105: How To Run Profitable Facebook Ads To Sell Physical Products Online With Miracle Wanzo

Intro: You are listening to the My Wife Quit her Job Podcast. And if you are new here, it’s a show where I bring in successful bootstrapped business owners to teach us what strategies are working and what strategies are not. Now I don’t bring on these famous entrepreneurs simply to celebrate their success, instead I have them take us back to the beginning and delve deeply into the exact strategies they used early on to gain traction for their businesses.Now if you enjoy this podcast please leave me a review on iTunes, and if you want to learn how to start your own online business be sure to sign up for my free six-day mini course, where I show you how my wife and I managed to make over 100k in profit in our first year of business. Go to www.mywifequitherjob.com, sign up right there on the front page, and I’ll send you the mini course right away via email.

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Welcome to the My Wife Quite Her Job Podcast. We will teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle, so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here is your host, Steve Chou.

Steve: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. Today I have Miracle Wanzo on the show. Now first off isn’t that the coolest name ever and in fact when I first met her I kind of assumed that that was her pen name. But no her name is really Miracle and she is one of the sweetest most down to earth people that you’ll ever meet. And I met Miracle at the Ecommerce Fuel live event in Nashville just a couple of months ago, and I’m really glad that I did. Now she runs Hip Undies.com which is a store where she sells women’s undergarments and lingerie.

And normally I tend to think that selling clothing or anything that has to do with fashion is very difficult and challenging, but — and in fact in my class that I run, I tend to discourage the students in my class from going this route, because it is in fact extremely competitive. But Miracle has pulled it off, and she does extremely well with her fashion line. And today we are going to find out exactly how she has done it, and so with that welcome to the show Miracle, how are you doing today?

Miracle: I’m doing great, how are you?

Steve: I’m very good, now I know you’ve been doing this for heck of a long time like over 15 years just on ecommerce. But can you give us a quick background story just kind of how you got started, and tell us how you ended up starting Hip Undies.com?

Miracle: Yeah, I got started on eBay, and I was selling off price designer clothing on eBay for a couple years way back when, and it got to the point where I felt like I was spending enough money on eBay to justify having my own website. And I started playing around with building websites and I have back then, I mean I used so many different platforms back then to build a website, because I built one and not quite like it, then go find another solution and start building a website on that. And eventually after a little bit of time I actually found software that I liked which probably isn’t even around anymore. And I built my first ecommerce site which was selling the clothing.

And the issue that I had with that was that I was selling actual clothing as opposed to under garments, and I felt like for where I was at that point and time it would have required too much for me to keep up with all of the trends and the changing out of inventory. Because that’s one of the issues that you deal with in fashion is that you have to constantly have fresh inventory coming in to keep up with what’s on trend and the seasons. And I wanted to find a way to not have that much change happening with my inventory. So I pulled back from that website — oh hold I have to cough. Sorry and started playing around with drop ship sites, so I could still stay in ecommerce while I figured out what to do.

And back then I was on a couple of mailing lists and a couple of forums for ecommerce merchants and there was this one guy who was talking about selling jewelry, and how it was one of the perfect things to sell online. He wasn’t selling high end jewelry; he was selling things like 30, 60 bucks. And he said because he could fit all of his inventory into a trunk and travel. And they just hit the road, travel all around the country, and they would stop wherever they were and they would ship out all his orders and get back on the road, and I thought oh my God that’s awesome, I got to find a way to do that in clothing.

And that’s how I ended up in lingerie because it’s so tiny, that it fit within his model of being small and not taking up a lot of space, light weight, easy to ship, small packages, nothing heavy and bulky. But still having a reasonable enough price point to [inaudible 00:05:56] our average order value is over 50 bucks.

Steve: So are you still selling clothing today, or is that completely gone?

Miracle: No I do not sell clothing; there are some things that sometimes I pick up with Hip Undies, like yoga pants or lounge wear, things like that but not real, real clothing.

Steve: Okay and then in terms of just fashion do undies — do they not go out of style as quickly I guess?

Miracle: There are two sides in the lingerie industry. Well this is in the contemporary kind of designer branded industry, because there is also the sexy side, and I’m not really in that niche. But in the branded designer industry there are two sides, there are fashion lines that come up with new collections all the time just like apparel, but then there are basics. And those are the things that women wear every day, that they buy repeatedly because they like to fit, or they love the fabric or it’s just like their go to piece, and they’ll stuck and wear it. So there is a side of it that changes rapidly as apparel, but then there is also a big group of it that doesn’t.

Steve: Okay and that’s the side that you focus on?

Miracle: Yeah.

Steve: Okay and so are your products — are they under your own label or are you selling other peoples brands?

