Meta Ads

[CassD]

How has peoples experience been using meta ads to market their plug-ins?

Do people use sales campaigns or traffic? Interested to know if people have had better experience using sales campaigns vs. traffic campaigns seeing as you can't install VST3 or AU on your phone.

Have people found it hard to track conversions with Pixel? I get a lot of direct website traffic as apposed to Facebook/instagram traffic, so I am assuming people see the ads and then visit the website at a later date, which makes it harder to tell if the ads are working.

Also, did people run engagement ads initially to create awareness around their brand?

Interested to hear peoples experiences as it's a tricky subject and it seems like there are a lot of changes going on with the roll-out of the Andromeda AI.

[tobbentm]

In our experience, Meta ads are like the second most important ad spend, after Instagram, quite good conversion usually.
But you need to get the Meta Pixel to track everything, otherwise the targeting won't learn/improve. Depending on your shop setup, this can be quite easy or quite hard.
I haven't talked to anyone who didn't run conversion campaigns, as that's usually the end goal when you are mature enough to dump enough money on Meta ads for it to matter. As always though, there's never a silver-bullet answer when it comes to ads, everyone's experience is very different, depending on audience match, content quality, and so much more.

[dannytaurus]

@CassD said in Meta Ads:

I get a lot of direct website traffic as apposed to Facebook/instagram traffic, so I am assuming people see the ads and then visit the website at a later date, which makes it harder to tell if the ads are working.

That's exactly the problem I have. Tracking is very difficult because of this.

I run a £40/day sales campaign on Instagram. I have no idea what my real ROAS is, but the revenue is there so I don't touch it.

[David Healey]

@dannytaurus do you set the tracking duration to the maximum? So that people who discover you through an ad but then return via a direct link still get picked up by meta?

Edit: Attribution Window is the thing I was referring to.

[dannytaurus]

@David-Healey I sell on Gumroad, so it's... complicated.

As long as revenue is more than ad spend, I'm happy to kick it down the road.

[David Healey]

@dannytaurus said in Meta Ads:

I sell on Gumroad,

Get yourself on Moonbase

[dannytaurus]

@David-Healey I'll probably build my own site and checkout this year. Glutton for punishment!

Moonbase looks cool but I don't do licenses so wouldn't use any of that functionality.

The e-commerce stuff looks good but it won't be as stable and battle-tested as Gumroad.

The fee looks lower than Gumroad, but the 1€ per sale would kill me, since I have several £5-10 products.

Moonbase feature set does seem to be growing, so I'll keep any eye on it

[MOONBASE, learn spelling FFS! ]

[David Healey]

@dannytaurus said in Meta Ads:

but the 1€ per sale would kill m

Unless my maths is wrong, £10 @ 10% + $0.5 (£0.36) = £1.36 and £10 @ 5% + 1EUR (£0.86) = £1.36

So I think Gumroad and Moonbase will work out the same cost for a £10 product.

@dannytaurus said in Meta Ads:

I'll probably build my own site and checkout this year

Build your own site, but not your own checkout - whichever way you do it will work out more expensive than Gumroad or Moonbase. I've been using Woo for years and it seems cheaper on paper but there is so much more to do, especially when it comes to taxes. That's the main reason I'm switching to Moonbase - still using my own site though.

[ustk]

why those platforms if the Hise Unlocker combined with a PHP script on the server side and something like Woocommerce Plugin License Manager does the job?

[David Healey]

@ustk Three words: Merchant of Record

Moonbase in particular has a lot more features though, things that I'm paying multiple wordpress plugins for currently. I won't be using the licensing system because I don't need it but for those that do the integration directly in the plugin is a nice feature.

[tobbentm]

@David-Healey says it well; you might have a working checkout with WooCommerce or Paddle or FastSpring or whatever, but it's the "other stuff" we specialize in. Eliminating the glue code of connecting purchase history with your newsletter subscribers, offering upgrade pricing and exclusive discounts, so many things you need to scale your sales.

And according to our merchants who move to us from Gumroad, we've been more stable than Gumroad has, but better check with our merchants to verify that fact. Happy to give anyone a demo with no strings attached, just book a slot: https://cal.com/moonbase/introduction

Anyways, sorry for hijacking the thread, this is about meta ads, not us, here's how we track conversions through our embedded storefront: https://moonbase.sh/articles/adding-meta-pixel-support-to-the-embedded-storefront/

[dannytaurus]

@David-Healey said in Meta Ads:

Build your own site, but not your own checkout

Nah, I'll build my own checkout too - that's the fun part! I've worked directly with Stripe APIs for more than 10 years, so I'm fine with it. And they have Managed Payments now, which is MOR.

Still interested in Moonbase though. Depends where I want to spend my time, I guess.