We love Facebook marketing, nowhere else can you show ads to such an amazingly targeted audience in a place where people actually pay attention.
It might just be the most perfect advertising channel the world has ever seen. Done right, Facebook advertising can bring incredible results.
But that’s not the reality for most companies. Most advertisers struggle to achieve both scale and ROI on Facebook.
We see this all the time:
An advertiser will have some success on Facebook—maybe they’re making money at a certain level of ad spend. But anytime they try to scale up their campaigns, the ROI goes south.
Sound familiar?
Well, here at Tier 11 we’ve built our reputation on helping companies like this to scale up their Facebook campaigns while, in most cases, significantly increasing their ROAS.
And in this post I’m going to share exactly how we do it.
You’re about to learn the the exact step-by-step process we use to scale up ecommerce campaigns in Facebook while increasing return on ad spend. It involves a strategy called, “The eCommerce Ad Amplifier™ ” or “The eComm Ad Amplifier” for short.
Here’s what it looks like:
So what is the eCommerce Ad Amplifier™? How does it work? And how can you use it to scale your campaigns, sell more physical products, and double your ROI in Facebook?
We’ll begin with…
What is the eCommerce Ad Amplifier™ & Why Does It Work?
Let’s start by defining the overall, big-picture strategy behind this system:
The eComm Ad Amplifier™ works by segmenting everyone based on how far they have made it through your buying funnel, and showing them the ideal ad for where they’re at in the buying process.
It sounds deceptively simple…but it’s really powerful. It’s also extremely rare in the Facebook marketing world.
Most advertisers on Facebook use the same handful of ads for everyone:
- cold traffic
- site visitors
- shopping cart abandoners
- previous customers
…and so on.
This is a mistake.
What you should really be doing is showing different ad messaging to each of these segments of people.
With cold traffic, for example, your message needs to hook their attention and pull them in to learn more. These people don’t know who you are, so you have to take time to educate them on what your product or service is and what the benefits are.
But when you’re showing retargeting ads to shopping cart abandoners, by comparison, you can get straight to the point. You can assume these people know what your product is—so your job with these ads is not to sell them on the benefits, but to convince them to complete their purchase. You might choose to focus on different messaging, like scarcity or FOMO (fear of missing out).
One of the awesome aspects about the eCommerce Ad Amplifier™ is that we can customize our ads based on every possible customer audience—which means that your cold traffic sees an ad that’s custom-made for cold traffic. People who viewed a product page see an ad that’s custom-made for people who have viewed a product page. Cart abandoners see an ad that’s custom-made for cart abandoners.
And that leads to another benefit of this strategy: it prevents wasted ad spend!
That’s because the eCom Ad Amplifier™ pixels everyone. And it’s constantly updating your audiences so that you can remarket to every single person who engages with your ad or visits your website.
In other words, nobody falls through the cracks.
So now that you’ve got a basic understanding of what the eCom Ad Amplifier™ is and why it’s so effective, let’s dive into the details of how it works.
The 5 Levels of Traffic in the eCommerce Ad Amplifier™
First things first, you need to understand the different types of people that you’re targeting in Facebook. We’ve identified 5 traffic levels that more or less mirror the customer journey or the buying process.
Everyone in your Facebook marketing funnel can be categorized according to these 5 levels:
eCommerce Ad Amplifier™ Level 1: Cold Traffic
Cold traffic refers to people you are targeting for the first time ever. This includes groups like lookalike audiences and interest-based audiences.
Generally speaking these are people who fit your target demographic…but have never heard of you before. (At least, not yet.)
eCommerce Ad Amplifier™ Level 2: Engagement (Page Engagement & Page View)
Level 2 consists of traffic that we’re calling “engaged.” These are people who have engaged with you in one of the following ways:
- Anyone who has viewed or engaged with your Facebook page (left a comment, etc.).
- Anyone who engaged with your Facebook ads (such as watching a certain percentage of a video ad).
- Anyone who became a fan of your Facebook page.
- Anyone who clicked through from one of your Facebook ads to your website. (At this point, the person will have triggered a “Page View” standard event in Facebook.)
Basically, you’ve gotten these people’s attention. They’ve seen your ad, and they did more than simply scroll on by—they took a moment to engage with you by leaving a comment, watching a video, clicking through to your landing page, and so on.
But they haven’t actually checked out your products or made an indication that they’re ready to buy.
eCommerce Ad Amplifier™ Level 3: View Content
If level 2 includes people who have engaged with you in some small way, level 3 includes people who have taken the next step in the buying process—they have actually shown interest in a particular product or service page, firing off what Facebook calls a “View Content” standard event.
