This article is going through Ismael Mouhab’s journey of scaling an ad account to $5 000 000 revenue per month for a period of 7 months. Ismael was able to achieve this while keeping a relatively healthy margin of 4.0 ROAS.
This income was generated by the use of Facebook Ads only without Google Ads, or any email marketing. While running campaigns for this brand, Ismael was able to generate $500 000 during the Black Friday week as well.
In this article, we are going through the campaign strategy that effectively produced results for Ismael during this 7 months period, from understanding the customer avatar, testing creatives, tracking up to scaling. And also how he adjusted the campaigns to maneuver through the Apple iOS 14 update which strongly affected Facebook advertisers.
Brand details
- Niche: Skincare
- AOV: $60
- CVR: 4%
- Target: USA
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The Customer Avatars
A customer avatar is a representation of your ideal customer or the type of person you want to purchase your products or services. Once you have a product or service to sell, you need to start figuring out what kind of customers will actually be buying from you.
Ismael suggests that creating customer avatars based on the different customers that you aim to serve in the market can help you answer three key questions:
- Who will use my product?
- What problems do they currently have?
- How does my product help solve those problems?
Skincare is something that has been attracting a lot of attention in the e-commerce space lately. There are so many pages and groups on Facebook that talk about skincare. There are so many brands that are bossing the skincare industry and have millions of followers. All of these points are taken as interests that Facebook collects data from and creates audience sizes based on how popular each interest is. When you choose these interests, you are basically narrowing down your audience size and focusing on things that will definitely get you the result.
Building customer avatars based on different potential customers that may buy from your skincare brand helps you establish a connection with them which then helps you pick out their interests and target your ads better. Interest targeting also dictates what your ad copies and creatives will look like and can help you make an educated guess on how the audience will interact with your ad.
How many avatars do you need?
There is no hard and fast rule on how many customer avatars you need to make for your brand. When starting, focus on creating 3 or more customer avatars. That will allow you to focus on all types of potential customers you will have in your target market. You can target a whole host of interests and demographics based on each avatar you create and give your brand the best chance to build awareness and loyalty.
For products that have customers at the heart of their brand, you don’t need many customer avatars to better target your ad. Your brand is already focusing on a problem-solving feature and so you naturally have customers who are the main targets. You focus on those customers and create your customer avatars based on those features.
On the opposite spectrum, a market-centric brand focuses on identifying the needs, challenges, and pain points of existing customers in the market and aims to cater to those through the products/services that they offer.
Customer Avatar Checklist
One of the first things you need to do is name your customer avatars. Each customer avatar must have its own name based on what gender they are and what problem or market segment they fall in.
When it comes to customer avatars, demographics are important, but you don't need to focus on them too much. The demographics that you should add are age, education level, relationship status, parental status, and the income level or career path that they have.
Quoting means putting yourself in the customer’s shoes and taking educated guesses on what they might say or complain about when it comes to the industry you’re operating in.
These quotes can be anything ranging from ‘I wish I could have ______’, ‘I want something that helps me ______’, or ‘Is there any product that can help my skin with _______?’
This is one aspect that doesn’t apply to all businesses. If you’re selling a product/service that caters to working individuals or if your target market includes customers who are working, you can add this section to your customer avatars.
Now we're moving on to the more interesting aspects of creating customer avatars. Once you have the name down, the demographics sorted, and the quotes penned down, you need to focus on other aspects of your avatar's life. One of the most important things in their personal life.
Getting into the personal life and how each avatar functions in their daily life can help you get a deeper understanding of your customers and allow you to focus on interests that may bring in a better ROI and engagement on your Facebook ads. The key things to focus on here can be broken down into a few easy questions that you can ask yourself as you create each avatar:
- What are they interested in?
- What are their hobbies?
- What do they do that no one else would do in their daily life?
- What are their favorite brands?
- What are the values they live by?
- How do they like to spend their free time?
- What kind of shows or movies are they watching?
- What kind of music are they interested in?
- What apps do they use daily?
- What other tools (tangible or intangible) are they using?
- Goals and Challenges
Walking along the same path, the final thing you should be focusing on when creating your customer avatars are the perceived goals and challenges they may have. Understanding the goals of each avatar can help you understand how your product/service will fit into their lives and how you can add more value with your offer.
- Creatives
Gone are the days when you could have a creative running smoothly for a year, since the IOS 14 update was launched one of the main changes that we noticed was the need for consistent new creatives.
Ismael noticed that creative fatigue happens once every 3-4 weeks at the minimum, therefore the main solution when it comes to creatives is to be consistently refreshing them.
