In a competitive online world, getting eyes on your eCommerce store can prove to be challenging. You know you have multiple great products and great photos, but the clicks and views just aren’t coming. What’s left to try? Well, if eCommerce Facebook ads aren’t part of your strategy yet, it’s time to make it one!
eCommerce Fb ads tend to yield significant conversions, and that’s just one reason it’s time to include them in your strategy for growing your eCommerce store. Luckily, you are in the right place. In today’s post, we are going to cover our step by step guide for setting up eCommerce ads efficiently and effectively.
Some of the topics we are going to cover include:
- Creating a product catalog for your eCommerce Fb ads
- Creating a product feed for your Facebook ad strategies
- Plan a targeting strategy for your eCommerce Fb ads
- Setup for upsells and cross-sell campaigns as part of your Facebook ad strategies
- Designing and planning your eCommerce Fb ads
- Monitoring and modifying your Facebook ads
Steps To Set-up Effective eCommerce Fb Ads
Are you ready to get started? Then let’s go!
Creating Your Product Catalog
First things first, you need to create your product catalog for your online store. This type of marketing collateral includes important information about your products for buyers. Much like a physical catalog, you will see at a car dealership or travel agency, Facebook users can browse this catalog looking for what they want.
This catalog is something you will advertise for your eCommerce store. That’s why it needs to be created strategically!
To create your product catalog on Facebook, here’s what you will need:
- An active Facebook ad account
- A Facebook page
- A Facebook business manager account
Of course, you will also need products (including images and information about these products) to include in the catalog.
How to Create a Product Catalog on Facebook
Once you have all this, it’s time to start creating your product catalog on Facebook. Here are the steps you will follow.
- Go to Commerce Manager
- For your first catalog, you will click “Get Started,” then select “Create a Catalog.” If this isn’t the first catalog on that account, instead you will select “Add Catalog” to add a new one.
- Now, you will choose the type of inventory you sell. Click Next.
- For eCommerce products, it’s time to now choose how to add items to your catalog. There are two ways to do this.
a) Choose “Upload Product Info” if you want to add items yourself directly into the Commerce Manager.
b) If your items are already on a partner platform, you can choose “Connect a Partner Platform” if it has an integration for Facebook. Select the appropriate platform and follow the steps for importing the items to Facebook.
- Now you will click on the Business Manager account for your catalog. Once you do this, you will have access to more ways to put this catalog to use. If you only use a personal account, the capabilities are limited.
- Choose a name for your eCommerce product catalog.
- Click “Create.”
Congratulations! You have just created your first eCommerce product catalog. This is an important part of setting up eCommerce Fb ads. Give yourself a pat on the back for crossing it off your list.
Set Up Your Product Feed
Now that your catalog is set up, it’s time to set up a product feed next. This is a file with a list of items you’re selling, as well as important pieces of information about these products. There are a few different ways to go about this on Facebook.
- You can choose to add items manually one by one using a form. As outlined by Facebook, images must be at least 500 x 500 pixels and in JPEG, GIF, or PNG format.
- Another option is to use a data feed file. When you do this, you will need to create and upload a spreadsheet file that allows you to add items in bulk—this is a data feed file. You can choose to upload this file once, or set uploads on a set schedule if this file is regularly updated.
- Finally, you can choose to use a Facebook Pixel. That way, you can import and update items automatically from your website. This is a trickier method to set up, but it can be incredibly convenient when it’s done.
Depending on things like the level of effort required, the size of your inventory, and how much management you are willing to commit to, the right option is different for every eCommerce store owner. Take a look at this helpful chart from Facebook where they outline the best option based on these factors and more.
Plan Your Facebook Ads Targeting Strategy
Moving right along, now it’s time to discuss planning your targeting strategy for your eCommerce Fb ads, specific to the custom audiences that you’re trying to reach..
When you plan your ad campaign, you will keep this strategy in mind and set up your ads for eCommerce accordingly. Your strategy needs to be in line with your goals, and your goals are represented by the objective you choose for your campaign.
