A decade ago, true legato sampling was considered to be a specialty feature reserved mostly for premium, flagship products by larger developers. However nowadays, true legato is more or less a minimum requirement anytime a developer releases a product based on an acoustic instrument of voice that will be used in a melodic musical context (especially bowed strings).

While there are myriad approaches to true legato sampling, many of them closely guarded in-house secrets, there are a few concepts that I can share that will be more or less unchangeable regardless of the specific method you choose for your product(s).

Basic Concepts

True legato sampling involves recording the individual intervals in between notes in up and down directions usually up to an octave. Let’s use the note C3 as an example, a “round” of legatos intervals for this would involve capturing the following.

1. C3-C#3, C#3-C3
2. C3-D3, D3-C3
3. C3-D#3, D#3-C3
4. C3-E3, E3-C3
5. C3-F3, F3-C3
6. C3-F#3, F#3-C3
7. C3-G3, G3-C3
8. C3-G#3, G#3-C3
9. C3-A3, A3-C3
10. C3-A#3, A#3-C3
11. C3-B3, B3-C3
12. C3-C4, C4-C3

We will talk about a couple of specific ways of capturing these intervals below but the basic concept above remains the same.

Recording Transition with Sustain

The most time consuming way to record legato transitions is to record each interval transition leading into a full length sustain of 6-8 seconds (or however long you want your sustains to be).

Advantages:

1. Less editing –  In fact there have been libraries out there that have used the whole transition and sustained audio samples opting to deal with the transitions via sample offset in kontakt.
2. Crossfading – No need to cross fade between transitions and sustains. A lot of time and effort is spent nailing the right crossfade between legato transitions and sustains, this is a non factor when the transition and sustain are recorded together.
3. Most realistic – The result of this recording approach often leads to a legato that is highly playable and realistic – though there are plenty of developers that have managed excellent results with other approaches.

Disadvantages:

1. Time – Recording all of the transitions you need for a given instrument is both time consuming and mentally exhausting for all involved.
2. Money – The extra time needed to capture transitions + plus sustains means more billable hours for both the musician and the studio, so set your budget accordingly. Consider reserving this approach for premium libraries with a price that will offset the additional budget and or for instruments with limited ranges but maximum expressiveness.
3. Flexibility – While recording transitions and sustains simultaneously offers a lot of clear benefits, it does mean that you are locked into whatever type of sustain you end up recording. For example if you wanted to offer transitions with vibrato you would have to record a new set of intervals leading into vibrato sustains. There are of course ways around this but they sort of undermine the purpose of this approach altogether.

Recording Transition Only 

Advantages:

1. Time – Recording transitions alone is a much faster method of capturing legato. For comparison, capturing a set of 12 chromatic intervals for a note recorded with the first method would take 108 seconds (without rests), assuming a transition length of about a second and a sustain length of 8 seconds. On the other hand you could record two round robins of the same legato intervals alone in under 30 seconds!
2. Money – The time saved recording transitions only means less studio time and less time you will need to keep your musician(s) on the books.
3. Flexibility – Whereas the transition + sustain approach locks you into a particular sustain type, recording intervals alone opens up a world of opportunities. Use the same set of legato intervals non vibrato, vibrato, even sul tasto or sul ponticello. The only limit is your imagination and the skill of your scripter!

Conclusion

Those are the basics of true legato sampling, as you are probably starting to see there are a million ways you can approach recording true legato intervals. How you approach true legato in your products is going to come down to the budget and time you have available, not to mention the skill of your scripter.

There is no right or wrong way to approach things. It helps to do your research, experiment and don’t be afraid of making mistakes. Many developers have changed their approach to true legato sampling over years of experimenting with different approaches.

With the current market conditions of excessive inflation, oversaturation of products and recession looming, now more than ever customers are being very careful with their money and beginning to spend less. Across the industry, many companies are seeing reduced customer spending and thus reduced revenue due to these factors. With this in mind, now is a good time to examine your monthly expenses to ensure you are running lean as possible and not spending frivolously.

Here are 5 suggestions for reducing expenditure in the common areas sample library or plugins companies spend their money.

1. File Hosting & Bandwidth

File hosting and bandwidth costs can be a large expense particularly if you are selling sample libraries which can be anywhere from 5GB to 100GB. The most common solution is Amazon S3 but at $0.02/GB for storage per month and $0.09/GB for bandwidth, the costs can add up quickly, particularly if you’re using it to distribute free products. Luckily there are a number of other options:

• Digital Ocean Spaces – Spaces is Digital Ocean’s “S3-compatible object storage” (ie. its own version of Amazon S3). It’s fully interoperable with S3 meaning if you currently use Amazon S3, its simple to swap it out for Spaces as it works in the same way. The pricing of Spaces is far less than S3, coming in at $5 per month for 250GB of storage and 1TB of bandwidth (the equivalent on S3 would be $95) and additional bandwidth costing just $0.01/GB instead of $0.09/GB. There are two small downsides to Spaces, the first being that you’ll need to copy all of your data from S3 to Spaces (which can take a while if you have a lot of files) and the second being that download speed can be a little slower on Spaces than S3, but generally speaking its similar.
• Bucket Blaze – If you’d rather not move from Amazon S3 but want to integrate a CDN to increase download speeds and reduce your costs without having to use Amazon Cloudfront (which can be very expensive), then Bucket Blaze is a service designed for this. Its compatible with multiple platforms (not just WooCommerce) and essentially becomes a wrapper around your S3 files, copying them into the Stackpath network cache then delivering them to customers from there instead of S3, resulting in costs being reduced by approximately 50% (bandwidth only costs $0.05/GB for CDN delivered files), far faster download speeds for customers and useful “per file” analytics so you can see which files are costing you the most each money, where your customers are based and more.
• Downloader Apps – Apps like the Pulse Downloader App can actually help save you money in a number of ways.