Miracle: Both. I have what I call house brands which are brands that I have made up and manufactured. I also bought someone that I knew that had a line, and she was winding it down to go back to work as a custom designer. And I bought out all of her assets, all of her patterns, all of her designs and things like that. So I have a few house brands, but the bulk of it at this point is brands that are found in department stores or specialty stores or boutiques.

Steve: Interesting, so if you are selling brands that can be found in department stores and that sort of thing, so what is Hip Undies’s unique value preposition, and how do you actually get customers into your store?

Miracle: I know, and people ask me that, and I have a really good friend who’s been a sales rep in lingerie on the other side, selling manufactures brands to retailers, and she is been doing this for 20 years. And after I came back from Ecommerce Fuel, because people ask me that a lot, and we talked about it because I felt like we just didn’t see it through that lens, and we still don’t see the industry through that lens, because I’m not sure if it’s a matter of the customer having a different perspective on it, or if it’s that we just didn’t look at the industry that way. When you think about it with all of these brands, any brand that I carry if there in Nordstrom, [inaudible 00:08:46] some of them are in Macy’s, Bloomingdales, not so much Macy’s, but sometimes you find a few.

And they are in these department stores yet still there are all of these independent boutiques that still carry those same brands and they co-exist. So when I looked at it, I didn’t see what I was doing as being any different than having a boutique other than the fact that my boutique was online instead of a brick and mortar store. So I didn’t see it through that lens of well if Nordstrom has it, I really need to have a unique value preposition to be able to sell something. Because I mean that’s just what it was offline and I didn’t see online as being that drastically different. I think with customers it’s just a matter of what they want, and then being able to get what they want.

And they’ll buy it from whomever, and with Hip Undies considering that I started in 2003 and it’s 12 year later, so a lot has changed. There were — initially there were a lot of advantages that I had that bigger companies weren’t doing at that time, especially when it comes to servicing people who are Americans, but who’ve moved to somewhere else because a lot of the other websites still don’t really make it all that easy for international buyers.

Steve: Interesting.

Miracle: Then also there’s a matter of selection, offering certain things that other stores don’t, because a big company is not going to necessarily buy across a collection. They’re going to maybe stick with some of the best selling items and not carry the rest. I think more than anything it wasn’t the large retailers that were an issue. It was really as the manufacturer started to get into ecommerce, that really changed things, because they can offer everything they have to offer versus a retail like myself or any large company not wanting to carry an entire product line.

Steve: Do you find yourself selling more of your own house brands, or more of other people brands?

Miracle: There’s two sides. There’s search, and of course with search-based traffic most of them are looking for brands that they know. Then there’s paid advertisement. With paid advertisement, then it’s more advantageous to me to advertise the brands that I own.

Steve: Let’s talk about paid search for a little bit, because I know you do a lot of paid search. For the listeners out there, Miracle posts on the Ecommerce Fuel forums, these really long and detailed posts which are really awesome. You mentioned Google search. Is it hard to rank for brands?

Miracle: It is harder now definitely after Panda and Penguin, it is much more difficult than it was before, absolutely.

Steve: Do you have any tactics that you use to rank in organic search, or have you pretty much focused more of your efforts in to just pay-per-click at this point?

Miracle: I gave up, so I think last year, it was either last year or the year before, at one point I was really having SEO and I spent a lot of effort and money into developing all of the resources to really handle Search Engine Optimization, and there came a point where I was kind at a fork on the road. I said, okay, I either can go this SEO path and invest more in it, or I can really try to figure out paid traffic. I made the decision then to just go the paid traffic route, and kind of let the SEO stay where it was. Not to really focus on it, but to put my time and my resources into learning pay traffic.

Steve: If you break down your traffic and your conversions today, where are most of your sales coming from? Is it paid traffic or organic traffic, or direct?

Miracle: At this point, there is organic search, there’s search for the domain name and stuff like that. At this point in terms of where it’s going, it’s on the paid side, and also probably because for me personally it’s easier to have a direct correlation between money spent, and growth on the paid side as well.

Steve: Absolutely. I know Ecommerce Fuel Live you talked about Facebook. Is Facebook your primary paid source at this time?

Miracle: Yes because for me I find it hard to keep growing Google product listing ads, and I’ve gone around and asked all the merchants like, you know? It seems to be that with the catalog of products you have eventually you kind of hit a little bit of a ceiling with that.

Steve: Yeah, there’s only so many searches that are out there right? Do you use generic Adwords or is it just listing ads?

Miracle: No. It’s product listing ads. I probably have a few generic Adwords campaigns, but not so much with what I have just because of the people who bid high and bid a little bid broad. It’s tough.

