You have found the product for your ecommerce store and set up your online store using our ecommerce website creator. And assume that your store is ready to go live. Can we now say that you are all ready to make your first sale? But, the only thing posing a hurdle for you is how to make your store visible to the masses so that your target customer base can reach your online store. The solution to this lies in advertising your store or product.
Gone are the days when the only medium of advertising your products was the traditional media. Advertising has evolved drastically since then and has accumulated many other modern channels. Instead of spending your resources and energy on creating time-extensive print ads, television commercials, and billboards, you can simplify your life by advertising your products on social media platforms.
When it comes to social media advertising, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram top the list. Among these platforms, Facebook takes the lead as it gets almost 2 billion daily users daily, according to a study, making it one of the most lucrative platforms to drive traffic and increase revenue.
While scrolling through the Facebook newsfeed, you often come across sponsored posts in between the sea of posts from your friends. Those posts are Facebook Ads which offer you a chance to capture the attention of thousands of potential leads and prospects. The monthly active users on Facebook are a whopping population of 2 billion, indicating the value it can bring to your advertising campaign. Recognising the importance of this platform, many marketers have already turned to Facebook. If you want to reach buyer personas and a diverse target audience along with looking for a way to reach your existing customers, Facebook is your answer.
If you have entered the ecommerce world, you would have found out by now that ecommerce has become highly saturated. So it is important for you to lay the groundwork properly if you really want to leverage the true essence of Facebook advertisement to stand out in the brimming ecommerce marketplace.
To ensure that your money is not going to waste and your Facebook ads actually prove to be fruitful in driving revenue for your business, here is how you can prepare for Facebook Ads.
Let’s say when you first see an ad on Facebook and click on it, you get redirected to the landing page where you are supposed to make a purchase. But oftentimes, you also leave the ad after seeing it and come back to purchase at a later time. This duration, from interacting with the ad to taking action on the website to buy the product, is known as the attribution window or conversion window.
The results of the attribution window appear in the ad manager; studying them lets you analyse how your ads perform. Attribution window analysis allows you to tweak your marketing campaign and shape your Facebook ecommerce strategy accordingly.
Before you get on with running your Facebook advertising for ecommerce, you must have a proper system installed to track your audience’s behaviour. This is where the role of Facebook pixel comes into the picture. Pixel lets you trace your audience's behaviour when they interact with your ad. It tells you which ad drives great metrics and if your audience is converting.
The ultimate goal of Pixel is to extract essential data from your ad campaign to give you an idea of how your ad is performing and assist you in improving your advertising efforts. Adding Pixel before you start running your ads is effective as it lets you quickly capture essential data.
The Facebook conversions API is yet another valuable tool in your data toolkit that, combined with Pixel, works well to ensure that you have the complete data required to crack the right marketing campaign.
Sometimes, Pixel might fall behind in keeping track of all the data because of the masking tools such as ad blockers and cookie blockers. This is where Facebook conversions API compensates for the missing information by tracking the data on your end instead of your customer’s.
Using both, Pixel and Facebook conversion API together can fill the gap in the data and can give you highly valuable insights into your audience’s behaviours and attributions.
Once you have done all the preparation for your ecommerce ad campaign, it is time to run the ads finally. Here is a step-by-step guide on how to do that:
The very first step that you need to do is to create your Facebook account, assuming you do not have one already. Using your ad account ID that Facebook gives you by default upon sign-up, you can create an ad in Ads Manager.
However, you will need a verified payment method, a Facebook page for your business, and a role as admin, editor, or advertiser of the page (if you are not the creator of that page).
Now that you have a business account, the next step is to create pixel and API conversion you can create a pixel id by following these steps:
Go to Business Settings in Business Manager.
Select your business.
Click Data Sources.
Select Pixels.
Click Add by the search bar at the top of the page.
Type in a name for your pixel.
Optional: Enter your website URL.
Click Continue.
To install your pixel on your website, click Set up the Pixel Now. If you want to stay in Business Manager, click Continue Managing My Business.
Source: Facebook
It would be best if you determined the goal of your ad first before creating them so that the creatives and content for the ad can be tailored according to that goal. The goals can be any one or more of the following:
To get more messages
Increase your website visitors
Business/product promotion
Page promotion
Post boost only
Gain more leads
More calls
You can choose goals for your ads on your Facebook business page by tapping Promote. While selecting the goal for your ad, you will have to first decide what you are aiming for; say that you want to create awareness of your brand/product or you want to increase your customer base. Based on these objectives, you will either choose page or website promotion.
After deciding your goals, the next step is to add visuals to your ad. Your ad has three key components: visuals, text, and an action button. Your visuals must be eye-catching and attention-grabbing; they can be either a video or a photo.
