Shopify Facebook Ads Market Research – Top Market Research Method
Here at the Rainmaker family we are all about helping people find ways to create passive income and achieve financial freedom. Lately we’ve been talking about Facebook Ads, retargeting strategies, as well as how to find and use data. This time we’re going to show you how to use data from Shopify and Facebook to do some market research in order to make a Facebook Ad Campaign. This market research will help ensure that the money we are putting into ads is not being wasted on people who don’t care, as well as showing people with similar taste something else they might like and offering our services. In order to do that we are going to select one item, for one audience, and design an ad around that.
How to Choose an Item to Market
If you have only one item then you obviously know what you’re going to target and sell. If you offer multiple items, we are going to narrow it down to just one, and market that to people most likely to buy it as a gateway to your brand. The best way to choose is to start with your best seller or a favorite item among your current customer base.
Audience Research
The next thing we have to figure out in market research is who exactly we are marketing to. Who is your audience? Think of your shopify story and what you offer. If you offer more than one kind of item we’re going to have to dig deep to find the right audience. If you are a one item shop, then you already know who you’re marketing to.
The two tools I like to use to help me find my “who”, are Facebook Insights and Interest Exploration.
Interest Explorer
Interest Explorer is an incredible tool that can help you narrow down interests of people on Facebook and find the right groups to target for your ad campaign. There is a one time fee to use the tool, but that one fee gives you access to this tool for life. If you are primarily using online commerce and Facebook to target people, this will pay for itself over and over again.
The first thing you’re going to do is type in an interest that you think would fit the people who would like your product. For example, let’s use the term “hockey” because we pretend to sell hockey equipment.
Once we search, it will pull up a list of potential interests on Facebook that are related to hockey. If we scroll down to the word Hockey, we would see that there are potentially 186 million people interested in hockey. Now we have to be a little wary of this, because this just means that maybe they were searching for a hockey stick, they liked a video that had a hockey player in it, read an article related to hockey, or anything like that. So not all of these people are in the market for buying.
What we’ll do instead now is look around at some of the more specific niches that are like your product. Maybe groups like hockey players, hockey safety, little league groups, things like that, and just click on as many as you think fit your brand.
There is a little G button next to all these names you can click on to do a quick google search and see if this group is what matches your brand or if it’s something completely random that isn’t in your wheelhouse at all. This will put your selections together in one stacked group that we can then copy over to Facebook.
When you find smaller groups and stack them, it’s actually going to be cheaper to target ads towards them, than it is to market to the bigm broad “hockey” group, because we don’t know what those “hockey” people are actually tagged for.
Audience Insights on Facebook
You will need a Facebook Business page for this tool to work, but if you’ve already been using Facebook Marketplace and created a pixel to join your Facebook and Shopify together then you already have a business page. If not, check the links below for information on how to set up your pixel and get your Facebook Business page going.
To get to your business page type in
business.facebook.com/ads/audience-insights
- or –
Log in to your Facebook Business page
This spot gives you some good data but it may be hard to target a specific group since it’s based on broad interests.
Click on the interest bar, and paste those groups you clicked on from Interest Explorer. This will pull up basic demographics from the start page. So from here you’ll get information like gender, age range, occupations, education, etc. This is very broad information, but it can still be useful to use, because you may see a larger spike in one age range over another, so you’ll know you have to think like that age group for the ad.
Next to the Demographics page is a tab called Page Likes. This will show what pages and groups the people/interest groups you just searched have liked. This is your more nice space and might be a better place to target your advertisement. The sweet spot we like to look at is groups/pages of 50,000 to 1,000,000.
How to Pick Your Target Groups
The last thing we are going to do before launching into our ad campaign is choose what groups we want to target. Reflecting back on the selection list from Interest Explorer, and based on the data we found in the Audience Insights, we are going to think of one single group that best targets your item and go all in on it. You have the data, and you know your product better than anyone so you will know which group resonates with you most.
Time to Get Creative
Now that you have your one item, one group, and we are ready to go all in on it. So now you have some homework to do. It’s time to make some creatives around your group for your ads. We need to get creative around our audience. Think about your own personal scrolling habits on Facebook and Instagram, what are the things that pop up that make you “stop the scroll”? Is it a picture of an item you like, a boomerang video, a clip of someone doing something creative, an example of an item being used?
We’re going to use those ideas and come up with our own creatives for three different groups.
Group 1 will be our broad group, like the main keyword we used to get our data. A creative directed at all hockey players for instance.
Group 2 will be a different interest. It will still be in that hockey player group, but now we’re going to choose one of the groups that we found in the Insights and come up with a creative for this specific Facebook group.
Group 3 will be a little more random. This is where we’re going to just take a shot at something adjacent to our focus product and go for it. Maybe this where we choose a totally different Facebook group, or we go for a totally different type of ad. This where we have the most leeway, and creative opportunity which can make it tricky to plan for. I say just come up with the idea or the group in your mind and jump on it. Facebook is great about interest stacking with its users, so if a person likes X they probably also like Y and Facebook will show both XY to the user. So this is the one that might catch other people who were initially looking at one thing but ended up with your product as well.
That is how we do a bit of audience and market research before jumping into our Shopify/Facebook Ad campaign.
Once you have your data examined, your item and target group picked, and you’ve made up an idea for your three creative groups we’re going to work on making the ad.
Keep a look out for part three, and let us know in the comments what successes you found as you were looking through the data, what kind of creatives you came up with, if you have a creative block and need some inspiration, we want to know it all and interact with you. We are here to be your cheerleader, your wingman, and your support team, so go get creative and get ready to make it rain!
References
Shopify Ads and Market Research
> https://youtu.be/9mSlp0sUGPo
How to Create a Facebook Pixel for Shopify
> https://youtu.be/AufVMw53mgk
Interest Explorer
