I remember it well – the moment that I just finished setting up my dropshipping store, and I was ready to market my products to get some sales! I wish someone had taught me back then how to correctly test products really quickly. This way I could have saved a
For me, the best method to quickly test products with dropshipping is using a Facebook PPE Campaign. Create 3-10 $5 ad-sets, depending on your budget. Wait until you have 1000 impressions, usually one day. Then, look to see if your target audience loves the product or not.
Why Testing Products is Important for your Dropshipping Store
Having a dropshipping store is great. No inventory and no worries on how to send a package to your customer.
The one thing you do need to really focus on, besides great customer service, is marketing your products.
Do you know the problem with this if you’re just a beginner?
It costs a lot of money!
Even if you just focus on just 1-3 products at the same time when you’re just starting out, you will still have a so-called learning curve. You will need to learn from your mistakes and keep on going!
You will make advertisements which will look hideous when you look back in the future.
But don’t worry, I’m here to teach you how to quickly test products so that it won’t cost you that much money before knowing if you should continue advertising that product or not.
Testing products to find winning products
With most dropshipping stores, profits will come from a few products. That’s why testing products are so important. It’s to find yourself one of these so-called “winning products”.
Winning products are products that your target audience loves and that sell like crazy.
These products will give you the confidence to keep on going and not give up.
This all might seem really easy right now, but I’m here to tell you that’s it not. It takes time and effort to succeed with dropshipping! And last but not least, you need to keep on going even though every piece of your body is telling you can’t do it and you need to quit.
You can click here if you want to learn more about what a winning product is!
Why quickly test products?
So why should you quickly test products?
Well, because time is money. Every day that you let advertisements run that are not working, you lose money.
This is definitely something you don’t want if you’re on a tight budget. You don’t want to just throw your valuable money away.
But you should still test products. Even though you’re scared to lose money.
Reason? Because most people need to test a lot of products before they find one that sells. Especially if they don’t have much experience yet with marketing products to potential customers.
So, that is where quickly testing products comes into place.
This method will let you quickly test products so you know if it works or not without spending a lot of money.
Of course, after you’ve tested a product and you got some sales and you think, “Hey, this works,” you still then need to test a lot in further campaigns.
Think about:
- Product price: a lower product price might convert better (get you more sales).
- You can change the kind of sale you’re holding, you might be doing 50% off right now, but you could also try $10 off or 60% off.
- Different kinds of offers, you might be doing a normal retail offer now with a discount, but you could also try “buy one, get one free” or “buy this and get a free gift!”
- Your advertisement might work better if you use a different:
- Image or video (or if use an image now, maybe try using a video)
- Caption (text that you place with your image or video to get people to click to your store)
- Different targeting, so that means using a different Influencer or target a different audience on Facebook
Instagram or Facebook: Which one should you choose if you have not made a choice yet?
Before I begin, I suggest you start with Instagram if you haven’t started with marketing your dropshipping store yet, or if you don’t have any prior experience with marketing.
Facebook is a big beast which can be incredibly profitable, but it takes time to learn how to use it correctly. That’s why I suggest you start with Instagram. Basically, with Instagram, you can just find an Instagram page in your niche or the niche from your product.
Then contact the owner (or so-called influencer) to ask if they sell shoutouts and how much they are.
One thing to note is that this will not be a guide on how to market your products with Instagram or Facebook, but how to quickly test products. This is still marketing, but I won’t go over the basics here.
If you don’t have any experience with marketing on Instagram, I suggest reading this. The same goes for Facebook; if you’re not sure yet if you should use it to advertise your dropshipping store then check out this article here.
If you are sure that you want to start with Facebook Ads, don’t forget to check out our complete Facebook Ads beginner’s guide here.
Quickly Test Dropshipping Products Using Instagram
Now that you know testing products quickly is important, it’s time to learn how to do this by using Instagram as your marketing platform.
To start off, I’m using Facebook mostly to quickly test products – that’s why I have much more information on that for you below!
But that doesn’t mean that Instagram isn’t a great way to quickly test your dropshipping products.
How do I use Instagram Influencers to quickly test products?
First, find out what kind of niche your product (or store) falls into.
If you know that then it’s time to start finding pages around that niche. This way you have a great opportunity to advertise your product to people within that niche!
