In this episode of Subscription Box Answers, I discuss Facebook ads and what's working right now.
Over the last six weeks or so, Advantage+ ads have been performing better than ever. I share how we are currently using them at BusterBox and how I recommend testing them for your subscription box.
Getting this right on your account can help reduce CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) and increase volume.
If you have a question you'd like answered on the episode, head over to www.SubscriptionBoxResources.com.
The Subscription Box Experts Academy is opening on March 12th. You can join the waitlist at www.SubscriptionBoxExperts.com."
In this episode of Subscription Box Answers, I discuss Facebook ads and what's working right now.
Over the last six weeks or so, Advantage+ ads have been performing better than ever. I share how we are currently using them at BusterBox and how I recommend testing them for your subscription box.
Getting this right on your account can help reduce CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) and increase volume.
If you have a question you'd like answered on the episode, head over to www.SubscriptionBoxResources.com.
The Subscription Box Experts Academy is opening on March 12th. You can join the waitlist at www.SubscriptionBoxExperts.com."
Welcome to Subscription Box Answers with your host, liam Brennan. You're no rubbish, no crap. Straight to the point podcast with real, actionable tips, real strategies and insights from the industry which will help you start and grow your own successful subscription box business. You ask the question, you ask the questions, liam gives the answers. It's as simple as that.
Speaker 2:Welcome back to a brand new episode of Subscription Box Answers. As always, I hope your day has gone really well, I hope business has gone well and I hope 2024 has been good for you so far. On today's episode, we're back chatting about Facebook ads and I'm going to share what's working for us right now, because things change all the time in the world of Facebook ads. Before we jump into that, I have a very exciting announcement On March 12th, I'll be reopening the Subscription Box Experts Academy. Now, if you don't know what the Subscription Box Experts Academy is, no problem, let me explain.
Speaker 2:This is a full, self-paced video course slash program which will teach you exactly how to make your subscription box business a massive success. If your goal in 2024 is to either launch a new subscription box or scale up your existing subscription box, I highly recommend joining it. It contains all the strategies that we've used in Buster Box to sell over $11 million worth of boxes Over the last few years. There's been so many different subscription box owners in every niche you can possibly think of join this program and have massive success. So if your goal is to have massive success with a subscription box business in 2024, this is the program for you, because you'll get all the knowledge and support that you need to achieve that. Now, the only thing is I only ever opened the program to 50 subscription box owners at any time, and the reason I do this is I want this program to have a massive positive impact on your business and I want to be able to deliver an exceptional service, and if more than 50 people join, I would not be able to provide the service that I want to provide in the private group. So if you're interested, please head over to SubscriptionBoxExpertscom right now and join the waitlist. As I said, the program will be opening on March 12th, so a good while ago now, facebook released something called Advantage Plus Shopping Companions, and if you don't know what a Advantage Plus Shopping Companion is, let me explain. It's basically like open targeting on steroids. It's simple to set it up and all you're really doing is just setting it up. Picking is the budget and, obviously, your creatives. That's literally it. So really simple setup and the Facebook algorithm then handles the rest.
Speaker 2:Now, when this first came out, it was suggested that this should be used to supplement your main campaigns. So you would roam your manual campaigns as normal, but you would also roam advantage and put shopping campaigns as well to supplement them. You give them probably 30% of your overall budget and it would help your overall performance. It worked great. Now we've been testing this since it was first released and it has been really good for us and we've gotten a lot of new subscribers signed up from it and a very good cac overall. But I would say that over the last six weeks, performance has really improved on this. It's improved to the point that on some of our campaigns it's even working better than a manual setup with lower cac and more volume.
Speaker 2:Now let me explain our setup right, just so you can understand this fully. We have a engagement campaign rung in on a low budget. Now, I've mentioned why we do this a few times on previous episodes of this podcast. So if you're interested in finding out why we do this, definitely listen back to some of the other Facebook episodes and you'll find out. We then take the post IDs of those engagement ads and we pull them into our manual conversion campaigns. Okay, so we've our engagement campaigns, bring you all budget, put the post ID into our conversion campaigns and we run them all together and that's been working great for us for a good few months now, but we also run Advantage Plus Shopping campaigns as well, and we actually use the exact same engagement ads in them campaigns as well and, like I said, over the last six weeks, these have been working unbelievably well for us.