Next comes text or copy that must complement the visuals you have created for the ad and should be powerful enough to drive your customer towards a concrete action you seek from them.
The next step involves defining your audience for the ad, which you can do by determining which kind of people are typically attracted to your business or product/service. By identifying what they have in common, you can establish your audience. Once you land on the audience selection tab, you will find age, gender, and characteristics fields. Find out all the required stuff related to your audience and save it.
It is essential that you decide the budget you want to spend on your ad and its duration. The budget that you will keep for each day will be the average amount of your total expenditure. Say if you decide to spend $5 dollars daily on your ad for five days, your total ad expenditure will amount to $25.
The biggest advantage of Facebook advertising for ecommerce is that it lets you advertise on Instagram as well. So you can target two social media platforms with only one ad, saving yourself from the hassle of creating an entirely new ad for Instagram.
You have created an amazing ad that targets your desired audience and looks appealing and attention-grabbing. It is time to make your ad live now. Sit back, relax, and let your ad do wonders!
Log in to your webx account
Go to your Dashboard
Select Facebook Pixel Setup
Add Facebook Pixel ID that you created in the Business Manager
And enter the access token
To use the Conversions API, you need to generate an access token, which is passed as a parameter in each API call. Inside Events Manager, follow these steps:
Choose the Pixel you want to implement.
Select the Settings tab.
Find the Conversions API section and click on the Generate access token link under Set up manually, and follow the instructions pop-up:
Note: The Generate access token link is only visible to users with developer privileges for the business. The link is hidden from other users.
After obtaining your token, click on the Manage Integrations button in the Overview tab in Events Manager. Click the Manage button next to Conversions API in the pop screen.
If you already have your own app and your own system user, you can generate your token inside Business Manager. To do that:
Go to your Business' Settings.
Assign a Pixel to your system user (you also have an option to create a new system user at this stage).
Select the assigned system user and click Generate Token.
Source: Meta for developers
If you think that complex ad formats and a structure based on a five stages sales funnel are the only key components in giving you a killer Facebook ad campaign that is certainly not the case.
The key to successful Facebook advertising for ecommerce is one and only; keeping your campaign simple. But you also have to strike the right balance between making your campaign extremely simple and too excessive. To do that, we have put together a list of a few suggestions to help you create high-converting ecommerce Facebook ads.
A surefire way to fritter away your money is to keep your objectives for Facebook ad campaigns unclear. The lack of clear objectives in your Facebook ad campaign will surely reflect in the creative you select and the audience you keep for it. You must decide what exactly you want to achieve with your ads and structure your campaign according to those objectives. This means your visuals, copy, and everything will be according to the objective and yield effective results. A clear goal followed by a relevant action plan will never lead to a wasted budget.
If you create new ad sets for the same thing that you promoted before, you are likely to lose all the valuable information about your audience that you had gained with your previous ad. That’s just how the algorithm of Facebook works. So to avoid this, you should prefer using the same ad sets even if you are running the campaign after some time has passed since your previous campaign.
Having multiple ways to showcase your ad can be overwhelming and would cause you confusion in deciding which one to choose. Whether you want to go with photos, instant experience ads, slideshows, videos, carousels, and collections, depends entirely on your goals.
Too many ad accounts brimming with multiple ad campaigns can cause a problem and reduce your creative efficiency. It also becomes difficult to track down the performance of each ad and your overall advertising budget. To avoid such a situation, you will have to reduce the number of ads and bring them to an ample amount you can handle easily.
The ultimate goal of any advertisement, whether traditional or contemporary, is to display the human side of your product, service, or brand. Therefore, using content in your ad that can immediately connect with the audience is highly important in creating a long-lasting impression. Trending memes and funny GIFs or any other viral content is the best way to establish a connection with your audience via your ad visuals.
There is no denying that your entire life now depends on your mobile devices. From staying connected with your entire social circle to taking medical consultations, everything is at your fingertips - quite literally, thanks to our mobile phones.
With just one touch, you can book a flight to a place seven oceans across or send money to your loved one living miles away from you. Your life has become a product of this one touch. So even if you make visually appealing ad creatives that can instantly grab attention, if they are not optimised for mobiles, you are in for a big setback. Nothing will be effective, even if you keep clear and accurate goals and write a striking copy for the ad. Since 80.5% of Facebook users access Facebook on mobile phones, you must optimise your ad creatives so that they can be seen properly on phones and serve their purpose well.
The right image size, high quality, and high resolution will give your ad creative the optimisation they need.
