Forums Forums White Hat SEO PPC Having a rough time after Apple iOS update (diminished Facebook ads)

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    Having a rough time after Apple iOS update (diminished Facebook ads)

    Posted by seohelper on May 7, 2021 at 4:45 pm

    I just want to scream into the void a bit. I relied heavily on creating Lookalike audiences of my best customers for Facebook ads. This worked like gangbusters. It was like a combination of top of the funnel and pure sales. We were selling *to brand new people* every day. The ad started out costing me $4.90 per purchase and I ran it for *16 months* with very minimal tweaks. By the end of the 16 month run it was costing about $14 per purhcase but it was still worth it to me because it was a combination of a purchase + a new customer acquisition.

    Since the iOS updates that cost per purchase has gone up to $30. That is way too expensive for me so I stopped running them.

    Since then I’ve been doing some things that I kinda knew I had to do but put off because the Facebook ads were working so well (my own fault for procrastinating.) I finally started doing SMS marketing and paying more attention to my email list.

    But in the meanwhile my sales have dropped drastically and I’ve already had to let two of my team members go (my biz had 8 employees, we’re down to 6.) And I might have to lay off one more.

    The SMS marketing has a lot of potential, but I did a quick calculation and I’d need about 17,000 subscribers to replicate the sales results I had with Facebook. My sign ups are currently at 200. My email list is more robust at about 50,000 subscribers but the majority of them don’t open emails from me consistently enough to get the flow/volume of sales I was used to. I keep running discount sales to my email list to get a flow of sales going but there is some fatigue there.

    I’m bummed and honestly I don’t want to be in this position again where I relied so heavily on a third party marketing platform that I’m screwed when they go under (prior to the iOS update I go 50% to 70% of my daily sales from Facebook.)

    Just need to scream into the void for a bit. Anyone relate? How are you dealing?

    JWPapi replied 2 years, 10 months ago 1 Member · 12 Replies
  • 12 Replies
  • subtle123

    Guest
    May 7, 2021 at 6:17 pm

    Not a seller but an advertiser for sellers and it’s just gone down and down since end of January. I totally feel your pain and I feel sick each day before opening up ads manager to see how shit the campaigns have performed.

    I’ve tried an abundance of different strategies with no luck.

    From the various things I’ve seen and FB reps I’ve spoken to I get the feeling it’s a shit show behind the scenes at the moment.

  • merchandise_

    Guest
    May 7, 2021 at 6:23 pm

    Yup, turned off fb ads as I was pretty much giving them cash with bread crumbs in return. Same with another site I ran ads on; dried up entirely

  • PPCvsInfluencer

    Guest
    May 7, 2021 at 6:49 pm

    I moved my campaigns to mega broad, lookalikes at 10% right now to test a new theory.

    If I give Facebook enough space, will it self-select out of iOS14 users and find my target audience when they are on their laptop or desktop at work?

    So far my CPL (it’s a browser game company with cosmetic purchases etc.) is where it was at the beginning of January. This is better than where it was at the end of April but still a far shot from where it should be with the audience gates so wide open. Conversion rate into purchases is dropping on them so we’ll see how long I can keep this up.

    Moved some budget over into YouTube ads which I am seeing some success with, but not much better than current CPL on Facebook (though with much more room for optimization).

    ​

    I feel very similarly. I put a lot of eggs into the Facebook basket over the years and this has really made me second guess my tactics. I think we’re about to enter a bit more of a comprehensive marketing strategy time and firms that don’t get ahead will be left behind.

    Whatever free time you have, use it to learn something!

  • Mysterious_Ad_0897

    Guest
    May 7, 2021 at 6:56 pm

    Hello

    Here are alternatives you can test out with a daily budget of $10 for each ad set.
    – Cold audiences with stag interest that are relevant to your business.
    – lookalike of those who engaged with your Facebook and Instagram profiles
    – a broad lookalike range (5% and above) of conversion events like purchases or sign-ups.
    – you can also run lead gen campaigns for cold audiences to collect phone numbers and emails.