At this point we know the person is getting closer to making a purchase, because they’ve checked out a specific product that piqued their curiosity.
eCommerce Ad Amplifier™ Level 4: Add to Cart
This level of traffic is pretty self-explanatory: it includes anyone who added a product or service to their shopping cart, but did not complete their purchase.
This is a strong indication of buying intent, which means these people are close to making a purchase.
eCommerce Ad Amplifier™ Level 5: Purchases
Finally, level 5 consists of people who have actually completed their purchase.
The Best Ad Formats for Every Audience
Now that you know the 5 main levels of traffic, the next step is to figure out which types of ads are most effective for people at each of those levels.
The Best Ad Formats for Level 1 Traffic
The first thing you need to do with cold traffic is grab their attention.
Help them realize that you exist. You can show almost any kind of ad to cold traffic—as long as it does a good job of capturing attention and encouraging further engagement:
- Lead Magnets
- Instagram story
- Click-to-Messenger ads
- Educational short videos
- Educational long videos
- Dynamic product ads (DPAs) with broad targeting
- Blog post ads
- Page content + video
The Best Ad Formats for Level 2 Traffic
Once someone has engaged with your Level 1 ads in some way, here are some of the best ad types to drive them to the next stage of the buying process.
Remember that these people have shown an interest in you—but they haven’t yet checked out a specific product page. With that in mind, you’ll want to use one of these ad formats to educate these people on your products and drive them to take that next step in the buying process.
- Educational short videos
- Educational long videos
- Product ads
- Product carousel
- Testimonial ads
The Best Ad Format for Level 3 Traffic
After someone has viewed your product page, there’s one type of ad that clearly outshines all others—dynamic product ads (DPAs).
This will show an ad that dynamically updates with the exact product that the person viewed on your site, making DPAs an essential ad format (especially for eCommerce companies).
- Dynamic product ads (DPAs)
The Best Ad Formats for Level 4 Traffic
These people have added a product to their cart, but they didn’t complete their purchase. So your goal at this point is to convince them to complete their purchase by reinforcing the benefits, answering any doubts, and so on.
Although you can use many other kinds of ads at Level 3 and Level 4, DPAs are still the clear winners here, along with Click-to-Messenger ads—which provide you a great opportunity to engage with these people on a deeper level so that you can help to overcome any lingering objections.
- Dynamic product ads (DPAs)
- Click-to-Messenger ads
The Best Ad Formats for Level 5 Traffic
At this point, the person has purchased your product. Congratulations! But at this point you’re still not done. You can—and should—continue to advertise to them.
Maybe the person purchased once, but they need a refill after 30 days. Maybe you see an opportunity to cross-sell them on another product. Maybe you want to let them know about your new referral program.
Whatever it is, there is almost always some way you can continue to monetize customers after their initial sale. And because these people have already bought from you in the past, they are liable to be extremely receptive to your messages. So don’t miss out on the big opportunity available here—instead, test some of these ad formats on your new and existing customers:
- Content video
- Product video
- Dynamic product ads
- Product image ads
3 eCommerce Ad Amplifier™ Case Studies
Now that you know the 5 levels of traffic, along with the best ads for people at each step of that journey, let’s walk through a few case studies to show you how the eCom Ad Amplifier™ works in practice.
eCommerce Ad Amplifier™ Case Study #1: Treat Yourself to R&R With Bath Bombs
Let’s start with a relatively simple campaign.
This company sells bath bombs, which are a great product for Facebook—they’re fun, they’re easily consumable, and they’re inexpensive enough for an impulse purchase. Our strategy with this campaign was twofold:
- Capture leads for lead nurturing & follow-up and,
- Enter them into a contest giveaway to generate buzz and excitement
Which Parts of the eCommerce Ad Amplifier™ Did This Campaign Use?
One thing that’s important to realize is that you don’t have to use every single piece of the eCommerce Ad Amplifier™ for every single campaign.
Some campaigns are complex and might require all these assets—but other campaigns are simpler and will not.
For this campaign, which was fairly straightforward, we used these parts of the eCommerce Ad Amplifier™:
Basically we used Lead Magnets, Instagram stories, Click-to-Messenger ads, and short educational videos to hook and engage cold traffic. Then we retargeted that traffic with short educational videos, testimonial videos, DPAs, Click-to-Messenger ads, and product videos.