Steve: Yeah. I know. It totally is especially when you’re selling other people’s brands and that sort of thing. One of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show is because you have had a tremendous amount of success with Facebook. In terms of my store I’ve had success too with Facebook ads, but mainly from a combination of email marketing and backend funnels. What I found interesting about your presentation at Ecommerce Fuel was that you’ve managed to run profitable ads that pretty much directly result in sales. I was hoping that you would be able to share some insights with the listeners from the perspective of a smaller shop on how to run some of these campaigns.

Miracle: Yeah. I will also say that I should learn how to set up a photo and I’m trying to learn how to do that, because I think that at some point it will start to tap out what you can do with selling direct. The way that I got into this was because I started focusing on Facebook ads. I was managing ads for another company, and at that point in time the only groups that I could find that were really going hard with Facebook and making sales of products were the people who were selling T-shirts on sites like Teespring and other crowd sourced type of print-on-demand apparel sites. I started getting involved in those groups and learning from those groups.

They really, really figured it out. I mean seriously figured it out. The great part about it was that because Teespring was almost solely depends upon these marketers for their revenues, they had to make the adjustments that the marketers needed to help them convert better. Teespring kind of took care of the heavy lifting of conversion optimization and split-testing, and they take all the marketers’ feedback and they keep tweaking and refining everything to get to the point where they built a platform that converted really well on desktop and most importantly mobile. All the marketers had to focus on was just driving traffic and tweaking that side of it. Go ahead …

Steve: No, I was just going to say, if you can go into a little bit more detail? Let’s talk about Hip Undies. Let’s say you want to start … Let’s consider one of your most successful ad campaigns. A couple of questions right off the butt. You create an ad and then you have it point directly to a product range. The thing about Facebook is that a lot of people are on there just to hang out, and not necessarily there to buy. I was wondering if you could just provide some of the guidelines that you’ve used to create your most highest converting ad.

Miracle: First I will say that I think everyone who’s come before us has made it such that people on Facebook are now used to seeing things that they want to buy and buying those things from the newsfeed. I think that they’ve done such a good job with marketing and because they were … And for product sellers and they sold it to all these other people and these other people have also done it.

To the people who purchase, not in Facebook in general, because we have to keep in mind that out of all of the people on Facebook maybe only a small percentage of them are active shoppers from ads. Of those people at this point, the idea of being interrupted in their newsfeed and going to buy something is not foreign to them at this point. What you find … I need to put you on hold for a second. I’ve got to grab an inhaler. Hold on real quick, okay?

Steve: Sure, absolutely.

Miracle: Sorry about that. I’m going to start after what you fired. Among those people who shop from Facebook is that they actually shop from Facebook. I even spoke at one point when I was interviewing for [inaudible 00:18:23] that there are Facebook boutiques and there are Facebook buying groups. There are groups of women who group-buy things, and then one of them is responsible for shipping it out to all of them. I think at this point, it’s a thing now. It’s a thing where a lot of people are into finding things On Facebook and shopping and buying those things.

Even on my ads where I have posts you’ll get comments that say I bought one or I bought one like this and I bought one of these last week. It’s the thing now, I think. I don’t think it is that foreign any more. It’s just a matter of there being this huge, broad Facebook audience, and when you run ads you have to figure out how to get more of the buyers in the group of people who see your ads.

Steve: Let’s talk about that. It sounds like targeting is the key here.

Miracle: Yeah, pretty much. Of course you’re going to have products that just don’t work, no matter how good your targeting is, but yeah.

Steve: Let’s say you want to sell one of your undergarments, and let’s just again take your most successful ad. What did the targeting look like, and how did you actually come up with that audience?

Miracle: Trial and error. I’ll say that honestly because there are times when I go in and I think I know what’s going to work and it doesn’t. I’ve tried a whole bunch of different things, and it’s hard for me to say that it’s the most successful ad, because even within the campaign I will have different ad sets. Those ad sets target different groups.

First it’s a matter of making sure that the product is going to work, because sometimes you have the right targeting, but the product just isn’t appealing and that can make you think that your targeting is wrong, but it’s not your targeting. It’s just that the product didn’t work. You have to keep trying things. Sometimes I feel like it’s just a matter of hitting the right thing at the right time.

Not necessarily because my ad was great or my targeting was great just like everything combined at that moment to find that audience and to pick up momentum, because that’s one thing we know for sure about Facebook is that it builds off of momentum. If you get momentum, most of the time you keep momentum, and if you don’t have it’s really hard to get it. It was trying a bunch of different things really, trying a lot of different things to target. It’s targeting brands sometimes. It’s targeting other online shopping destinations. Sometimes I’ll try QVC or HSN or …

Steve: Interesting. Let’s just do a hypothetical situation here. Let’s say you have this new product coming up. You mentioned yoga pants earlier, I‘m just more interested in the process here. Let’s say you want to sell these yoga pants. Who are you going to target first, what’s your creative going to look like?