    I’ve seen cold audiences work best the last few months.

  • _FinalPantasy_

    Guest
    May 7, 2021 at 7:01 pm

    Sounds like you got complacent and now you’re paying for it.

    The past year has been an anomoly. We won’t see ecommerce this big again until the next pandemic and money printers being turned on. With people getting vaccines, starting to go out, not getting increased unemployment checks or stimulus, we’re going to hit a slump on sales, I think, until things normalize over the course of the year. People are going to go out more, be away from online shopping, travel, and people that made big time stupid purchases while bored at home are going to finally realize they fucked up and pinch pennies to keep the credit collectors away.

    Lol with the downvotes. Our april and mays were bigger than our black fridays the year before. That has never happened in the history of any of our clients. You guys can’t truthfully believe this type of performance will continue always.

  • FeedDirect

    Guest
    May 7, 2021 at 7:36 pm

    I just started running top of funnel ads, turned off remarketing campaigns, and stayed on top of my testing. I met with a FB expert yesterday and had missed one of the changes needed on the Shopify side to ensure that I captured my events using the enhanced FB setting in Shopify. I finally broke even with my campaign today by testing my ads and going after the winners. The FB expert told me that for my company it might be best for me to stick with TOF campaigns for now and hone in on interests/behaviors as needed. I’m back at 3:1 with one of my ads. The FB expert told me that it’s going to be a while before FB stabilizes.

  • cmsciguy

    Guest
    May 7, 2021 at 9:19 pm

    Yeah I feel your pain. Honestly, I moved on from Facebook months ago and I’m so glad I did. Everything about Facebook is janky… The ads manager constantly bugs out, performance was never consistent over more than a few days for me, and ads and my account would get flagged every other week.

    I’ve been a long time user of Google & Microsoft and glad of it, they’re continuing to perform stellar for me. Best of luck to you.

  • GatsbyJunior

    Guest
    May 7, 2021 at 9:58 pm

    you can Still retarget by video views. create some funnels there if you haven’t. set your attribution to 1 day click. That helps tco.

  • fhigurethisout

    Guest
    May 8, 2021 at 12:28 am

    I’m so sorry, ugh! All I can say is… I. FEEL. YOU. Our sales have dropped sooo much this last week and it’s so frustrating testing ads and wasting money to see if something will work. We nailed our LLA and it was going fantastic, and now it’s just… poof, gone.

    Thank you for making this thread though, reading through the comments, it looks like there’s some helpful conversation here.

  • throwawaybpdnpd

    Guest
    May 8, 2021 at 1:34 am

    My average results went up by about 20-30%, but nothing like 300-600% like you

    (I do lead gen only though)

  • JWPapi

    Guest
    May 8, 2021 at 6:43 am

    For us our Sales improved with the new update. But we have a product with very broad appeal. I assume it got cheaper for us, since other brands went out. We run no targeting campaign very profitable.

  • seagamer

    Guest
    May 9, 2021 at 1:07 am

    After reading most of your comments, it seems to me that most of your problems can be offset if FB simply reduce the CPM they charge in order to compensate for the lower performance due to iOS 14.5 & the lower user sentiments about buying through fb Ads.

    FB is used to being pampered by advertisers who were willing to pay handsomely for those impressions. Yes, that was justified when it had results.

    But that ship has long sailed you greedy giant! You gotta bite the bullet, your platform is not performing as well as it used to. Stop sulking and stop placing the blame on Apple when advertisers demand a solution.

    If you can’t give the same quality, reduce your price. For those who complained that your cost per conversion jumped from $15 to $30, please wake up! It is not your fault that performance has worsen. FB is applying an outdated tariff (designed for the better days of FB ad platform) on its now subpar platform. That’s why your cost skyrocketed.

    At times like this, the act of FB still trying to put the blame on Apple is preposterous, time has changed.

    FB is literally saying “We won’t budge. Either Apple revoke the changes, otherwise the advertisers suffer.” This does not make any sense!