And we structured those assets into a campaign with four basic steps:
Step 1: Engage
First we had to grab our prospect’s attention. For this we used several different types of awareness assets, like videos…
Videos work great on Facebook because they can visually demonstrate the product in action. You can see how the bath bombs fizz up in the tub, and watch as someone discovers a ring inside (basically demonstrating and dramatizing the value of the giveaway).
We also used Comment-to-Messenger ads…
These ads can work really when for lead capture. Facebook makes it easy for someone to give you their email inside of Messenger, which you can instantly share with your email service provider.
And last but not least, Instagram Stories:
And the goal of all these ads was to drive people to this landing page, where they could sign up for a chance to win a bath bomb and a ring worth up to $3,800.
Step 2: Reinforce
Next we can retarget the people who engaged with us in step 1 (for example, by watching most of a video ad) or who opted in to the landing page. We do this using a combination of short educational videos:
We also used testimonial videos that showed how much fun people were having using the product:
And in this step, because these people have already opted in, we can skip the opt-in landing page and send people directly to a landing page:
Step 3: Overcome Objections
At this point, we’re retargeting ads to people who have both opted in and also clicked through to view the product page. So our goal at this stage is to overcome their objections by teaching them more about how cool the product is.
For that, we use dynamic product ads that look like this:
These ads will take people directly to the sales page for that specific product, like this:
This step in the campaign is where we generated the majority of the return on ad spend.
One thing we’ll do with dynamic product ads is separate them out based on the day span. So we might have one ad for people who viewed a product in the past three days, and a different ad for people who viewed a product in the past seven days. We test this sort of thing all the time.
This way even if the first ad doesn’t generate a sale, we still have an opportunity to present people with several different ads and sales messages. If they don’t convert after some time, say 21 days, then we might show an ad with a coupon code. Like this:
These time frames (3-21 days) won’t work for everyone, but that’s okay!
The details of how you implement this will vary depending on your business and what you’re selling. What’s important here is that you understand the underlying fundamental strategy of re-engaging with your prospects at just the right time.
Step 4: Re-engage
At this point we’ve generated a customer. But we don’t stop there—we serve ads to these people, too, showing them related products they might be interested in. Like so:
This is simple cross-selling to people who have already made a purchase. A highly effective strategy that worked very well in this campaign.
The Results
So what were the results?
Using the exact steps described above, we took this client from $5k/month in ad spend with a 2X ROAS…all the way to $20-$50k/month with a 5.8x ROAS.
eCommerce Ad Amplifier™ Case Study #2: A Hair-Growth Helmet (That Works)
In this case study, we’re selling a much more complicated (and expensive) product—a $600 hair regrowth device that actually works.
To make matters even more difficult, we’re marketing to a highly skeptical audience here…so this campaign requires a lot more education and proof to generate sales.
Which Parts of the eCommerce Ad Amplifier™ Did This Campaign Use?
For this campaign, we used only two rows from the eCommerce Ad Amplifier™—both short and long educational videos—along with eight of the retargeting assets:
These assets are delivered over the course of three main steps:
Step 1: Educate
The biggest obstacle with this product is believability—getting the audience to accept that this device will really regrow hair. So to do that, we tell a story of the effectiveness of the product in a video ad containing lots and lots of proof.
And this educational video has five main parts to it:
- Moving intro
- Describe
- Why
- Proof
- Recommend
Here’s a quick summary of what we have to achieve in each of those 5 parts:
- First, we get some motion in the intro to hook attention.
- Then we describe the problem that we’re about to solve.
- We follow that up with the “why.” Why does the product work? This is where we give some cool details about the new laser technology this product uses.
- Next we show compelling proof that the product really works. In this case, the proof came in the form of before-and-after images taken straight from the results of a legitimate study that was performed on this laser hair regrowth technology.
- We finish things up with a video of a doctor recommending the product. (The call-to-action.)
Step 2: Reinforce
With a $600 price tag, this product definitely does not fall into the “impulse buy” category. Instead, we find that most people need about 30-60 days to buy.
So in order to get more of those sales, we need to reinforce our sales message to people during that critical buying window with effective retargeting ads.
And in this case, we got the best results from re-using the same great video from Step 1:
Remember, it’s okay to use the same ad across several different steps of your campaign as long as it fulfills the objective of each step.
And because we know these customers tend to be skeptical about the effectiveness of the product, we also use a lot of testimonial videos at this stage of the campaign.
Step 3: Overcome Objections
At this point we’ve gotten our audience’s attention!
They know about our product. And we’ve retargeted them with ads leading to the product page.