There are currently 13 objectives to choose from with Facebook ads, sorted into three categories.
Awareness: Brand awareness, reach
Consideration: Traffic, app installs, video views, lead generation, post engagement, page likes, event responses, messages
Conversion: Conversions, catalog sales, store visits
Any of these objectives can be helpful for eCommerce Fb ads. However, most eCommerce store owners focus specifically on the conversion category.
Setup Up-sell and Cross-sell Campaigns
Once your objective has been chosen and you have created a product catalog, you can enable dynamic ads to have Facebook automatically deliver relevant services or offerings to people based on their interests, intent, and actions. They will deliver ads in different formats based on these things, including single images, carousels, stories, or collection ads.
Another advantage of choosing dynamic ads is the ability to create upsell and cross-sell campaigns. These are helpful tools for increasing the lifetime value of your customer base. Additionally, these ads are personalized so they deliver the most relevant ad content to the right people.
They’re also always on, which means you don’t personally need to create and promote specific ads for specific items. When users visit or site or express interest in your products, these ads are also helpful for automatically retargeting them.
Finally, with broad audience targeting enabled, it can help you reach new customers and people who have never visited your site.
Design/Plan Your Facebook Ads For eCommerce
Now that we’ve convinced you of the benefits of dynamic Facebook ads for eCommerce, it’s time to talk about creating them!
First, let’s go back to cross-sell and up-sell ads and get more specific about defining them.
Upsell ads
These help a potential customer move from one item in your catalog to one with higher profitability. For example, a bigger size version or a higher priced product.
Cross-sell ads
This type of eCommerce Facebook ad is helpful because it means you can earn more from a single shopper. It’s just one way to increase their lifetime value.
For example, if they purchased a new tennis racket, they aren’t necessarily going to need to buy another one anytime soon.
If you only sold tennis rackets, you could have maxed out their lifetime value. But what if you also sell tennis shoes? With up-sell ads, they could be targeted for tennis shoe ads to help boost the likelihood of them making another purchase from your store.
As for setting up cross-sell and upsell items, here’s what you need to remember before beginning:
In order to use this ad type, you need to have two product sets in your campaign. One will be used for retargeting and the other is for determining the products that will be included in the campaign.
Facebook shares a great example of doing this:
“You could select a product set called “Running watches for greater than $50” for retargeting, and then show a product set called “Running watches for less than $50” to people if you know the running watches lead to more sales.”
Creating your eCommerce Facebook Cross-Sell and Upsell Ads
Here is some step by step instructions for creating these ads for your own campaign.
- First, head to ad creation.
- From the campaign level, select “Catalog Sales” as your objective. Next, you need to pick the catalog for promotion.
- Now, from the ad set level, choose the product set to display in the Products section.
- Navigate to the Audience section. This is where you can choose Cross-Sell Products or Upsell Products.
- Now you need to pick a lookback window for product views. (More on that in a moment)
- Your next step is selecting the product set you are using for retargeting, and finishing creating your dynamic ad!
Lookback windows
If you read those steps for creating your eCommerce Fb ads and you’re left thinking “what the heck is a lookback window?”, we are about to tell you! It’s actually a simple concept, and it’s one you might come across frequently as an eCommerce store owner.
The best way to explain what a lookback window is is by giving you an example.
Let’s say you create a Facebook ad for your designer dog leashes. You set the lookback window to seven days. A user clicks on this ad, but they don’t purchase it that day.
Instead, they purchase 11 days later. Because this is longer than the seven day lookback window, it means this conversion won’t be attributed to your ad. If, however, the user purchases the leash immediately after clicking your ad or within 7 days, that sale can be attributed to your ad!
Facebook lets you choose this attribution window, and you have the following options to choose from:
- 1-day click
- 7-day click (default)
- 1-day click and 1-day view
- 7-day click and 1-day view
Monitor and Modify Your eCommerce Facebook Ads
You’ve done a lot of hard work to get to this point! Your Facebook campaign’s eCommerce ads are up and running—this is huge! But your work isn’t over yet.
