An Unbeatable Facebook Ad Strategy For High ROAS Cold Sales
Supercharge your e-commerce sales
As a media buyer, whenever a client talks to me about something not working, or they ask me for some magically high ROAS like “I’d like to have 12 ROAS” and they expect me to just press my magic ROAS button, which they wouldn’t get unless they ask, it’s frustrating.
And for a long time, I was like, “there are no secret tricks. No hacks. No magic buttons to just do better.”
Well, Facebook has come a long way with their algorithm and ability to target buyers with no targeting.
They just know.
Did you know they have over 400,000+ attributes they ascribe to any Facebook user, from what religion they are, what body type they are, do they eat ice cream, what brands do they love, and so on?
That means, right now, one of the most powerful ways to reach a buying customer is to use no targeting at all.
I call this method the 30D Ad Testing Method.
30D Ad Testing
Plainly stated, 30D is a testing method where you create an ad, duplicate it 30 times, make it a purchase objective, leave it open with no interests, age ranges or audiences, and let it run.
From there, you’ll see that if you have buyers out there, Facebook will find them (unless you ad isn’t performing or your landing page can’t convert, but we’ll get into that later.).
Here’s how I run the campaign.
I usually start with 5 ads:
One Video Of The Product
One Video Testimonial
One line after state + Photo
One Carousel + Testimonial
One Story of the brand (last one can be photo or video)
I then duplicate these ads 29 times each (so 150 ads in total), at $3/day ($450 / day to start, but you’ll drop the budget quickly by turning them off).
Then I go through four rounds of optimization. With each round, you’ll turn off about half of your ads.
Day 1: Turn off any ads that have 200 reach but no landing page views.
Day 2: Turn off any ads that have a less than 2% CTR (unless there’s an add to cart or purchase).
Day 3: Turn off any ads with no purchase, ATC, or initiate check out.
Day 4: Turn off any ads without a purchase.
Now this is where you’ll be able to answer two questions:
Was it my landing page experience or my ads that failed (or succeeded).
If you’re around a 4–6% conversion rate by the end (on the ads remaining), your landing page is fine. (Take purchases and divide by landing page views).
If almost all of your ads have a less than 2% CTR, it was your ads, but your conversion rates are good, it was your ads.
If successful, however, you should be left with 0–20 ads of your original 150. From there, I do two things.
I take the most successful ad (or 2 or 3) and duplicate them another 30–60 times and reset the whole process over again.
At the same time, I also set a rule to increase the budget of $3 a day by 10% daily, if the ROAS in the last 7 days is above 3 (or whatever your break even margin number is).
And that’s it. I’ve scaled up MULTIPLE stores from zero to $100,000 / month using this method, and it’s just the beginning. It’s an entry point, and where I test my ads, before moving them into higher scaling CBO or audience testing campaigns. But with this strategy alone, I’ve gotten a store with zero historical sales to $100,000 in monthly revenue in just a few months.
Ian Canon is a media buyer from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. He’s also the author of It’s A Long Way Down (2018) and Before Oblivion (2017). His second novel What We Do On Weekends is forthcoming. His stories have been featured in The Creative Cafe, Montreal Writes, The Junction, The Sunlight Press, The Spadina Literary Review, Found Polaroids, and he’s been profiled for Vue.
