Important Lessons For Running Successful FB Ads In 2024 with Aleksandar Hadzhiyski

Andy Splichal:

Like prepare yourself to invest a few minutes with the make each click count podcast to discover new details in how to accelerate your sales and profits while making sure you're getting the absolute most out of your online marketing dollars. Hosted by Andy Spleckel, who's been running paid click campaigns for his clients for 20 plus years. Join us and discover what's working today and and start making each click count. Without further ado, here's the acclaimed author of the make each click Count book series, the founder of True Online Presence, the founder of make each click Count University, and the host with the most Andy Spleckel.

Andy Splichal:

Welcome to the make each click Count podcast. This is your host, Andy Spleckel, and we are happy to welcome this week's guest to discuss today's topic, which is important lessons for running successful Facebook ads in 2024. Today's guest is the owner of Titan Agency, a performance agency that works to scale ecommerce businesses and the newest contributor to make each click count University. A big welcome to Aleksandar Hadzhiyski, hi Aleksandar.

Aleksandar Hadzhiyski:

Hey Andy, thanks for having me though.

Andy Splichal:

Thanks for coming on. So, hey, let's get right into it. Why should an e commerce company consider using Facebook to advertise their products?

Aleksandar Hadzhiyski:

Yeah, that's a great question. I think the biggest one is because Facebook ads allow small businesses to compete with the bigger brands. Because with organic reach on social media platforms, including Facebook has become increasingly challenging due to the algorithm changes and the competition. Paid advertising allows e commerce companies to bypass these limitations and ensure their content reaches their target audience. Also, I think Facebook ads are cost effective and can really speed up your last, probably last but not least because of all of the data Facebook and metahass on all their platforms. It allows you to precisely target your ideal customer, which I believe is key.

Andy Splichal:

Now, are there particular types of e commerce companies that do better than others?

Aleksandar Hadzhiyski:

In my personal experience, I have found companies with higher average order value do better because it's a lot easier to get higher. Roas obviously companies with good branding, good product and if you want to maximize your chances of success with Facebook ads, you really need to have a good website and high conversion rate. Because regardless of how good your ads are, how good your product is, if your website does not convert people, you will never be successful. And some of the biggest brands in the world that spend millions a month on Facebook ads, they obsess with conversion rate because with them even a slight change like 0.1% increase in conversion rate means millions.

Andy Splichal:

Now you hit on a couple, but what are some of the reasons that you find companies might not be successful using Facebook ads.

Aleksandar Hadzhiyski:

So the two main things that I have seen is bad creative and poor campaign structure and targeting. Now with the bad creative. Creative is the one thing with Facebook ads that you have full control of. And the creative is the thing that's going to stop people from scrolling in their feed and it's going to make people click on your ad, go to your website, check your product and eventually buy it. And with the targeting, when I take over new accounts, I see a lot of businesses that run traffic campaigns, for example, and they expect sales. We need to realize that Facebook is really good at giving you what you optimize your campaigns for, because again, Facebook knows everything that's happening on the platform. Facebook knows if you're the type of person who just engages with ads. Facebook knows if you're the type of person who clicks on ads and just visits the website, or you like to buy from Facebook ads and find new brands.

Aleksandar Hadzhiyski:

So if you want more sales, you need to optimize for sales.

Andy Splichal:

So do you run for your clients pretty much only conversion ads?

Aleksandar Hadzhiyski:

Yeah, for all of my clients, I run only conversion ads. There's probably one or two businesses that we run engagement campaigns. And those are the type of businesses that, let's say we spend at least 50 or 60,000 a month. For the businesses that spent less than that, we only focus on conversion campaigns and sales.

Andy Splichal:

Now, you had mentioned creative is the most important piece of the ads. Where do you get your creative and what type of creative does the best?

Aleksandar Hadzhiyski:

So when it comes to creative, you really need to test. You need to test a lot, because there are so many different creatives that you can do. You can do carousels, you can do collections, single images, videos. And the way I do my research, when it comes to creatives, I like to go on my competitors ad libraries. All of this data is public on Facebook. So you can see what brands are using, what creative they are using, what text they're using. And I like to check for how long they've been running those ads because Facebook provides that data. And if I see an ad has been running for, let's say, two or three months, it means that it's working.

