Meta Ads

[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.

[CassD]

@dannytaurus I managed to write a script (with claude's help) that uses a Cloudflare worker (free tier) and Payhips Webhook API to track purchases.. Which is working now! Great to finally see ROAS. Happy to send that through if you would like to try it. I'm assuming Gumroad will work similarly.

@tobbentm @dannytaurus - Do you find broad targeting works best? Let meta find the buyers? Or do you use manual targeting/suggest targeting, like targeting people who are interested in FL Studio, Audio Brands, D.A.W?

I am having such a crap time figuring this all out. Do you find it takes a while to get sales after starting a campaign? I usually dont see a sale for a few days or none at all.. And I've reacted and turned them off. I am assuming sales pick up after a week or two? I'm wasting a lot of money (it seems)

@tobbentm Interested to know more about MOONBASE. - I am currently using Payhip + HISE Activate. My Payhip page loads quite slowly, so about half of my link clicks result in a landing page view. It seems like this is on Payhips backend, so I definately need to find a different platform for when I can scale.

[dannytaurus]

@CassD I don't see my ads as a direct path to purchase. I do them to raise awareness of my brand and products. So I'm not too concerned about tracking ROAS.

I don't do any special offers, sales or shouty stuff in the ads. They're just simple videos showing the plugins playing through some of the presets. I just want to put them in front of people who might like them. Then let the plugins do the rest.

Targeting

I originally had quite a few DAWs and other very specific niches in there but a few months ago Meta did away with most of them and folded them into more generic categories.

Here's the targeting, same for both my ad sets (images and videos).

Meta is pushing everything towards fully automated targeting and audience selection anyway, so I'm not fighting it.

I do turn off all of the AI-assisted ad 'improvements' though. I don't want them putting different audio on my ads or any of their visual additions.

Here's the link to my ads in the Facebook Ads Library, so you can see how boring they are.

Response

I started on £10/day to test the waters. I saw an uptick in revenue after 2 weeks, so I doubled to £20/day. Saw another uptick so after another 2 weeks I doubled again to £40/day. It's been on that for almost a year now.

I did a test in Feb where I increased to £60/day for a month, but saw no significant change. So I dropped it back down to £40/day.

Part of me wants to spend more time creating new ads and testing different campaigns, and the other part of me is completely icked out by the whole thing!

I think when I've moved from Gumroad to my own site, or Moonbase (looking more and more likely) I'll revisit the whole ads setup and get a bit more involved. But for now, the £40/day budget gets me a decent amount of revenue, so I'm happy leaving it as is.

Hope all this is helpful in some way, and possibly even encouraging that ads can work and don't have to be complicated.

[CassD]

@dannytaurus Cool! Thank you! I didn’t think of the education targets.

So your running sales campaigns? Traffic campaigns would get you a lot more traffic. Cost per 1000 impressions are high for sales ads.

Ads look perfect for the niche you’re in!

[David Healey]

This video came up in my feed yesterday and gives some guidance on fine-tuning Meta's automatic targetting. I think for our niche it's good to show the ads more to men than women, at least in my case around 90% of my customers are male.

https://youtu.be/bv8AsY0xkIk?si=z4qgXg2lkpSwNPSq

[dannytaurus]

@David-Healey Yeah, I keep meaning to look at the stats for gender. I doubt I need my age range to go up to 65 either