Marketing AMA with Duane Brown, Direct-to-Consumer Marketing Expert

[TyW]

Join marketing expert @DuaneBrown as he hosts an Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) session to answer your marketing related questions.

When: October 21 from 10:00 AM – 11:30 AM and 2:00 PM – 4:00 PM EST

What do I do? From now until the end of the event on October 21, you can ask your questions to @DuaneBrown below. See “How do I participate?” further in this message.

Things you can ask @DuaneBrown about:

• Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): Having trouble converting your visitors? Add your question below.
• Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising: Not sure how to get started with advertising or a specific ad channel? Wondering how to optimize a campaign? How much is too much for an ad campaign? Ask away in the comment section below!
• Social ad platforms: Not sure what platform is best? Have a specific social media ad platform question? Ask your question below.

Sample Questions

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• I’ve never tried pay-per-click advertising before, where would you recommend I start running ads for my furniture ecommerce business?
  
  
• How do I choose the best keywords for my Google Search Ad Campaigns? What tools do you recommend or use frequently with clients?
  
  
• I get 1,000 visitors a day to my ecommerce homepage with no sales, what are some common problems you see with stores that drive traffic but no sales?
  
  
• How do I load my products into my ad campaigns for Google and Facebook?

About @DuaneBrown

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Duane has been called an international man of mystery and digital nomad by friends. He has lived in 6 cities across 3 continents and visited 40 countries around the world.Over the last 5 years Duane has had the opportunity to work with brands including ASOS, Birdies, Walmart, Jack Wills, Rose & Rex and FTD/ProFlowers.


He now lives in Canada helping ecommerce and DTC brands grow through data, CRO and PPC marketing across search & social ad platforms.

About Take Some Risk

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Are you struggling to make PPC marketing work for your ecommerce brand? Take Some Risk helps ecommerce and Direct-To-Consumer (DTC) brands create, manage and scale profitable PPC campaigns across North America, Europe and Australia.


Working with us is like having a Director of Marketing on your team. You’ll get the experience of a senior marketing professional with the skills and knowledge of someone who can get in the trenches with you and win against competitors. Reach out to our team and let us help you scale your brand. This is our moment in ecommerce.

How do I participate?

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1. Ask a question: click Reply below and add your question providing as much supporting detail as possible. Questions that are not related to Marketing activities such as CRO and PPC will be moved to the most applicable discussion board.
   
   
2. Like someone else’s question to upvote it: If you already see a question posted that you are interested in, click the Like button. The questions with the most likes will be prioritized
   
   
3. Follow up to answers: We might not be able to answer every question but this topic will be left open after the event should you wish to ask any follow up questions, or engage with others.

A note regarding email notifications

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If you participate in this AMA topic you will receive email notifications when other members add their questions, and during the event as @DuaneBrown responds.

If you’d like to turn off email notifications for this topic in particular you can but don’t worry about missing a response directed at you as we will be using the Mentions feature which will result in you receiving a mention notification.

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If you’d like to manage more subscription options click on your avatar followed by My Settings and finally Subscriptions & Notifications. Within you can customize which notifications you receive currently, and frequency options.

[TyW-test]

I'm curious about your thoughts on which variable in a digital ad to adjust first.

Whether copy, design, targeting, platform, what do you tend to adjust the most? First?

Thanks! 

[DuaneBrown]

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@TyW-test wrote:

I'm curious about your thoughts on which variable in a digital ad to adjust first.

Whether copy, design, targeting, platform, what do you tend to adjust the most? First?

Thanks! 

---

For our clients, what we adjust first comes down to where we think there is a bottle neck in our customer funnel: People see an ad, click on an ad, go to the site, look at the product page...maybe check out other products, add to cart and start to checkout and purchase.

If we see that the ad is getting shown to tons of people but no one is clicking on the ad. Then we would look at ad justing our ad copy to make sure it resonates with the people we are targeting. If people are seeing the ad and clicking on it and going to the site and not converting. We could look at making tweaks on the site. However, being an agency we can only suggest these ideas to clients and they don't always have the capacity to make these changes. This means then we would look at testing out other audiences to target on Facebook or new keywords on Google.

The two levers you have above all else is who sees your ad and the ad copy that you show that person. You need to make sure you find ad copy that matches an audience and gets them to convert. If you can find that match. You can scale up your ad spend and get more people to convert. 

