Facebook ads are performing better than ever (This is why)

It's as simple as that .

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So thanks very much . Now , on today's episode , we are talking about what is going on with Facebook ads at the moment , because our performance with Facebook ads are the best since the pandemic . Seriously , it changed around July and performance is really , really strong at the minute . Our cac has dropped down significantly and we're getting a lot of people signed up .

So I'm going to explain why I think this is the case and I'll give you an overview of what we're doing so you can hopefully learn from it and apply it to your own subscription box business . So the first thing is right . I think one of the main reasons why performance is so good is they've actually done a lot of work behind the scenes on Facebook ads .

I think last year there was a big push for the metaverse and obviously they had some blowback over that .

Investors weren't happy , share prices dropped and it became kind of a meme online around the metaverse and I think a lot of shareholders were urging Facebook to get back into doing what actually makes some money , and providing people with the opportunity to run ads is where they generate the majority of their revenue from .

So I think a lot of work has gone on behind the scenes to improve performance and to as close as we've seen before the iOS updates came out .

So I think that's a big part of the reason , because obviously I'm in a lot of different communities and stuff with people who spend a lot more money on Facebook ads compared to us and they're saying the same things the performance is the best it's been in a very , very long time .

Number two , and like I said this at the start of the year , a lot of companies now have pulled back spending or , unfortunately , they've gone boasts because of the economy and the way things are at the moment .

So when other companies pull back spending or they go boasts , it means there's less competition in the auction , so CPM prices will drop , and that's exactly what we're seeing . Cpm prices have gone ridiculously cheap again .

They're the cheapest they've seen in a long time and that's playing a massive part of this , because if your CPM prices are cheaper , you're going to reach more people for a lower cost and it's just going to improve your overall performance of your ads . So that's playing a big part as well . The other thing is we're mainly targeting the UK .

The weather in the UK has been notoriously poor this summer pretty similar to Ireland , and there's been a lot of rain , so people are at home . Now .

It looked like this was going to backfire on us , because we have successfully run a splashpad offer many times in the past where we basically give away a dog's splash pad if somebody signs up for six or twelve months , and we got a lot of these in stock .

God damn , the weather has switched and it was just raining and raining and we were going oh no , this is lining up to be a pretty poor summer . We're going to be stuck with all these splash pads . But it's actually been the opposite .

Obviously we had the switch offer because people aren't interested in the splash pad if it's latching raining , but we switched to a more appropriate offer and performance has been really really good so far . So I think that's playing a big part as well .

And then , obviously , there's been heat waves in Europe and in a number of countries , really , really strong heat waves . So my theory is maybe people aren't going on as many holidays to these countries because it's so hot and they're choosing to stay at home , and then it's raining at home , so they're stuck in the house . They're on social media .

There's less competition because other companies have pulled back , facebook have improved performance as well , and it's just a mixture of things coming together to , thankfully , greatly improve performance . So I am curious to know are you seeing the same with your Facebook ads ? Because I'm speaking to many different people and I'm getting conflict in reports .

Some people are saying that performance is unbelievable . Things are going great . Other people haven't noticed much difference . I think a lot of it comes down to your niche and where you're actually located . So now I'm going to break down what we're actually doing to make the most of this good performance . Let's jump into it .

So the first thing you need to be aware of is your offer . What kind of offer are you running ? If you want to make the most of this good performance on Facebook , you have to put out your strongest offer . It doesn't make a difference how cheap the CPM prices are or how good the performance is .

If you're trying to run an offer that doesn't convert , it won't work out well for you , you won't get enough people signed up and your cat will be really high . So for us , we're running an offer where , if you sign up for six or 12 months , you get 50% off your first box and a free dog bed .

You need to find an offer that converts as well as this in your business . Your offer needs to be so good that , if your ideal customer sees it , they're ready to pull out their credit card and sign up on the spot . I'm always talking about offers and how important they are , and that's because things do not change in marketing .