Miracle: Sure. First I’m definitely going to split the ages. Facebook works I think it’s like 35-44, 45-54, 25-34. I’m definitely going to split the ages. I’m probably not going to expect much out of the 25-34 range. When I set up that ad set they’ll get the least budget.

Steve: Is there a reason why? Is it because you looked at your audiences who shop on your site already, and you’ve determined that that age group doesn’t spend as much?

Miracle: No, it’s not from looking at the audience. It’s from looking at the ads reporting. A lot of times in my experience just from what I’ve been doing, the 25-34 they’re very highly engaged with Facebook so they’re very clicky and they do a lot of comments and shares, but when you run the report and you break down your conversion by age, it tends to take a lot of money to get a conversion in that age range.

Steve. Interesting, okay.

Miracle: I don’t know why. Maybe it’s other factors, you know. They have less disposable income.

Steve: Sure, absolutely.

Miracle: Typically, I’ll split apart the ages for once. If they were yoga pants, then I would start looking at things like … I just did one for yoga a few days ago. I think I have in there stuff like yoga journal, and other yoga websites and yoga terminologies for yoga pauses, and just let it go and see how it goes.

Steve: You’re using only interest based targeting at this point?

Miracle: For something like that, yes. If it’s yoga pants. If I were looking at something a little more general like a bra, but not really because I wouldn’t do it with a bra, but just say I was. Then I would do something broader or I’d do a lookalike audience. If I were trying to sell yoga pants, I would start going for … I’d look at it like, this brand, when it’s in a store, it’s merchandized this way. It’s with these other brands, or it’s at this type of store. If I want to find the kind of person who would buy that, that’s where my mind thinks to look for that person.

Steve: Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. You’re running a variety of different ads I would imagine at this point, how do you evaluate the ads. What are some of your metrics to determine what to continue running and when to stop?

Miracle: Right. Usually when I sort of fine testing, like I said I just started something with yoga in it last week. I will look at that early on and see if I’m getting a click-through rate that’s reasonable. Like if I get a less than 1% click-through rate then I know I’m just way of the mark with the targeting. I’ll look at that early on, and if the click-through rate looks good, like it’s 3%, 2% and above, then I’ll let it run for a couple of days to see what happens with the website visitors and how expensive or inexpensive they are because on Facebook a click is a click. It’s not necessarily a visit to the website.

I’ll start to look at, is it being added to the cart and if it’s converting. If it’s being added to the cart and it’s converting then that’s it, I’ll let it go. If it’s converting well enough, like cheap, then I’ll start to look for other interests to target, and add another interest to target, and another ad set to that campaign.

Steve: It looks like you’re looking at a click-through rate that’s greater than 1% and preferably in the 3% range?

Miracle: Yeah, early on, early on.

Steve: Early on, right. Is this just … are you looking at this like after a day or 2 days?

Miracle: If I’m trying something that I haven’t done before, then I’m looking at it … I’m starting the ad earlier in the day like in the morning, then I’m looking at the click through rate in the late afternoon or evening, if I’ve not done that before. If I’ve done it before, then no.

Steve: Okay. It’s like a one day thing and then you make a judgment after one day whether to continue running that.

Miracle: Well, I make a judgment if I feel like I really bummed, because sometimes I’m way off. Just way off and it’s like, this click-through is so bad. I’ve got the wrong audience here, because again, on Facebook it’s hard to get momentum if you don’t have it. It’s hard to turn something that’s not working into something that’s working, and it’s much easier to just go back to the drawing board than to just sit there and cross your fingers and hope that it works.

Whereas if you’ve got some momentum going, your click-through rate’s good, the engagement is good, then just let it go and the algorithm will do its work. It’s kind of like a car. If the engine’s running smooth it’ll run smooth, but if it’s having a hard time getting started. You’re in for trouble.

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Steve: How much do you put on an ad, and what is the size of the audience when you’re doing these experiments?

Miracle: Sure, ultimately more than 100,000 people. Sometimes I can’t get there with what I’m targeting and again, because I said I break the ages out into separate ad sets. Really honestly if I’m just starting something I haven’t done before, no more than $10 a day in that ad set.

Steve: You typically run multiple of these ads, and then you look in the late afternoon after running for what sounds like a day, and you pretty much iron out the obvious losers.

Miracle: Yeah, the obvious losers. That’s a good way to put it.

Steve: What do you do with the guys that are the click-through rate is like one and a half percent? You start looking at the shopping cart ads percentage you said, right?

Miracle: Right, the next day though, because if my click-through rate is that low, then I’m not … You know I only have $10 a day budgeted. I’m not getting that many visitors to the website yet. I’ll look at the next day and start to see where I’m at with adds to cart, or with conversion.

The adds to cart is a back up to conversions, right, because if something hasn’t converted but you see a healthy enough adds to cart, then it’s just a matter of time before people start to complete those purchases, but if it’s not converting, and you hardly have any adds to carts, then it’s just not going to happen.