[CTheory]

I've had my store launched for a while now but haven't done much in terms of the social media marketing. I'm leaning more towards Instagram marketing, but am very apprehensive about it working so I'm a little scared to take that first leap with it. Can you offer any advice or guidance on a first time social media ad user, mainly with Instagram? 

[DuaneBrown]

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@CTheory wrote:

I've had my store launched for a while now but haven't done much in terms of the social media marketing. I'm leaning more towards Instagram marketing, but am very apprehensive about it working so I'm a little scared to take that first leap with it. Can you offer any advice or guidance on a first time social media ad user, mainly with Instagram? 

---

Why are you picking Instagram to start with? Are your customers there? Are you going to able to make it convert for your store? A lot of store owners pick Facebook and Instagram (or even Snap As) because it is always in the news and very popular right now. You need to pick an ad platform that is going to convert for your store and has a lot of your customers on it. If you are starting from Scratch on Facebook and Instagram, then you need to make sure there is audience targeting you can take advantage of. If you can not find interests to target on Facebook that you think covers your target market. Then Facebook and Instagram may not be for your store right now.

[CTheory]

Similar to my question about social media paid ads, I also would like to look into using Google search ad campaigns and have the same reservations and no idea where to begin. Any tips or direction you have for a first timer with Google ads?

[DuaneBrown]

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@CTheory wrote:

Similar to my question about social media paid ads, I also would like to look into using Google search ad campaigns and have the same reservations and no idea where to begin. Any tips or direction you have for a first timer with Google ads?

---

Odds are you not going to have enough ad spend to run ads on Facebook / Instagram and Google Ads at the same time. You need to pick one ad platform, focus your energy and money towards one and making it work as you get sales and scale up how much money you spend on ads. Within Google, I would actually look at using Google Shopping to run ads because 70% of Google search engine result pages (SERP) contain a shopping ad in 2020. Search ads are still important but you can easily find product searches that only contain shopping ads and no search ads. Shopping ads are becoming a must have ad format for ecom stores. For some of our clients, we easily spend 70% of their Google ads spend on shopping ads. In my signature, there is a link to my uDemy course on Google shopping if you need to get started.

[Justina_Fox]

Hi Duane! I've got a question about CRO. We do not display the payment methods (cards, etc.) in the footer in our store due to design reasons. Our average CVR is 0.95% and we are in the beauty/skincare niche. We do not display the payment methods anywhere on the store - there are not on the product page, nor in the cart preview. Basically, the customer finds out about the payment methods in the 3rd step of the process - Payment. Should we add the payment methods to the footer? Also potentially somewhere else?

In terms of payment methods, we currently offer Paypal, or Quickpay (Visa, Mastercard or Paysafecard) on our DK and EU stores, while on the US store we offer Paypal or credit card (Visa, Mastercard, AMEX, Discover, JCB, Diners Club, Elo, and Apple Pay). Our CVR in DK/EU is around 0.85%, while in the US is 1.27%. Should we consider adding more payment methods to the EU & DK stores? Shopify keeps suggesting Shop Pay and Google Pay to us - are they worth our attention?

[DuaneBrown]

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@Justina_Fox wrote:

Hi Duane! I've got a question about CRO. We do not display the payment methods (cards, etc.) in the footer in our store due to design reasons. Our average CVR is 0.95% and we are in the beauty/skincare niche. We do not display the payment methods anywhere on the store - there are not on the product page, nor in the cart preview. Basically, the customer finds out about the payment methods in the 3rd step of the process - Payment. Should we add the payment methods to the footer? Also potentially somewhere else?

In terms of payment methods, we currently offer Paypal, or Quickpay (Visa, Mastercard or Paysafecard) on our DK and EU stores, while on the US store we offer Paypal or credit card (Visa, Mastercard, AMEX, Discover, JCB, Diners Club, Elo, and Apple Pay). Our CVR in DK/EU is around 0.85%, while in the US is 1.27%. Should we consider adding more payment methods to the EU & DK stores? Shopify keeps suggesting Shop Pay and Google Pay to us - are they worth our attention?

---

Yes, you should add payment methods in the footer of your store and on an FAQ page for the store. The worst thing you can do is let something get all the way to end and find out they can not use the payment method they want. Also, if you want to run Google shopping ads in the future, Google requires that you have payments methods displayed on your store and most brands put in the footer.