The information below will be easy to follow if you know the basics of how to find and select Instagram Influencers. If not, then I suggest reading this.
I suggest you select 1-3 pages that fit within your budget. You could pick bigger pages, but they will cost more money which might not be worth it if you don’t know if your product and influencer post works.
If you’re on a budget and want to quickly test products using Instagram influencers, then I suggest not spending more than $20 per page.
Just make sure that the engagement rate of that Instagram page is good. Preferably above 3%.
How many Instagram shoutouts at the same time?
If you have more than one influencer shoutout lined up for testing a product, don’t do them at the same time! Or if you already know how that page performs for you; otherwise, just don’t. The reason is that you will not know from which Instagram page the traffic came from.
This will be important to know if the product or niche is working good for you and if you’ll want to try more on that Instagram page.
How do I know if I need to continue testing that product?
After the influencer post is almost finished, just look to see if you got comments on that post and if so, if they are positive.
Then
All that information can tell you so much!
What’s even better is to have something like a Heatmap (Hotjar has a good free version) to see what your visitors do on your website.
Analyse all that information and see if it’s worth testing on the second Instagram page. At your second test, you can also try different variables like images, captions, and so on.
You can find all the different variables to test in a list above in “Why quickly test products?”
Quickly Test Dropshipping Products Using Facebook
So, you’re ready for Facebook? Or maybe you’re already using Facebook advertisements for your dropshipping store. Either way, it’s time to learn how to quickly test products using Facebook ads!
Alright, let’s get started.
What I do when I want to quickly test products when using Facebook is I create PPE ad’s for that product. PPE is short for:
Page Post Engagement; if you use this as your campaign objective it tells Facebook that you want your ad shown to people who are most likely to engage with it. This means likes, shares, post comments, and so on.
Why use PPE to quickly test products?
The number one reason that you need to use PPE to quickly test products is that it is cheaper than let’s say, the purchase (conversions) objective.
The CPM (Cost Per 1000 Impressions) for PPE will be around $5. While the CPM on all my purchase campaigns were around $8-$15 or even higher.
So this means that it will be a lot cheaper to see if your ad works on your target audience.
I hear you thinking, but why should I do purchase objectives later on then? Can’t I keep it on PPE to spend less money on advertising?
No.
Facebook will show your ad to people who are most likely to engage with it. Not who is most likely to visit your site and go through the whole checkout process.
While purchase (the conversions objective) might be more expensive, it will give you the kind of people you want. At least, if you’re like me and want sales!
Conversions objective is Facebook’s most popular campaign objective as it is optimized to deliver you new leads or purchases.
Conversion ads are aimed to increase sales, sign-ups, purchases, or other desired actions on your website, and Facebook’s auto-optimisation works really well.
How do I use PPE to quickly test products?
Alright, so you have a product you want to test. First, you need to create an Engagement Campaign.
What you do now is create 3-10 ad-sets in that PPE campaign.
Why 3-10? Well, I usually do around 7-10 so you have a greater chance of finding that winning ad-set (an ad-set that the target audience reacts well too).
But if your budget is tight, I suggest you keep it lower, to around 3-5 ad-sets.
Just don’t make a lot of ad-sets because you need to. Make them because you want to test different things, like targeting.
Now your goal is to get 1000 impressions on each of them. What I do is I set the budget to $5 per day. Then usually when I look the next day it got the 1000 impressions! Because like I said above, 1000 impressions are around $5.
So, now you have all the information you need for that one ad-set for $5. Now let’s say you had 5 ad-sets for this product. You now only spend $25 to know if a product works or not. And not only that, you got all this information in one day!
How do I know if I need to continue testing that product?
Great, now that you’ve made your PPE campaign, 3-10 ad-sets, and waited till you got around 1000 impressions on each ad-set (which will take around a day if you set your budget on $5 per day), it’s time to analyse your ad-sets and see if your product is worth continuing testing with the conversion objective. Which is more expensive, but you will get the right people who are most likely going to View Content, Add To Cart, and so on.
First, look to see if there are many link clicks and how much your CPC (Cost per Link Click) is.
Then look if you have some Add To Cart’s, Purchases, and so on. This is a great indicator of if the audience of that ad-set is loving your product or not because these people are usually only liking, commenting and visiting your store.
