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
This testing phase is to gather information about how your audience reacts to your product. This phase is not about making money. You might get some sales, but you will most likely end up in a loss for that product.
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.
With advertising, using Instagram I mean, use Instagram Influencers. I don't mean promoting your own post using Instagram's own advertisement options. You can check out these Instagram shoutout examples for inspiration.
How do you 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 you know if you 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 2023
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 2023. 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: A 20-Step Guide to Starting Your Store
Here are some of our best articles:
- AliExpress Dropshipping: A 20-Step Getting Started Guide (2023)
- The Complete Guide: Can You Start Dropshipping Without Money in 2019?
- 12 Reasons Why Most People Fail With Dropshipping in 2023 | Beat Them!
- 23 Awesome Shopify Dropshipping Store Examples
Also, if you want to get started with Shopify, then you can click here to get a free 3-day trial + pay $1/month for the first 3 months!
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.
34 Comments
Love the read mate, very easy to read and helps alot for newbies,
thanks again
Great to hear!
So when creating multiple ad sets for Facebook, what should the difference be between them? Also, how do Instagram influencers usually charge for shout-out posts?
Great questions!
Every ad-set should be testing something different. Think about a different country, different targeting (wine lovers, beer lovers, moms and so on.) or simply a different age.
I suggest when you’re first creating your PPE ad-sets that the only difference between ad-sets is the targeting! (So same countries, same age). So you know what interests work and what not work before you narrow it down on age, gender & country.
I suggest watching a few videos (like this one, and this one) to learn how to target on Facebook if you don’t know that.
Regarding your Instagram question. It all depends on how big the page is and what kind of niche you’re in. I suggest asking a few Instagram pages in your niche for their prices to get an idea of how much they charge in your niche!
Let me know if something was unclear to you or if you have any more questions! I’ll be happy to help you!
Hi,
Really good read you got here. I just have some few questions.
For testing a PPE campaign, as for the ads itself. Do you still split test the creatives and copies of each ads per ad set?
And lets say I duplicate my ad set to try different targeting, do I need to check the box “Show existing reactions comments and shares on new ads”
TIA!
Hi Juls,
Thank you for your great comment! I’ll go over your questions below:
1. I hope I read your question right, but if not, then let me know. If you want to do the PPE testing, then the simplest thing to do is to only test one thing at a time.
So, that means that you should only change one thing (creative, caption, targeting, etc.) per PPE adset. (If you’re not sure which one to test, then test the targeting as that’s one of the most important things later on)
Of course, that isn’t written in stone, you can change more things at the same time if you want, but it will be harder to see what worked or what didn’t work if you changed a lot of things per adset. Does that make sense?
2. Yes, you can press that checkbox. When I wrote this article, that wasn’t an option yet. (This is one of the first articles on Do Dropshipping) But you can still do it the same way as I wrote in the article. You can find the Post ID under Engage customers -> Page posts -> Ad posts
Good luck with everything!
– Richard
Hi, does this still work for you. Well it might as your pixel would already be full of data. Anyways, there are recent changes so I wanted to ask. Would love an honest reply.
Hi Henry,
Thank you for your comment! Great question, we didn’t test it yet with the recent changes (like iOS 14), but I’m planning to write an updated version or a new one later on (if needed).
Good luck with everything! 😊
– Richard
Your information is genuine and very helpful for beginners like me. Please keep up the awesome job! Thank you!
Thank you so much! Good luck with your dropshipping store and let me know if you ever have some questions!
Hi,
This may seem like a stupid question, but in order to test a product, you need a site?
So every single time you want to test you must create multiple sites?
Would be nice if there was a way to test without having to create a site, then dump it and create another etc etc?
Thanks for the guide it was really useful!
Hi Ben!
I think you’re not understanding it correctly. You got 1 site (your dropshipping store, for example on Shopify – which you can find online with your own domain name, like: mydropshippingstore.com).
You then need to have products on your site in order to sell something to people. (for example, what is a grocery store without any products inside the building?)
You don’t create multiple sites, you add multiple products! (for example, on Shopify, you can add as many products as you want)
If you don’t like the product, then you remove that product, not your site.