Generally, it is better to offer more payment methods and especially PayPal, Shop Pay and Google Pay as they offer express checkout, which means someone can buy what they want faster on your store. People are impatient and the faster you can let then buy from your store. The better off you will be. If you are unsure, you can offer these payment methods and then see if your customers start using them. If you find out in 6 - 8 months that no one used them. You have not lost out on running this test.

[imitchell100]

Hello Duane Brown, I have a question about product research and launching a new ad campaign for a new product.

Without any data, how much of a paid media budget do you allocate towards a new product until you scrap the campaign?

Example: 180$ product. 50$ cost of goods shipped. 130$ margin.

[paisanclothing]

Hi there. I run Paisan Clothing Company, an outdoor lifestyle clothing brand that donates half of all its profits to charities across the world.

We have been struggling with our conversion rate (this month its at about 0.13%), despite having between 100-150 unique web visitors a day. 

I would love to hear all suggestions and criticism as to how we can improve this conversion rate! Thanks. 

Our website is paisanclothing.com 

[DuaneBrown]

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@paisanclothing wrote:

Hi there. I run Paisan Clothing Company, an outdoor lifestyle clothing brand that donates half of all its profits to charities across the world.

We have been struggling with our conversion rate (this month its at about 0.13%), despite having between 100-150 unique web visitors a day. 

I would love to hear all suggestions and criticism as to how we can improve this conversion rate! Thanks. 

Our website is paisanclothing.com 

---

Thanks for asking your questions. If you are struggling to convert site visitors. Then you either have an issue with your site design or there is an issue with the people and traffic you are sending to your site. Even with a good CTR or tons of traffic, if people are not buying then it's not the right traffic. Not all traffic is created equal. The one thing we tell each client is that you can get traffic of all kinds but that does not mean it's the right traffic for your store. I would double check that the traffic you are sending to your store is the right type of traffic that is going to convert.

As for your site, there are some tweaks I would consider making to test and see if that help more people convert.

Product Page  Feedback

1. Move the sizing chart off your product pages and make a new page for this. That way you can link to it from your product pages and in the footer. This will clean up your page and make it look more professional
   
   
2. Make sure each product has 3 - 5 images as that will help someone decide if they want to purchase. A lot of products I saw only had 1 or 2 images right now. People like to look at a product from a few different angles.
   
   
3. All your product descriptions are 100% exactly the same right now. You should focus on making the product description unique for each product page. This will also helps with SEO and ranking in organic search
   
   
4. I would redesign the layout of your product page as it's disorganized right now. I would make sure you have Product Title, Costs, Size/Colour Selection, Add To Cart button and then Product Description as the order of your product page information. Anything else needs to be put somewhere else on the product page...the above layout is what people expect

I think looking at some of the changes above and focusing on the products first and talking about the donation second. Will help drive more sales. 

[DKdk]

Hello, I am running my new campaign since 2 days and it's been targetting mexico for some reason with CBO. Now comes the issue : I've got 50 add to carts and 21 checkout initiated during these 2 days (1,5 days) and NO SALES. ??? How is that possible, is there an issue with Stripe and Mexico? I'm using Stripe and Paypal as options. 

[DuaneBrown]

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@DKdk wrote:

Hello, I am running my new campaign since 2 days and it's been targeting mexico for some reason with CBO. Now comes the issue : I've got 50 add to carts and 21 checkout initiated during these 2 days (1,5 days) and NO SALES. ??? How is that possible, is there an issue with Stripe and Mexico? I'm using Stripe and Paypal as options. 

---

If there is an issue with Stripe and Mexico, that is something you would need to chat with Stripe about. As for your marketing efforts to date. 2 or even 4 days worth of data on Facebook is hardly enough time to draw any conclusions with what is going on. Without knowing what you sell, you could easily have a longer sales cycle that causes people to add something to the cart and then they come back and buy weeks later. Also, Facebook can sometimes target people who will add to cart and checkout but never purchase. If you have your Event Optimize towards Add To Cart or Checkout, then this is why you are seeing a high number of Add To Cart / Checkout but no one buying. You should tell Facebook to optimize towards a purchase. Then double check that the audience targeting you have setup is going to convert.

[SvenVA]

I get a lot of traffic but my conversion rate is about 0.8%, My ads get a lot of unique link clicks and I get about a 3-4% Add to cart. The checkout process works fine. Anyone got any ideas? If you want me to show you my store i'll PM you.