Speaker 2:Now I speak to a lot of different subscription box owners, some of them truly subscription box experts program, some people like just now in the industry. Some of them have bigger businesses than mine and a lot of them are seeing similar results. Over the last six weeks or so, advantage Plus Shopping has been performing really well for them as well. Now, my guess is right it will eventually get to the point where the algorithm is so powerful. There is simply no need for any kind of targeting or editing, and I actually think we're nearly there now, and I think they would have gotten here a lot sooner if it wasn't for the iOS updates. I think that really knocked them back for a few years while they were figuring out how to actually solve that. But apparently a lot of stuff has gone on behind the scenes and I would say Facebook ads are working the best they have worked since before the iOS updates. They're really back to a high level now, which is great because, as subscription box owners, we usually need Facebook ads to actually scale up.
Speaker 2:Now, if you haven't been using Advantage Plus Shopping at all, I recommend testing it. Keep it really simple. You can go with my engagement strategy or, if you want, just put in four ads that you know a hundred percent will convert and give it a go. Now, the thing about any of these strategies that I share right, to get any of them to work, or just Facebook ads working in general, you have to have ad creative that converts and offer that converts and a website that actually converts. The mechanical side of running Facebook ads is actually only a really small part of the entire equation. Yep, all of this stuff can really help you out and it's great to know it.
Speaker 2:But if you don't understand why people actually buy your product and you can't put together an offer that actually converts, then none of this mechanical stuff or any of these strategies will actually make a difference. And the example I want to give you is if you never knew any of the mechanical stuff but you were really good at putting together an offer and you went in with like some basic Tagging, a really basic campaign with just a killer offer, that would actually perform Pretty well for you, probably okay. But if you knew everything about the mechanical side of set up Facebook ads and all the different strategies, but you never had a clear how to put together an offer and your website didn't converse, it would not make a difference what strategy you try to implement. You would find it really difficult to get traction. So definitely focus on both sides of the equation and see the full picture. When it comes to advertising, you have to be good at Putting together offers, writing copy, testing your website and you need to know the mechanical side. It's not one or the other. Also, every single ad account is different, and a few people that I've spoken to have actually said advantage posts is terrible and it doesn't work for them at all. Now I've a theory that if you have a mass market product, there is a higher likelihood that this is going to work, and if your product is like really niche, well then it still may be better to do some of the targeting yourself. But look, you literally never know unless you test.
Speaker 2:We can drive a lot of volume in the UK, but Ireland has always been difficult because the country is so small. It's a really, really small country and there's not as many dog owners over here and there is not as many people on the line Over here either, because population is smaller. So recently I switched all of our campaigns in Ireland to advantage plus Literally no manual campaigns at all. I said I'm going to test this, I'm going to switch everything to advantage plus. Well, the cake dropped by about 20% and now we're actually able to drive more volume. Now this test has only been going on for probably a week or so at this stage, so it's still pretty early in into the experiment, but the science are very positive and what he really is.
Speaker 2:We have a mass market product and we're giving Facebook full control to target anybody in any audience bucket, so the audience size is less of an issue, whereas if I went with like lookalikes or interest based targeting, I'm restricting Facebook in a country that's already Small.
Speaker 2:So in this case it makes a lot of sense to go with advantage plus and just give them full control and say, okay, anybody in this country who you think is interested in signing up to a dog subscription box, get our ads in front of them and See if that's something up and it, like I said, it's been working great so far. So I hope you found this podcast Helpful and, if you did, will you mind giving me a review, either on Apple or Spotify or just wherever you listen to podcasts, because it just really helps me get this show out to more people. Now we'll be back next week at the exact same time and, as always, if you have a question that you want answered on the show, head over to Subscription box resources. Calm, join the free Facebook group and post it there. Speak to you then. Have a good day.