This Is How You Can Profit From A PPE Facebook Campaign

AliDropship team uses page post engagement ads in promoting our self-owned dropshipping stores. It could seem strange since such campaigns usually don’t lead to purchases. In this article, I’ll explain the purpose of using PPE Facebook campaigns.

In one of our previous articles, we described how to search and test Facebook interests. You might have noticed that our first step was creating and running a PPE campaign. However, such campaigns usually result in no sales, so you may wonder why create something that brings no profit.

Actually there’s a number of reasons why AliDropship team uses PPE ads on Facebook in their strategy. But before that, let’s find out what this is all about.

What is a PPE Facebook campaign?

PPE stands for Page Post Engagement. It’s a type of Facebook advertising campaigns aimed at stimulating the engagement rate of a given post as opposed to other typical objectives such as funneling traffic to a website or increasing the conversion rate, etc. The purpose of Page Post Engagement campaigns is to stimulate interactions with a given post such as likes, views, comments, shares and clicks.

By launching a PPE Facebook campaign, a business account owner makes a post popular in social media terms, so to speak. It’s not just about showing the post to more users but also about stimulating activity around it.

How we create PPE Facebook campaigns

Before going to Facebook business account, our team creates materials for future posts. As practice shows, video ads work best, but picture and photo posts can do well too. The team creates not just one but many videos (about 30 seconds long) with different content.

After that, we publish the videos on the Facebook page of a given dropshipping store. Such posts differ from each other: they have different content, or different video thumbnails, or different call to action buttons, or ad texts. The point is we’re not going to use all of them, but I’ll get to it later.

Now, the team launches a Page Post Engagement campaign by choosing to promote existing posts (the videos we published before). This part is important: you don’t want to boost new posts each time you launch a campaign.

We create one ad set per one video post and set the daily budget to $5-15. As a rule, the more you spend the faster you get the results. Depending on how the ad sets perform, the budget can be raised or lowered or you can completely shut down an ad set if it brings no results.

As the campaign keeps running, it generates engagement actions (likes, shares, view, etc.). But as a rule, it doesn’t convert users into buyers (with rare exception). Now it’s time to talk about why we always use Page Post Engagement campaigns.

Why you should use PPE campaigns

1. To test products and creatives

Launching a PPE Facebook campaign which boosts several posts at once allows you to test them. That’s why you want to make more than one creatives with different elements. After a while, you will see how they perform or even will be able to tell what exactly is wrong with them.

For example, this ad set on the screenshot was shut off because its CPC was much higher than that of the other sets and its average play time was only seven seconds. This ad cost us too much and wasn’t really interesting to users, so the team decided it wasn’t worth keeping it active.

After the first few days of testing, you can pick the most efficient ads which you will use in other campaigns aimed at converting users into buyers.

Moreover, based on how a PPE ad on Facebook performs, one can tell whether there’s demand for a given product.

The thing is, Facebook tries to show PPE ads to its most active users, people who statistically like, comment and share more often than others. So, if even such people show no interest in a post, it means you shouldn’t expect much interest from potential buyers.

But if a PPE campaign generates a couple of sales (which is extremely rare), you can be pretty sure the product has potential.

Of course, one can test a product by trying to sell it from the very beginning. But the cost of conversion of campaigns aimed at broad and untested audiences can be really high. So, if the experiment fails, it’ll cost you much more than a failed Page Post Engagement campaign.

2. To collect data for other campaigns

Beside testing products and promotion materials, PPE campaigns are also used to find the most interested Facebook target audiences by using the demographic data collected during the tests.

Moreover, after we launch a conversion campaign, we do not stop the PPE campaign – at least the most successful ad sets. We simply lower the daily budgets to $5 but never turn it off. Instead, the campaign keeps running and collecting even more data which we can use to adjust our targeting settings.

There are two more reasons to keep PPE campaigns running.

3. To increase users’ trust

As I already mentioned, PPE ads on Facebook generate engagement. As a result, the posts get hundreds and thousands of views, comments, shares and likes.

Later, when we use the same posts in conversion campaigns, potential customers see video ads with a high level of engagement. The more likes a post has the more the chances that people will take a look.

Compare these two posts. Which one would you click on?

4. To make conversion campaigns cheaper

Have you ever thought why certain ads on Facebook cost less than others to advertisers? Facebook’s algorithms don’t just show ads to people for money. The system handles them as pieces of content. If people don’t like them (don’t interact with them), Facebook shows them to less people. And when it does, it asks for more money, so to speak.

But if the audience enjoys the content, Facebook tends to show it to more users, the ad posts tend to win bids more often and the cost of promotion goes down.

Moreover, the more people interact with a post the more data Facebook collects, which allows it to target better. As a result, it promotes a post with a high level of engagement more efficiently than a completely new ad with zero interactions.

The benefits of PPE Facebook campaigns: conclusion

PPE campaigns are great for getting started with a new product. It may seem like a waste of money, but it’s not. By spending a couple of bucks, you can test the product and promotion materials. Without this phase, you risk wasting much more money on campaigns that failed.

Besides, by keeping PPE ads running, you make conversion campaigns more efficient and even cheaper.

All this testing allows AliDropship’s team to select the best possible products, marketing materials and audiences. The products then go to the catalogs of our Premium Stores – exact copies of our most successful self-owned websites. As for video ads and banners, you can have them too by purchasing marketing packages along with one of the Premium Stores.