The Weekly Sharpener #81

👋 Hey fam!

We're back with another immense Tuesday roundup that I'm excited to share with you.

Hope you're able to enjoy some summer fun!

Jess Bachman (Co-Founder @ Fire Team) and I trade creative strategy notes on this episode of Add Creative.

We dig into his philosophy on making creative that converts, how creative can be broken down to a science, and how being great at organic social isn't as easy as everyone makes it seem.

Enjoy us saying first principles 10x. If you're trying to think about creative differently, this one is for you!

We also get a practical breakdown about how Shopify Audiences are working to run ads and we dig into how some best practices in building landing pages isn't yielding the results we all expect.

We are grateful for the space in your inbox and for you sharing some of your valuable time with us. 🙏

Cheers,

Chase

Pencil - Creative AI

Pencil allows you to scale your creative testing on paid ads by automating the creative production process. All you need are your assets, branding, and performance data then in minutes you'll have your new ads ready to go. 🚀

www.trypencil.com

🎙Add Creative

A sneak peek from Episode 13 👀

Grab the 🍏 podcast version here or watch it on YouTube.

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Special Content

We spoke to Dr. Jonathan Snow from the Snow Agency about how you should be using Shopify Audience. Here is what we learned. 👇

What are Shopify Audiences?

Shopify audiences is essentially equivalent to a Facebook lookalike audience, but the data is coming from Shopify and it's all first-party data.

So as cookies and, and third-party data diminish and interests start diminishing over time on the Facebook platform and lose power.

Shopify audiences theoretically would not be impacted. Cause it's all the first party data coming from Shopify and you'd be targeting these people directly.

How can you get access to Audiences?

Shopify audiences is only available for Shopify Plus merchants and you need to be processing transactions with Shopify payment.

If you're on Shopify plus, but using a third-party processor, like a Braintree or Stripe or whatever other processor you might have, you would need to switch to Shopify payments and you would need to be on the Shopify plus plan in order to get access to the Shopify Audiences app.

How is the audience built?

Let's just say you're selling women's shoes. You would select the SKU of the shoe in the store.

It's very important to label all of your products. If you don't label your products, you won't be able to leverage Shopify audiences because they use the product label to find people throughout the Shopify network of merchants whose customers were in the market for women's shoes.

You would select the SKU, Shopify will then start creating that lookalike to find up to 2 million people that are in the market, essentially for women's shoes.

These are people that might have abandoned carts on other women's shoes, stores. It could be anyone that was browsing, other stores browsing your own store. It's not really clear. Those are my kind of assumptions on how they find these people, but it's only up to 2 million people for now.

And it takes 24 hours for the audience to generate.

What platform integrations are in place?

Facebook is the only integration at the moment, but they're actively working on the TikTok integration. That should be rolled out definitely within 2022. They're also working on the Snapchat integration and Pinterest. So those are the three next in line for access here.

Does the audience refresh automatically, like on platforms like Facebook?

The Shopify audience will update and refresh, but only in Shopify, not in the Facebook ad dashboard.

Every one to two weeks, you should turn it off. Re-export the new refresh Shopify audience into the ad dashboard and start your targeting.

Will introducing a refreshed audience restart learning mode?

That's a weakness of the product, which is still very early, but the last thing you want, if you're getting these great results on, on an ad and it's out of learning, is to turn off that ad.

Cause now if you go to the relearning phase and kind of re-upload this audience and start from scratch again.

But if you leave that audience on forever, you're gonna be targeting the same 2 million people. Over time. So keep that in mind.

🔥 tip → My best practice is always put the date that you exported the audience in your audience title and put it in your ad set title.

So you can really keep track of this easily. Um, and know when it's time to refresh that audience and re-export.

How has this been affecting performance?

CPMs are actually much higher on this audience. I'm talking like significantly higher, like 30 to 50% higher; because it's a finite audience of high intent consumers, obviously.

You know, when you're targeting a finite audience on Facebook, you're gonna have to bid more on the options automatically just to reach those people.

But that premium you're paying is getting paid back through elevated performance because these are higher intent consumers.

We're seeing conversion rates much higher on the Shopify audience-driven funnel. Um, and so that is decreasing CPA.

So the people coming from this audience onto the website are much higher intent than those that are in the Facebook lookalike audiences right now.

