Yes. Wasn’t expecting to see such a niche question but this is exactly the position we’re in.

For 8+ years I operated an agency where we tried to do everything. We were spread thin in like 9 different directions. (E-mail marketing, conversion rate optimization, media buying etc.)

After selling due to low profit margins & too much stress, I decided to focus on 20% of the services that generated 80% of our happy clients & outcomes.

So I relaunched with just those services.

But we also “productivized” it so pricing isn’t really fluid anymore and we outline the quantity of everything a client gets. So there are clear expectations & deliverables.

As far as how it went… honestly way better than expected. More demand than I anticipated. May start a waitlist soon. We also just started hiring like crazy lately due to all of this.

A bonus tip if you can figure out a way to apply it to your industry… we find it’s much better to sell a productivized “front-end” product that’s simple, without overwhelming our clients. Then you can offer more complex things on the backend.

So for us, the frontend offer is done-for-you ad creatives. We basically plan, write, film, edit, & design high converting ads for paid social. Once we prove ourselves and clients are like, “Woah, your ads are $0.78 CPLC while our best existing stuff was $3.22” now we have a strong foundation and can sell the actual month to month ad management / media buying services.

(Tbh I also do this because most other agencies/sources for ad creative are quite awful so I wouldn’t want to do media buying for a company and NOT be the one supplying the ad creative. Would basically be doing a disservice to clients. So it’s much easier to have the frontend product basically be a prerequisite to working with us.)

Hope this answers your question. Good luck!

Nice write up! For it to be more beneficial to the readers here, would be nice to get some granular details.

• Did you test multiple variations of the video you found working? Tried different hooks?
• Are you starting to experience ad fatigue with that one video you scaled? Or are you scaling multiple videos simultaneously?
• What prevented you from securing a loan or investment to fund inventory / prevent the fulfillment constraints?
• Is the November sales increase partly due to a strategy shift or purely due to the typical Q4 increase in consumer spending? Does what you sell have an element of seasonality?
• Do you run ads to a landing page / advertorial, or straight to a typical Shopify product detail page? Anything you’re doing to increase conversion rates?

I think answering these specifics and “talking shop” might be beneficial to everyone here and something concrete they could take away. Obviously non pressure to answer. - Simon

Thanks! And it’s my pleasure :)

Great question! In this case I would setup a landing page with a survey/form so people can get “a free estimate” calculated based on their answers like square footage, etc. Behind the scenes, what would happen is that anyone who fills in their e-mail & contact info would trigger a “Lead” event. However, if they select specific options in that form, they can get redirected to a page with a “Purchase” FB pixel installed. OR, after completing the lead form they could be prompted with a Calendly page to schedule a virtual 25 minute consultation. After booking that consultation, THEN you would trigger a Purchase event from the pixel.

Now when you are running ads, you are optimizing for booked appointments/consultations instead of just for leads.

Obviously there are limitations with offline businesses but there is a lot you can still do. Hope this gave you some ideas.

If you setup your pixel properly and make sure events are firing, as well as Conversions API that is native to Meta, you will be golden. All of the after-market stuff for 3rd party tracking is honestly overkill and unnecessary. If you want an extra layer of accuracy you can use UTM parameters and then track them straight in your Shopify analytics without any apps or plugins. Even so, with proper setup our Meta Ads are pretty darn accurate right now across the board. Probably 90% accurate.

Of course, many clients also sell on Amazon, Walmart, & sometimes retail so there are unattributed sales. Especially when you are sending traffic to Shopify but a person opens their phone and buys from the Amazon app. At that point, we handle attribution by finding the correlation of advertising spend to sales from each channel. It becomes pretty easy to calculate the percentage change and ratio of ad spend to “organic” sales on Amazon and such.

Oh, and this is assuming you have a decently short buying window. If it’s 1 to 7 days Meta will be pretty accurate. After that is where things get rocky. If your average customer takes 10-15 days to make a buying decision, it will be much more difficult to track. For certain special situations like that, I recommend having a smaller conversion first like a free opt-in of sorts. Then at least you have some measurable KPI to strive towards and track.

Nobody here will be able to tell you because there’s too many factors involved. Your best bet is to go to Google, find a list of chocolate factories and places that make chocolate bars, and start e-mailing / calling them asking for a few minutes of their time. Make sure you COME PREPARED with a list of questions so you don’t waste their time. Get an idea of pricing, minimum order quantity required, etc.

Most importantly, be prepared that these conversations may not be exactly what you’re looking for, but through them you’ll find out about “this guy” or “that lady” who might be able to help you. People will point you in the right direction, and then those people or companies will have what you’re looking for. Good luck!

I think the closest thing you’ll find are those Amazon Sales Estimators from JungleScout & others. You can just pop that into a Google search and fill it out with the information such as which product category it’s in and the seller’s rank. Then you can get a close estimate of sales.

According to my clients it’s pretty darn accurate.

To get the whole size of the market, I would find several of the top products and repeat this process. Then I’d assume that Amazon accounts for like 30-50% of total sales depending on the market. Hope this helps, good luck!

There’s no one-size-fits-all answer for this. It heavily depends on your industry, EBITDA, profit margins, etc. Team size, assets, so on and so on.

Your best bet is to start researching how companies are evaluated on YouTube, then check out a few calculators you can find in Google. It’s also a good idea to Google search big companies in your industry that were recently acquired and work your way backwards from there.

I see this all the time working in the eCommerce sector. And tbh the only way to truly fail is to go to either side of the extreme.

Saw a startup basically do 90% on development to make a sick product. They thought “build it and they will come” and that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Ran out of budget to sell & market, so they ended up having to be acquired by another company for pennies on the dollar who did have the gunpowder for marketing.

Then you have the private label brands or companies who just barely “make” a product, but they already have a celebrity partnership lined up and all this elaborate marketing. That will appear to work right out of the gate, but since the product tends to be bad or nothing new it will fizzle out with no repeat sales.

Every brand I worked with who succeeded was somewhere between the two.