Aleksandar Hadzhiyski:

So I'm trying to create something similar and iterate on what they're doing. I also use foreplay. It's a tool that helps you save ads in different libraries. So I have different libraries for all of my different clients, like, for example, jewelry, clothes, et cetera. So I research different brands there and I save the ads.

Andy Splichal:

So you have an idea of what kind of creative you want. Are you creating those in house? Are you using AI? How are you going from your idea or what you want to be for a customer, for a client to the actual creative? How are you creating the creative? I guess so.

Aleksandar Hadzhiyski:

With the creatives, we work together with the clients. We give the idea, we give the guidance of what exactly do we want, and the client, on their end creates those creatives.

Andy Splichal:

Got it. Have you used AI at all in any of your Facebook ads?

Aleksandar Hadzhiyski:

When it comes to creative, no, but we do use AI when it comes to the copy and when it comes to research. So what I like to do is I go through my clients reviews, I copy them and I add them to Chat GPT, and I ask a couple of questions. What are the biggest complaints? What's the most common complaint there? What we can improve on. I do the same thing for their competitors, so we can see how we can improve and what we can do better than their competitors. We don't use it specifically for creative, but for research purposes, as I said, like copy reviews and what we can improve on. Yeah, we use it for that.

Andy Splichal:

So for somebody just getting started who might not have the money to hire an agency like yours, what would be a piece of actionable advice that you would give them when first getting started?

Aleksandar Hadzhiyski:

So one thing I would recommend is never stop testing now. Tasting will allow you to stay ahead because something that works today might not work tomorrow. Today, your audience might respond better to videos tomorrow they might respond better to images and the other way around. You always need to set aside budget for continuous testing. And with Facebook, there's so many things that you can test. You can test copy creative audiences, campaign structure, Facebook, shop versus your website and the list goes on. So again, when with continuous testing, you get hit and you always have something that's working. So when your ads stop performing, you have something to replace it and scale it.

Andy Splichal:

How are you testing? Are you testing with a different campaign? Are you testing a, b testing always in the campaign, in your ad sets, how do you do the testing?

Aleksandar Hadzhiyski:

So it really depends on the client and how much we are spending. If we are spending, let's say more than 10,000 a month, I have a set where I test everything. But if we're spending, let's say two, three, 5000 a month, I test within the scaling campaigns. And when something is working, I just increase the budget on it. When it comes to creative, the way I test is, let's say I'm going to test four different images. And I'm going to test, for example, the text overlay on each of those creative is going to be different. And I'm going to test that if at number one performs better or performs best, I'm going to take that ad and I'm going to test something else within that ad. So I might test the copy or I might test the color, I might test the font of the actual text overlay.

Aleksandar Hadzhiyski:

And this is how I continuously test on what is it now?

Andy Splichal:

You know, I had mentioned, and very excited, I'd mentioned in the intro that you are the newest contributor to the make each click count University with your master class Facebook meta ads master class favorite beginner to intermediate strategies to 2024. Can you take us through that master class and what somebody who takes it could expect to learn from it?

Aleksandar Hadzhiyski:

Yeah, of course. So if you're just starting out with methods or you have started but struggle to scale, I think this is going to be the perfect master class for you. I explain everything there that you need to know to be successful with Facebook ads. I show you how to structure your account, how to track data, how to identify bottlenecks in your strategy, how to structure your campaigns, how to identify what is working and what is not, how to test the different types of audiences, and much more. So, again, if you're a beginner or even if you have spent some money on ads, I think this is going to be a really good content for you to improve your learnings and improve your results on Facebook ads.

Andy Splichal:

I'm curious, how did you even get started running Facebook ads?

Aleksandar Hadzhiyski:

So I started running Facebook ads around 2019, and in the beginning I was running Facebook ads because I was doing affiliate marketing. And if there are some people who don't know what affiliate marketing is, you basically promote other products and services and you get a small commission on a successful purchase, usually between one and 5%. And as you can imagine, that's not a lot. So it was very hard for me to continue running them in 2020. When the pandemic hit, I spent three to four months obsessing with Facebook ads. I was buying courses, I was watching YouTube videos, and luckily enough for me, I had two friends that had online businesses, both of them had clothing brands. So I started helping them with methods and we were successful. So then I decided that I'm going to start my agency.

Andy Splichal:

That's great. Now, have there been any challenges that you struggle with in getting results for your.

