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!!
Here is one more post that may interest you: How to find products for your Shopify store that convert on Google Ads.
13 thoughts on “How to find the people most likely to buy your Shopify products? [FREE GUIDE]”
Thanks for sharing. I also drank the koolaid of large audiences (1mil+) but my best campaign ever was with an audience of around 100k using a combination of behaviour targeting narrowed down with interest targeting. I then scaled by using the same audience in different geos and when i built up enough purchases in each country scaled again with LLA.
thanks for reading, yup a lot of kool aid around… i fucking hate kool aid and prefer whiskey.
Attilla doesn’t bullshit.
I see that you’re optimizing for post engagement, why not purchase?
i believe in one thing, and one thing only – that engagement drives cheap clicks, therefore we test PPE first, and where we see traction is worthy of a test as a WC.
Did you figure out how to setup FB pixel the way, so it could capture not just “Purchase” event, but “Purchase-ProductName” events for each product purchased?
What does your comment have anything to do with the written article? answer: NOTHING (#Spammer)
Boom. Thanks Killa
so, did they approve your “You have a virus” push?
Thanks for sharing this. At what number of purchases do you look for with an audience of 12k to create a lookalike? Thanks!
the size of audience isn’t the point here, layering, and adding the things most passionate people do/look for online is the point.. you can build an audience of 1 million+++ using this method which will be better than a broad audience, esp if you do something very niched 🙂
Nothing new bro. I saw you posted this on Facebook Ad Buyer group by Tim Burd but no much response because it’s nothing new
maybe it’s nothing new to You, and maybe I posted it there like a week ago or so. But this is a post from 2017!! I just revised it, because now, more than ever that NEIL PATEL was quoted saying affiliate marketing is dying its extremely important to write unique angles, and target super duper well.
You may “KILL IT” 24/7 going broad, but you can’t go broad lets say if you promote the services of Banners&Landers. Only a super niche market understands the services B&L provides, and if you’d go broad and not laser targeted you’d blow THOUSANDS and not get conversions/orders. SO, the method I shared works UBER WELL if you combine it with a VERY GOOD ANGLE which will also give you a HELL OF AN ADVANTAGE, a 300-400% ROI in CASINO, hell sometimes even 1000%!!!!
The biggest guys doing the most volume today are the ones who do unique angles and do the type of targeting that is “NOTHING NEW” to you, but a def AHA moment to many.