How To Run Profitable Dropshipping Ads In 2023

Many dropshippers fall short on marketing and advertising, which results in them missing out on a great way to get traffic and revenue. A good business plan and good products aren’t enough if you want to grow your business and be highly profitable. You need dropshipping ads.

That’s why in this blog, I’ll discuss what these ads are, how you can prepare them, where you can run these dropshipping ads, and how much budget you should spend. It doesn’t matter if you’re a beginner or are already dropshipping, I’ll help you utilize these ads to get great results.

What are Dropshipping Ads

Dropshipping ads are essential for the success of any dropshipping business. Advertising helps you increase your brand awareness, traffic, and conversions. The ads also inform your existing and potential customers of what offers you have and encourage them to purchase from your dropship store.

However, creating these dropshipping ads can be tricky. You need to create them in a way that your customers will be enticed to visit your site. This is a daunting task for people that aren’t knowledgeable enough about marketing and advertising.

To help people with this, I created this article to discuss the ins and outs of dropship advertising.

How to Prepare Your Dropshipping Ads

When preparing for your dropshipping ads, you need to consider 3 main factors that will dictate the success of your ads: your target audience, campaign goals, and keywords.

Your Target Audience

Always consider your target audience since most advertising platforms need to know who you’re advertising to. Effective dropshipping ads are those that reach your target audience. It won’t even make sense otherwise.

For example, if you’re dropshipping clothes, like shirts, your ads shouldn’t target people looking for shoes or electronics. You should only advertise to people looking for the kind of products you sell.

Make sure to determine who this audience should be. The more target audiences you identify, the better. To help you identify, consider demographics like gender and age of your target audience. Doing such will help you determine what types of ads and which platforms you can use to reach them. 

For example, if your target audience is people of all ages, Facebook is a good platform. However,  if you’re targeting younger audiences, social media channels like TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter would be better.

Aside from the demographic factors, your target audiences can be more segmented. This means that your target audience may have different experience levels with your store and products. This affects what kind of message you’ll use in your dropshipping ads.

For instance, if your business is in the fitness niche, your ads for customers that are complete beginners in working out should be different from your ads for your athlete or experienced customers.

Your Campaign Goals

This is something you’ll always be asked when setting up your ad campaigns. You need to set up clear goals and performance metrics. These will help you measure the success of your dropshipping ads.

Think about what you want to achieve with your ads. Are you looking to get more sales? Drive more traffic to your store? Increase your brand awareness? Boost your engagement? Gain more followers? Introduce new products to your customers? Are you aiming for more conversions?

Be clear on what you’re specifically trying to achieve with each ad you’ll make.

By identifying your objectives, you can structure and target your ads more accordingly. Your goals will help your advertising platform determine how to run your ads and to whom they should show them.

Many dropshippers fall short on marketing and advertising, which results in them missing out on a great way to get traffic and revenue. A good business plan and good products aren’t enough if you want to grow your business and be highly profitable. 

Of course, if you have different objectives, don’t settle for one ad campaign. Create different drop shipping ads for each objective to ensure more chances of achieving each of them.

Your Keywords

It’s crucial that you use relevant keywords for your dropshipping ads. To remind you, keywords are phrases and words that people enter into search engines like Google to look for something.

Your keywords should be relevant to your products and audience. Continuing with the clothing dropshipping store example, you should use keywords like “floral shirts for men” or other variations because it’s what your customers would most likely use. This will help advertise your products with floral designs.

All of these just mean that you need to know what keywords you should include in your ads. There are many ways to determine the right ones, such as thinking like your customers and using keyword tools.

Where to Advertise Dropshipping

Now that you have a clear vision for your dropshipping ads, the next step is to get it out running. For this, you need to use an advertising platform and there are 5 main options for you.

Here are ways and platforms you can advertise your store and products:

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

This is one of the most common ways of online advertising. Pay-per-click or PPC is Google’s own advertising system in which you’ll only have to pay a small fee every time someone clicks on your ad. It also has one popular form – sponsored search results.

How does this work? When someone searches for something, sponsored PPC ads will be shown as the top results for that search query.

For this way of advertising, you don’t need to use images or videos. Instead, you should focus on your budget for the campaign and good copywriting. Again, make sure to use targeted and relevant keywords.

For a successful PPC campaign, make sure these things are met:

  • Keyword relevance: Are the keywords you’ll use accurate to what you’re advertising? 
  • Landing page quality: Does your site’s landing page look good? Does it have persuasive and relevant content? Also, make sure there are clear CTA messages. 
  • Quality score: This is Google’s rating for the relevance and quality of your keywords, campaigns, and landing pages. Higher scores mean more clicks and less costs. 
  • Creativity: Will your ad stand out from the competition? What are your unique selling points? 

The better results for these requirements, the more likely your ads to rank higher than those of your competitors.

Facebook Ads

Aside from Google, social media is the next most effective advertising platform for your dropshipping ads. This is because:

  • The large and diverse Facebook membership makes it easy to reach different audiences.
  • Facebook has helpful advertising features and tools you can use, like Facebook insights.
  • Clicks and conversions are higher on it than on other social media platforms.

To run dropshipping Facebook ads, you need to have a Facebook Business page or account which you’ll use to access and use the Ads Manager. With the Ads Manager, you can set up, run, and monitor new ads.