At this point we use dynamic product ads (DPAs) to overcome some of the most common buying objections.
And more DPAs…
And here’s a closer look:
If you’re doing eCommerce, you absolutely have to be using DPAs. They’re essential.
Keep in mind that the details of the execution are going to vary depending on your product and your business. In the first case study, we were using windows of 3-21 days for our DPA retargeting. But because this product has a much longer buying process, we’re testing longer timeframes of 30-60 days with great success.
The Results:
Over the course of about six months, the campaign described above took this client from $30k/month with a 2x ROAS all the way up to $160k/month with a 2.7x ROAS.
eCommerce Ad Amplifier™ Case Study #3: Improve Your Wellbeing With Supplements
Our final case study is for a line of health supplements that includes juicing and protein powders.
It’s a great product, really high-quality, with a price around $70 and a recurring subscription model. But on the other hand, this is an extremely competitive space—so if we were going to help this client grow, we would need to pull out all the stops.
Which Parts of the eCommerce Ad Amplifier™ Did This Campaign Use?
This campaign is more complex than the others, using the full arsenal of the eCommerce Ad Amplifier™:
And all these ads and retargeting assets are deployed over four main steps:
Step 1: Educate
The first thing we did in this campaign was to target cold traffic with ads meant to educate people on some of the benefits of the product—along with some of the negative effects from their competitors’ products (like too much sugar).
We did this with image post ads, video ads…
…Instagram stories, Facebook Canvas ads…
…and pretty much every type of ad out there. We used dozens of different assets in these campaigns.
And we’re sending people to landing pages. Not product pages, but landing pages that are consistent with the message in the ad:
And when people click through on one of these landing pages, they’ll land on a product page—thereby firing Facebook’s View Content event. But before we talk about that, let’s go to the next step in the campaign.
Step 2: Reinforce
Next we target the people who have clicked through on the landing page but have not taken the next step in the buying process. So we display these ads to reinforce some of the amazing health benefits of using these products:
You’ll notice some of the ads in Step 2 are very similar to those in Step 1. That happens a lot with these early campaign stages (especially Steps 1 and 2). But we also throw some new ads into the rotation like testimonial videos, educational videos, and product videos showing how easy the product is to use:
The goal of all these ads, remember, is to reinforce the fact that this is a great product that they should consider buying.
Step 3: Overcome objections
Now we’re targeting people who have not only engaged with the ad, but have also clicked through to view a specific product page.
And that means we can remarket to them using dynamic product ads (DPAs):
At this stage, all our DPAs are all still very benefit-driven. Remember, these people have viewed the product page, but they have not indicated that they have already made up their mind to buy by adding the product to their cart.
This time, rather than driving people to the landing page (which they’ve already seen), we’re sending them directly to the product pages they’ve already visited. This way they’re just 1 click away from adding the product to their cart and completing their purchase.
Step 4: Remind
At this step we’re targeting people who have added the product to their cart, but have not completed their purchase.
We still use DPAs here, but our messaging is different. Rather than being benefit-focused (like the ads in step 3), this time we’re just reminding people that they added something to their cart and didn’t yet complete their purchase.
Here’s an example of what I mean:
Notice how the ad matches the level of intent. We know the person added the product to their cart, so we assume that they have the intention to buy. This kind of subtle mindset shift makes for a very compelling and effective retargeting ad.
The Results
So what were the results of this campaign?
When the client came to use they were spending $30k/month at a 0.25 30-day ROAS. (Keep in mind it’s a recurring subscription, so they don’t need to break even on their ads right away.)
Those results are pretty impressive, but we were able to scale them up even more—to $570k/month with a 1.1x 30-day ROAS.
Struggling to Scale Your Own Campaigns?
Like we said, Facebook marketing might be the most perfect channel for marketing that businesses have ever had access to.
… But it’s not easy — not by a long shot.
That’s why our team does what we do for our clients. We’re media buying experts that love what we do, and love helping businesses grow.
The eCommerce Ad Amplifier™ is an extraordinarily effective system for Facebook marketing. It can be complicated to execute, but when it’s done right it’s the single most powerful eCommerce marketing strategy you’ll ever see.
If you read through all the entire process above, and you’re finding yourself saying, “I need that!”…
Do yourself a favor and get in touch with us. As you’ve seen, we have a track record of helping companies to grow quickly and profitably through Facebook and Instagram ads… scaling up your campaigns while actually increasing your return on ad spend.
So if you’d like to be our next success story, click here to learn more about how we work. And once you’re ready to talk, fill out this short form to tell us more about your business.
