5 Mistakes Subscription Box Owners Make With Meta Ads!
May 20, 2024
Liam Brennan
Meta ads are usually the best and most effective way of acquiring customers for most subscription box businesses. However, if you don't know what you are doing, you can end up burning a lot of money.
On today's episode of Subscription Box Answers, I am covering five common mistakes that subscription box owners make when it comes to Meta ads.
We have acquired over 60,000 customers at BusterBox using Meta ads, and I have helped a lot of different boxes in various niches scale up using Meta, so I have a clear understanding of what works and what is a complete waste of time.
I see the same mistakes coming up time and time again. On today's episode, I am covering the five most common mistakes so you don't need to make them.
If you have a question you want answered on the show, head over to www.SubscriptionBoxResources.com, join the free Facebook group, and post your question there.
Meta ads are usually the best and most effective way of acquiring customers for most subscription box businesses. However, if you don't know what you are doing, you can end up burning a lot of money.
On today's episode of Subscription Box Answers, I am covering five common mistakes that subscription box owners make when it comes to Meta ads.
We have acquired over 60,000 customers at BusterBox using Meta ads, and I have helped a lot of different boxes in various niches scale up using Meta, so I have a clear understanding of what works and what is a complete waste of time.
I see the same mistakes coming up time and time again. On today's episode, I am covering the five most common mistakes so you don't need to make them.
If you have a question you want answered on the show, head over to www.SubscriptionBoxResources.com, join the free Facebook group, and post your question there.
Speaker 1:
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 questions, you ask the questions, 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 you're having a really great week. Can you believe we are now five months into 2024? We're actually five and a half months in, because I'm recording this right in the middle of May. Does anybody else feel like this year is just shooting by quicker than ever? It's absolutely crazy. Before we know it, we're going to be approaching Q4 again Insane.
Speaker 2:
Anyway, on today's episode, I am back discussing Facebook ads, or meta ads, whatever you want to call them, these days, and the reason why I'm discussing them is I want to help you make your meta ads work better. If you are running a subscription box business, more than likely you are dependent on meta ads to drive a big proportion of your customer acquisition. Obviously, there are many other ways of marketing your box. Everything doesn't have to go through meta, but meta still performs really, really well and for the vast majority of subscription box businesses, it's still the most cost effective and reliable way of growing your subscriber base. We've acquired over 60 000 subscribers in BusterBox through meta in the last few years, so, yeah, the channel definitely works. Now I've helped a lot of different subscription box owners either get started with meta or scale up using meta advertising, and I've come across some common mistakes that subscription box owners make time and time again. Now, if you're listening to this, more than likely you have a subscription box or you're thinking about setting up a subscription box and you'll probably need to use Meta to grow. So let's just go through five common mistakes that a lot of subscription box owners make. I'll point them out, I'll explain why they're making these mistakes and how to correct them, and then you can take that knowledge into your Facebook advertising and improve your performance. That's my goal of this podcast, so let's jump into it right.
Speaker 2:
The first common mistake subscription box owners make and it's not only subscription box owners. A lot of people who run facebook ads make this mistake they get obsessed with the technical side of things. They want to know the exact campaign to set up, the exact number of ads you should be running in your ad sets, the exact number of ad sets you should be running, how many ads should be videos, how many ads should be images, and they just get completely obsessed with the technical side of things. Now, I'm not going to lie. The technical side of things is very important. Going to lie the technical side of things is very important. You do need to know this stuff, but you should only be spending a very small amount of time and energy on that stuff. The vast majority of your time needs to be spent on perfecting your offer, perfecting your website and producing creative that converts, because these days, that's the key driver of success when it comes to facebook ads. And I'll give you a example. Right, you can know very little about the technical side of things, but if you have your offer dialed in and you have a website that converts and you have great creative and you send that out in the most basic campaign ever, you are going to see success. And likewise, if you know everything about the technical side of things but you have a terrible offer and a website that doesn't convert and a product that nobody wants and really rubbish creative, you're not going to get anybody signed up, no matter how good you are on the technical side of things. And the best advertisers know this and that's why they spend the majority of their time focusing on the stuff that really moves the needle the offer, the creatives and the website really, really important. And I'll give you an example I know a lady with a very successful kid subscription box. It's a seven figure box my seal box and she set up her ads from her phone at the start, but she had all of that stuff dialed in. She had a really powerful offer, a great website and creative that converts, and she was setting up the ads from her phone and they were driving sales and scaling up the company because all of that stuff was dialed in. That's how important it is, okay.
Speaker 2:
Number two another common mistake that people make they have unrealistic expectations. Look, the days of 2015 are finished. Back in 2015, facebook ads were still relatively new and there was a lot less competition. We are in 2024, so you need to have the correct expectations around how much you can pay to acquire a customer. If you think you are going to drive a lot of volume for like five dollars a day, you will be sadly mistaken. Obviously, that's a extreme example, but the point I'm making is it costs money to grow and you need to be comfortable with paying whatever the CPA is going to be.