  1. Reduced bandwidth costs – if you’re delivering files from S3, Digital Ocean etc. you may be paying for up to 40% more bandwidth due to broken downloads from customers downloading large files via their browsers. Downloader apps like Pulse ensure that bandwidth is not wasted through its pause/resume functionality (restarting downloads from where they were stopped instead of restarting from scratch) and checksum verification functionality (ensuring downloaded files are correctly downloaded before extraction)

  2. Reduced customer support – For sample library companies especially, the most common customer support queries are “I can’t extract my software” and “Why can’t I use my product with Kontakt Player”. Pulse takes care of all of your download/installation queries, reducing those emails to zero resulting in lower costs on customer support.

2. Graphic Design

While a great graphic designer is an incredibly important asset to your company, you may not be able to afford to hire one at times or perhaps there may be some elements you would prefer to do yourself. There are a number of alternatives you can use to create advertising banners, product images and other graphic elements:

• Online Graphic Design Tools – There are lots of useful browser based platforms that provide you with simple to edit templates for banner ads, Youtube cover images and much more. While a graphic designer might be able to provide something better, if you’re looking to create them yourself without having to learn and pay for a tool like Photoshop these tools can get you most of the way there with little effort: Canva, Adobe Express and Snappa.
• AI Image Generators – These are already being used by a number of companies to create product artwork images and backgrounds for banners etc. to great effect. For example, maybe you want to make a banner advert for a piano sample library sale? Generate a background image using an AI image generator then put that into Canva to add text and buttons overlay . Our favourite so far is Midjourney but two other useful options to try are Nightcafe Studio and Starry AI

3. Email Marketing

The most common email marketing platform used by the large majority of companies is Mailchimp and for a good reason – its incredibly easy to use, has many useful features and integrates with every platform. However, once your email list starts to grow past a few thousand subscribers, the costs can become eye wateringly expensive. For example, 50k subscribers can cost you up to $700 per month. Luckily there are other options which are worth exploring!

Though it can take a little effort to integrate and is less feature rich than Mailchimp or similar platforms, Sendy is an incredibly cheap option to reduce your email marketing overheads. Sendy integrates with Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) to deliver emails via your Amazon SES account at a rate of $1 per 10,000 emails. There are no contact limits and you’re not charged for the number of contacts you have in your list – just the number of emails you send.

It takes a little work to set it up as its “self hosted” and you need to setup SES on your own Amazon account (its also worth paying for a dedicated IP address to ensure higher deliverability) but you can use a service like EasySendy who offered managed hosting meaning it requires less work to get setup or alternatively you can find a contractor on Upwork who can help you get it setup quickly and easily.

4. Website Hosting

If you’re using a self hosted eCommerce solution like WordPress, WooCommerce, Drupal, Joomla then you might be paying more than you need to for your website hosting. While many smaller companies use cheap website “shared hosting” plans mid to larger sized companies use dedicated hosting and a VPS to ensure high website durability and uptime. However, this can be expensive and there are plenty of less expensive and better optimised options available.

Our favourite option for this is Digital Ocean Droplets. For $5 per month, you can have a 1 click install WordPress droplet with 1GB CPU, 25GB SSD and 100GB of bandwidth and the best part is you can easily upgrade any element within seconds. Website slow? Just increase the RAM or CPU on the fly and its done within seconds

Digital Ocean is highly recommended for any self hosted website because they guarantee a high uptime in their SLA, its very cheap and you can easily upgrade/downgrade any element of the website resources at any time without having to change between specific plans – you only pay for what you need. Tip: add the free Cloudflare plan on top of your website to reduce the load so you don’t need to pay for more website resources.

5. Advertising Optimisations

For all banner ads, email ads, third party placements etc. you should track conversions accurately using Google URLs and Google Analytics. Once you’ve setup your Goals correctly in Google Analytics, this method allows you to see how much traffic is coming from a particular link, how many conversions its creating and the ROI from it.

So for example, if you’re running a banner advert on a forum, you should be doing the following so you can see the exact amount of revenue that advert is bringing you:

1. Setup the conversion Goal in Google Analytics (eg. if a user gets to yourwebsite.com/completed then you know they have checked out and bought a product)
2. Ensure revenue is setup for tracking in Google Analytics
3. Create a specific URL for your banner ad using Google URL Builder (eg. https://www.mywebsite.com?utm_source=kvr&utm_medium=bannerad&utm_campaign=julybanner&utm_id=kvrforumadvert)
4. Ensure that URL is being used for the banner ad link

Once setup, you can regularly check each of your campaigns / adverts to see what is bringing you in the most revenue and turn off ones that are not bringing you in enough revenue to provide a positive ROI. Here are some additional optimisations for other ad platforms:

Google Ads:

1. Setup negative keywords to ensure your ads are not being triggered and displayed for incorrect phrases. eg. if you’re selling audio plugins, but want to ensure your ads don’t show up for “photoshop plugins” on a broad match search term for “plugin”. Look at your search terms report to see every search query that resulted in your ad being shown, then ensure any incorrect triggers are added to your negative keywords list
2. Optimise locations – if you’re targeting all of USA for an ad campaign, you may find particular states have a higher ROI than others. Target those states and turn off the lowest performing states / countries
3. Use more exact keywords and long-tail keywords rather than broad match phrases. For example instead of “audio plugins” try “buy audio plugins online” or “top 10 audio plugins 2022“

Facebook Ads:

1. Ensure you’re using the Facebook Conversion API instead of the Conversion Pixel – the Conversion API gives you more accurate reporting in turn giving more detail metrics to gauge your ROI on so you know what’s working and what’s not. Alternatively use a platform like AnyTrack to get even more accurate reporting so you know where to stop spending money.
2. Optimise locations & ages – look at your conversions and see what countries the majority of your conversions are coming from, but also look at the gender and age group. It could be that when you look closely, Males between 40-54 are actually spending the most but you’re targeting all genders and all age ranges.
3. Optimise placements – again, you may find the majority of your conversions are coming from a particular placement or media type.

