Ep 30 | Know Your Numbers To PROFIT Online

With that let’s dive right into our five questions for today so that I can go ahead and cover that topic. The first question is by Juan. Juan said,

If one account has been closed by Facebook because of they said I breaking the terms, can I still require more ad accounts? what to say when applying the new account? Thanks!

That’s a really good question that you brought out Juan.I hate to bring the truth to you but the reality is that if you have your account suspended, you either have to appeal it or try to get your account back by constantly messaging and sending email Facebook support to explain why you got your account suspended and tell them you’ll get it fixed or it may be a human error on Facebook’s side. This is why in all my videos especially in my 10-part video training series and also in my members’ area, I keep telling everyone to get a business manager account in Facebook. Before you start advertising you can actually get a business manager account and from there, you can right away create three new ad accounts within one Facebook log in. Knock on wood, if one of your ad accounts got suspended, you still have two more ad accounts that you can use so it doesn’t sabotage and put a halt in your business. That’s very, very important.

At times there are a lot of cases where you can actually appeal with Facebook and get your ad account back but you have to have a full explanation and drill down to the culprit of why you got your account suspended. If you don’t know why your account got suspended chances are Facebook is not even going to respond to your email because they feel that you have not done your due diligence yet. So if you have an ad account suspended you really have to figure out, “What did I violate? Is it a claim? Is it because my landing page is irrelevant to my ad? Is it because there is something wrong with my ad or some words which I shouldn’t be using? You have to drill that down first before you can actually file an appeal and make sure that you don’t basically violate their policy again. Anyone of you who is having a Facebook ad account right now seriously get a business manager account. Once you have that you can have three ad accounts right out the gate under one single log in. Most importantly if you two ad accounts that are active with ads running maybe $5, $10 or $20 a day, you can actually request Facebook to give you more ad accounts.

I have one of my ad accounts in my business manager over a thousand ad accounts. I have given the ability to do so. Here’s the thing though, inside your business manager account, if one of you ad accounts got suspended you are not able to create a new ad account. You have to create as many ad accounts as possible so that if one of them got suspended you still have a lot or more ad accounts to use so it doesn’t sabotage or jeopardize your business. That’s my answer to you Juan. Again, I know that it sucks and this may not be the answer that you are looking for. The other thing that you can do which is obviously a risk on your end is look for a friend or family member’s Facebook and create a new ad account and make sure that you do not violate their policy again. I hope that helped you out. Melissa said that I have five accounts on BM. Great stuff. It’s usually three, four or five. It really depends. It varies from time to time on how many ad accounts you can actually get. I have seen one of my business managers’ accounts when they first started I only had the ability to create two then I had to request for more. But the thing is if you are in good standing and if you have active ads running you can contact support at Facebook to give you more ad accounts.

The next question is by Jeff Dimmick. Jeff said,

Hi Fred,
I launched a new Shopify store several months ago and have been drop-shipping some of my products from China using Aliexpress. The problem I’m running into is the long shipping times using ePacket delivery from China to my customers located here in the USA. Even when I list the expected delivery times in my product descriptions, my customers still contact me wondering what happened to their orders and it causes them to be less likely to ever order from me again in the future. Are there other options for sourcing my products from USA based suppliers that still would offer competitive pricing along with faster shipping times? I appreciate your videos and insights.
Thank you very much! 🙂

The answer to your question Jeff is that Aliexpress is already the cheapest source when it comes to sourcing products. It really depends also on where your customers are located. If they are located in a remote area yes chances are it will take a longer time for people to actually receive the product.  I do have to say though; you’re not going to get a lot of people asking about where that product is going to be. Maybe you’ll get 1 out of 10. I have seen those, around 1 out of 10 customers will contact you and say, “Hey where’s my order? I want to find out the tracking status.” As long as you are responsive to every single email inquiry and you give them a tracking number customers are going to be fine with it. That’s very important right out the gate.

If you really want to look for a US supplier, here’s the reality the cost is going to be a lot more. Your margin is going to be a lot slimmer than what you can actually make up of Aliexpress because you’re going straight to the manufacturer and going straight to the source with Aliexpress. With US suppliers, there are several places that you can look at one of them is doba.com. The pricing margin is not as great but they’re all sourced in the United Sates. You have to work directly with the vendor, communicate and create a communication line with them. Another US supplier that you can check is wholesalecentral.com but as what I have said the margin won’t be as great.

Next question is by Timothee Legros. This is actually the question that inspired me to put into the topic “You have to know your numbers”. Here’s his question for me,

Hi Fred!

So recently I ran an ad campaign that got around 2.6k views (almost half organic), 90 engagements, 20 link clicks and 1 sale. At this point I had spent about $30-$40 in ads. My questions is, when is it time to stop a campaign based on data? Is the data I just gave you good results or are those bad results? What are some key metrics that you utilize to decide whether to keep running or to kill a campaign?