They usually do not go through the whole checkout process. That’s why your CPM is so cheap (Cost per 1000 Impressions).
Also, don’t forget to look at the comments that you got. Look at how positive they are. Do you have comments like: “I need this (Tagged Person)!” Or more like: “Why would anyone need this?”
If the comments are positive then you could test it with the conversions objective! Now you know how your target audience is reacting, in this case: positive.
Examples of my PPE Campaigns that I used to quickly test products
The best way of learning about how to quickly test products using PPE is of course to see some examples!
PPE Campaign example 1
As you can see in this one, I had only two ad-sets. One of them I knew already would work, that’s why the budget is $10 per day, but I think it’s a good example for if you see the difference between the first one and the second one.
That’s the difference between good and bad targeting. The first one has a CPC of $4 while the second one has one of only $0.05!
So what I would do is duplicate the second ad-set to the conversion objective and start testing if people are going to purchase! Spoiler: they did!
PPE Campaign example 2
This one is quite simple. As you can see, almost every single ad-set here is worth testing with a conversion objective.
Except, of course, the first one. Which, as you can see, I turned off earlier because I was not only quickly testing products, but also on a budget.
The CPC is not that high though, but it is high in comparison to all the other ad-sets below.
You also need to look at the engagement of the ad-sets. Things like Cost per Post Engagement, Video Percentage Watched and Post Reactions.
These can tell you a lot about how an audience is reacting to your product. You can see the difference in the example image above!
PPE Campaign example 3
This one is awesome. I got a purchase while testing this product on PPE! So that’s why I had that ad-set running a bit longer than the rest, hoping for another purchase.
How many of these are worth testing with the conversion objective all depends on the budget you have.
If your budget is tight I would say the last 3 or 4 ad-sets are looking good. Otherwise, test every ad-set except for the first one of course!
These are the engagement results of the ad-sets of this example. As you can see, the Video Percentage Watched is so much higher than the previous example.
Also, it’s good to have a Cost per Post Engagement of $0.01 or lower. As you can see, the last ad-set has one of $0.0005!
If you keep testing, you will have your own examples to compare to. You can compare old results to the results of a new product. This way you will know more on if you should continue testing that new product or not.
Yes. Really simple; when you create the first ad-set for your PPE campaign and you have pressed publish after you thought, “This is the perfect ad!”
Then go to the Page Posts section.
After that, simply look up your post that you just created while publishing your ad-set. And then you see the ID of that post. Copy that ID.
Then when you’re creating a new ad-set with different targeting or a different campaign objective, simply put the Post ID there. So you don’t have to create a whole new post.
This way you can keep all the likes, comments and so on for every ad-set! You will also keep it now for when you’re going from PPE to the conversion objective. Just use the same Post ID!
Getting Started with Dropshipping in 2021
So, are you ready to get started with dropshipping? Or maybe you have already started, but you’re looking to get some inspiration?
If so, I suggest reading my complete Shopify dropshipping guide!
It’s a huge article, but it contains everything that you need to know to create your own Shopify dropshipping store in 2021. It’s like a dropshipping course, but for free!
Reading this article will surely help you to get started and stay motivated while beginning and continuing your dropshipping journey!
Just don’t forget that success takes time. Keep improving each and every day!
Shopify Dropshipping Complete Guide 2021: Create Your Store!
Here are some of my best articles:
- AliExpress Dropshipping Complete Guide for Beginners! (2021)
- The Complete Guide: Can You Start Dropshipping Without Money in 2019?
- 12 Reasons Why Most People Fail With Dropshipping in 2021 | Beat Them!
- 23 Awesome Shopify Dropshipping Store Examples
Also, if you want you to get started with Shopify, then you can click here to get a free 14-day trial!
Conclusion
I hope you now have a good idea on how to quickly test products while using Instagram or Facebook. This method will not only save you some money, but also time!
Just don’t forget that yes, time might equal money, but it will also take time before you start seeing sales.
It takes hard work before you get to your goals, but you will get there if you don’t give up and believe in yourself!
If you have any questions then please contact me directly by pressing the “Contact Us” button at the top, or you can comment below! I will be happy to help you.
