If you are unsure about starting running Facebook ads for your eCommerce store, then you are missing out on a big opportunity.
We’ve been able to grow a watch company called Kaysor from zero to $1.6M in sales within 6 months with Facebook ads. We’ve also brought 3.22X in ROI to an eCommerce website named Mozart Supplies.
We want to convince you to start running Facebook ads because we know that if you are looking to grow it’s an amazing advertising channel to:
- Grow your website traffic
- Grow your revenue
- Grow your profits
- Completement other traffic sources by retargeting
If you are getting started and want to maximize your results, here are 9 high-growth Facebook ads strategies for eCommerce we know will get you there.
1. Use dynamic product ads
Dynamic product ads are probably the most important part of Facebook ads for eCommerce.
What are Facebook’s dynamic product ads? They are the most “personalized” option for retargeting your customers.
If a customer eyed one of your products, it would show them that same product on Facebook with a dynamic text of your choice.
They are extremely useful for turning visitors into buyers and generally are the ads that bring the most amount of profits!
What do they look like?
So what do you need to create Facebook dynamic product ads for eCommerce?
- Uploading a product catalogue
- Creating a custom audience
- Creating a dynamic template
Let me step by step explain how to create a dynamic product ad.
The first step is to go inside your Facebook business manager. If you haven’t created one yet please do so.
Once you are logged in, you should be able to see a menu on the top left and you have to click on “catalogue“.
Once you’re there, you should see a big button called “Create Catalogue”.
Then you’ll have four different options. You can choose eCommerce, travel, property or auto. Depending on your industry, pick the one who fits most.
Once you’ve made your choice, you’ll have to select either to enter your product catalogue using a form or connecting it to an eCommerce platform such as Shopify.
You’ll also need to give a name to your catalogue so you don’t get lost later on.
After that, you can go to the ads manager and launch your dynamic product ad by selecting the Facebook campaign objective “catalogue sales”.
2. Strong customer journey optimization
In eCommerce, the customer journey is pretty straightforward. Here’s what it usually looks like for a full journey optimization:
- Knows about your brand
- Viewed product
- Add to cart
- Initiate checkout
- Purchase
Your goal with advertising is to push people from one step to the next.
Hot tip: make sure to always exclude the people in the step that is supposed to happen later down the line. People who have added a product to cart have also viewed the product and thus should be excluded from the viewed product audience.
The goal with Facebook ads for eCommerce is to really dive into this customer journey and show to people different ads based on where they are in the process of buying.
For instance, you could show a “thank you” ad for the people who purchased from you and give a discount for those who initiated checkout but didn’t end up buying just yet.
3. Show social proof
Adding your company to being featured on an authoritative website or showcasing your top customer testimonials is a great way to convince your audience to buy from you.
Here’s an example of what design pickle does for their client testimonial:
Another suggestion would be to use snip.ly if you’ve had a major publisher talk about your brand to retarget people with that social proof article.
What does this do? It allows you to add a link on that major publisher’s website so you can advertise that article and it can link to your website to generate sales.
4. Leverage lookalike audiences
Lookalike audiences are probably the best cold audiences out there. Facebook essentially creates an audience out of the Facebook custom audience you create.
A custom audience can be the people who viewed your product or even bought from you. Imagine having Facebook finding similar people to those who bought from you with AI. Well, that’s what it is.
You can’t start a new ad account with lookalike audiences since you don’t have enough data, but as soon as you get 500 to either interact with your Facebook page or visit your website, you should.
Hot tip: we recommend starting with 1% for your lookalike audiences, but you should always test all the different percentages: 1%, 2%, 0-5%, 5-10%, 0-10%, etc.
5. Leverage custom audiences
As stated above, Facebook custom audiences are one of the most powerful advertising tool out there. They allow you to do what we call Facebook ads retargeting for eCommerce.
Here are some of our favourite custom audiences for eCommerce:
- Viewed product
- Top 10% time spent on a website
- Added to cart
- Initiated checkout
- Purchase
6. Install a Facebook pixel
If you don’t have a pixel on your website, you won’t even be able to know if you are getting leads or making sales. Even worse, you won’t be able to create a custom audience and lookalike audiences.
So what is a pixel? It’s a piece of code that you insert on your website in order to track when people land on your website.
How do you set it up? If you want to insert your Facebook pixel on WordPress, just check out our article on the best methods to do it fast. Other website platforms usually have integrations such as Shopify.
Here a few tutorials based on the platform you might be using:
7. Set up dynamic product ads
Dynamic product ads are probably my favourite thing with Facebook ads for eCommerce. Even been on a website’s product page to then see the exact same product on Facebook? Yes, it could have been me setting that up secretly.
You essentially upload a product catalogue on Facebook and you can retarget people dynamically with the product they’ve seen.
It’s usually in the form of a carousel ad like the one below.
We wrote an article showing you exactly how to create dynamic product Facebook ads and more importantly how to leverage them.
For example, you could retarget people with a discount next to the product they’ve already viewed on your website.
8. Use carousel ads
Carousel ads are pretty awesome for eCommerce because they support multiple images or videos. They are definitely not the ads that will generate the most engagement in terms of likes and shares but they can be very efficient to generate leads or sales.
We usually recommend to use them for retargeting, especially for dynamic product retargeting ads. An example would be the ad in the section above from Blinkist.
Here’s another one from Quickbooks which might look like an error that ended up performing well. This example shows that the goal of ads to stand out and bring curiosity first.
Here a few ideas for your carousel Facebook ads for eCommerce:
- Your best selling products
- Customer testimonials
- Your best features
- Reasons why people should work with you
If you haven’t tested carousel Facebook ads and you wish to generate sales or leads, then I urge you to test them out!
9. Create video ads
Video ads can be extremely profitable Facebook ads for eCommerce. We’ve seen some video ads perform 10x better than any image ad we’ve tried but we’ve also seen horrible video ads.
For that reason, we always recommend working with experts when it comes to creating a video ad for your Facebook ads. Finding a media company with video capacities becomes very important at this stage.
Here’s an example of a great Facebook video ad from Doordash.
10. Find your USP
This might sound cliché, but for Facebook ads, I can assure you it is not. When it comes to Facebook ads, you always want to shorten your message and it is very difficult.
It’s about saying exactly what you want to say in the most convincing way and with few words. It is probably the copywriter’s biggest goal.
As you can see with this MVMT watches ad below, their message is very clear and concise.
“MVMT’s BIGGEST sale of the year is here” gives the readers the most valuable and convincing information in a short sentence. That’s why it’s key to find your unique USP.
What’s next?
If you run Facebook ads for eCommerce and you’ve seen a strategy that you weren’t using here then I urge you to test it out. We’ve seen amazing results with the strategies stated above.
The Facebook ads landscape is constantly changing, but it doesn’t mean you can’t win. There’s no channel better than Facebook in 2020 to advertise your eCommerce store when it comes to generating results.
Let us know if you think we should change one of those strategies for another.