Steve: What’s a typical good adds to cart percentage?

Miracle: I don’t know. I don’t have a thing that looks at the percentage. It just has the number and I just kind of eyeball it. What I look at … This is how I do it, because I don’t like to bring all my reports into Excel all the time, because it takes too long then. I look at, how many people … Do I have enough people that have visited the website for me to start expecting to see adds to cart and conversions?

Then I look at, do I have enough people adding it to cart for me to expect to see conversions, like kind of eyeballing. What I look at is, if I only have 2 adds to cart and I spent $20, $10 a day for 2 days, and I only have 2 adds to cart then I’m like, okay, well that’s probably not going to get me where I want, because by the time I get a conversion out of this, I’ll be probably 30, 35 bucks in. This one doesn’t have any momentum here. I can try it again. Sometimes you can just restart that same ad and get better momentum just because you’ve hit better timing, maybe it’s pay day, a bunch of other factors.

Otherwise I look at, let’s say that I spent $20 but I have like 10 adds to cart, then I’m like okay, I only got to see 2 of those convert to sales before, I’m okay with keeping this ad running. I kind of eyeball it. It’s not all that specific, because if I bring it in to Excel, then I’ll never get it done, and I have to make a report and make a decision based on what I see in the Facebook interface.

Steve: I think I see where you are getting at and really determine — it really depends on how much profit you are going to be making per sale also right? You know how much profit you are going to be making, and so you just eye ball to see if the ad will potentially be profitable right that’s what you are saying okay?

Miracle: And even if it’s kind of not really all that profitable let’s just say it’s an item that’s like 30 bucks, and I’m up to $15 per sale right? Even if I’m out of number like that or arguably the 15 is my margin. I’ll still keep that going just because there are obviously a lot of people who buy more than one.

And then there is also the impact of the people who come through on organic click from Facebook which is that someone saw it as a pain impression, and then because of their engagement someone else saw it organically. And they clicked through and that’s not reporting in the ads interface. So that also brings in traffic and in some of those people who don’t come in right away, they come in a little bit later.

If a person saves your post, if they see it as an ad, but they save it, then they come back later and click through later, that’s also not going to show up in the ads reporting because it wasn’t a pain impression at that point. There is a lot of traffic that’s not recorded in the ads interface.

So even if I’m not all the way profitable on that specific campaign or ads set, I’ll still keep it going because it’s bringing in more sales for more items than it’s being recorded there. And while I could go looking Google analytics and I could run the reports. Again I need to be able to make a decision off of what I see in Facebook; otherwise I’ll never make these decisions.

Steve: No that totally makes sense, and I was just curious how does retargeting kind of factor into your calculations?

Miracle: I run the retargeting in a separate campaign. I build custom audience, I build custom audiences based off of products and collections of products, so like brands or groups, or I’ll have a custom audience for one type of garment versus another type of garment. So I have a bunch of custom audiences in there, and I will set up retargeting camping sometimes for specific products.

Sometimes they are dynamic products we are targeting that Facebook feature that has that where Facebook matches up the products. And then sometimes I cross promote something, so I’ll take one product and promote it to a group of people who’ve either looked at or added to cart, or purchased a completely different thing.

Steve: I was just curious though, so you have these experiments and let’s say you have one ad that has like a huge click through rate, but not that many ads to cart. But on the flipside maybe some of those people are coming back through your retargeting ads and actually making a purchase. Is it just kind of a gut feel whether you want to continue with that ad?

Miracle: No, I learn because — like I said I got involved in these t-shirt groups and this is how I learned how to do this, and I have had different people help me out. And one of the guys I respect so much whose name is Glen Williams. And he published this article basically saying you need to have a system.

And this is the only way you’ll make it work consistently is if you keep making the same decisions over and over. If every single time you see something you have to think about it, and you have to decide in context, then you don’t have a system. So I really took that to heart and my system was if three days in a row, three consecutive days I don’t see a conversion, then in cut it off.

Steve: Okay, and in terms of the actual creative, what is your ad actually look like, and what does the landing page look like?

Miracle: The landing page is the product page and the ad looks like the product. It’s just the product shot that’s in the 12 — if it’s a link post; it’s the 1200 by 600. So in a lot of times because that’s the rectangular post in items and a [inaudible 00:34:13] can be toll up there more than one item in that picture, I’ll just – it’s nothing fancy, I’ll just put them together in Photoshop like two three pieces.

Steve: Do you put any text in the image?

Miracle: No, the only time I’ll put text is if it’s promotional, but I try to stay away from that, because, and it just was more than anything, it was probably a factor of having something very consistent that I could hand over to a VA to just make the ads, and not have to think what ads to go on each one.