Love the vids keep it up!

Timothy here’s the real deal, I think that you never actually gone through my 10-part video training series which is absolutely free. Simply go to Google look for Zero Up lite or if you are inside my starting from zero community you’ll see a pin post right at the top of the Facebook page and you’ll see how you can download my 10-part video training series. In there, it will tell you the four data points of optimization which are critical for your products. Here’s the thing, based on what you’ve told me I can tell you right out the gate that this is a mediocre ad and chance for you to actually generate lot of profit from this ad is slim. Here’s the reason why, you have 20 link clicks and you spent around $30 to $40 in ads so let me take the lower and upfront that means that you spend $30 in ad to make a sale. I don’t know what kind of product you’re selling but I would assume if you have spent $30 to 20 link clicks and have 2.6k views in your ad then chances are you’re losing money. First data point is going to be the cost per purchase. I’m pretty sure you are losing money with $30 and only having 1 sale right now.

Right now you’ve already spent $30 to only acquire 20-link click so if you take $30 divided by 20 clicks so your cost per click is a buck 50 right now. If you want to be in the profit zone, into the black zone not into the red zone, you need to actually get your cost per click lower than a buck 50. The best way is to really get under a buck. Based on what I’m seeing since that you’re telling me that you’re getting half organic views which means that people are somewhat interested in your product and in your ad, so it maybe just the targeting that you wanted to basically tested out. That’s why I have something called the 3×3 targeting or 3×3 Facebook ad method for you to test out different ads and also different targeting because again there are three variables that would make or break; number one is the product, number two is the ad creative and number three is actually the targeting.

Based on what I’m seeing if you’re getting half organic views from just running your ad which means that people are interested in your product you just may not have the targeting right. You want to basically look into that. Again, here’s a very important thing, you absolutely need to know your numbers. You need to know what they are. You need to figure out if those numbers are going to be sustainable for you and for you to actually generate profit or not. You can basically make a ton of sales but if you don’t know your numbers and profit margins you are not going to be in business for long. I don’t like to bring it up but that is the truth. You need to know how much you’re making per order, how much is going to your pocket and how much is going into your ads so that you have a healthy margin in place for you to generate profit. You can be breaking even that is absolutely fine. If you’re breaking even you have to make sure that you have what we call back-end sales funnel involved so you can make all your money back. I know a lot of large and small companies which are just simply break even on the front product so basically the sale covers the cost of goods, the shipping and the ad cost and they acquire a customer basically for free and they make all their money back from selling them through emails or other channels that don’t require them to use more ad spend. It’s very important so seriously you need to know your numbers because again, you have all the data points here, $30 ad spend, 20 link clicks that’s $50 cost per click it’s going to be hard for you to generate profit from that and given the fact that you only have one sale. Look at your data and your numbers.

Moving on to the fourth question by Amy Ivanova. Amy said,

Hey Fred. Do you use the Facebook Engagement add for Page Likes? Would you recommend it for new-starting eCommerce store? Thank youuu 😉

I covered this in previous episodes and the answer is NO. We are direct advertisers. By likes it doesn’t mean that it will translate into a sale. What you have to do is to make sure that you use website conversion ads so that you are actually getting purchases. Inside your ad when a person is scrolling through the news feed he or she won’t know how many page likes or followers you absolutely have. All they care about is what do you have to offer, what’s in it for me? What you have to do is to monetize it and translate your ad and invest into your ad and you profit. You don’t want to basically invest into likes where chances are when you post something organically it’s not going to reach to every single of your followers based on the Facebook algorithm so chances are you’re simply just wasting money right out the gate.

You are telling me your brand new but if you are running your business for quite some time, your building a brand then you may want to allocate somebody on building likes so if people see they’re like, “Wow, a great social presence” and you can go from there. But the truth is if you’re new to ecomm, you’re new to all this

You are telling me your brand new but if you are running your business for quite some time, your building a brand then you may want to allocate somebody on building likes so if people see they’re like, “Wow, a great social presence” and you can go from there. But the truth is if you’re new to ecomm, you’re new to all these, there’s no need of you spending money on getting likes. It’s not needed to be really honest with you.

Now to the last question, Roger said

Hope you try pronouncing my last name! lol

I’ve just started watching your videos and find them choc full of nuggets. Thank you.

I have a couple of questions for you.

I’d was wondering what is the minimum number target audience you would select when advertising on Facebook? Is 150,000 too low? Secondly, what strategy has helped you make the most money – selling mostly one off products/orders or creating a customer list and then on-selling them in the future?

Thanks again. Keep up the great content.

