Scaling e-commerce withcustom Facebook marketing automation

Andrej Pancik

My background

Some marketing A data management platformfor ads

A lot of marketing

Represent platform

How do we make money?

Margin for the creatorManufacturing Work

How do we make money?

This is how we operate

How do we make money?

This is how traditional e-commerce operates

Margin for the creator

How do we make money?

That is like our white glove marketing services

How do we make money?

But usually it is this

Who are our users?

We are a two sided marketplace

One side is influencers like

• Celebrities

• People active in their community

The other side is their buyer audiences

Venn diagrams of our audiences

Influencer #1 audience Influencer #2 audience

Influencer #3 audience

Venn diagrams of our audiences

Venn diagrams of our audiences

Why custom ads automation?

Not a reason

A/B testing of ads and audiences

Scheduling

Rules

Templates

1. We had bad data

We can't be investing a lot of money

1. We had bad data

Pixels reports – 15%+ error

No Life Time Value tracking

Not appreciating business nuances

Data all over the place

2. We didn't have the right data

We wanted actionable data points that would guide our bidding and spending1.

2.

This is how I imagined the click cost distribution to be like

Bid

Volume

50%

This is how I imagined the click cost distribution to be like

Bid

Volume

Your bid

What it is really like

Bid

Volume

70%

What it is really like

Volume

Bid

Your bid

It's about the absolute volume you can capture

Bid

Volume

Sometimes good enough

A budget of the big company

2. We didn't have the right data

We wanted to estimate for each audience

• The optimal long-term bidding strategy

• Its true addressable size, and overlaps

• Product affinities

1.2.

3. We were just slow

Many products/audiences › many campaigns › a lot of mistakes

Optimizing existing campaigns

Exploring new opportunities

Traditional rules not sufficient

Traditional templates not sufficient

1.2.3.

Sample setup

Creatives

• set for newsfeed

• set for sidebar

Campaign setup (all dark posting)

• Conversions for 300k+ audience

• Clicks + CPC

• Engagement – with direct CTA

• Retargeting + CPM

1.2.3.

Sample setup #2

Audience tests & research

1. Owned pages data

2. Interest targeting

3. Past website data

4. Custom audiences

5. Lookalikes

6. Behavior on site

Setup pixels

Setup tracking urls

Budget / Optimization

• Initial $10 per ad set (rigorously tested)

• Quick scaling up

• Frequency cut-off

• End of campaign/relaunch

1.2.3.

Why custom automation?

1. We had bad data2. We didn't have the right data 3. We were just slow

Our custom toolingon top of Facebook API

Public tools

Ad banner creator

Facebook Ad launcher

Ad Banner Creator

Sample ad banners

Internal tools

Dashboard

Targeting finder

When using Facebook API –You are on your own.

Summary

TL; DR

We did custom automation because it was

• difficult to get the ground truth to existing tools

• difficult to optimize bidding and spend with existing tools

• still time consuming even with some automation

We built our own stack on top of Facebook API to automate parts we didn't find elsewhere – it was tough but it worked

Good luck!Follow me at @AndrejPancik