Steve: Interesting, okay, and so there is no text, you don’t like to use promotions it sounds like?

Miracle: I do sometimes, but then — but here is the thing right, because sometimes if you’ve put a promotion on a post, and you’ve done something that restricts you and you get super good engagement, and you want to reuse that post in another campaign at a later time, then you can’t, your hands are tied, because you’ve restricted it.

I try not to put text on the image, I think I’m going to start putting though the logo on some way like where it has maybe a stroke around it, so it stands out on all of the images, I’m probably going to do that. But outside of that probably not much, because I just won’t be able to have a VA make all of these images without having to think about matching up words to pictures.

Steve: Interesting when you are running these experiments how many do you typically run at a given time? So if you are doing yoga pants for example how many variations would you try?

Miracle: How many variations, so typically if I were doing yoga pants I would start off with one set of targeting, split by age, and then the next day — I have to cough, sorry. I would go in and based on the failure or success of what I had already done, I would start another group of ads or ad sets with different targeting. If it’s working I want more, and if it’s not working I have to try again.

Steve: You start out with age groups and interests, right?

Miracle: Right, so I’ll pick a group of interest like I said like yoga journal and yoga pauses and maybe a couple of famous yoga sites, and a couple of brands. And then I’ll just split those into different age groups and that’s three different ad sets and I’ll let that run. And then the next day either way it goes, I’m probably going to have to do something right? Because if it’s not working I’ll have to try something else, and if it’s working I’m going to want to find more groups to target, more groups of people to target.

And then after that’s gotten a lot of traffic, let’s say we’ve run it for a week or more and I have got a lot of visitors and some ads to cart and purchases, then I can go for the look alike audience, and see how that does.

Steve: Interesting, so you don’t go to the look alike until alter?

Miracle: Well if it’s something like yoga pants, right? If it’s a broader general item from my site like a robe, then I’ll go for the look alike based on the audience that I already have from the website. But if it’s something like yoga pants, I’ll collect an audience based on the targeting that I have done right? Because I’m sending them to a specific part of page and even if there are people that have seen that product that didn’t come from that ad, it’s not that big of a deal for me. And I’ll collect a look alike audience for people who visited that page. And I’ll also collect a look alike audience for ads to carts and purchases. Then I’ll go ahead and run an ad to that look alike audience, I also use look alike audience, because before you said, how big are your audiences.

And let’s just say I can’t figure out how to target something, and I have wrecked my brain and the biggest audience that I could come up with is like 70,000 people. Well I’ll also I’ll just run that ad, and once I get enough people in a custom audience, then I’ll create a look like audience off of that with the hopes that that look alike will bring in more people that I couldn’t figure out with my targeting.

Steve: Interesting, so do you do all — one thing I don’t really like about Facebook ads it is kind labor intensive. Do you primarily outsource this stuff?

Miracle: No, no and I have gotten really fast with it. My biggest issue with Facebook is that it’s so buggy that it’s time consuming. And I think at some point I’ll probably go and find something that I can use that’s third party. But most of the ones I have tried haven’t really hit the spot.

I have a blank ad set like — well it’s just a generic campaign, I have a generic campaign that already has the ad sets set by age, they just don’t have any interest in them in the current reset. Then the ads where the pixels and everything are just set up, but there is no ad in it and there are no interests in it. So I can just copy that pain and just pop into …

Steve: You got it stream lined?

Miracle: Yeah.

Steve: I was just curious you separate up by age, and you’ve already told me that the younger crowd doesn’t convert as well, yet you still run the ads, do you just bid last on those ads?

Miracle: Yeah, I allocate less budget, sometimes they convert, but consistently I have found that the cost for conversion for them is kind of high. But they do help, because they are engaged, they do help boost the social proof on the ads which I think impacts other people in the other target ages getting to it. Sometimes I exclude them altogether, like if I really feel like maybe based on price or something else that it’s just not going to work or that group, I’ll exclude them all together.

Steve: Okay and can you just give us an idea of the copy for one of your ads, just any generic ad that you’ve written?

Miracle: Yeah, it normally says I’m not a copy writer, so it’s not going to wow you. It normally says the first thing is a question like do you like something, or like if its pajamas and maybe the pajamas have puppies on it, love dogs, be sure to check these out. I believe it says tag someone who would love this year if you would wear it, click here to get yours. It’s really not fancy.

Steve: Okay and then the ad and then just the product photo?

Miracle: Yeah and but I do ask them to tag someone or to share it and I do, and I got that tip from someone else, and I found that that does make people do what you ask them to do. They will tag people, even on some of my ads almost 50% or more of the comments are them tagging other people.

Steve: Interesting, so you’ll always point this add directly to the product that’s in the photo as well, right?