Roger, great question. If it’s a brand new product that I have never tested and I’m just trying out right into the market, I test around 300k to 500k. That is around sweet spot, it can go up to 700k but less than a million. The reason why is that because you want to drill it down specifically to whom most likely respond to my product? You don’t have to go in a bigger market right away. You have to basically go small to test out the product if it works or not. You can go lower; in this case you’re saying 150,000. You can’t go over 150,000 since what’s going to happen is that you will exhaust the audience quite quickly because even when Facebook shares with you that there are 150,000 audiences inside the select targeting, you’re not going to get all 150,000 because not all are active and on Facebook every single time.

What you have to do is to monitor the frequency of your ad. You can start with 150,000 basically right out the gate maybe in the first week if you’re spending $10 a day you may not have a high frequency right away but on the second week it will increase. How frequency really works? This works in all forms of advertising. Frequency is basically standing for how many times have your ad being showing to that specific individual. Let’s say you have a frequency of a two. It tells you that at the end of the day in your audience, in your interest targeting every single person have seen your ad two times already. And if you actually look at your data and compare it back to when it started to until you hit that frequency of two, you’ll see that your cost per click start to increase, you click-through rate decreases and your cost per purchase increases at the same time. When that happens that means that you are already exhausting the audience and go from there. You can do that if you want to look for a short-term play, make some cash and move on. At the end of the day, what I really look at is around 300,000 all the way to 500,000 when I first test a product. If I know that the product is working out well then I would go as high as a 1 million plus but no more than like 1.5 or 1.6 million because that’s the next scaling route. Again, that’s what I look at and that’s the number that I really look at the end of the day. There’s no set stone on what’s the absolute minimum. You can go ahead and target 50,000, you can do that if you want but your ad exhaustion would just come our very, very fast. That means that you have to basically change the market, create a new ad creative and sell the same product or sell a different product that is similar and keep chasing that same market because chances are even if you go after the 50,000 and let’s say that every single person actually saw your ad more than once or twice still not all of them are going to buy your product. You may have a 2% click-through rate and that means 98% still haven’t clicked because they have not been convinced enough to click and buy your product. You’re leaving out 98% of the market so you can chase the market at the same time. I think in one of my ask Fred Lam shows that I hosted earlier this year; I talked about chasing a market. Go to my YouTube channel there’s a video all about it. Again, there’s no set number.

To answer you last question which is what strategy has helped you make the most money selling mostly one-off products/orders or creating a customer list and then on selling them in the future? What I can tell you is that I have my customer retention as high as over 25%, so 1 out of 4 customers comes back to keep buying from me. You can actually sell one-off items but you still need to have a back-end strategy in place because that’s where all the money comes in.

Here’s another thing though, when it comes to subscription and continuity which is a completely different animal and I never really talked about this publicly because there’s a lot of things that you have to basically worry and keep involved inside.  Subscription and continuity is going to basically help your company make a million a year all the way to $5 million a year and onwards. However, your acquisition of your first customer is always going to be a “one-off” product because you still have to convince them to subscribe and basically buy from you. When it comes to subscription products there are a lot of things that you have to worry about. Number one is that majority of the stuff on Aliexpress are subscription products. There are really brilliant and smart people who sells like mystery boxes or mystery loots that make work well. Maybe you have someone signed up for $15 and every single month you send them a man’s accessory gift since they bought from men accessory and they’ll get something random from you. You can look into that. There are two different plays. I have basically played both but the subscription model is a lot harder because it is more like for health supplement, things that are going to be recurring and they are more of products that are a necessity and those basically work.

At the end of the day, one-off products still work really, really well but what is most important and where the money is always going to be at is always at the back—the back end profit, the back end sales funnel that you have. You find products that simply your customer will most likely also buy because they’ve already expressed interest within your niche and build a relationship with them and start selling them more products down the road.

So, that’s really it for our five questions today. Listen, if you want your question to be featured go to www.fredlam.com/ask make sure you submit your question in full details. Only submit one question; people are abusing me right now. They’re putting multiples questions in one entry, seriously just one question that will be best for me and for everyone.

That’s it for today’s daily huddle. Make sure you are here live with us at 6PM Pacific, 9PM Eastern. I’m going to make a public announcement about a recent change on Facebook  very, very shortly after I have drilled down to the culprit. It has been something that a lot of people are basically making comments about in the internet, everyone is scared about it. I have some information about it already but I don’t want to make a public statement until I really drill downed on this so make sure you basically stay tuned in my YouTube channel and Facebook, on my emails because this update that Facebook had done yesterday makes a drastic difference into a lot of people’s businesses. Once I have all those information, I will immediately share it with you guys. Let me know in the comment box what you think about today’s daily huddle. If you are still not a follower of my Facebook page make sure you like my page then click on the following see first so you always see my posts and if you are on YouTube make sure you subscribe to my channel. In 2018, I have some amazing stuff to share with you guys other than just our daily huddle. Other than that I look forward on seeing you guys tomorrow and make sure you keep hustling and keep go, go, go.  Bye now.