While it's not a total deal breaker to be a startup or anew Shopify store, there are aspects of being abrand new business that make jumping into working with a professional agency challenging. On the rare occasion that we work with new stores, we like to see that there are a few key things lined up first.It can be a tricky situation when you are not quite ready for an expert FB ads team to take over and scale your ads. You may WANT toscale and THINK you're ready, but you're really only ready to scale if you have a strongfoundation in place, site-side.
Unless you have the following key metrics in place, you’re not ready for an expert FB ads team to take over your ad campaign,even if you feel you are.
To be specific, you need the following metrics to be optimized:
Website conversion rate (at least 1-2%, however, this does vary with the price point of the products**)
Average order value (Above $50)
Lifetime valueof a customer (Above $100)
** It’s important to note, that as a rule of thumb, higher conversion rates are more typical with lower priced products and lower conversion rates are typical with higher priced products. This is simply because it's easier to get people to buy more affordable items. So the 1-2% baseline doesn't necessarily apply to stores that sell items in the $10-$20 range....in that case, the conversion rate should be higher. We list 1-2% here, because that's a basic threshold. To learn more about the nuance of these metrics, click here to watch this video.
Most importantly, pro agencies like to see that someone is dedicated to working on the website conversion rate while the site is in development and after launching. The foundation plays such a vital role in how Facebook ads perform, so we like to make sure that the business is taking the website portion seriously. Facebook ads are meant to complement and amplify but not fix a business. We've seen many businesses expect Facebook ads to "make" the business upon launching, but without the foundation dialed in, that's simply impossible.
Another KEY aspect to consider is whether yourinventory is fully dialed in without supply chain issues. Are you truly ready for growth? If you try to increase your Facebook ad spend upon reaching great results and then irresponsibly let things sell out on your site, this literally KILLS Facebook ad success. When this happens, your ROAS will inevitably tank due to the conversion rate declining rapidly on the site and you may have to pause ads completely until you're restocked, both of which are extremely problematic. We've seen this time and time again with businesses that have inventory problems and it really gets in the way of incredible growth that can happen with Facebook ads.
So, when you don't have that all dialed in yet, what should you do? Should you still work with a FB adsagency?
Notimmediately. First, you should prioritize working with a conversion rate optimization expert to make it EASY to convert people on your site. That money that you would be spending on a FB ads agency should go to hiring an awesome CRO expertfirst -- that is most important. Because if your site sucks at getting people to buy your products, Facebook ads will not help or fix the problem. That's on the site itself.
But when you have zero traffic or sales, what should you do when youneed that traffic data to help determine what needs to change? Start running some FB adsyourself at a lowbudget. Using a DIY guide, like ourbundle, can help give you the right initial guidance to build your campaign on your own. This will allow you to run some ads, get some initial website data, which will then help you and the conversion rate expert to identify what FIRST needs to be fixed to improve theconversion rate.
Once you've gotten a little bit of traction site-side in terms of your foundation and fixed some holes, you can then entertain the idea of working with anexpert team.
Remember: we cannot stressenough how important dialing in the foundation is BEFORE running Facebook ads.When you jump right into Facebook ads with an agency without any idea about the website foundation, you can end up bleeding a lot of money. Again, spend money on a CRO expert or coach first and run the FB ads yourself (to get traffic). Then, once you have optimized the site well enough (at least 1-2% website conversion rate), you're at the perfect time to find a great agency to take over the ads for you and take you to thenext level.
Working with a new business and website is definitely agamble; we have no data to go by. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get started with building a solid website foundation and optimizing your key metrics. If you’re a new startup that is looking to grow and wants to slowly start running ads in order to gain that valuable traffic data, check out ourFB ad guides to learn our expert secrets while you DIY!
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