Speaker 2:
Obviously, there are things you can do to cut down your CPA, aka testing different offers and creative and optimizing your website, but sometimes it's going to be what it's going to be and guess what? That's absolutely fine. We are in the subscription business and we don't need customers to be profitable straight away, but what you do need is a clear understanding of your lifetime value, your payback period and your cash requirement to grow. Once you know that information, though, you will be a lot more comfortable around paying the cpa that you need to pay to get your company to grow. Also, a lot of the time, the best advertisers are not spending all day worrying about their cpa. They're focused on increasing their lifetime value and their average order value, so they can actually spend more to acquire a customer. And if you can spend more to acquire a customer, it gives you a massive advantage over your competitors and allows you to scale much quicker.
Speaker 2:
Number three Number three big mistake people make is they get really really narrow with their audience. Look, these days it usually works a lot better to go wider with your targeting. You either go with broad targeting, which is essentially open targeting, where you don't target anybody and you just pick the country you want to send your ads out to, or go with big lookalike audiences or big interests. The days of getting like really granular with your targeting are pretty much gone, and you can see they're gone because facebook are continuously removing interests. They're doing it all the time. Back a few years ago, if you were running, say, like a beauty box, you might go into your interests and you'd be like women who are interested in beauty and they're also engaged shoppers and they also like subscription boxes and they also like this and they also like that and you narrowed down your audience really tight and that was the audience you went after. These days, it usually works a lot better if you go wider. If you go tighter, we have found that it can drive up your CPM because you've restricted the algorithm. In most cases, it's better to go wide and you let your creative do your targeting for you. You get your offer and creative dialed in. Go wide and Facebook usually figures out the rest. Obviously, there are exceptions, but that's normally the best way to go about it these days.
Speaker 2:
The next mistake that people make they either go all in with a manual setup when they're setting up their campaign or they're all in with the new way of doing things, which is advantage plus shopping campaigns. So, yeah, you're either stuck in your ways and you're doing everything the old way and you won't change to the new way, or you're going all in on Advantage Plus and you're depending on Facebook to do everything and you just won't do any kind of manual setup anymore. Look, the truth is both of these work and it's highly likely if you want to scale up, you're going to need to use a mixture of both of them. Both of these campaign types are just different tools in your toolbox. You hear people go on all the time. What is the exact way I should do it, when the truth is, every account is completely different and there is no right or wrong way of doing it. Both of them can work and both of them need to be tested.
Speaker 2:
We actually run multiple campaigns at once in buster box and we could have a manual campaign running and a new advantage plus shopping campaign running at the exact same time, and we found that's a great way to scale up. So you should test both and you should be willing to use both, and you should also be willing to use both at the exact same time, as you probably will need to do that if you're looking to spend more money and scale up horizontally. And if you don't know what scaling up horizontally is, let me explain. There's two different ways of scaling there's vertical scaling and horizontal scaling. Vertical scaling is when you just increase the budget on a campaign and you just keep increasing it and to increase your ad spend. That way that can work, but it can be challenging to do that because you can end up breaking your campaign and sending it back into poor performance, pretty much where it kills your cpa. What we like to do is we scale horizontally, so we've loads of different things going at once and that may include a manual campaign and a advantage shopping campaign, and then we just add on to them to increase our spend and to get more people signed up.
Speaker 2:
The final common mistake that we see this is normally new advertisers, but I do see people make it time and time again Make sure you have your conversion API set up correctly. Look, you can still advertise with just the pixel, but you're going to get much better and more accurate results when you have your conversion API set up. Now, if you don't know what the conversion API is, no problem, let me explain. So this is directly from Facebook. The conversion API is designed to create a direct connection between your marketing data and the systems that help optimize ad targeting, decrease cost per result and measure outcomes across meta technologies. How does it work?
Speaker 2:
Well, the Conversion API is designed to create a direct and more reliable connection between your marketing data from your server, website, platform, app or CRM and meta. To put it in the simplest way possible, it's similar to your pixel, but just much more powerful. Now, depending on your platform, it should be relatively easy to set this up. We obviously use subly, and they make it extremely easy. I'll explain to you how you can set it up. You just go to the facebook app in your subly account and they have instructions there, but it's simply a case of going to your ads manager and copying some data and pasting it into that app. That's all you do. It's really really simple to set up and, yeah, subli have made it really really easy. So, yeah, if you're on subli or whatever platform you're on, find out how to set up the conversion api correctly and make sure it's set up. It will definitely help you improve your performance. Now, I hope you found this episode helpful and I hope you learned at least one or two things that you can take into your own advertising campaigns and hopefully help you improve things.
Speaker 2:
I'd like to give a big shout out to all the people who reviewed this podcast recently, I saw all the new reviews coming in. I really appreciate that. If you have been listening for a while and you found value in the information that I'm sharing, could I ask a big favor Would you mind giving me a review, either on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to this podcast? It just really helps me get the show out to more people. As always, we will be back next week at the exact same time and if you have a question you want answered on the show, make sure you head over to subscriptionboxresourcescom and join the free Facebook group and post your question there. Thanks a lot and chat to you next week. Bye-bye.