Aleksandar Hadzhiyski:

The. I think a couple the main things that make it hard to be successful with Facebook ads are the small profit margins, one of them is small profit margins for sure. So when a business has small profit margins, you don't have a lot of room to test and you need to be very precise with your targeting and efficient with your ads. So the way we combat this is by adding bundles and by adding up sales and cross sales. Now bundles will improve the average order value, which then increases the ROS, but with the upsells, cross sales and down sales, what we do is basically when people complete their purchase, and it's very important that we do these upsells after people complete their purchase, so we don't interrupt the customer journey. And after they complete their purchase, we give them a one time offer, a discounted product. So if they decide to take on that offer, they just click one button, complete purchase, and automatically adds it to their cart. And they don't need to add their payment information or shipping information again.

Aleksandar Hadzhiyski:

So it makes it very easy for them to complete their purchase.

Andy Splichal:

How do you program that in? Is that a certain platform that's based on.

Aleksandar Hadzhiyski:

Yeah, so there's a lot of different apps that we use on Shopify. Shopify, yeah. But the one that we use the most is called one click upsell.

Andy Splichal:

Okay, yeah, I've heard of that.

Aleksandar Hadzhiyski:

Yeah. So we use that one. It's very easy to do. You can test a lot of different upsells there, a lot of different funnels and it makes it very easy.

Andy Splichal:

And Titan agency, the name of your agency, what are all the services that you provide for clients?

Aleksandar Hadzhiyski:

Yeah, so the two main services are Facebook ads and email marketing. And in the past year we also added Google Ads.

Andy Splichal:

Got it. Cool. And who is the best client for your guys services?

Aleksandar Hadzhiyski:

So at the stage that I'm at, probably the perfect client would have good profit margins, ideally above 50%, already generating, I'm going to say, at least $400,000 a year, good website conversion rate. And I think the most important thing is say hungry for success founder. Because when we work together, I see this as a partnership and I like to work with people that are hungry and want to succeed. It makes my job a lot easier and it also makes the workflow a lot smoother.

Andy Splichal:

And your clients, are they all over the world? Are they in the US? Mostly. Where are they at?

Aleksandar Hadzhiyski:

So at the moment, we do have 21 clients. The majority of them, 16 or 17, are in the United States. And we have a couple in Australia and a couple in the UK.

Andy Splichal:

Now, just curious, is there a big running, how do the US ones perform, I guess, against international ones what's the profitability like? Is there a difference? Anything special?

Aleksandar Hadzhiyski:

So there's a couple of things. Now with the US, the audience that you can target on Facebook is a lot bigger. If you target broad, you can reach, I believe it was 340,000,000. Where is it for Australia, for example, the audience, if you target broad, no age or gender restriction, I believe you can reach 35 to 40 million. So in Australia, for example, when we scale clients, we can't use any interest or lookalikes, we just target broad, because if we target a specific interest or lookalike audience, the audiences fatigue a lot faster, so it prevents us from scaling. Whereas in the US, you can play around a lot with different audiences. And in the US, I think people are a lot more used to shopping online. So they engage with the ads a lot more and you get feedback on your ads a lot faster, you get a lot more data, which then you can use to work on your ads.

Andy Splichal:

Interesting. So people are more used to shopping online in the US. Can you still be profitable outside the.

Aleksandar Hadzhiyski:

Of course, yeah.

Andy Splichal:

So how can an interested listener learn more about working with you?

Aleksandar Hadzhiyski:

I think the best way is to visit my agency's website, Titanagency Co. UK. Over there, I have all my social medias. I also have my YouTube channel where I share strategies about Facebook ads and how to be successful with them. And yeah, I think our agency's website is the perfect place.

Andy Splichal:

Well, this has been great. Is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap it up today?

Aleksandar Hadzhiyski:

I think that's it, Andy. Yeah.

Andy Splichal:

Cool. Well, thank you for joining us, Aleksandar.

Aleksandar Hadzhiyski:

Yeah, thank you for having me, Andy. Been a pleasure for listeners.

Andy Splichal:

Remember, if you like this episode, please go to Apple Podcasts and leave us an honest review. And if you're looking for more information regarding Titan Agency or connecting with Aleksandar, you'll find the links in the show notes below. In addition, if you're interested in his master class, visit Make Each Click Count University, where you can access his current masterclass and all other content for just $19 a month. Well, that's it for today. Remember to stay safe, keep healthy and happy marketing, and I'll talk to you in the next episode.