Additional Tips:

• If you use WooCommerce, you’ll know plugins can be pretty expensive to buy and keep up to date when you have a number of them installed on your website. You can use a platform like Cheap WooCommerce (completely legal) to get your plugins for a lot cheaper reducing your upfront costs.
• If you currently use a downloader app like Continuata, we can offer you one year free use of Pulse (excluding your own bandwidth costs) if you change over to Pulse. This can save you a lot in fees over the course of a year.
• With current inflation and recession fears, customers are more scared than ever to make purchases. Offering payment plans like those from Paypal, Klarna or Partial.ly can help improve your conversion rates for customers.
• Don’t forget to checkout our other articles on 10 Ways to Increase Your Revenue and The Beginners Guide to Running Facebook Ads.

A/B testing (AKA split testing) compares two versions of a landing page or marketing asset and measures the difference in performance. Basically, it’s a competition. You’re letting two elements battle it out for the top spot. You never test more than one variable at once, otherwise it’s impossible to distinguish what’s driving the results. Knowing which variation works better can help inform future decisions when improving your website copy, email content, or any other aspect of your digital marketing strategy. It’s an essential practice if you want to increase sales and sign-ups. Led by the data, you’ll be able to craft better campaigns and drive more conversions over time. Here are twenty different tests that you could run to try improve your conversion rates across your ads, emails, or on your website.

Facebook A/B tests

• Automatic vs edited placements

Facebook Ads Manager sets all campaigns to ‘automatic placements’ by default. Try running 2 identical campaigns but edit the placements on one of them. Many marketers would argue that the newsfeed is the best placement for driving conversions. This is a good placement test to begin with in comparison to automatic placements.

• Test multiple audiences

If you’re not testing your Facebook audiences, you’re missing out on some juicy conversions. Narrowing down audiences that give you a great return on investment takes plenty of experimentation and tweaking, but it’s totally worth it. Try A/B testing different interests, demographics, and custom audiences to get a clear picture of your best converters. 

• Single image vs carousel 

One of the best features of Facebook ads is its creative formatting options. But how do you know what works best for each campaign? Keep everything the same except your creative style. A/B test carousel, image, and video ads options to draw helpful, data-based conclusions about performance.

• Long vs short headlines

You’ll see a mix of long and short headlines on Facebook ads. That’s because the best length really depends on each campaign and audience. Pit multiple headlines against each other to consistently improve your conversion rate. There’s plenty of tests to choose from like: long vs short, emojis vs no emojis, the wording of your offer (½ price vs 50% off), etc.

• Long vs short videos

This generation has been mocked for their short attention spans, but that doesn’t mean only short videos produce conversions. Maybe your audience will enjoy a richer, more informative video or perhaps short and sweet is the way to go. Test, and you shall know for sure.

Google Ads A/B tests

• Short vs long headlines

It might be tempting to use up all the space for your Google Ads headlines. The reality is, some campaigns might perform better if you make them more concise. As long as you’re only changing one element at a time, you can test anything: adding your brand name, different CTAs, benefit vs feature-based language, and much more.

• Automated vs manual bidding strategy

Do you tend to stick with the same bidding strategy for every campaign? It’s good practice to compare a few bidding strategies frequently, as each strategy can produce dramatically different results. You could try one campaign using target CPA and another with manual bidding, for example. Give the test enough time to find a winner, and you’re on your way to getting more sign-ups and sales for less!

• Dynamic vs non-dynamic text

Your campaign may benefit from the use of dynamic text. This is when Google pulls in a combination of headline and description text based on the user’s intent. It can increase the relevance of your ads, therefore increasing the chance your audience will convert. The important thing is that you’ll know for sure once you give it a go, rather than relying on your gut feeling.

• Two landing page versions 

Where your audience lands after seeing your ad is incredibly important. Can changing one element on each landing page really create more sign-ups or conversions? Give yourself more data to work with by testing this out and seeing how your visitors react. Something as simple as adding a product demo video or button colour might resonate better with your visitors.

• Different targeting options

When you know what specific audiences are giving you more clicks, sales, and sign-ups, you can concentrate your efforts on the right people. Without adequate testing, you’re pretty much going in blind. For example, if you’re selling an 808 bass plugin, maybe 18-24 year olds are more interested in the product than 40-60 year olds? Based on the results, you can give more budget to the best-performing audience and exclude groups that aren’t worth your while.

Email A/B tests

• Email Headline

The headline is the most important part of your entire email marketing campaign and if you get it right, you can dramatically increase your open rates. Asking a question or piquing the customers interest with an unusual headline can increase open rates (though its effectiveness may reduce in the long term). For example: “Can you have enough piano sample libraries?” (instead of something more mundane like “We released the black grand piano“) or “Is this the weirdest sound design plugin we’ve ever created?” (instead of “The Morph plugin is now available at $99”) Every customer base is different so you need to balance your email headline with what your customers expect from your brand – ie. don’t be too serious if your brand is fun and don’t be too whacky if your brand is professional.

• Send without prices

This sounds counter intuitive right? But it actually works…most of the time… This is an unusual split test to run and can have varying results. Some customers get annoyed if you don’t include the price in your email, but at the same time, your click through rates (and thus overall sales) will increase as people will have to click through to your website to see the price. This generally works best when running a sale – the customer can see its 70% off in your email, but needs to click on the “More Info” or “Buy Now” button in the email to see the final price. Again, it can upset some customers so you’ll need to see if it works best for you.

