Social media platforms are frequently changing their algorithms to customize what users see in their feeds. The chance of your target audience seeing your organic content on social media is lower than ever before. When it comes to promoting e-commerce sites, Facebook continues to play a huge role. And you’ll have a huge advantage over your peers if you leverage the platform (and leverage it correctly).
Facebook Ads are a must for Ecommerce businesses that want to stand out among the competition and grow their online business. The issue is that many online stores don’t know where to begin. This article will highlight the strategies to use, the areas on which to concentrate their advertising budget, or even how to make an ad in the first place!
The Facebook Consolidated Account Structure is a framework for organizing your campaigns, ad sets, and ads. To design and carry out campaigns, you can arrange the consolidated account structure in one of three ways:
- Audience
- SKU
- Offers
1. Audience-Based Facebook Advertising Campaigns
The audience account structure is the best option for businesses with sales funnels or websites that are exclusive to particular regions. To be clear, this does not apply to targeting custom audiences based on interests or Lookalike Audiences (LL).
It is based on targeting on certain countries. It moves away from splitting out a bunch of audience CBOs where you might have Interest CBO 1 with a variety of interests and pivoting towards stacks.
Ad Sets by Target Audience:
The consolidated ad structure looks at four different layers:
- Lookalike Audiences
- Engage with Page Audiences
- Interest based Audiences
- Retargeting Audience
1. Lookalike Audiences:
Facebook’s advertising system takes an existing audience, identifies its key characteristics (like behaviour and interests), and then finds similar audiences sharing those traits. You can pair Lookalike Audiences with other ad targeting parameters, such as age and gender or interests and behaviours.
When you’re running product funnels and offers for ad packages, LLs really show. Utilize the following Facebook to start:
- Customers who purchased that specific product
- Engagers who interacted with a product advertisement
- Website visitors who clicked through but didn’t make a purchase from that PDP
2. Engage With Page Audiences:
You can run ads to reach those who have engaged with your Facebook page content. To do this, you first need to create Facebook Page Engagement Custom Audiences.
Facebook Page Engagement Custom Audiences allow advertisers to create audiences of people based on engagement with their Facebook content for targeting in ads. You can create audiences based on the following types of engagement:
- Everyone who engaged with your Page
- Anyone who visited your Page
- People who engaged with any post or ad
- People who clicked any call-to-action
- People who sent a message to your Page
- People who saved your Page or any post
3. Interest Based Audiences:
Interest-based targeting is generally used for cold audiences – when you want to introduce yourself to people who haven’t heard of you before. Instead of dividing up your interests for your prospecting campaigns, stack them all together. Concentrate on the unique ad creatives rather than combining all of your Interest audiences into one ad package.
4. Retargeting Audiences:
Retargeted marketing is a type of advertising in which messages are sent to audience groups based on past behaviours, like visiting your business. The reasoning is that leads who have already visited your store, looked through your products, or even added stuff to their carts, are far warmer prospects than those who have never heard of your company.
The majority of your remarketing should be contained within full-funnel campaigns, despite the fact that this may seem contradictory. improved reporting and budget allocation, not only for better data.
- Viewed or Added to Cart But Not Purchased: target those who didn’t proceed all the way through the purchase process after seeing an item and/or adding it to the cart.
- Added to Cart But Not Purchased: target only those visitors who have products in their cart but haven’t checked out.
- Upsell Products: offer more expensive products to people who have viewed/purchased the products on your website
- Cross-Sell Products: offer similar or related products to people who have viewed/purchased the products on your website
- Custom Combination: offer items to the Custom Audience, selecting or excluding audiences depending on their interaction with your website. For example, you can target only those who added products to the cart and exclude those who completed the check-out within a certain period.
Select the group of persons you wish to retarget, and specify how many days ago the retargeted activity occurred.
2. SKU's - Based Facebook Advertising Campaigns
Your advertisements will be organized by SKU, which will help you identify the most profitable products. It works well for brands with three or more main SKUs or more. Running an online store and selling your favorite products are easy. However, owning some of the winning SKU items is damn difficult. Once you find it, you definitely roll it out to Omni channels and generate sales and profit as much as possible and as soon as possible.
You don’t have to set up campaigns for each individual product if you have many SKUs with different AOVs. Instead, it might be a cluster of products or a collection. If you’re running with a limited budget, select your top-selling products that offer the optimal brand experience or work well in prospecting.
3. Offer - Based Facebook Advertising Campaigns
Offer ads are promoted discounts you can share with existing followers and other target audiences on Facebook to encourage them to shop on your website, your physical store, or both. They display like many other Facebook ad formats, natively in users’ News Feeds
Overall, offer does not imply discount. It also doesn’t only represent promotion. Offer instead refers to the amount of your;
- Product(s)
- Price
- Positioning
Offer campaigns might divide unique events, special offers, or particular perspectives in your account structure. You may run several campaigns, customize the offer or angle for various audiences, and build up various landers to outline the many advantages using the offer account structure.
4. Setting Up Your CBO Campaigns
CBO allows Facebook to optimize your ad delivery in real time based on your ad set targets. In a way, across all ad sets’ audiences, Facebook finds the optimal people to deliver the total campaign budget, regardless of ad set boundaries.
