eCommerce Marketing Tips for Facebook Ads

Facebook Ads can be daunting to newbies investigating how it can slot into their eCommerce marketing strategy and it’s understandable. Facebook is an extremely sophisticated advertising platform when compared to others with an array of settings to choose from when it comes to targeting and optimizing ads. That being said, it can be an excellent sales channel if done properly.

So here is an overview of some aspects of Facebook Ads that you should become more comfortable with if you wanna watch your online store scale.

Set up your facebook tracking pixel

In my eyes, the biggest advantage of digital marketing compared to traditional mediums such as magazines and TV is the abundance of real feedback you get from your advertisements. If you run a TV ad, there is no way of quantifying how effective it is. With a tracking pixel properly set up, Facebook can attribute a user based event, conversion or sale to a specific campaign, ad set, creative, targeting method and even demographic data.

This allows you to identify what is working, what isn’t working and how you may optimise your ecommerce marketing efforts. Fortunately, Facebook already provides an array of conversion optimization algorithms that will take the data from your tracking pixel and make adjustments to your ads parameters automatically as it learns. Powerful stuff.

So if you haven’t already, make sure your tracking pixel is installed wherever it should be and reporting back accurate information regarding your website visitor’s behaviour. This is a must for all successful online businesses.

Embrace Dynamic Product Ads

If you have an eCommerce website with a variety of products in your catalog then you should definitely include dynamic product ads in your eCommerce marketing strategy to help squeeze the highest ROI out of your budget.

The way this works is that you design ad templates which Facebook will combine with product information provided when you upload your catalog. This includes product names, images, pricing and more.

Facebook will then show relevant ads from your catalog to people based on their scarily intricate knowledge of all the platform’s users.

Push more than one product at a time

I am sure you have seen this before, where multiple products are presented in a carousel style ad. Think the ever weird wish.com ads you see all over Facebook that give you the ability to horizontally scroll through a small portion of their offerings.

By presenting more than one product at a time, you are increasing the odds of showing them a product that they might want. Adobe embraced multi-product ads as part of their eCommerce marketing strategy and saw a huge increase in click-throughs with a reduction in cost per click and cost per conversion.

Another great feature that works wonders for people selling several products.

Retarget!

People love to click around when online shopping, adding things to their wishlist, putting a thing or two in the cart and then putting down their phone to get back to the real world. These people need a nudge to remind them to follow through and transact.

In fact, without any encouragement, it has been shown that only around 8% of cart abandoners will return and check out their shopping cart. While the same study from Wishpond shows that retargeting will generally bring that number up to around 26%. A gain well worth chasing.

So make sure you have your pixel set up well and have developed some strong custom audiences to retarget.

Segment your visitors with custom audiences

As we know, it’s possible to use your tracing pixel to track how people clicking through from your Facebook Ads behave on your site after doing so. We can also use this behaviour to segment people into separate audiences so they can be more specifically grouped and targeted.

You can have separate audiences for people who have just visited, people who have checked out products, people who have added to cart, people who visited check out and people who went all the way with you by buying something.

Now you can adapt your ads to show more relevant copy depending on how far down the sales funnel they made it. Offering up discounts, rewards or incentives based on their behaviour.

Find new customers with lookalike audiences

Once you have built up some strong custom audiences with a decent amount of people in them, you can feed these into Facebook’s lookalike audience making machine and it will use the data from all the people in your seed audience to build a new audience of people who most closely match your audience based on thousands of data points per user.

This is an incredibly powerful feature that should definitely be implemented as it can do an amazing job of delivering brand new traffic to your eCommerce site that, if given enough seed data, will be of high quality. High quality means conversions. Conversions means money.

So if you want to increase your user and customer base, look into implementing lookalike audiences as soon as possible. Just make sure your seed audiences have at least 500 or 1000 people in to present the algorithm with enough data to draw from. The bigger your audience, the better the results.