Add To Cart or Purchase Conversion Event?

0:00hi guys it's ben heath from lead guru and in this video i'm going to talk about whether you should be running facebook ad campaigns to optimize for the add to cart conversion event or the purchase conversion event i'll talk about the pros and cons of each and which one i think you should be going for before i get to actually frequently ask you to smash that like button and of course subscribe to my channel if you are new and haven't done so already okay so i'm an example facebook ad account i'm going to quickly create an example campaign now obviously for this to um apply you need to be

0:32using the conversions objective okay and we're not gonna bother giving it a name let's just quickly create that and then let's jump to the ad set level and here we get to this point here where you get to choose your conversion event right and you can this is an example facebook account by the way so you're going to see all sorts of arrows just ignore those you can see that we've got add to cart as an option um or we can go with purchase which is probably the two that most businesses most facebook advertisers are going to focus on the most particularly those that are advertising

0:59like e-commerce products or their drop shippers or they're trying to sell you know sell something that people buy directly and some sort of product which would be most facebook advertisers i would say and when you're selecting your conversion event you're basically saying to facebook this is what i want you to go and get me this is what i want you to optimize my campaigns for so facebook if you think that a certain type of person within my target audience is most likely to purchase go ahead and put my ad in front of that person if you think a certain time of day gets more purchases run my ads at that time of day more than

1:32other times if you see that people are more likely to purchase if i run an ad on the instagram feed as opposed to facebook stories then do that you basically send to facebook do all these things optimize my campaign for this for purchase or for add to cart and the decision between the two you know given that explanation you might think why wouldn't you always just optimize for purchases and the the issue with doing that potentially is around conversion volume so facebook has said that in order to fully optimize a campaign for a campaign to optimize properly just along the lines of what i'm saying facebook being able to do those various

2:08things you need to be generating 50 conversions a week now there are lots of advertisers particularly new facebook advertisers that may generate 50 ad to cart events per week but don't generate 50 purchase conversion events per week because i don't know the average business might generate three four times as many active carts as they do purchases and if you're generating say 80 add to carts a week but only 20 purchases you might think well if i optimize for add to cart in my conversion event then that's going to get me out of the learning phase that's going to help facebook optimize my campaigns better and i'm going to

2:43have overall better results supposed to go into purchase because i don't meet the 50 criteria i would argue that that's not the case i would recommend going for purchase unless you're going to be generating less than 10 purchases per week which is a very small amount just every one per day i would recommend going for purchase even if you're in 15 20 25 30 still under that 50 mark and the reason why is because i believe and i've tested this enough to know that this is true a partially optimized facebook ad campaign that optimizes for the purchase conversion event so it's not fully optimized but it's going

3:19for exactly what you want it to get is going to outperform a fully optimized campaign that is optimizing for add card it's like you've got a a better tuned machine but it's going after something that you don't quite want the slightly worse tuned machine that's going after exactly what you want performs better okay so when you're running campaigns conversion campaigns with the purchase conversion event you may well see learning limited pop-up you may see these errors don't let that dissuade you from going with that setup i really do believe you're going to see better results we've tested this so many times to know that it's the case the downside to going

3:54to add to cart going for add to cart in your conversion events is that facebook is so good at getting you what you asked for so facebook will go out and find the people find the time of day find the placement options find the all sorts of things that get you add to carts but often those add to carts don't then go on to convert to purchase so for example if we run a facebook ad campaign with the conversions objective optimizing for the purchase conversion event we may see a three to one add to cart to purchase ratio so you get three adder cards for every purchase

4:25sometimes it'd be two to one something like that if we run a conversions campaign and we optimize for the ad cart conversion event we have seen ten to one add to caster purchases fifteen to one out of cost purchases so the campaign looks like it's doing great and you're generating tons of add to carts but those people aren't going on to purchase and that's because to some extent of course there's overlap but there will be a slightly different personality profile in the people that add to carton just add to cart versus the people that add to cart and then go on to purchase and if you're saying to facebook add to

4:59cast my conversion event go ahead and go for that well facebook is then just going to be able to just going to go for that right they're just going to get you those people that can't think whether they go on to purchase or not we've done our job like yay us facebook we've done our job we've got this person add to carts which is what they want um if in doubt of course test it run account exactly the same campaign with add to cart run exactly the same campaign with purchase see what's performs best there's always going to be exceptions to the rule where add to cart will perform best

5:27but i think 95 of the time purchase is the way to go provided you're generating more than 10 purchase events per week you don't need 50 and don't worry if you see learning limited all that sort of stuff up it's still the best way to go so just a quick video for you today before you go something i want to quickly mention and that's a free webinar i've created called three killer facebook ad strategies to double or more your revenue completely free to watch link is in the video description this webinar shows you three different strategies two different sales funnels that we use all the time it also shows you which

5:55sales funnel to focus on depending on what you're selling right so if you're an e-commerce business you need a certain sales funnel if you're a local business you need a different sales funnel if you're high-end service provider you need a different sales funnel all of that is covered so go ahead check that out if you found this useful please give it a thumbs up please don't forget to comment to let me know comment below if you've got any questions i get to as many of those as i can and of course subscribe to my channel if you are new and and haven't done so already thanks a lot

6:18guys best of luck with your facebook ad campaigns and i'll talk to you soon bye for now