 When it first started dropshipping back in 2016, the business model that it had set up was predominantly Facebook ads, driving traffic to a Shopify dropship in store, selling cheap products from China off of Aliexpress. Needless to say, it didn't go very well. So my education at the time on my experience was pretty much watching YouTube videos for the space of a couple of weeks. And I was at the point where my motivation was really high. I'm super excited to give dropshipping a go because I was always looking for different things. I hated so much with a passion what I was doing at the time that dropshipping just seemed like the next greatest thing. It was super easy to get started. So I created an ad account, jumped into Facebook ads and needless to say, things went horribly wrong. And it was safe to say that I had absolutely no clue what I was doing. I was just watching YouTube video after YouTube video and hoping for the best, basically testing lots of different products. And it wasn't until I spent about 400 pounds and tested my sixth product, they actually got my very first sale. 400 pounds to see your first sale is obviously a massive loss. However, by that point, I was starting to see sales trickle in. And at that point, I was looking for validation that the dropshipping business model could work. So that kind of spurred me on or motivated me to put even more time and more resources into learning how Facebook ads works. Because generally speaking, building a Shopify store is pretty easy. And finding suppliers and products is pretty easy. If you know what you're looking for, that wasn't the part that I struggled with. What I struggled with massively was Facebook ads. So that's where I invested my time into learning how Facebook ads worked. The reason I failed is because I didn't have a deeper understanding and level of understanding of how they worked. I would watch a step by step strategy on YouTube. I would replicate it with the product I was selling at the time I would cross my fingers. I would set the budget I would publish it and I would hope for the best. They can work to some degree, they can work. But what you have to think is that when that person is creating that strategy, I've done it myself in the past, it's going out to so many different people, hundreds of different people, thousands of different people. Everybody has different budgets, everybody has different products, everybody has different Shopify stores. Everybody has different creatives. So it's impossible to create a strategy that's going to apply to everyone. So best case scenario, you could follow one of those strategies and they could help you scale up to maybe £100 per day, £500 per day, or if you actually get lucky £1,000 per day. But at some point it is inevitable that sales are going to drop off and ultimately the business is going to fail. Simply following a step by step strategy on YouTube is not enough to create a legitimate and sustainable business that ultimately is going to replace your current income that you can rely on to pay your bills each month. The only way to do that in my opinion is if you have a true understanding of Facebook ads, what the data means, how to manipulate and improve that data to favour your business, and that's what I'm going to show you in this video. So today I'm going to be focusing on three different data points. If you have not been able to run sustainable and profitable Facebook ads up to this point, then this is the video for you. This is going to point you in the right direction about where you need to do your research, how to understand the numbers, and more importantly, how to manipulate them so you know how to improve the results that you get and in turn turn your business profitable or make it even more profitable. Okay, so the starting point for everyone because this is probably the easiest place to start is when you've been running some ads, the best thing you can always do is take the data and see what's happened and review that data and then let Facebook actually tell you what you need to do next to improve it. So what a lot of people don't actually know is that there used to be a relevant score. Facebook used to score ad creatives out of 10 a relevant score to tell you basically how well that ad creative resonated with your audience. But what they have now is quality rankings and they have three different ones. If we jump into my ad account, take a look at these ad sets, we can see exactly what they are. So we have a quality ranking, we have an engagement rate ranking, and we have a conversion rate ranking. They're pretty self-explanatory, but basically quality ranking is your audience kind of perception of your ads and how they react to it. Engagement rate ranking is how often people are actually engaging with it. So clicking on it, comment it, liking it, reacting to it, sharing it, that sort of thing. And then conversion rate ranking is basically what happens off of Facebook. So how often somebody is clicking your ad and then actually converting on your Shopify store. And as we can see here, what Facebook does is it gives you a rating against everybody else that's basically competing in that same audience as you. So it will score you as above average, below average or average. Now where this is important is you can plug your results into this table here. So if we go onto the Facebook Business Help Center, if you search for how to use ad relevance diagnostics, you'll see this table here, which is color coded basically to show you exactly what you can do to improve the results of your Facebook ads. So if you've been running ads up to this point and you haven't seen those consistent and profitable results, the first thing you need to do is check out these quality rankings and see how you can then go on to actually improve them. Some of the common places where I see people fall down then to give you an example is probably this section here. So quality ranking of average or above, engagement ranking of average or above, but the conversion rate ranking is below average. So basically the cause of getting this below average score is the ad isn't producing conversions. So the recommendations that Facebook gives you is to improve the call to action of your ad. So that could be perhaps including it in the primary text, giving people the link there so they know exactly where to click. It could perhaps be somewhere on your image ad or in your video that actually tells people what to do. So it could be literally as simple as click the shop now button now or some form of scarcity to encourage more people to click it. And they also mentioned the post click experience. What this is basically is what's happening off of Facebook. So if lots of people, if you have a really good, engaging ad creative, and it's put in front of the right audience and lots of people are clicking it, you click through a is like 10 plus percent something ridiculous. However, nobody's converting, then that is because whatever's happening between Facebook and your Shopify store, that's where the process is breaking down. And therefore that is where you need to then focus your attention. Your Facebook ads are basically doing their job. But it's what happens off of Facebook, which is letting the process break down basically Shopify store isn't doing its job of converting people because I don't know. It could be hundreds of different reasons from your product is too expensive. You've got dodgy imagery or your page just doesn't load properly or you've got things that are putting your customer off basically. So this is step one. If you've not been getting the ad results, you've hoped for head over to here, plug your results into here, your