[DuaneBrown]

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@SvenVA wrote:

I get a lot of traffic but my conversion rate is about 0.8%, My ads get a lot of unique link clicks and I get about a 3-4% Add to cart. The checkout process works fine. Anyone got any ideas? If you want me to show you my store i'll PM you.

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A lot of traffic can mean different things to different ecom store owners and marketers. Do you mean you have 100 people coming to your store each day or 5,000 people each day. In either case, when clients have a low add to cart percent. That means you are not targeting the right people on Facebook and Instagram. If you ad copy and creative (static as, GIFS, video) are what you wan them to be and are on brand. Then you need to continue to test who you target on Facebook to find a better audience that is going to add to cart, checkout and convert. This is assuming your store is set up for them to convert and is something people want to show on.

[Iwan02]

Hi there. I hear so many different things about paid ads. Some people pay £0.08 per click on an ad? Also what does per click mean? How is your money actually spent when using Facebook/Instagram ads? If you pay £10 a day, or £0.08 per click, how long is that one ad gonna last and how much traffic/engagement/conversion is that budget going to get you per day? And do you pay £0.08 per click on top of the £10 a day? And what if I only have £10 a week or £10 a month to be able to spend on adverts?

[DuaneBrown]

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@Iwan02 wrote:

Hi there. I hear so many different things about paid ads. Some people pay £0.08 per click on an ad? Also what does per click mean? How is your money actually spent when using Facebook/Instagram ads? If you pay £10 a day, or £0.08 per click, how long is that one ad gonna last and how much traffic/engagement/conversion is that budget going to get you per day? And do you pay £0.08 per click on top of the £10 a day? And what if I only have £10 a week or £10 a month to be able to spend on adverts?

---

How much you are paying for each click does not matter. What matters is are those people who click on your ad converting? £0.08 per click means that each time someone clicked on that ad, the person paid Google or Facebook £0.08 on average. If your budget is  £10 / day, then your £0.08 per click comes out of that £10. That means if you had a £10/day ad spend and were paying £0.08 per click, you would get about 125 clicks each day. When you set a daily budget in Facebook or Google, the ad platform will try to spread that money over the whole day.... the ad platform are not perfect and they could spend the budget in 12 hours or 18 hours.

There is no way anyone can tell you how many sales you are going to get for your budget. Especially because we don't know what you sell or what your store is. If you only had £10 a week or £10 a month, then you should not be running any paid ads. You should focus in public relations, in-person/cold calling sales to grow the business. Just like you can spend to much money on ads, you can also spend to little money where you won't see a return on your investment. 

[CorradoM]

Hello

I'm currently using Facebook Ad campaigns within Facebook Business Manager to promote my Shopify Website on Facebook and Instagram. 

Is Facebook Shops a different Advertising service? How are they different?  How do they reach different markets?

If both are a different service, can I use both or do they conflict with each other?

Would it be business viable to use both?

Any clarity would be greatly apricated.

Thank you

Corrado

[DuaneBrown]

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@CorradoM wrote:

Hello

I'm currently using Facebook Ad campaigns within Facebook Business Manager to promote my Shopify Website on Facebook and Instagram. 

Is Facebook Shops a different Advertising service? How are they different?  How do they reach different markets?

If both are a different service, can I use both or do they conflict with each other?

Would it be business viable to use both?

Any clarity would be greatly apricated.

Thank you

Corrado

---

Facebook Shop lets you sell directly on Facebook an Instagram. People will see the shop on your Facebook page and Instagram profile. They can add items to their cart and checkout all right on Facebook. Think of it as having another sales channels kinda like eBay would be another sales channel outside of your Shopify store for selling your products. The Facebook shop would reach people who already like your Facebook page and Instagram profile. 

Your Facebook ads that you run within your Facebook Business Manager would be reaching different people as you get to tell Facebook who you want to target with lookalike audiences or interest targeting. With BFCM here in a few weeks, I would focus on your Facebook ads and getting them ready for the biggest holiday season of the year. Yes you can use both Facebook ads and a Facebook shop but just focus on your Facebook ads and sending traffic to your Shopify store right now.  

[DuaneBrown]

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@imitchell100 wrote:

Hello Duane Brown, I have a question about product research and launching a new ad campaign for a new product.

Without any data, how much of a paid media budget do you allocate towards a new product until you scrap the campaign?

Example: 180$ product. 50$ cost of goods shipped. 130$ margin.