• CTA button text

You might not think so, but there’s a massive difference between ‘Subscribe’ and ‘Sign me up’ CTAs. Maybe your audience likes the first button more because it’s succinct and professional. Perhaps they’ll enjoy the more personal approach of the second CTA. These subtle changes could be the difference between 20 and 50 subscribers.

• Different times

Consider testing sending your emails at different times of the day or week. With most major email platforms, you can split test this automatically – try allowing your email platform to automatically send at the best time (this is generally based customer timezones) vs when you think would be best. Alternatively try sending emails on a Monday vs Friday or Wednesday vs Weekend –  you might be suprised with the results.

• Personalisation

According to a study by Campaign Monitor, click-through rates increased by 14% in emails using personalisation. It’s not a one-size-fits-all strategy, however, and can actually deter a portion of your audience. Try it out for yourself today by adding your recipient’s name into either the subject line or the body text and see if this boosts your open rate.

Website A/B tests

• CTA placements

Does CTA placement really matter? The answer is absolutely. It needs to stand out in all the right places. Should you put it above the fold, below it, at the end? All of the above? This truly depends on your own website. Try testing the same landing page but with the CTA above or below the fold and continue with other variations until you have the winner.

• Banner images

Your website’s banner image is the first thing your visitors see so you better make it count. Many business owners stick with the same website banners for years, maybe it’s time you tried something new? Psychologically, everything from the colours to the size of your banner image can affect how users engage with your website. You could try the same image but with a different background colour, or demographic of people for example. Get creative and reap the rewards of your thorough investigation. Use Canva if you don’t want to spend money on a designer. See these 20 conversion-boosting hero image examples for inspiration.

• Short vs long copy

There are multiple approaches you can take when it comes to A/B testing copy. One of the simplest tests to run is to show one version with succinct copy that gets right to the point and another with more informative text. Here’s where you can determine what people like and apply the same theory to your other pages. You can also test the tone, headlines, and product descriptions for a more conversion-driven experience.

• Different Currencies

Sometimes its easiest to sell in your own currency only, but depending on when your customers are located, you might be losing out on potential sales if they don’t see the price in their own currency. For example, maybe you sell in GBP but the majority of your customers are actually in the US so you should actually price in USD? The best option is to offer multiple currency options (see example by Plugin Boutique below)  but if that’s not possible, its a good idea to test with different currencies to see if one resonates best with your customers. Alternatively, take a look at your Google Analytics information to see where the majority of your customers are located and make a decision from there.

• Sign up forms

If you’ve installed a pop-up form on your website, evaluate the best display trigger and time for your audience. Too early and it might annoy users, too late and they might miss it. You can also test multiple texts, images, form fields, and incentives to decide the best route to take. If you’re looking for more sign-ups, testing the form is crucial, so don’t leave it out of your testing strategy. Additionally, try only placing popup forms on specific pages rather than your entire website – like your freebie page only or just on your blog?

Want better results? Start testing!

As you can see from the above examples, there are plenty of split tests you can be running at all times to make incremental improvements in your metrics. The simplest ones to start with are email and Facebook/Google ads. You’re looking to level up your sales and marketing – why not level up your customer support too? The Pulse downloader app streamlines your product download and installation process for customers which in turn reduces the time you have to spend on customer support – allowing you to spend more time on the things that matter like creating new products and sales/marketing. See our pricing information here.

Even if you’re not yet running Facebook ads, if you haven’t yet set up a “Facebook Pixel” on your website then you’re potentially losing out on a lot of valuable data which you may use at some point in the future.

The Facebook pixel helps you do two things:

1. Show your Facebook ads to the right people – The pixel will collect user data and build audiences for your ads based on people who visit your website or take certain actions on your website
2. Measure the results of your ads – Provide you with in depth analytics and measure the effectiveness of your Facebook adverts after a person sees them or clicks on them

Once you’ve added the Facebook pixel to your website, it will be triggered when a person arrives on your site and/or when they take an specified action (like adding to cart or completing a purchase). This information is then sent to your Facebook Ads Manager (or Events Manager) page where you can take further actions.

Facebook conversion tracking can seem daunting for many beginners – maybe you’re not how to set it up, what you should be tracking, or how to analyse the data?

Our step-by-step guide will show how to track the actions that are valuable to your business and use this data to create meaningful ROI for your ads.

How to Install the Facebook Pixel

First things first, if you haven’t already, get your Facebook Pixel installed. Go to your ‘Events Manager’ within the Facebook Ads Manager back-end. From here, you’ll be able to install the Facebook pixel using one of 3 methods. You can:

1. Install the code yourself on the header of your website.
2. Use a partner integration to install it automatically.
3. Email installation instructions to a developer.

Don’t worry: it’s easier than it sounds! Here’s how to setup your Facebook Pixel on different eCommerce platforms:

• WordPress: We suggest using the PixelYourSite plugin
• Manually / HTML website: Copy your FB pixel code and paste it into the header of every page (or your header template file) just before the code
• Shopify Instructions
• Wix Instructions
• Squarespace Instructions

Alternatively, if you’re not confident about installing your pixel correctly, you can use Upwork to find a freelancer who can help you with this – it should not cost much at all and would take less than an hour.

How to Decide What Events to Track

Once your Facebook pixel is installed, it will automatically begin tracking ‘landing page views’, but to follow when a user converts, you’ll need to track what’s called ‘standard events’

These standard events are everyday actions people take on websites like ‘add to cart’, ‘purchase’, ‘contact’ etc. To see all the standard event options, see Facebook’s event guide.