Although he recommends speaking to a creative agency regarding your brand and what kind of creatives might work for you, he found these types of creatives extremely profitable:
- Creatives that include current social media trends
- Images with 4+ benefits of the product
- Influencers
- UGC
- "How to use the product" Videos
- Unboxing videos
- "Comparing benefits to competitors" Images
- "News styles/advertorials" Images
- Memes(works on low AOV & younger demographic)
- Tracking
When it comes to tracking, Ismael used UTMs (Urchin Tracking Modules) and Hyros. Offline conversions are great to get more conversions sent to Facebook, but he finds them a bit complicated in many instances.
- Post-iOS 14 Facebook ads strategy
Once the iOS 14 update was released, Facebook became less of a ‘set it and forget it’ platform to an ‘always new challenges’ platform (yet still profitable).
"We faced many challenges, but we were able to adapt to the situations when things went bad, which is how we managed to achieve 7-figure revenue with positive ROAS," Ismael says.
The ads strategy below is what he used to test the ad campaigns, stabilize them and scale them to $5 500 000 per month.
TOF Customer Avatar Testing
During testing, Ismael went with 3 ABO campaigns, which were:
- LLA campaigns
- Interests campaigns
- Broad campaigns
LLA and Interest campaign structure:
- 8 - 12 adsets
- 8 Ads/ adset (2 Images & 2 Videos duplicated twice)
- $100/ day budget
- 1- day click
Broad campaign structure:
- No target
- 3 adsets
- Age split 18 - 34, 35 - 44, 45 - 65+ (depends on the customer avatar)
He ran these test campaigns for 4 days and he based the winners on the lowest CPA and highest CTR.
Stability
To maintain the stability of the test campaigns, Ismael took the following steps:
- Running the winning ABO campaign, adsets, and ads for another 4 days, then
- Duplicating them to CBO campaigns and raising the budget to $500 - $1 000
- Not turning off the ABO campaigns until CBO campaigns perform well.
Stability to Scaling
Before scaling, Ismael made sure that he ran the CBO campaigns for 3 days until they break even or have a profitable ROAS.
His goal was then to increase the daily budget by $100 for profitable campaigns every 4 days.
"If the performance drops after increasing the budget, then duplicate the adsets inside the CBO. If the first adset starts performing poorly with a bigger spend you can turn it off, if not, you can run it simultaneously with the duplicate adset.
If the campaign does not perform within a 14 hours period, turn it off for that day and turn back on 12am/ midnight ad account time (so it spends evenly for the entire next day).
If the campaign is not performing for a day, ‘refreshing’ worked well for us. We turned it off and on immediately." Ismael says.
After 1 month this scaling strategy stopped working for him so he moved to manual bidding.
New strategy — scaling campaigns with manual bidding
To scale with manual bidding, Ismael took the following steps:
- Change all CBO scaling campaigns to ABO with bid cap.
- Bid cap at 0.75x CPA, slowly increase until results come in.
- 7- days click or view.
"We had 2 members from our team monitor the ads 24/ 7 since the campaigns did not have accurate reporting so we could not keep rules in place (the changes were made based on GA and Hyros reporting).
But this strategy performed well only for a while, so we adapted by duplicating the ABO manual bidding campaigns to CBO auto-bid 1 - day click or view.
Which was the final campaign structure where we were able to run profitably till today by consistently increasing the budget, new adsets, and ads." Ismael says.
MOF and BOF strategy
Campaign structure:
- ABO campaign
- $20+/ day per adset (upon the TOF budget increase)
- 7- days click or view
- Auto-Bids
MOF:
- FB Page Engagement 365 Days, 180 Days, 30 days, and 15 days
- Instagram 365 Days Engagement, 180 Days, 30 days, and 15 days
- Video Views : 3 sec, 50%, and 75%
BOF:
- Page Views 180 Days, 60 Days, 30 Days, 15 days, and 7 days
- AddToCart 180 Days, 60 Days, 30 Days, 15 days, and 7 days
- Video Views 95%
Creative angles:
- Unboxing
- UGC/ testimonials
- Discounts
Conclusion
The strategies above are exactly what Ismael used to scale his client’s Facebook campaigns to $5 500 000 per month in revenue with an ad spend of $740 000 per month.
According to Ismael, understanding and modeling the customer avatar first before running the campaigns helped him discover the "perfect audiences" to target for the long term.
We hope that this has given you insight on how to scale Facebook ads on high-spends while ensuring that you have a positive ROAS.
