Wondering how to use social media ads to get sales?
Hint: stop focusing (only) on sales, and start looking at your audiences
When evaluating social media ads, it can feel counterintuitive to consider anything other than “is it driving sales?” But without a quality audience to serve your ads to, you’re less likely to make those sales. This can be frustrating…and expensive.
Sales are the ultimate goal. The first step to reaching that goal is to focus on building your audience.
“I don’t care about audiences, I care about sales!”
These two things are closely related. To generate sales you need a targeted audience of shoppers that visit your online store. And before they can visit your store, they need to know about your store.
If you run an ad and it doesn’t generate sales but does generate visitors to your online store, the ad is still working. It’s helping you build your audience of potential customers.
The better your audience, the better you can target ads to them, and the higher your chance for sales. One of the most powerful audiences to use is a lookalike audience.
What’s a lookalike audience, and why do I want one?
Lookalike audiences provide a way for your ads to reach new, better qualified potential buyers who are likely to be interested in your brand. Ads that use them see higher conversion rates.
Kit uses Facebook to create lookalike audiences that analyze, in detail, the similarities of your current audience. They then find new people on Facebook and Instagram that look like those visitors.
By showing your ads to people that are most like your visitors, you have a better shot at selling your products.
It takes visitors to get (more) visitors
To build a lookalike audience, you first need visitors to your online store. If you’re just starting out, or haven’t had the opportunity to use organic or paid marketing to drive traffic yet, there’s not enough data to create a lookalike audience. Kit can help!
How it works
Marketing on Facebook is all about gathering the data needed to constantly improve your targeting.
A lookalike audience is built from your current audience (also called a “source” or “custom” audience) of site visitors. (As these visitors turn into customers, Kit also keeps track of those customers in a separate source audience.) To build a lookalike audience, the source audience must contain a large number of store visitors from the same country who are also Facebook users. Generally, you need an audience of around 250 unique, recent visitors before Facebook can create a lookalike audience.
To reach this goal, Kit will suggest an ad and budget for you. Kit will build this ad using interest targeting based on the products featured in the ad.
Once Kit builds the ad, you can preview it and make any changes to the copy you’d like (this is especially easy if you’re using the iOS Shopify Ping app to talk to Kit). Once you’ve said “yes,” Kit will publish the ad for you.
Ads run for seven days if your budget is over $35. Otherwise, they run for two days. You can check how your ad is performing by asking Kit to run a business report.
Once you have a large enough source audience of store visitors, Kit will initiate the creation of your lookalike audience on Facebook. Kit automatically uses this audience for your future ads to provide as high a conversation rate as possible. Since Facebook continues to add your new site visitors to your source audience, your lookalike audience will be regularly updated, which also helps with conversion.
Running ads is not an exact science. It takes time, investment, and some experimentation to build audiences — especially early on.
The power of lookalike audiences is they target new people who are similar to your current visitors and customers. The power of Kit is that it helps you drive traffic to build a lookalike audience. This leaves you free to do the important work that can’t be automated.
Tell us how you use Kit. Share your story for a chance to be featured in our next merchant spotlight!