Your next step is deciding what events are most meaningful to your business. If you’re selling sample libraries and/or plugins, then you’ll want to track events like ‘purchase’, ‘add to cart’, ‘initiate checkout’ and ‘add to wishlist’.

How to Set up Conversion Tracking

Now you’ve decided what you’d like to track, it’s time to install the code that records each action. Just as there are 3 ways of installing the Facebook Pixel, there are also 3 ways of tracking conversions on your site:

Create Custom Conversions

To create a custom conversion, all you’ll need is the URL of the page your customer reaches once they’ve completed your desired action. Custom conversions are usually complementary to adding standard events and further segmentation of important actions taken on your site.

Standard events can track things like button clicks (adding to the cart, hitting a call button, etc.), whereas custom conversions allow you to track a specific URL.

If you’re selling 3 different plugins, the ‘purchase’ standard event won’t tell you exactly what course was bought. Creating custom “thank you” page URLs for each course and tracking each of them using the custom conversions tool will give you a better insight into what’s working well.

How to create a custom conversion: 

• Go to the event’s manager and click ‘create custom conversion.’
• Name your custom conversion, e.g. “Bought product.”
• Define the category of event you’re tracking, e.g. ‘Purchase.’
• Add in the landing page URL you want to track, choosing either URL ‘contains’ or ‘equals’ (if you have a specific thank you page for each purchase, then use “equals“, if your “thank you for purchasing” page is the same for all, then use “contains“)
• Click ‘Next’ and ‘Save.’

You’re done! Now you’re recording your custom conversion.

Add Standard Events Manually

Adding standard events manually to your website’s code requires technical skill. If you’re not used to changing things on your website’s back-end and typically get a developer to help you, installing event tracking should be passed on to them.

If you’re competent in website coding, installing standard events is pretty straightforward to do.

How to install standard events:

• Copy Facebook’s standard event code
• Above the tag in your Facebook pixel code, paste the standard event code that’s relevant to each page.
• Do this for every page that you want to track.

If you’re not comfortable with this, you can use a free tool like Pixel Your Site to add the events for you. Alternatively, you can use Facebook’s event setup tool – more on that below.

Use the Event Setup Tool

The event setup tool can be a godsend for anyone trying to track conversions without the help of a developer. It gives you the option to track standard events, create custom conversions, and add the value of each conversion, all without the use of code.

It’s user-friendly, highlights the buttons on your site you might like to track, and lets you choose from their multiple tracking options.

Here’s how to use it:

• Go to ‘“Events manager”, select your pixel, and click ‘Settings’.
• From there, click ‘Open Event Setup Tool’
• Add in your website URL and click ‘Open Website’
• The event tool will then appear while navigating your site.
• You can click the highlighted CTA buttons you’d like to track on each page, whether ‘contact us’ or ‘purchase’
• You can also add tracking to specific thank you page URLs you hit and mark them as a ‘purchase’ or ‘lead.’
• Then you need to confirm your tracking.

How Test Your Conversion Tracking

Now that you’ve installed your Facebook pixel and conversion tracking, it’s time to test if it’s working. We highly recommend you do this to avoid any confusion or wasted budget. There are two ways you can test if everything is working correctly.

• Install Facebook pixel helper

Facebook pixel helper is a free tool that will allow you to see precisely what tracking is in place on each page of your website. Add it as an extension on your browser, and once you land on your site, it will show you the tracking it’s picking up.

• Test events in Facebook’s events manager 

To run diagnostics on your pixel and see if tracking is firing correctly, you’ll need to click on ‘data sources,’ then choose your pixel in Facebook’s events manager. From there:

• Choose ‘test events’
• Add in your website URL.
• Navigate through multiple pages.
• Make the conversions you’re trying to track.

Once you’ve flicked through a few pages, Facebook will simultaneously show you precisely what events are firing and when in the results section of your events testing interface. You’ll be able to pinpoint any issues with your conversion tracking and re-install the tracking correctly.

How Create Ads That Convert

Now that you’ve set up your standard event, it’s time to begin creating ads and audiences geared towards fulfilling your desired actions. If you’d like Facebook to optimise a campaign for conversions, follow these steps.

1. Choose the ‘Conversions’ objective when setting up a campaign.
2. Choose the specific conversion you’d like to optimise the campaign for at the ad set level.
3. Ensure the event or custom conversion you choose has a green button rather than a red one beside its name. (this tells you whether the event is active or not.)
4. Consistently analyse the data to see what ads are driving conversions at the best ROI.

There are other objectives when running Facebook adverts also, like “awareness” or “consideration”. For the purpose of this article, we’re assuming that you simply want to make sales immediately from your Facebook ads so in this situation you’d only choose “conversions” as the objective. You can read more about what the other objectives are for here:

https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1438417719786914

Tip: Use Canva to create eye catching and professional looking graphics for your Facebook adverts. Its quick, simple and affordable.

How to Create Custom Audiences on Facebook

Creating custom audiences based on the conversion data you’ve gathered is key to increasing conversions at a lower cost per conversion.

Custom audiences are fantastic for remarketing campaigns and for creating ‘lookalike’ audiences. Lookalike audiences are people that Facebook deems similar to those who have already taken action with you.

You can create a custom audience based on things like: 

• People who have purchased from you before.
• People who have added to the cart.
• People who reached a specific page.
• People who have visited the website.
• People who filled in a contact form.

You can also segment an audience based on more than one event, which is excellent if you want to crossmatch people who have added to the cart but didn’t purchase. Using this data, you can target users based on where they are in the buyer cycle leading to higher conversion rates.

Learn more about creating custom audiences.

