FAQs: Which TPT product should I promote with Facebook ads? | 14
Knowing which TPT products to pick to promote can be a daunting task. There is so much data to analyze and it can really be overwhelming. So in this week’s episode, we explore some key data points that we can use to optimize our TPT listings and also select the perfect products to promote using FB ads.
FAQ #1: Which TPT product should I promote with Facebook ads?
When looking at your TPT products, here’s my three tips for selecting which ones to promote.
Pick products that are converting well.
Driving traffic to your store will not improve the conversion rate, so it’s important to pick a product that is converting well organically. I recommend you have a product in your store for at least three months before running ads to collect this data.
Think about the timing of the ads. Is this product currently relevant?
Some products sell well year-round. Other products are more seasonal. Think about when teachers need this particular product… is it perfect for back-to-school? or better for wintertime? It’s unlikely all the money in the world will make a Halloween product sell well in April. So consider the timing of the ads when selecting your product. Use the data available in your TPT dashboard to determine relevance of a particular product if you’re unsure.
Select a specific product or bundle, not a custom category or your entire store.
As a consumer, when I click on an ad, I want to be taken to the product I saw in the ad. I don’t want to have to scroll through an entire store or group of products to find what interested me. There’s no better way to lose a buyer than to confuse them. Picking a specific product or bundle allows you to tailor the ad for that product and helps create an effortless customer journey that leads the buyer to the checkout.
FAQ #2: How do I use TPT's data to improve my sales?
So your TPT sales are as great as you hoped, but you aren’t sure how to improve your listings. By using your data, you can more quickly determine which parts of your listing will have the biggest impact.
Problem #1: Low Traffic
Solution: Start by optimizing your cover image, title and snippet which are seen in the search results. Your title will help you rank higher in the results, an optimized cover image will draw more people to the listing and the perfect snippet will make people click.
Problem #2: Low Conversion Rate
Solution: Update your thumbnails images, be sure to include a high quality product preview and update your listing to show buyers the benefits (not just the features). Your thumbnail images need to give buyers an idea of what they’ll get, so they should be high quality images of the product with or without text. The product preview needs to clearly show exactly what they’ll be getting. Collages can work for both the thumbnails and preview as long as what’s included is obvious and not hidden. Finally, we tend to describe features in product descriptions, things like 23 pages or 4 student workbooks, because it is easier. But buyers often make buying decisions based on the benefits (save time, low prep, keeps students engaged), so be sure to include benefits higher up in your descriptions.
If you want more help with this then be sure to reach out on IG (@heyitsjenzaia). I’m a self-proclaimed data nerd and love talking all things numbers!!
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Episode Transcript:
Hey there, I'm Jenzaia and this is Market Scale Grow. A podcast created for ambitious teacherpreneurs looking to have a bigger impact on the world, achieve freedom, flexibility, and ultimately make more money with weekly strategy sessions and inspiring stories from fellow teachers. Just like you. My goal here is to help you create a customized marketing strategy so you can grow your teacher business beyond your wildest dreams.
Okay, so before we jump into the episode, I am super excited to share a brand new freebie with you. It's my targeting ideas for Facebook ads. If you've dabbled in Facebook ads or you've done them and you've tried them, and you're just looking for some fresh inspiration for your audiences, this freebie is for you. I share my top Facebook ad targeting groups for you so that you can have inspiration and find those people that are perfect for what you have to offer. From warm audiences to cool lookalike audiences, to cold interest based audiences. I cover all three in this freebie. Head to marketscalegrow.com/audiences to grab your copy today.
Welcome, welcome friends. I am so excited that you are joining me for today's strategy session. This is Market Scale Grow, and I am Jenzaia. I'm very thankful that you've chosen to spend the next 10 to 15 minutes hanging out with me. Today we are going to be talking about one of the questions I get asked all the time. It's how do I pick where to spend my ad money in my TPT store? So you've seen some success, your store is growing, and you've decided that you want to start running Facebook ads to your Teachers Pay Teachers store, but you don't really know where to spend your money. I have three tips for you that will help you to decide where is the best place for you to spend that money.
Number one, what is converting well? You can go into either the product statistics or on your dashboard and look at conversion rates for specific products. Every store is different. There's a huge range of what would be considered good depending on your niche and how long you've been selling for and many other factors. So I want you to go in and pick products that are converting well before you put ad spend behind it. This is so important because people are searching for your products on TPT, and that's more of an organic conversion rate.
So I have a product that does well in April- it's a fractions unit of boom cards, and it does really well in April. I've had it for a couple of years now and every year, the same thing. So in April, that would be a good product for me to put ad spend money behind because it converts at about 15 to 20%. Whereas in September, it doesn't convert as well. And maybe not that it doesn't convert as well, but it doesn't get as much traffic and it's not what people are looking for. But when I put ad spend behind it, my conversion rate dips a little bit. What happens when you start putting ad spend money behind it is that it starts showing up in people's news feeds and they see it. They're not specifically looking for fractions at that moment. On TPT, people are actually specifically looking for 'grade one fractions boom card French immersion' to try and pull up a resource that meets all of their needs. So when they find it, they're like, "Hey, this is what I was looking for. I'm going to buy it." Facebook ads again are just showing it to people who aren't necessarily interested or wanting fractions right now. So while they might click and say, "Ooh, this will be good when I'm teaching fractions," they may not be looking to buy at that moment. So you have to remember that and know that running ads is actually probably going to decrease your conversion rate because you will have more eyes on your product, but not necessarily people who right at that moment are looking to buy, but that doesn't mean the ads aren't doing their job. So again, tip number one is to pick something that organically is converting well.