The one thing that marketers do wrong is using the same ad creative for different locations. Let’s say you want to run your ad in two cities at the same time; if you use the same visual and copy for both cities, which may be miles apart in their respective cultures, your ad will fail to evoke the emotions properly in the audience of either of the cities. But thanks to localisation, you can adapt your ad creatives according to the location and persuade that audience effectively.
Representation of your brand’s personality in your ads is essential to the success of your Facebook ecommerce ad campaign. Still, you must not forget to factor in that the ad has to interact with your audience. Therefore, it is important for your ads to speak to the audience at a level where your audience can understand them. For this, the ads must be more about them and less about you; the best rule of thumb is that 80% of your ecommerce Facebook ads strategy must be about your audience, and 20% of it can be about you.
There are many types of Facebook ads to choose from. However, knowing about these types is important to choose the suitable type.
You must have come across boosted posts while scrolling through your Facebook feed, or you would have surely seen dedicated ads with still images. These are image ads with a static image accompanying an attractive copy and a CTA.
Having been used by many advertisers, image ads serve as the best way to promote your product or business and require considerably less amount of effort. To create an attention-grabbing image ad, you need to keep your word count below 20% for easy reliability. Many big brands prefer to use image ads because of their effectiveness.
Where image ads successfully engage your audience, there is another type of ad that is more engaging and pulls your audience's attention almost immediately. That is Video Ads. The dynamic effect of the video gives the watcher an immersive experience that helps create a strong association in your audience’s mind. The importance of video ads is also reflected in the fact that more than 1.25 billion people consume video content on Facebook. Due to their characteristic of being extremely engaging, they are best for advertising products that are being launched for the first time.
If you aim to boost engagement on your page, poll ads are the best bet to increase engagement with your existing audience. By surveying your audience, you can gain insightful data and create brand awareness among potential customers. Poll ads can be created by using an image or a video and are the best way to find out your audience’s thoughts, new ideas, and target market.
Opening new creative possibilities, Canvas takes the entire experience of interacting with the ads to a whole new level. It offers a wide creative space where advertisers can easily share their brand or product without any limitation, thanks to the combination of images, videos, GIFs, and CTA buttons. At first, Canvas could be mistaken for a traditional newsfeed ad, but it transforms into an entire microsite-like experience when you click on it. This type of ad gives you a vast field where you can play with trillions of ideas to bring your product, service, or brand to life.
Slideshow Ads let you leverage the effectiveness of video without needing the budget required for making video ads. With Slideshow Ads, you only repurpose your existing ad assets, which means you combine all the ad files together and put them in a slideshow video format.
If you want to collect data for your email marketing campaigns and advertise your brand, lead ads are the easiest way to do this. These ads allow you to gather information about those people who can be your potential customers, basically, it helps you in gaining leads, as the name suggests. With the help of instant forms, they ask prospects for all the relevant information, such as email addresses, phone numbers, names, and more. These ads are famous for their mobile responsiveness, auto-population, simple data collection, and highly targeted segmentation.
To effectively curate lead ads that can guarantee attracting prospects, read our detailed guide on lead generation in 2022.
Connecting the product catalogue with Facebook pixel and Facebook events manager, dynamic ads offer highly personalised and relevant advertising. When you incorporate these ads in your Facebook ad campaign, whoever visits your website store will be shown your store’s product catalogue on Facebook's newsfeed. They are in carousel ads format, and their creatives change according to your website's respective viewer’s behaviour.
These ads offer the following audiences that you can target:
Viewers who viewed your products but did not purchase them.
Visitors who added the products to the cart but did not purchase.
Upsell and cross-sell purchases which means recommending your customer to buy add-ons that can increase the value of the overall order.
It’s time to take your advertising game out of the field of the Facebook newsfeed and bring it to messenger and stories where chances of getting clicks on your ads are higher. Messenger ads appear in a user’s chat tab, while story ads appear in Messenger stories. These ads take your viewers directly to the preset destination, which could be your website, your Facebook page, or your website. Moreover, Messenger ads can also be used on Instagram and Whatsapp.
Many times you must have found yourself browsing products online on an ecommerce store, immediately adding them to the cart, so they do not run out of stock. But then abandoning the cart eventually because you acted on a whim and later found out that you did not have enough money to make the purchase.
This is where the Facebook advertisement comes as a saviour with its retargeting campaign, which acts as a reminder to those who abandoned the cart but may have decided to buy later when they have enough money. Regardless of the situation, such site visitors are in, retargeting campaigns effectively bring your potential customers back to your site.
Advertising your product or an entire brand is not limited to only traditional media. Utilising all the modern social media platforms, you can reach a huge audience. When it comes to social media advertisement, Facebook stands out as the winner. If your Facebook advertising campaign is curated carefully and backed by a strong strategy, it will give you effective results.
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