Shopify is hard as hell, it’s not uncommon to blow $10,000 to test 100 products, and lose $9000 in the process. When you ask people how do you target your products, most will always tell you BROAD. Which is total bullshit, and it’s a sure way to lose all your money really fast. (Unless you already spent a million bucks plus, and you have a trained pixel, but that’s another story not all of you starting out can proudly be in possession of).

So HOW DO YOU maximize your chances to succeed and find the peeps most likely to buy your SH*T? 😀    

Facebook audience targeting / interest targeting / keyword targeting coupled with the NARROW down function.

Let’s say we are trying to sling a cooking related product, going broad would mean targeting everyone in the country of U.S.A… thats a woman, maybe 25+ right? That’s like over 30 million people, too much. Even if you narrowed it down by using the “COOKING” interest keyword, it’d be way too broad. You see the way fb works is their algo will automatically throw anyone in that liked anything related to cooking, and this does not mean that person loves to cook; hell no. Maybe they watched America’s Test Kitchen once, and liked the show, or they are fans of Gordan Ramsay just because they ate at his restaurant. THIS WAY IS THE SURE WAY TO BANKRUPTING YOURSELF!

The right way to go is to go after the passionate people, you find them by starting with the broad keywords like COOKING, and then narrowing that down with RECIPES, and then adding in some MAGAZINES like Taste of Home, and even more magazines, like Cooking Light, and more magazines like COOK’s Illustrated Magazine.

We can use facebook’s audience insights and check affinity score to find related targets. We can also use Google and do quick searches for example….. For magazine’s just type top NICHE magazines, NICHE organizations, NICHE clubs, and the list goes on. Then you take these names, and add them into your targeting.

Here’s how cooking is looking for me, narrowed down through 5 layers:

As you can see, the audience is 12000 only – yes, yes I know when you talk to people they will say they love their audience to be 2-5 million, that is the sweet spot.   REALLY?   Why is that the sweet spot, do they explain?  Or do they explain how they got to that audience size?

You see,  the smaller the audience size the better as long as you are targeting and narrowing it to be the most passionate.   Facebook is so damn smart, that if you run ads to these guys and the product does well,  then you can generate a LOOKALIKE based on everyone that clicked through from this audience, and then you will have your 1 mill, 2 mill…. 5mill audiences that are very much like the people in your super passionate narrow audience.   And that is where scaling begins…..    

PS:  Make sure you start out with Website Conversion > PURCHASE objective, as Facebook truly knows who are the buyers so if you do the above and target purchasers you will be able to build a real nice lookalike audience.

PPS:  Retargeting people using dynamic ads is also highly recommended right from the start, as it will help get you the sales you need to scale and NOT GIVE UP!!  

PPPS:  Everyone that follows my blog iAmAttila knows that I REALLY don’t like “SHOPIFY” and drop shipping from AliExpress because a) Takes forever b) quality of goods is questionable.  These two things will hardly ever produce the happy customer, which means you can lose your fb account if you get too many bad reviews and you can also forget about returning loyal customers.  Loyal customers that come back over and over again is how you can turn your little side hustle of Shopify into a business with real employees.  

All the best
-iAmAttila

UPDATED POST FROM 2017!!