feedback, your quality rankings into here and then get Facebook's own advice on how to improve the results of them. Using just this one strategy will help improve the results of your ads and pretty much takes care of everything else. However, there's two other things that I want to show you. If we head back into my ad account, they are, if we come to the right over here, CPC cost per link click and CTR this is link click through way. I could mention CPM briefly as well. So what you have to remember is Facebook is a bidding platform. The more people competing for the same space as you, the more expensive it's going to be. But there are some other things which go into that without getting too complicated. Your CPM is also kind of reflective or is connected to your quality ranking as well. If you have a really poor quality ad, Facebook doesn't want to show it to as many people because it doesn't want to annoy the people on its platform and therefore it's going to drive up your CPM costs. But without getting too complicated, I just want to focus on the three basic things in this video. So going back to cost per link click. The reason why it's per link click is because that's actual intent from the customer that they want to leave Facebook and go to your website and actually buy the product or at least get more information about the product. They're basically clicking an external link. Reason why this is important is because it allows you to clearly kind of identify between the different ad sets that you've tested, which ones are performing the best or which audiences have most intent with the creative that they're currently seeing. If you have tools like the one I've created as well for members of our program, like the breakeven CPC link calculator, then with tools like this, it allows you to, I'll give you an example. So if we put, let's say the cost of our product is, I don't know, 11.49 and that's delivered and we're selling it for 45 pounds. That's probably a little bit expensive actually. Let's go for 34.99. That leaves a profit per sale of 23.50. Basically what we can afford to spend on our social media ads. And then we can marry it up here against what our conversion rate is of our Shopify store and then what the breakeven CPC is. If we head back into our ad manager and let's take one of the better performing ones. So let's go for this one. It has a cost per link click of $1.06. If we head back into our calculator, we can see $1.06 is in and around this figure here. So this tells us that we need to have a conversion rate on our Shopify store of in and around 4% if we want to be profitable. Then we can go back onto our Shopify store, have a look at reporting and see exactly what our conversion rate is. And if it's above that number, then we know we're making a profit. However, if we're not at 4% and we're at say 2%, we know exactly what clicks or what cost per click we need to achieve in order to make our business profitable. And this in itself is why the numbers are so important and it's really important that you understand them. And most importantly, like I mentioned in the introduction, how to manipulate them. Once you understand what I'm talking about in this video, you will be able to build a sustainable and profitable dropship in business for the long term. The third and final piece of information I want to talk to you about is CTI link click through rate. The reason why this one is so important is because this is a direct indicator of how interested that audience is that you're targeting is in the creative that you're putting out to them. So obviously, the higher the percentage is the higher percentage, as it says here, times people saw your ad and performed a click. So this directly shows you if each ad set has the same creative, which audience is responding the best to your creative. The reason why these numbers are super important is because when you run tests for many different ad sets, so if we take this as one campaign as an example, we can take what the averages are and of $1.14 here for the CPC and what the average CTI is of 1.26%. And that's the average. So we can set that as our baseline and say any ad that we run in the future, that is what we need to be and that's what we need to improve. And that's essentially all Facebook ads is is you're trying to constantly essentially drive down that CPC costs or increase that CTI rate. Now, I understand I've been talking about lots of different numbers. Hopefully you're still with me to finish the video off, then let's do a quick recap. So step one is always to consider your quality rankings. You can plug them into this kind of like scorecard, I suppose we could call it from Facebook, and they will tell you what you need to do to your ad creative, or actually what happens off of Facebook, so i.e. your Shopify store in order to improve the results. That would be my first step. If I was you, I'd make those changes, make some tweaks, and then run those ads for a further couple of days and see what happens and fingers crossed that would be all you need to do. If not, this is when you need to take a look at a bit more detail and consider things like your cost per link click and link click through rate. And this is where you need to start manipulating what you're doing on Facebook in order to improve the results of these. So to improve the amount of people who click your ad, you can either change up the audience to an audience which is more responsive to it, or you can include more call to actions within your ad and the creative to encourage people to click that link button. Ultimately though, what you should always be doing is having a benchmark, a baseline of data, a cost per link click, a link click through rate, and ultimately always be trying to improve upon that. And if the data continues to improve and always gets better, then you will eventually hit that mark of being profitable and being able to run a sustainably profitable business. When you understand all of this and get your head around it, the whole thing becomes a whole lot easier and you will never get to a point where you feel stuck not knowing what to do because there'll always be something you can test or change to help manipulate and improve the results. And with that being said then guys, I'm going to wrap the video up there. I really appreciate you sticking with me this long. Hopefully I've taught you something new and given you kind of like a new line of investigation or some new actions to take in your own ad account to help you kind of re-boost that motivation. I know as a beginner, it can be like a roller coaster of emotion, so to speak. You can be super excited, wishing and hoping for the best and super kind of like enthusiastic about things and then when you don't see the results, it can kind of send you down like a one-way path to wanting to quit, etc, etc. But if there's one thing you take from this video, just stick with what you're doing. Keep trying new things because the hardest thing about dropshipping is getting your business off the ground. It's easy to get started and it's easy to scale a business. The hardest thing is what's left in the middle, which is finding that one product and you truly are just one product away from changing your life forever. If you would like some extra help getting started down the right path and skip all of this trial and error and hours, months, weeks, maybe even years of headaches and frustrations, make sure you check out my free training. It's the top link in the video description below, so 100% free. It's one to two hours long, so bring a notepad, block out some time and get ready to take some notes. Thanks for watching guys and I'll see you in the next one.