Tip number two is a bit of an extension on that and you need to think about the season that we are currently in. I'm not talking actual scientific season of the year. So do you have summer products or end of the year products that you could be promoting right now? But I also mean, is there a holiday that you have a product for that you could be advertising, or do you have a unit that people tend to like at this time of year, or do you have a bundle of any of your products? Because right now it's May, and so a lot of people are at that end of year timeframe. So those are another piece, it's not just something that overall converts well, but right now at this time of year, does it convert well? That's really important.
Now my final tip, tip number three is to pick a product or a bundle. I personally do not recommend that you advertise a custom category or that you advertise your entire store. The reason for this is people clicking on your ad, want to be taken to something specific, to see something specific. If you take them to your entire store, it's just too big and there's a lack of focus. It's kind of like walking into Winners, where things are just kind of everywhere and you don't really know what you're looking at or looking for, versus when you walk into Bikini Village, you're looking for a bathing suit. So if you take me to your product, then I know, and this is what I'm looking for. But if you take me to your store, I kind of just get overwhelmed by the sheer quantity in many stores of things that I could be buying. A custom category is the same as your full store is offering, it's just too much. There are some exceptions to that. For example, if you have an end of the year custom category, or you have a Halloween custom category and your ad is specifically saying, "come look at all the great resources I have for the end of the year." Then you're taking into like an end of year group of resources. That could be an exception, but I still prefer to send people to a product or a bundle because it gives them direction.
So, my three tips again are: pick something that converts well organically, think about the time of year or the season that we're in and pick something that is seasonally appropriate, and tip number three is to direct your ads to a specific product or a bundle. Now, you all know that I am a numbers girl. So one of the big pieces of data on TPT that you can use to make decisions is your traffic or your page views and your conversions. So let's start with traffic. If you're looking at a product and you're like, this should be doing great, but your traffic is lower than you would like. First of all, how long has the product been out for? Generally speaking, I recommend that a product be up for 12 months before you start thinking about how good the traffic is. This can be dependent on the size of your store, the newer your store, the less traffic, the fewer followers you have, the longer it's going to take for you to get really solid data. But six to 12 months is a good time range.
It's especially important for you to give it that long if it's a very seasonal item or something that's holiday-based. So, I have a St Patrick's day word search that flies off the shelves. I posted it right before St. Patrick's Day, the year that I posted it. So if I had waited 10 months, well, obviously I'm not getting traffic. Most of that time, I probably only got traffic for the first week or two that it was up and then nothing for 10 months. So that's not enough time. In a case like that, you really need to let the holiday go by again and have a full season because people start buying St Patrick's Day things a month in advance, sometimes even six weeks in advance. So you really need to let that full cycle go by before you make any determinations. So at least one of those full cycles, if not two.
Now, if your traffic is low and you're wanting more eyes on your product, the first two things you need to update and make sure are optimized are your cover image and your snippet. The snippet is the first three lines of the description that show up in the TPT search. Making sure that your cover image and that snippet are really well optimized is going to draw more people in. The other thing you need to optimize, of course, is your title. That is going to get people to even see it and for it to show up in the search results. So if the data is saying that your traffic is low, update your cover image, your title, and your snippet, so that they are keyword rich and enticing.
The second piece of data that I want you to look at is your conversion rate. The conversion rate is the number of people who purchase divided by the number of views. So if 10 people have purchased your item and 100 people have viewed it, then your conversion rate is 10%. Again, I think I said this already, but conversion rates vary immensely from TPT store to TPT store. So you really need to look at your entire store and find what your range is for your particular audience, your niche, and just your store in general before you make any decisions of what a good conversion rate is and what a poor one is. When you've decided, okay, this isn't converting well, make sure again, that you have already updated and optimized your title, cover image and snippet. To help it convert even better, you want to make sure that you are effectively using your thumbnails, your preview, and that your entire description is optimized.
This is not something that I specialize in, but if you need more information about how to update and optimize your TPT listings, send me a DM on Instagram. I'm @heyitsjenzaia, and I have a couple of different people that I can send you to as resources that I love and that I trust and that I follow. So make sure you reach out if this is something that you need to focus on.
Ok, so we went over my three tips for where to put your ad spend. Then we also talked about the data and what to do if your traffic is low and what to do if your conversions are low. If you have any questions, or like I said, you want support on optimizing those two picky listings, reach out. Don't forget to share this episode and let me know which one of these tips resonated most with you. Was it one of the ad spend tips or was it one of the data tips? I always reshare your shares, so I will be looking out for those. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. Thank you for spending some of your Saturday with me.
Thank you for listening to today's episode. Today was brought to you by Dubsado my absolute favourite customer management tool. If you're looking to streamline and systematize your service-based business, I highly recommend Dubsado for 20% off of your first month. Head to marketscalegrow.com/dubsado that's D U B S A D O and use the code Jenzaia at checkout. And don't forget to head to our community at marketscalegrow.com/community where you'll find inspiring, ambitious teacherpreneurs who are looking to grow and scale their businesses just like you... See you soon.