It doesn't matter if the economy is good . It doesn't matter if the economy is bad . You have to give people what they actually want . Now my advice would be to get working on this immediately and try to figure this out . Run some test offers .

If you've been running your business for a while and you know you had an offer that worked really , really good in the past , my advice would be to bring it back and start running it again now . Number two we are going with open targeting at the moment and we're allowing facebook to do the majority of the lifting for the majority of our campaigns .

So if you don't know what open targeting is , let me explain . This is where you basically touch nothing at all and you just leave Facebook to do all the targeting . So you pick your country . That's pretty much it the country you're targeting .

You don't put any interests in , you don't mess around with placements , you don't do any of this and you leave Facebook to do all of this work . You load up the campaign with different images and videos and you run it and you see how it works .

Now , if you've only been running a while , this may not work for you , because Facebook needs a clear idea of who your ideal customer is , and if it doesn't have enough data build up , it may not work too well for you , but you should still test it just to see if it actually works or not .

Something else you should definitely test at the moment are lookalike audiences . Lookalike audiences are working really well . Now , my advice around them will be don't be lazy and use a lookalike audience that's been sitting in your account for years .

That used to work back in 2020 , now freshen things up and feed Facebook new data and create new lookalike audiences fresh lookalike audiences and that will give you the best probability of getting them to actually work in your account .

And then the final tip I can give you around targeting , and it sounds so , so basic , but interest based targeting is working so well at the moment and I think that's because everything just seems to be working well because of the different factors that I actually brought up at the start of the podcast .

But if you're going with interest based targeting , my advice will be to go with really obvious interest based targeting that gives you big enough audiences to actually target . So in our case , that will be people like dogs , and we wouldn't really go much deeper than that .

I think the days of getting like really really narrow with your interest based targeting and really like hammering in on ideal customer avatars are kind of finished a bit , because Facebook is taking over a lot of the heavy lifting .

They know who your customer is and better than you do , so you want to leave the algorithm some opportunity to actually find these customers . So you want to go as wide as possible , and so I definitely recommend giving that a go and then finally , make sure you're testing advantage shopping campaigns .

They're a big part of the reason why our cac has dropped down so low and in recent weeks , so you don't need to complicate these when you're setting them up . We keep it really really basic and straightforward .

All we do is we take Our ads from our normal campaigns and then we set up a Advantage shopping campaign and we put them in there and we run them at the same time and we put the budget in the Advantage shopping campaigns at about 20 to 30% lower than the budget in our normal campaigns and we run them side by side .

It usually takes a couple of days for these to kick in on our account , but when they do kick in , it really pushes things forward . We get an enormous amount of people signed up and it brings down our overall CAC boy quite a bit . So , yeah , definitely give it a go .

I've recommended that to a good few subscription boxes in the last few weeks and everybody's seeing pretty positive results from Advantage shopping campaigns . So yeah , that's it . I wanted to just record this podcast because we've been seeing some very good results .

I wanted to share some of this information with you so you can hopefully learn from it and you can implement this into your business and help we see some really good results . Obviously , we've Q4 coming up , and very , very soon , and my advice around that would be do your testing now and find out what is going to work now .

Don't leave it until Q4 kicks off . Q4 is a really , really bad time to be testing things because there's so much competition and it tends to get really , really expensive .

To make the most of Q4 and to get ahead of this , you need to know what's actually going to convert , and then it's just the case of ramping up when Q4 kicks in and that consumer purchase intent increases and people are ready to buy like crazy . So I hope you found this podcast helpful .

Like I said at the start , if you've been enjoying the content and it's been helping you improve your subscription box business , I'd really appreciate if you could give this podcast a review on Apple or Spotify or wherever you're choosing . Thanks again .

If you have a question you want answered on the show , as always , head over to SubscriptionBoxResourcescom , join the free Facebook group and post it there . We'll be back next week at the exact same time . Have a great day .