Every CBO campaign should have just one goal. Be intentional and use different CBOs for either,
- Specific products
- Specific buyer personas
- Specific offers or seasonal events
- Specific purchase types for large catalogs
- Or, a specific geographies if you’re shipping internationally
Benefits of using Facebook CBO:
- CBO helps advertisers to manage their budgets automatically, which reduces the time spent on ad campaigns.
- CBO simplifies the way ad campaigns are managed in the process of ad optimization.
- CBO gives better results for campaigns by increasing budgets for the most effective ad groups. The total value of the campaign is maximized by reducing the spending of each ad group.
- CBO budget optimization can reduce the learning process for Facebook.
- Reduces the number of situations where the budget is not spent.
- CBO is more efficient for audience group ad spend, which can facilitate all ad groups to use the lowest cost spend to get more accurate targeting.
5. Set Up Facebook Pixel & Conversions API
You must set up appropriate tracking before you begin running advertisements. Without this, there is no way to determine what is effective and what is not. You will thus require the Facebook Pixel and Conversions API (CAPI).
Facebook Pixel:
The Facebook (or Meta) Pixel is the key component of your ad results. This bit of tracking code added to your website helps to attribute clicks to sales and is the basis for creating the different audience segments. In essence, it’s like dropping a coin into a well and expecting thousands of dollars to come back up. You can’t run ads well if there is no pixel. So whether you plan to run ads right away or not, add the pixel first thing to start capturing essential data.
Set up a Facebook pixel on your Facebook ads account by following these instructions.
Conversions API:
The Facebook Conversions API (CAPI) is another tool in your Facebook data toolkit that works with the Facebook pixel to ensure you get all the data you need. Combined, they help you properly track, attribute and improve your Facebook marketing performance.
Most e-commerce platforms like Shopify or WooCommerce already have partner integrations with Facebook. Thus, it’s fairly easy to set it up and get the ball rolling.
Learn how to set up Facebook conversions API here.
6. Use Dynamic Ads for Broad Audiences
According to survey, about 76% of internet customers leave their shopping carts unfulfilled. With abandonment rates for mobile users approaching 78%, it’s a little worse. However, retargeting allows websites to recover roughly 26% of abandoned users and boost conversion rates by 70%.
This is why Dynamic product ads are vital for Facebook ecommerce advertising.
Dynamic product advertising combine your product catalog with data from your Meta pixel to retarget potential buyers and display relevant ads depending on their website activity. They are one of the most common Facebook ad formats in the ecommerce landscape — and one of the highest ROI strategies ecommerce sites can use — because they serve as a chance to bring back that 76-78% of hesitant customers that left without purchasing.
Because Facebook templates will utilize the product information you submit to Facebook to pull photos, product names, prices, and other information from your catalogue, these sorts of advertising don’t require marketers to develop ads specifically for each collection item.
7. Focus on Video Ads for Prospecting
Without a question, Facebook video advertising have the potential to be quite successful. Although you would believe that YouTube is the be-all and end-all of video platforms, Facebook actually comes in second with 42% of the market.
They can distribute your brand’s message quickly, clearly, and much more appealing than any other form of advertising. Ultimately, you get a ton of great information and visuals in less than 30 seconds. The largest percentage of qualified leads are generated by video advertisements. Additionally, more than 80% of marketers claim to be content with the return on investment from video commercials.
The following advice will help you create the most engaging video advertising possible:
- Make a scroll-stopping thumbnail image. Get them to stop at your ad and hopefully click.
- within three seconds, grab their attention (and even less – our attention spans are getting shorter by the day)
- Use subtitles to improve the video’s clarity; many viewers have hearing impairments.
- Deliver the CTA in under a minute (even the most interesting long videos are less likely to convert)
- Make sure the landing page leads to where they are in the funnel (home page to educate at the top, to their abandoned cart link when they’re hot).
8. Focus on Ad Creative & Copy
The laws of the game are always changing, but some rules are set in stone. A stunning ad creative and well-written copy will almost always convert. No matter what type of ad you decide to create, always include powerful words and phrases that encourage action now.
Write a short, snappy copy, and don’t be afraid to use appropriate emotions when possible. Write a clear CTA that will get customers doing an intended action! For instance, People are very susceptible to language that conveys a feeling of urgency. So, if you already know your potential customer is interested, encourage them to buy with copy such as:
- Flash sale
- Limited time only
- While supplies last
- Hurry
- Don’t wait
- Buy now
- Don’t miss out
- Offer expires
- Act now
- Clearance
- One day only
- Last chance
- Deadline
9. Use Ads to Communicate Your Brand Story
Regardless of its commercial appeal, Facebook is first and foremost a social platform. Most people are there to connect rather than to shop. You have the chance to interact with and develop relationships with potential clients through this. And you can do it by using ads to communicate your brand’s story
The creation of a series of ads that convey your primary brand message rather than making a sale enhances overall conversion rates, as the study by Facebook and Adaptly shown.
Make sure,
- It was short,
- Fast moving and
- The message/value was easy to understand (even with auto-play without sound).
Final Thoughts
There’s plenty of information to digest above. But once you do, you’ll be up and running Facebook ads in no time. But if you feel the ever-growing advertising landscape is just too much or too time-consuming, there’s a solution.
Feel free to reach out to our team at contact@commerceplus.asia or get in touch if you need clarity on running Facebook ads for ecommerce. And we’re here to help with all of them! That’s our specialty after all!