I hope that made it a bit clearer for you! Let me know if it wasn’t clear enough or if you have any more questions 😊
Hi, can you check my store please? 4herhandbags.com
I have created it for almost three months and do many facebook ads, but still not got one sale now.
Hi! What is your selling point? What makes your handbags different than the ones that your dropshipping store visitors can buy at their local store?
Also, how are people reacting to your Facebook ads? Any comments, link clicks or Add To Carts?
You can also email me, in case you don’t want to comment that information here, by pressing “Contact Us” at the top
But what if I use a winning product finder to find a winning product, then run a Facebook conversion ads for it. Will that be bad?
Hi Patrick, you can do that as well! Product research tools are there to save you time on testing.
Although, I do suggest you test it with a PPE ad first.
This way, you can see if your Facebook Ad targeting is working for that product.
If you target the wrong people, then it doesn’t matter if your product is from a product research tool, it will most likely not sell.
For example, targeting dog lovers for your just found cat product!
Good luck with your dropshipping store, I wish you the best!
CPM for one of the conversion campaign with purchase optimization event is about $70. What does this mean?
Hi Pavan,
CPM means how much it costs to reach 1000 people. $70 is quite high though.
If you want an example, take a look at my PPE campaign examples at the end of the blog post. It’s the last row there; CPM (Cost per 1000 Impressions).
Yes, that’s a PPE campaign, so that’s why it has a lower CPM.
Let me know if that helped you further or if you got any more questions!
Hi Richard,
I have been consuming your articles for the last week and thanks for the amount of detail you put in. This has definitely been the best resource I have found so far.
When running multiple ad sets, are they all about the same product? Are the posts i.e image and videos the same for all the ad sets? Therefore do you only change the people who you target and not the posts? But I can see in one of your answers to a comment above you suggest to not change the country and age?
Also should I target more than one country when running these PPE campaigns?
Thanks
Hi Abdu,
That’s great to hear that my articles are helpful to you!
I’ll answer your questions in the sequence that you wrote them:
1. Multiple ad sets for the same product? Yes! Your goal is to test one product. The method that I talked about here is that you create a few ad sets so you can test different things (like targeting). These ad sets will be for the same product. Otherwise, if the ad sets are not for the same product, how can you compare ad sets then to see which one is doing the best for your product? (I hope you understand this one. It was a bit hard to explain, let me know if you didn’t, then I’ll try again!)
2. Post i.e. image, and videos the same for all the ad sets? This depends on you. If you want to test different images or videos as well, then go ahead! But you could also test it with the same image/video if this will be your first PPE product test! Otherwise, it might be too much for you at the beginning. But you could definitely look into testing more things! (Like different image/video or ad copy)
3. Only change people to target or posts as well? See my response above on your second question. You can test it both if you want, but I suggest to test only the targeting at first, so you don’t overwhelm yourself with so much different data. (One thing to note, not sure if you have experience with marketing or not, if you do, then go ahead and test everything you want!)
And for the country and age: I suggest not touching the age yet; see what Facebook gives you for data after that day of testing. After that day, you can always change it if you see that one particular age group is really interested in your product. And for countries, see my last answer below.
4. Target more than one country? Yes, you can, but the thing is that this depends per niche and product. So I can’t say that you need to target the US only or UK only. I’ll give you three examples, though:
– You can target the big five (United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand) together.
– You can target worldwide (just don’t forget to remove a few countries, you can find that on YouTube).
– Or you can just target one country and see how it goes with your testing. If, for example, the United Kingdom, doesn’t work, then you could try the United States!
Just don’t forget to check with your dropshipping supplier if they ship to the countries that you want to target!
Let me know if this was clear to you (I know it was a lot) or if you got any more questions!
Greetings,
Richard
Thank YOU SO MUCH For this amazing article! and THANK YOU for the amazing site! Seriously, I’m very happy I was able to come across this extremely helpful platform!
Hi Nadine,
Thank you for another awesome comment 😊
Good luck with your dropshipping journey and let me know if you ever need any help!
– Richard
Hi! Just find this website and it’s really good stuff that you working here, thanks for the contents!