How to Analyse Your Facebook Ads Data

To see how every campaign is doing in terms of conversions, go to your Facebook Ads Manager dashboard. From there, you can customise the results you see for each campaign.

• In the top right-hand corner of your campaign results interface, click the button that says ‘Columns.’
• From the drop-down menu, click ‘Customise columns.’
• Now you can choose the custom conversions or specific standard events you’d like shown in your results dashboard.
• You can drill down to things like ‘cost per conversion’, ‘cost per add to cart’ etc., so you can see what ROI each campaign is producing.

 

Hopefully this article has provided you with useful information on how to setup your pixel, analyse your data and improve your conversions from Facebook ads. This is just a beginners guide to the process – the next step is to test, test, test. Split testing everything will gradually improve your results over time leading to higher conversion rates and lower costs overall.

Our aim at Pulse is to provide companies who use the platform with a solution for improving the download experience for customers, as well as the tools and support to grow their company too such as help with Facebook ads and suggestions for freelancers to work with etc.  Learn more about the features and costs of Pulse here.

With many online re-sellers and distributors to choose from, customers expect (and demand) more from their online shopping experience and you have to work harder than ever to compete for their dollars.

Any business that sells its products online, whether digital or physical, is in a constant battle with the competition for more sales, more repeat customers, and increased profit margins.

Fortunately, there are dozens of ways to get customers to buy more, buy bigger, and keep coming back for more. In this blog, you’ll learn 10 easy-to-implement ways of upping your eCommerce game to increase both your sales and revenue.

1. Cross-Sell and Upsell

Cross-selling is a fantastic way to encourage impulse buys and increase your average basket size. Showing customers a selection of products that go nicely with the item they’re looking at can tempt them to spend more.

For example, say the customer is buying a compressor, you could show them an offer on an EQ plugin at the cart stage if they add it to their cart too. Here’s how Waves do it:

Upselling at the checkout stage is another intelligent tactic to get your customer to spend more. This is a case of giving them an option to upgrade their selection (make sure the price difference isn’t too extreme.)

For example, you could offer the “Pro” version of a sample library (with more presets) for $10 more at the cart stage.

2. Add Videos

Putting a video on your main product pages can significantly boost revenue. Humans process the information in a video much faster than reading a product description. Providing the customer with a visual showing the product in action will speed up their decision process and entice them to take the plunge.

Videos are especially powerful for brands trying to sell products that look their best in action or need a demonstration to show off their features. You can also include customer testimonials in the video. Seeing other people rave about your product might be just what they needed to make a decision.

Tip 1: Ensure you have a very strict structure to your videos along with Youtube “chapters” so the customer knows where to skip to if they want the “walkthrough” or “sounds” section etc.

Tip 2: Use Canva to create eye catching Youtube thumbnails without the need for a designer.

3. Optimise for Mobile

According to businesswire.com, by the end of 2021, mobile sales will account for 53.9% of all eCommerce sales. So if over half of all eCommerce revenue is coming from mobile users, optimising your site for mobile has never been more important.

Here are some key points to keep in mind for creating a mobile-friendly site:

• Text isn’t too long: if the text isn’t readable, or is overwhelming to look at, customers won’t stick around.
• Straightforward checkout: a clunky mobile checkout will frustrate users and lead to cart abandonment.
• Fast loading speeds: nothing hinders conversions more than a slow website.
• Easy to navigate: make sure your most important pages are easy to find and every button is clickable.
• Responsive: check your mobile site doesn’t cut off any design features or mess with functionality.

Tip: Use Responsinator to check how your website looks on multiple devices

4. Capture Cart Abandoners

When customers fill their basket and leave without buying, this is not a loss, but an opportunity waiting to be seized. Customers might drop off due to things like unexpected VAT, lack of payment options, or even just closing the tab and forgetting to return.

Check out our tips below for reducing cart abandonment rates:

• Be upfront about shipping: don’t hide these costs, as you might catch shoppers off guard.
• Include product images: if customers can see exactly what they’re buying, they’ll feel reassured about their purchase, and excited to buy.
• Show checkout progress: this helps to motivate customers to continue to the end.
• Enable guest checkout: Many users see setting up an account as an extra step. Let them complete their purchase in as few clicks as possible with guest checkout.
• Follow up advertising: email reminders and targeted ads can remind users of their forgotten cart and reel them back to your site to complete their order.

Tip: Great cart abandonment platforms include Jilt, Klaviyo and even Mailchimp

5. Show Customer Reviews

Adding customer reviews to your site is an essential trust factor that will make users confident in their purchase decision. According to 3D cart, reviews make customers 71% more comfortable buying a product.

You can place verified reviews throughout your website, under specific products and on your homepage.

According to BrightLocal, 68% of customers leave a review after being asked to do so. You can automate emails to invite users to leave a review post-purchase and even offer a reward for their trouble, like entry to a competition or a discount code for their next purchase.

Tip: The most popular reviews platform is YOTPO but it can be very expensive. Alternatives include Trustpilot or even Mailchimp (using review email automations)

6. Split Test

Split testing, aka A/B testing, is a method used to improve conversion rates. In a nutshell, it’s the process of showing website visitors the same page but with one element changed for half of the visitors.

Something as simple as your CTA text, banner image, or button colours can have surprising effects on purchase behaviour.

Data is power, and once you know what’s driving revenue, you can use that information to make changes to your website over time. You can also split test ads by using two versions of the text, visuals, or CTA buttons.

Tip: Use Optimizely or Crazy Egg.

7. Re-Target your Customers

Retargeting is one of the best ways to increase eCommerce sales. You create audience lists of people who have taken specific actions on your site, and retarget them with ads.

This could be groups of people who have visited your site, people who have landed on specific web pages, those who have purchased from your site before, and so on. Your copy and visuals should be crafted based on their action.