Additionally, with dropshipping Facebook ads, you will have to use a photo or a video. Make sure you use visually appealing media to run successful dropshipping video ads and photo ads!

Instagram Ads

Next to Facebook is Instagram. It’s a great engagement platform for ad campaigns like:

  • Instagram Stories: These can be short video clips or a sequence of images where you showcase your products and store. These stories are displayed at the top of the Instagram feed and run for 24 hours only. 
  • Dropshipping Video Ads: These are individual posts of brief video ads. When posting such, make sure to add detailed captions. 
  • Slideshow Ads: These are collections or sequences of videos or images that automatically transition from one image or video to the next for your audiences. 
  • Photo or Image Ads: Like video ads, these are individual posts. However, instead of videos, you use visually appealing images. 
  • Carousel Ads: Like slideshow ads, these contain a sequence of images or videos, two to ten of them. However, your audience has the option to swipe through to view more details about them using the CTA at the bottom of the ads.

What’s great about Instagram is that even with a smaller audience, compared to Facebook, you’ll still surely be able to run successful campaigns. You can also use Facebook’s Ads Manager to run Instagram ads!

Twitter Ads

This is in a league of its own since it’s not linked to either Facebook or Instagram. Although it has a different advertising system, Twitter is still a great platform for building a community and improving your brand awareness with your targeted audience.

Here are four ways you can run dropshipping ads on the platform:

  • Campaigns: Like on Facebook and Instagram, you can run ads as part of a campaign with videos and images. You just need to set a budget and a timeframe for how long the ad will run. 
  • Sponsored Tweets: You pay popular Twitter accounts to tweet about your products or business and link back to your store. 
  • Advanced Search: With this, you can search for topics on Twitter in which you can join. Join the conversation about the topic, catch people’s attention, and increase your engagement and following. 
  • Twitter Card: This is a tool that tweets dropshipping ads that contain images and call-to-action messages. When users click on a Twitter card, you can save their name and email. 

Google Shopping Ads

Google Shopping is a completely separate section where products are listed and sold directly on the Google platform. Meanwhile, Google shopping ads are product ads on search results that contain quick information about the products even without visiting the store.

One of the benefits of this is that it’s easy to set up and manage. You just need to have Google Ads and Merchant accounts. With it, access the Google Merchant center, where you can also see the performance analysis of your ads.

  • Since you can’t use target keywords in this, make sure all product information on your website is accurate.
  • Focus on making ads for your best-selling products.
  • Create a negative keyword list of phrases and words you don’t want your ads to show up for.

How Much to Budget?

“Not because you have a budget, you have to spend it.”

Keep this in mind when running dropshipping ads. It doesn’t matter how big of an amount you have set aside for advertising. What you want to focus on instead is investing in what only gets you the best returns.

When you start, start small so you can get enough data that will help you decide on where to spend more.

From the budget you have, I recommend using only $1000 only and plan to budget that instead. This is more than enough to bring in lots of sales and net profit.

With $1000 as your starting budget, take 90% of it ($900) and put it towards a specific ad type, and use the remaining 10% of it ($100) for another ad type.

Use the $900 budget for Cold Traffic or Frontend Traffic and the $100 for Warm Traffic or Remarketing.

Budget your $900 for a month and you’ll end up with a $30 budget per day. Use this amount for your Cold Traffic, which means you’ll be using it for Google Shopping Ads. With this, your campaign can get sufficient data.

However, this can be either profitable or not. For example, you get no sales after 2 to 3 days. What should you do next?

This is where you optimize your campaigns, like adding negative keyword lists, changing your bids per click, and more. This is much easier for you and your finances compared to straight-up using a huge amount of money for day 1.

Start small because it’s still all about data in the beginning.

Moving into your separate $100. This budget goes to your remarketing campaigns, which are for people who’re already familiar with your store. With warm traffic, you can use dropshipping Facebook ads or Google Remarketing.

If you follow this strategy, you’ll be able to get high-quality traffic from your Google Shopping campaigns and have the budget to bring back people who haven’t purchased in your store yet. If you do that, you’ll see that $1000 is more than enough to start building a highly profitable dropshipping business.

Lastly, you can reinvest the profits you gain from this $1000 budget into ads again to get better results than your first month.

Dropshipping ads - Does That All Add Up?

Ultimately, dropshipping ads are vital to the success of your business. You can drive more traffic, get more leads, improve conversion rates, and more in different ways. These ads dictate how profitable your business can be.

At the same time, it’s also important to invest the right amount of money in the right advertising strategy. This way, you can avoid burning and losing cash and not getting any traffic or sales at all.

With the right amount of money and the right strategy, your dropshipping ads will give you good campaign results and useful data, which you can use to improve your campaigns.

  • Anton Kraly says:

    Hey Everyone,

    As many of you already know I created Drop Ship Lifestyle after selling a network of eCommerce stores and then trying to find a community of other store owners to network with… What I found was a bunch of scammers who promised newbies they would get rich quick by following their push-button systems!

    This led me to create a new community along with an online training program that shares how to build a REAL online business.

    I’d love to hear what you think… it’s a 2.5-hour training designed to help you drop ship profitably… all for free.

    Be sure to click here to check it out and send me your feedback!

    If you go through the “How To Start & Grow A Hyper-Profitable Online Store” webinar and still have questions just contact me and I will help you out

  • >