In fact, if you ask us, it’s just the beginning! Now that your ads have launched, you need to keep a very close eye on them.
You can’t just set and forget your ads. They need to be tested, monitored, and analyzed on a daily basis. Otherwise, you could be spending money on ads that aren’t bringing you any substantial return on your investment.
Here are some helpful tips for monitoring your Facebook ad campaign to give you the best chance of success:
- First of all, you need to be sure you understand what your analytics are telling you. Do you know what a click-through-rate (CTR) is?
- Or, more importantly, how to measure it? These are some of the things you need a strong grasp on to monitor your campaign properly. (Facebook has a handy ad glossary here to help you start)
- Make Ads Manager your best friend. This will be your base for monitoring your ad performance. To ensure you never forget about it, you might want to consider making it your homepage. Or at least, create a bookmark for quick access.
- Use the reports from Ads Manager to monitor your campaign. These reports are full of incredibly valuable information about your campaigns. In addition to campaigns, you can also monitor the success of individual ads.
- Some of the metrics this report includes are daily spend, click-through rates, and engagement. (This is another reason it’s important to be up to date on Facebook’s Ads terminology!)
- If this is your first set of eCommerce Fb ads, you won’t have a benchmark for comparing them. However, you can still look to these analytics to make sure they are moving in the right direction. If it’s not your first campaign, however, you can compare campaigns against one another to see what performs best.
Metrics for Monitoring Campaign Success
As for the specific metrics to indicate success (or a lack thereof) with your ad campaign, here are some of the key performance indicators to watch for.
- Engagement rates: Are your likes, shares, comments, clicks, and follows increasing?
- Awareness metrics: These include your reach and impressions.
- Click-through-rate: Back to CTR! This is what tells you how many people actually click on your ad after seeing it.
- The higher the rate, the better! Ideally, this rate should be increasing over time and with each campaign. (For reference, the average CTR for Facebook ads across all industries is 0.90%)
- Conversion rate: In virtually every type of campaign, the ultimate goal can be described as getting conversions. What this conversion is, however, can differ across industries and campaigns.
- For eCommerce stores, the ultimate conversion is a sale. But you might also have campaigns set up for newsletter signups or other conversions. In the case of making sales, your conversion rate is how many people make a purchase after clicking your ad.
- Cost-per-conversion: Your CPC or cost-per-conversion is how much you are actually spending on these ads that result in conversions. For example, if you spend $1000 on ads to make fifty sales, your cost per conversion is $20.
- ROI: Of course, you also want to be sure you’re getting a great return on your investment in eCommerce Fb ads. Are you generating more revenue than you are spending on ads? This can take time to build up, but your ROI is ultimately an important indicator of your ad success.
(By the way, if you trust Blue Water Marketing with your pay-per-click ads, here’s what you can expect: our campaigns are never left to chance or speculation. We analyze your industry, competitors, and location to determine trends that will dictate your campaign. We want to ensure that our clients are able to track each conversion and CTR, along with the other metrics we just covered. For Detailed Ranking, we must ensure each campaign is tagged correctly.)
Trust BWM with Your eCommerce Facebook Ads
“Setting up eCommerce Fb ads” might sound like a quick and easy process at first. But once you have read through these step by step instructions, you see just how much goes into them.
For your campaign to be a success, your ads need constant monitoring and tweaking. This involves testing and implementing new strategies according to the results of these tests. Understandably, the entire process is time-consuming and complicated.
When you’re busy running an eCommerce store, the last thing you might want to do is work on your Facebook ads. When you outsource this task to Facebook advertising experts, you benefit in several ways. For starters, you save yourself a lot of time. Second, you also have the peace of mind you’re entrusting this critical task to professionals, like Blue Water Marketing.
Don’t wait another day. Give us a call and start getting the clicks, sales, and conversions you’ve been dreaming of!