Miracle: Yeah I haven’t found as much luck with sending them to like a category page or a group of products, and I think part of that is probably because so much of that traffic is mobile.

Steve: Okay.

Miracle: I haven’t had much luck with that. I have played around with different landing pages for the products. Like cleaning it up, not having as much navigation on it, things like that to keep them a little more focused, or honestly really cleaning it up for mobile. Not so much for desktop, but for mobile like getting rid of the extra navigation, getting rid of some of the other stuff that maybe you’d put over to the side, like your related items and rearranging the product page for mobile, not so much for desktop.

Steve: That was my next question actually, so do you; you always show your ads on both mobile and desktop?

Miracle: Yes, always.

Steve: What about on the retargeting side?

Miracle: Yup.

Steve: You retarget on mobile as well?

Miracle: Yup.

Steve: Okay, so would you say then that most of your transactions are mobile transactions?

Miracle: They’re not that far apart. I mean I posted in Ecommerce Fuel; they’re not a percent a whole percentage point apart. They’re maybe a half a percent apart in terms of the conversion rate on mobile and desk top. It’s pretty close and tablet is up there with desktop of course, especially Ipad. Ipad’s really good, iPhone’s really good too, but it’s when you start to break down your audience by device, it’s hard to get a large enough people in it unless you’re going for a really big group in the first place. But yeah, but they’re very close in terms of conversion rate on desktop and mobile.

Steve: That is fascinating, because when I do it I only retarget on the desktop because for some reason our people like there’s a big gap between desktop and mobile use, or smart phone I should say, but yeah. That’s interesting, so in terms of mobile then is there anything that you do to make the check out process smoother?

Miracle: At post PayPal app oddly though most of them are still putting in their credit cards which I still find fascinating, but whatever. I change the buttons, the order of the buttons, and I have … So the software that I use it’s interesting. It’s old nobody uses it, but what it does is it allows you to run concurrent template sets for the same site. It was really built that way for people who were going to translate them. But what it allows me to do is to actually, outside of having something that’s over a mobile responsive, it allows me to set up a completely different template set, and just run traffic to that template set without having to really change the underlying software of the site.

There are a couple other things that I’ve played around with that I’m not sure how I’ll go forward with, but I’ve also played around with not having not asking for as much information right. There’s a down side because the less information you ask for on a credit card transaction the more you can get fraud.

Steve: Right yes.

Miracle: But reducing the amount of information that you ask for to make it easier for them to fill out. Reducing the amount of required fields to make it easier for them to check out, defaulting to more of a one step check out as opposed to the multi set, but also keeping the linking to allow people.

One of the things that I have to do is I found that I was getting a lot of ads to wish list, so I’m going to have to have a program or like let the wish list feature on my site go through Facebook connect, so that if they’ve come from Facebook and they see something and they add it to the wish list, instead of them signing up on the site they can just connect to Facebook and then that would drop in their name and email address and stuff to kind of make it easier.

Steve: Interesting yeah.

Miracle: And that’s another thing that I actually want to play with, I don’t know if I’ll do that until next year, but playing around with like, grabbing some of that persons information through Facebook connect. But it’s little things like that, it’s tweaking things to make it less cumbersome. I also tested doing the Google maps feature, where you can use that in you check out and as they start typing in their address it will pull up suggested addresses like Google maps does, so it’s a bunch of little things like that that I’ve tried.

Steve: Yeah that a great tip.

Miracle: But mostly it’s just, it’s taking away things that you don’t need to ask them that are default in most ecommerce checkouts, so that they have fewer fields to fill in when they check out.

Steve: Excellent, and I also I forgot to ask you this earlier how often do you rotate your ads, like what is the time to stop an ad and refresh it?

Miracle: When I get three consecutive days with no conversions, then that’s typically when I’ll start to get rid of them. If they are converting just not as inexpensively as they were before, I’ll let them go, because that you can control with the budget, right. If your conversions are dropping, then you can drop your budget accordingly. Sometimes what I’ll do is just start something new same post, different, like a little tweak on the targeting just to try to see if I can jump start it again, because I think like I said so much of it is going off for that momentum.

Steve: Right.

Miracle: In a worst case scenario like say none of that’s working, I’ll use the same pictures; I’m a little bit lazy on that regard. I’ll just change the type of post, so if I was running a link post, then I’ll try a carrousel [ph] the ones with multiple pictures and see how that goes.

Steve: Sure, so by momentum you mean likes and shares, right?

Miracle: All of it because…

Steve: Okay.

Miracle: You just start to see that the little graph at the top of the screen when you look at the ad set, you just start to see a little decline where you’re just not gaining as much out of it, so yeah. Then if I had a carrousel post I’ll try a link post, if I had a link post I’ll try a carrousel post.