What does this mean for performance marketing attribution?

The great backend potential of this is since Shopify is giving you hashed customer info for these audiences you don't know the names, emails, etc and it syncs directly into the Facebook platform.

Since Shopify knows who you were targeting, cuz they gave you that list of emails and they're converting on your Shopify store. That's a potential solution to attribution right there. Because if you know you targeted this. And they bought with that email then. Boom, that's a one-to-one match.

How do you tell if the audiences are working?

Shopify audiences has an attribution dashboard. So you can compare that to the Facebook attribution. That's been like another source of truth for us.

We've been seeing some great extra attribution that Facebook wasn't reporting on purely from the Shopify audience.

How are the AOV’s with this audience?

Yeah, I would say the AOV’s are a little higher, but nothing significant. I think it's more so the conversion rate that's really, you know, elevating that CPA to, to decrease on the Shopify audience.

What are you excited about for this in the future?

Right now the attribution on Shopify does not communicate with the Facebook attribution. Meaning the pixel and the algorithm are not getting this feedback loop passed back from Shopify.

Once attribution on Shopify gets more reliable on the audience and passes back to Facebook, that should theoretically increase performance on the ads tremendously because now the algorithm and the pixel has a

One-to-one match rate and the attribution solution that kind of went away with iOS 14, that's been solved.

Now that the feedback loop is more consistent and the algorithm won't get confused with like all the false negatives when they think Sally from Idaho didn't purchase but she actually did.

That like throws the whole system into disarray. So elevating the actual attribution, and making it more precise will increase performance in turn.

Hacks 🔥🤌 👇

A) To combat CPMs that are really high on the audiences.

One workaround is actually to change the objective to reach to lower those CPMs. If you're targeting these people that are already high intent, and now you're kind of hacking the whole CPM-based model on the conversion event. What you're then optimizing for, then you put lower CPMs and should improve your return on ad spend, and your CPAs should drop.

B) Exclude your Shopify audience from all of your other ad sets in the ad account, so that when you're actually targeting that Shopify audience, you're targeting those people only in that one ad set.

And it's not, you know, in multiple places in the ad account to minimize overlap.

Why it matters: If you have access to this data set, you would be foolish not to use it. In a world where targeting is getting less powerful, why not having a system able to find you more HIGH VALUE/INTENT users, that replenishes itself as you flood it with traffic from your normal prospecting campaigns on Facebook, TikTok, and Google.

Never let an advantage go to waste. Now if you don't have access because you're not on the right plan with Shopify you can either price out what an upgrade would look like to test this (against the potential upside in sales) or you can wait for this to possibly be rolled out sometime next year to a wider set of account ranges on Shopify.

Since the product is in beta, I think the latter will not be coming in the interim. Either way, this information is important to have for anyone running ads.

Thread of the Week 🧵

 Why it matters: This is about testing - this information is a vote for your testing multiple landing pages to determine what YOUR customers/prospects will respond to.

That's what I think is most important to note in all of this - each brand/product has a price bucket they fall into. Within that bucket there are certain expectations and needs of the customers you are working to acquire.

What is enough or not is up to your customers and how efficiently/scalably you can acquire them. SO TEST your landing page variants on your ads and see what works best, you don't know what creative style will work best.

Expert Strategy + Learnings

Some amazing learnings from thought leaders in DTC.

Carl's CRO Tips 🙌

Add descriptions and improve navigation Here we add descriptions to the Icons in the header. Also, we facilitate the navigation by adding both women and men to the first section. This enables customers to find products they want easier and faster.

For more 🔥 follow Carl Weische from Accelerated.

Rahul's Paid Media Learnings 🤘

Creative testing can be overwhelming and exhausting to constantly think of.

Try to keep it simple and show small changes you’ve made throughout the brand.

An example of this can be a change in price points for your offers you’re running. We are noticing that being transparent and owning the price point that your offer is at has helped reduce our CAC in the last 7 days.

Showing the price point directly on your ad can help users know that when they appear on your landing page they won’t be seeing something they weren’t expecting.

• Reducing bounce rate

• Increasing revenue per click and click through rates

If you want a in more in-depth overview, check out the YouTube video 👇

Follow Rahul here for more 🧠

Creative Cuts ⚔️ - ICYMI

Want to learn about WHY the creative you love works and how you can leverage it 👇

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