For example you might create a Facebook video ad that’s a quick 3 min walkthrough video of your plugin if they’ve already added something to the cart but haven’t purchased it.

One of the most effective ways to drive people back to your site is to show them the exact products they viewed or similar products. This helps to keep your brand top of mind and nudge them towards a sale. You can setup re-targeting adverts on Facebook to target users who have visited your cart page but not completed a purchase for example.

Tip: Try out Adroll to retarget users via adverts on other websites around the web. Its quite low cost and can provide good results.

8. Send “Drip” Campaigns

Drip campaigns are a set of automated emails that are sent to a customer based on their activity. They’re a highly targeted way of reactivating audiences who may not have purchased in a while and turning website visitors into repeat purchasers.

Some examples of drip campaigns might be:

• Recommendations: here’s another chance to cross-sell to your purchaser audience by sending them an email with similar products.
• Personalised discounts: a great way to drive more conversions is to trigger an automated email that thanks your customer for their loyalty and offers them an exclusive discount on their birthday.
• User re-engagement: “we haven’t seen you in a while, would you like to see our new plugin?”. Sending emails to only customers who haven’t opened an email in X months can be a useful way to target them specifically and help them “re-engage” in your emails, thus increasing your open rates in the long run. This campaign could have 3 stages:
  
  1. “We haven’t seen you in a while, here’s a 20% off code for any product“. If customer opens the campaign, they’re re-added back into your main “segment”. If they don’t open, then they’re sent the next email:
  2. “We hate getting too many emails too – are you still interested in ours?“. If customer opens the email, they’re re-added back into your main segment. If not, they are unsubscribed from your email list and sent one more email:
  3. “We hope you come back to us”. Customer has been unsubscribed, but this email contains a “resubscribe” button which they can click on to get re-added back into your newsletter.

Tip: Removing contacts from your email list who never open emails is beneficial in the longrun and is integral to maintaining a high open rate, which will convert to higher revenue over time.

9. Examine Analytics

If you’re an eCommerce business, chances are you’re running paid ads on the likes of Google and Facebook, have email marketing in place, and a site that’s optimised for SEO.

Constantly checking in on each channel to see what’s driving sales is crucial to improving your site’s overall profitability.

You can set up tracking in your ad campaigns and monitor results in Google Analytics to measure what campaigns specifically are giving the best ROI. Ensure your team regularly evaluates what’s working and what’s not, then adjusts campaigns and SEO accordingly.

This ensures you’re not wasting money on ineffective channels, and can spot opportunities for improvements across every platform.

Additionally, take a look at your “Goal Flow” in Google Analytics to see if people are dropping off at a certain point in the purchase process (cart page or checkout page) and see if you can reduce bounce rates at those parts to increase overall revenue in the long run.

10. Offer More Payment Options

Offering more payment options at the checkout page can result in a far higher conversion rate and lower dropoffs at the end of your sales funnel.

Paypal is one of the most popular payment options, followed by card (Stripe / Braintree etc.) but there are a lot of alternative payment solutions you can offer your customers also. For example:

• Partial.ly – customers can setup payment plans to purchase your product
• Amazon Pay – allow customers to pay via their payment details stored in their Amazon account
• Bitpay – receive payments via cryptocurrency
• Alipay – a Chinese digital wallet with over 1 billion users
• iDeal / Giropay / SOFORT – European bank transfer solutions

Tip: if you want to go further down that rabbit hole, you can offer select payment options to customers based on their location. For example, its likely European customers wouldn’t want to see Alipay options and vice versa.

This is of course not a definitive list and there are plenty of other options you can try to increase your revenue.

An alternative way to increase revenue is by decreasing your costs – Pulse can help with this. Pulse can reduce your Amazon S3 costs by up to 50% (while increasing download speeds for customers) as well as reduce customer support emails (reducing money spent on customer service) freeing up your time to focus on more important tasks like developing new products. Contact us to setup a developer account for free and try it out!

By now, you’ve probably already had the joy of a retargeted ad stalking you all over Facebook and Instagram for weeks after browsing an online shop. There’s a reason why they’re so popular – they work.  

If you don’t already, you should be running Facebook ads for your sample library or plugin. They’re simple, effective and if setup correctly can generate a steady income stream for your products. This guide will tell you everything you need to know to get started. 

Now we’re not going to beat around the bush, navigating your way around Facebook Ads Manager takes some getting used to. But with practice, it will become second nature!

We’re going to give you a good grounding in the basics of setting up a campaign in this ultimate guide to running Facebook Ads – just keep on reading!

Step 1: Set Up Facebook Ads Manager 

The first step is to create your Facebook ad account. To do this, you can head to this url: 

https://www.facebook.com/business/tools/ads-manager  

Then click on the button that says ‘go to Ads Manager’. This will bring you to the page with step-by-step instructions to create your account, which is simply a case of filling in: 

• Your ad account name
• The page you’d like to run ads from (If you don’t have a business page set up already, you’ll need to do so to publish campaigns)
• Contact information
• Payment details

Step 2: Choose Your Ad Objective

When you’re in the Ads Manager dashboard, there will be tabs labeled as: 

Account Overview

Campaigns

Ad Sets

Ads

Navigate to the ‘campaigns’ tab and you’ll find a big green button that says ‘create’. This will take you to your first step in creating your campaign which is to select an objective. 

Now, the objectives are often confusing for beginners, and rightly so. There’s so many options and it’s difficult to know what to choose.

Whichever objective you choose will tell Facebook the results you want from your campaign, whether that’s more clicks to the website, more awareness, more purchases, and so on.

Choosing the right objective

In our experience, the Facebook Ads that get the best results are typically ‘traffic’, ‘lead generation’, and ‘conversion’ ads. 