---

We have a few clients at our agency who have products in the $150 - $300 range. For testing out a new ad platform and getting to the point we can scale up our ad spend. We try to set aside $5,000/month for the ad platform. We don't think in terms of campaigns, we think about ad sets for Facebook and ad groups for Google. We pick our targeting and have 3 - 5 ads for Facebook and  2 - 3 ads for Google. Then we launch a campaign with those ads sets/groups. We look for people adding to cart on Facebook and after 3ish days, if we don't see anyone adding to cart. We might pause the ad set and launch a new one targeting a different audience with the same ads. Early on, your goal should be to find an audience that matches your ads and get them to convert ASAP. My budget for each ad set might be $50 - $150/day... it is balance between making sure we spend enough money to know this audience and FB ad combo don't work. We might launch 3 - 5 ad sets at once. 

[imitchell100]

Awesome! Great value! 

I appreciate you @DuaneBrown .

Do you have any tips on conversion rate optimization for a Shopify dropshipping store? In terms of the product page?

I have been using impulse theme for quite a while and the google page speed on our site isn’t that great sitting at a 40 on google page speed.

Besides that, I try to make the target audience, ad, and product page congruent.  

It could be the product is saturated and I’m testing with my small budget lol.

[DuaneBrown]

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@imitchell100 wrote:

Awesome! Great value! 

I appreciate you @DuaneBrown .

Do you have any tips on conversion rate optimization for a Shopify dropshipping store? In terms of the product page?

I have been using impulse theme for quite a while and the google page speed on our site isn’t that great sitting at a 40 on google page speed.

Besides that, I try to make the target audience, ad, and product page congruent.  

It could be the product is saturated and I’m testing with my small budget lol.

---

A saturated market and a small ad spend is not going to work well together. That makes it more competitive and harder to get sales. For any store, you want to have a strong brand and POV. You don't want your store to look like a drop ship store. Go to your favourite ecom sites you like to shop at. How do they layout their product pages, what do all those pages have in common?

When it comes to the layout of your product page. I would make sure you have Product Title, Costs, Size/Colour Selection, Add To Cart button and then Product Description as the order of your product page information. Anything else needs to be put somewhere else on the product page...the above layout is what people expect and see on mainstream non-drop ship sites. If I can go to your store and tell you are drop ship. You need to elevate the branding and design of your store. 

[imitchell100]

Awesome!!! I appreciate you boss!

[zencsaj]

Dear Duane,

could you please help with Google Shopping campaign optimisation? Currently we’re testing it with all products (ab 1100 plus size variations), but only the third of the daily budget is used by Google Ads. Could you give some advice how can I grow the impression rate or what could be the problem? The CTR on our first day is only 1.52% (other PPC campaigns run pretty well)

Thank you!

[DuaneBrown]

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@zencsaj wrote:

Dear Duane,

could you please help with Google Shopping campaign optimisation? Currently we’re testing it with all products (ab 1100 plus size variations), but only the third of the daily budget is used by Google Ads. Could you give some advice how can I grow the impression rate or what could be the problem? The CTR on our first day is only 1.52% (other PPC campaigns run pretty well)

Thank you!

---

One day of data is not enough to know what is happening. It can take a few weeks to have enough data to know what to do with Google shopping. Plus people can take 3 or 4 clicks with Google shopping before converting. With that said, if your whole budget is not being used. Then you mat need to optimize your Google Shopping Product Titles and making sure you have all the relevant keywords in your product title. If you are suing the Shopify app or one of the other free Google shopping apps to connect your store to the Google Merchant Center account. Then you may need to use a Google Shopping Supplemental Feed to customize your product titles even more.

A good example if you call a product variant navy and that is in your product title. It would be worth having the word blue in your product title as people are more likely to search for blue vs navy for a product. If your product titles are not the issue, then you should look at the Benchmark CPC column inside your Google ads account and see if your CPC bids are high enough to make your SKUs competitive in the ad auction. If your bids are to low, you may not be winning enough auctions to warrant your budget being spent. All this advice takes into account you are using standard shopping campaigns and not smart shopping campaigns.

[zencsaj]

Thank you very much, Duane, so useful! Are these settings showed in your course?

All the bests,

Magdi from Budapest, Hungary

[DuaneBrown]

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@zencsaj wrote:

Thank you very much, Duane, so useful! Are these settings showed in your course?

All the bests,

Magdi from Budapest, Hungary

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The course covers a lot of what you need to know to get up and running with Google shopping. We do have a video on product titles and how we format them.