I’d like to ask, since you mention that only test one product with all the adsets at one time, what if I sell multiple different product in niche store? should I test different product everyday and find the one that sell at the end?
Hi Levon,
That’s awesome to hear, thank you! 😊
Great question! I personally think, if you’re a beginner, that you should only focus on 1-3 products at the same time. (You can learn more about why I say that here)
So this also means that you will only test 1-3 products at the same time on Facebook (if that’s the advertising platform that you start with).
Just to note, if you’re not a beginner and already got experience, then of course, go ahead and test multiple products at the same time if you’d like that.
Let me know if that helped you further or if you got any more questions!
– Richard
After you finish testing products, how much do you usually put behind advertising?
Hi Tosha,
Thank you for your comment! That’s a great question. I will definitely update this article once we published more articles around the Facebook Ads topic (soon).
But until then, I suggest you start with $10 per day budget adsets. Try to let these run for 3 days, so you give Facebook enough time to figure out who the best people are for you.
Don’t forget to create a separate conversion campaign on Facebook if you used the PPE testing method as discussed in this article. You don’t need to create separate campaigns for each product or service, but it’s best to have adsets with the same objective in one campaign. (For example, the PPE adsets in a PPE campaign & the conversion adsets in a conversion campaign)
Let me know if that’s clear for you or if you got any more questions!
– Richard
That’s super helpful, thank you!
One more, unrelated question. I started my first PPE campaign yesterday. Is it a bad sign if it takes longer than 24 hours to get 1,000 impressions? My campaign has been running for 20 hours and only has 2,401 impressions for four ads sets (344, 653, 695 and 709). I just didn’t know if the slower impression rate could indicate a bigger problem?
Thanks again for all of your insight! This is the best video I’ve watched so far (from a beginner’s perspective).
Hi Tosha,
Sorry for my late reply. I hope you had an amazing weekend! Great to hear that it was helpful 😊
The campaign has probably ended now (sorry), but no, as far as I know, it doesn’t matter as long as the CPM is alright.
The best way to know for sure is to check how much the adsets spent already instead of looking at the total impressions they got.
Maybe the adset with 344 impressions spent less than the adset with 709 impressions! That’s why it’s always best to wait until at least one day has passed.
Also, just to be sure, which video do you mean with ‘this is the best video I’ve watched’?
Let me know if you got any more questions, and I wish you the best with everything!
– Richard
How are you brother, excellent content, very valuable!
I would like to solve a doubt, for example if I do a PPE campaign with 5 sets of ads and three creatives each can be these same creatives in each set of ads changing only the segmentation?
Could it be feasible and yield good results doing it correctly in this way?
Hi Marco,
Thank you for your great comment! The beauty of the testing part is that you can test whatever you like 😊
But indeed, it’s better not to change that many things per test. Here’s a great article from AdEspresso, which mentions this as well:
“While it might be tempting to start testing everything at once, think about it:
The fewer ad variables you have, the quicker you’ll get relevant test results.
Moreover, testing a single ad variable per experiment will make it easier to track and evaluate the result.”
Let me know what you think, and good luck with everything!
– Richard
How are you Richard, I hope you can also help me with these questions:
Do I have to create and configure a completely new store for each product?
I can validate the product by configuring the store in facebook and if it is accepted I can move on to create the store in shopify?
the shopify store?
Once the product is validated in this way, how long should I wait or what should I base my decision on or what should I base it on to be able to scale it?
Thank you!
Hi Marco,
Thank you for another great comment!
Great question, no you don’t need to create a whole new store for each product that you’re testing. However, this does depend a bit on the products that you’re adding. For example, if you’re in the dog niche and you’re suddenly testing a product for horse lovers, then that might look a bit weird.
Another option for this is looking at a general store, which you can find more information about in this article here!
Also, here’s another great article, which will help you with the other question 😊
Good luck with everything, Marco!
– Richard
This information is VERY valuable and applicable. I love the step by step approach used. Makes it so easy to understand. Just wanted to leave my appreciate. 🙏🏾
Hi Dia,
Thank you for your amazing comment! That is so great to hear 😊
Good luck with everything!
– Richard