It’s easier to measure the real-life results from these objectives, as you can see exactly how many clicks you’re getting through to the site, how many conversions the ad achieved, and at what cost. 

Objectives such as ‘brand awareness’ and ‘reach’ aren’t a great option for a small budget, because they rarely produce tangible results. The campaign will be optimised to get more views on the ad, but won’t show it to the people most likely to click through to the website. 

Click here to learn more about Facebook Ad Objectives and choosing the right one for your business. 

Pro tip for beginners:  Almost every button, and every step in Facebook Ads Manager is accented with a little ‘i’ button that will give you more information on each tool/ action when you hover over it. 

Think of it like Facebook holding your hand as you take each step towards publishing your campaign. It’s a great way to learn as you go!

Step 3: Create Your audience

Now that you’ve decided on your objective, it’s time to get to the juicy part; choosing who you’re going to target with Facebook’s highly sophisticated targeting system. 

Important note:  With Facebook Ads Manager, the best way to test multiple audiences is to do an A/B split test, where you can show the same ad to two different audiences, and see which one performs better. 

This helps to increase your ROI and make sure you’re spending money on the right people. (The A/B test will show up as an option at the audience creation stage.) 

Understanding Facebook’s targeting tools

You can create an audience based on their age, gender, demographics, behaviours, career, life events, interests, and much more. 

Once you get the basics filled in like their age, gender, and location, experiment with detailed targeting by typing in interests or behaviours related to your business. If you’re stuck for inspiration, try clicking the browse button to look at their targeting options. 

There’s an audience size dial on the left-hand side of your screen which will show you whether your audience is becoming too big or too small for your budget, and will also give you estimated clicks/impressions, etc. 

Placements

Facebook will give you the option of choosing ‘manual’ or ‘automatic’ placements, we’d advise going for ‘manual’. This way you can click the placements that get the most engagement which are the Instagram/Facebook newsfeeds, and Instagram stories. 

This will ensure that you get the best bang for your buck, and don’t waste money on placements people don’t click on as often. 

Optimisation

This tells Facebook what you would like the audience to do with the ad, whether that’s click on it, view the landing page, or make a conversion. 

We would recommend always choosing ‘landing page views’ over ‘link clicks’, because with landing page views, you’ll only pay when someone waits to load up your page. 

Creating a custom audience

Under ‘audience’, you’ll see an option to ‘create a custom audience.’ This is a place where you can create audiences based on users that have taken action with your website, your previous ads, or your Facebook/Instagram pages in the past. 

Pro tip:  Click ‘create’ and set up these audiences at the beginning, so that it can start collecting data for a few weeks. 

This is essential if you want to retarget customers down the line who have already shown interest in your business a.k.a high-value audiences. 

But you need to have what’s called a ‘Facebook Pixel’ installed if you want to collect this data and track conversions on your site. You might need a developer’s help with this, or you can install it yourself using one of their integration options.

Alternatively, if you have a mailing list, you can upload your list of customer emails to Facebook and they will match the emails to Facebook accounts so you can retarget those customers with ads on Facebook / Instagram.

Learn more here about installing a Facebook pixel. 

Step 4: Create Your Ad

Now that you’ve decided on your audience, budget, and date, it’s time for the fun bit: creating your ad! 

This is where you can get really creative with your ad copy, and imagery or video. In the ad creation section, you’ll see boxes for: 

• Format: You can choose a single image, video, carousel, or collection here. For your first ad, we’d recommend keeping it simple with a single image or video. (Carousel and collection ads are most often used for eCommerce businesses to show multiple products at once.)

Pro tip: Videos tend to get much higher engagement with social media ads, and there are plenty of platforms where even beginners can create engaging videos like Promo.com.

If you choose to go with an image, make sure it doesn’t have too much text on it. Websites like Canva.com have great templates for free to help you create enticing Facebook banners. 

• Image Size:  Ensure you create your banner in 2 sizes for newsfeed and story placements: 

• • 1080 x 1080 pixels (newsfeed)
  • 1080 x 1920 (stories)

• Headline: Make sure your headline is super to the point and convincing. If you can, pull the user in with an enticing special offer. Always think: “would I click on this?” The headline will appear in bold and usually catch the viewers attention more than the primary text, so make it count. 

• Primary text: Keep your text as short and to the point as you can. If your text is too long, people will tend to skip past it. Add emojis to emphasise key points and add a splash of colour. Also, make sure you’re capturing your audience before the text cuts off.

• Description:Write in a key USP and a call to action here. This doesn’t always show up, but make sure it’s filled in as it could help push the user to click. 

• CTA:Now, you’ll just want to choose a CTA for your ad. This is the button the user will click to your website, or in the case of a lead generation form to sign up to your mailing list. 

Finally, add in your landing page URL, and make sure you edit the display URL so you can control how it will appear to the ad viewer. Your real URL won’t be affected.

Step 5: Review, Publish and Go!

Before publishing, ensure your ad adheres to Facebook’s advertising policies. If it doesn’t it will get rejected, so be careful here! 

Congratulations, you’ve just created your first Facebook ad! Now it’s time to click publish. Next, your ad will go through the review process which takes a few hours and you’ll be notified when it’s live. 

Step 6: Keep An Eye on Important Metrics

You can view the results of your campaign in your Facebook Ads Manager dashboard. You’ll be able to see how many clicks it’s getting, how many people have seen it, how many times it was seen, and more. 

Learn more here about analyzing Facebook metrics.

Looking to improve your customer experience for your product delivery? Pulse is the industry standard for downloading, installing, updating, and managing your sample libraries – all in one place. Download at blazing fast speeds and retain access to your products forever. If you’d like to learn more about our services, chat to us today!