pixel maturity, audience sizes, niches and other factors that might be different from yours. So you should do your own testing too.

Many of you might not agree with some of what I am about to share, but that is all right. The idea of these tips is to share what I have observed so that you at least read it. Hopefully, some of you might just *consider* implementing a few things I talk about. And some of you will actually implement it:P

Ok, so here are some of my observations, not in any particular order. Hope you benefit from them.

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1. Facebook prefers big audiences, preferably 500K and above. An audience size of around 2M – 3M is great. I think the days of being precise with your targeting are slowly going away. Go broad, and let FB do the heavy-lifting for you by finding the right audience for your product.

2. Mobile ad placement is the way to go. I do not run Desktop ads in the initial testing stages of a campaign, except when I am targeting senior audiences (55-65+), or when a campaign is proven, and I want to reach desktop users. But never in the testing phase. It is always a loser for me.

3. Lookalike Audiences, although great, are not effective when the seed audience is not large enough. You need a hell lot of VC/ATC/Purchases on your pixels for an effective LAA. 1000 VC / 200 ATC / 100 Purchases are not enough for FB to really understand who your audience is.

I would suggest at least 3000 VC / 500 ATC / 500 Purchases for your LAA to be effective. Of course, the more the better. I know those are big numbers, but less than that would not be effective enough.

4. One account or Multiple accounts? There has always been a debate on this. But I will recommend 1 account per niche. If you are in this for the long haul, keep your pixel clean and do not mix it with data from different niches. As competition increases and FB evolves further, I believe it will be more and more beneficial to keep your niches compartmentalized under separate accounts.

Earlier all my niches were under just 1 account. But about 3 months ago, I created 1 account per niche. Many of you will not be able to do this because by default we are allowed only 2 accounts in our Business Manager. You will need to get in touch with FB and request they allow you to create more accounts. I can create 1,000 accounts in my BM. Yes, creating 1 account per niche is a lot more work, but there are many benefits to it:

• It keeps things organized and clean.
• Your pixel is focused on that niche – unadulterated and pure.
• If you hire people to handle some aspects of your ad account, it is much easier to give them access only to certain accounts, and not others. You are in control.
• Since all your accounts are separate, if something happens to one account, the rest of the accounts are safe.

5. Many people believe that when creating a new Ad, we should assign a daily budget of $10-20 and keep it running for 2-3 days before deciding whether to keep the ad or kill it.

But after creating thousands of ads, I have hardly seen any ad that does not perform well in the first 24 hours, pick up and start doing well later. It happens, but very, very rarely. The fate of an ad is often decided during the first 24 hours. If FB reaches the right people on the first day, there is a much, much higher chance of that ad doing well later on. But if FB reaches the wrong people on the first day, odds of it doing well after a few days are very slim.

So I am of the opinion that if you are spending more than $10-$15 to test an Ad, and more than one day, you are wasting money and time. (There might be exceptions though)

6. Starting my adset with a budget higher than $15 does not give me good results. For me the sweet spot is $12. Honestly, not sure why that would happen, but anything above $15 gives me unsatisfactory results.

7. I was recently watching a video by FB where they said that budget does not affect optimization. But IMO it does. If it did not, then why are we not able to scale our campaigns by 10x-ing our budget overnight, even for large audiences? But as we all know, if we even 2x or 3x our budget, the ROI goes down the drain…yes, overnight. A gradual 10-20% increase is the way to go. But even then, as soon as you start increasing your budget, the ROI will often start going down, albeit slowly.

8. Facebook does not like restrictions. It does not like you to break-down the ages, especially when the final audience size is less than 500K.

For example, if you run an ad targeting 1M people, aged between 25-65, and notice that the age group of 35-44 is converting well. Do not create a separate campaign targeting only 35-44 demographic, if the audience size of that demographic is less than 500K. If it is more than 500K, create another ad, but only if your earlier broad campaign (that targeted 25-65 demo) is not active any more. If you have both the campaigns active simultaneously, there will be overlapping audiences, and FB does not like that. More on that in the next point.

9. FB does not like overlapping audiences. So try not to have active adsets targeting the same audience, even if the objectives of those adsets are different. For example, if you have a VC-optimized campaign targeting a certain group of people, avoid simultaneously targeting the same group with an ATC or Purchase objective.

The ideal situation would be that each active adset has unique people. You may have to use the “exclude” feature to do that. But after exclusion ensure that the final audience size is at least 500K.

10. Continuation of Point 8… If you *have* to introduce another adset targeting the same audience as an existing adset (maybe with a different conversion objective), do it after 1 or 2 days of the first adset going live. This gives the first adset some time to optimize and stabilize before the second one is introduced.

11. Avoid running several active ad campaigns in the same niche simultaneously. Your campaigns will compete with each other, and as a result, all campaigns will suffer. If your niche has got 1M people, I would recommend not having more than 3 active campaigns at the same time. For a smaller niche, do not go beyond 2. 1 is better.

Hope you find this useful in your testing. All the best.

Got your own advertising tips to share? Post them in the forum!