Sometimes I do a photo post, not so much, they do get grade engagement, but the problem is very, very few people relatively speaking when compared to a link post or a carrousel post that I actually click through to that website. You don’t build as much of a customer audience with the photo post, but they get really good engagement, and you can get a lot of organic traffic from a photo post.

Steve: I was just curious so once you’ve found an ad that works, how much money do you actually put behind it because in my experience if you add a lot of money to your ad it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to get a whole lot more conversions?

Miracle: Right.

Steve: Like it’s not linear.

Miracle: No, you have to bump them bit by bit which is frustrating, so if you were to go and look at all the people who run a Facebook ads and what they suggest, most of them are in the 20 to 50% range in terms of an increase. To increase it is close to mid, like don’t do it in the middle of the day, because what happens is whenever you change an ad set the algorithm has to re-optimize. If you change it in the middle of the day, then you’ve interrupted whatever optimization was working to push it back a few hours while it re-optimizes, so most people will do them at the end of the day close to midnight.

Or if they’re in a different time zone they’ll do them super early in the morning since facebook runs off of the Pacific Time zone. They’ll do them super early in the morning when they’re not really messing anything up, but yeah you really can’t boost that budget way up, because all you’ll end up doing, if you look at your numbers, all you end up doing is sky rocketing you CPM cost. But you still have the same kind of clicks and all that going on, so then everything just tanks, it just gets more expensive, so yeah.

Steve: Yeah that’s totally what I’ve noticed, so you just gradually up the bid 20 to 50% a day till…

Miracle: Yeah I do like 50%.

Steve: 50% okay.

Miracle: If that’s in I’ll go to 15 maybe 16 and then the next day if it’s still working I’ll go 50% in that and so forth, yeah.

Steve: What’s a typical life time of one of your ads?

Miracle: That’s interesting. I have some right now that have been running for over a month.

Steve: Really wow, okay.

Miracle: Yeah, I have some that are older than that and then I have some old ones that were running maybe in June for like 4 to 6 weeks that I’ve restarted and pretty much now this month I’m going to restart a bunch of old ads. Because they’ve already got the social proof, I’ve already got the targeting, and we’re moving in a holiday season…

Steve: Yes.

Miracle: All that really happened with it was that it fatigues, so I’m just going to restart it now that more people are shopping.

Steve: One of your keys it sound like is to reuse these ads that already have a whole bunch of social proof on them, right?

Miracle: Yeah.

Steve: They naturally go viral?

Miracle: Yeah I use the ones that already have a lot of social proof on them, because it looks good right?

Steve: Yeah totally.

Miracle: When you already have got a lot of shares and likes and comments, it looks better than starting new, so yeah. I’m going to restart a bunch of old even probably I’m going to start some campaigns from last year, because I still carry some of the same stuff from year to yeah, so yeah. I’m probably going to go back all the way into like summer 2014, and start picking that stuff and then restarting it.

Steve: Cool, so Miracle yeah, that was a great, that was a lot of detail you just gave on how you run your Facebook ads. We’ve already been chatting for almost 50 minutes, so I want to be respectful of your time. If anyone is interested in undergarments I guess, or I mean questions for you where can they find you?

Miracle: Yeah mostly on Facebook, if someone wants to hop on Facebook and ask me a few questions I’ll be happy to answer them.

Steve: Also you have miraclewanzo.com.

Miracle: I don’t monitor that though.

Steve: You don’t monitor that?

Miracle: I just did it, because I wanted to make sure that my own website showed up in Google.

Steve: Okay and where was that one resource that you were talking about with; was it Greg about having a Facebook strategy, or being consistent with your Facebook strategy?

Miracle: Gosh, I don’t remember.

Steve: Okay, well maybe offline if you can, if you end up finding it, then I’ll link it up in the show notes.

Miracle: Okay cool.

Steve: Cool, well awesome, hey thanks a lot for coming on the show Miracle, really appreciate your time.

Miracle: Thanks for having me.

Steve: Take care.

Hope you enjoyed that episode. I’m always interested in how people structure their Facebook ads, because it seems as though there’re just so many different ways to it and still make money. For example my Facebook strategy is a lot different than Miracle’s, and I’m anxious to give her strategies a try. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequiteherjob.com/episode105.

And once again I’m starting my own ecommerce conference this year. It’s called the Sellers Summit, which is going to be held on May 19th in Miami Florida. If you’re interested in learning about ecommerce, or talking your existing ecommerce business to the next level, then you must attend. Go to sellerssummit.com for more information.

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Finally if you’re interested in starting your own online business, be sure to sign up for my free 6 day mini course where I show you how my wife and I managed to make over 100K in profit in our first year of business. So go to mywifequiteherjob.com for more information, sign up right there on the front page, and I will send you the course right away via email. Thanks for listening.

Outro: Thanks for listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job podcast, where we are giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitherjob.com.