Facebook Ads for eCommerce [Complete Guide]

In the following Advanced Facebook Ads for eCommerce guide, I will help you realize the untapped potential of Facebook, learn from examples & scale up your Fb Marketing.

Facebook is an ever-changing ball game. It has grown like wildfire in the past decade, mainly for the good of businesses.

Still, as we praise the usefulness of this mammoth platform for small businesses, it is also essential to decode & resolve the problems marketers face on Facebook today.

Be it the problem of zero engagement, organic reach, or the low conversion horrors, this guide will help you navigate with tips, strategies, how-tos, and much more.

1. Why Is Facebook Marketing Quite Mandatory for Every Business?

Facebook has 2.91 billion monthly active users making it the largest social media platform in the world.

Source: Statista, November 2021

What excites the Facebook audience is the easy connection with their favourite brands. According to their statistics, Facebook connected 1.6 billion users to small businesses on the platform. So online businesses must start using Facebook advertising. An estimated 78% of consumers have discovered retail products from Facebook. Also, 42% of marketers mention Facebook as vital to their business growth. Facebook ads consistently deliver one of the highest ROI.

Marketers are targeting their ad spending on mobile, which makes sense, given that most users are accessing Facebook on their handheld devices. 93% of social media advertisers use Facebook Ads. The next closest platform is Instagram, at 24%.

I know there is a high chance you have been using Facebook ads for eCommerce for a while. But with the addition of new intelligent marketing features, such as chatbots, the marketplace, 360-videos, new targeting capabilities, and algorithm updates, Facebook has evolved in many ways that have changed the reasons to use Facebook marketing strategies for all companies.

2. Reasons to Use Facebook ads for eCommerce to Grow Your Business

Daily, Facebook helps hundreds of thousands of businesses like digital shops, SaaS-es, and service providers worldwide to achieve their goals.

Here are ten reasons why you should not ignore Facebook ads from your marketing mix:

2.1 Wide Audience Roster

Let’s not bore ourselves to the brunt by repeatedly going about the size of the Facebook audience. It’s enormous; you got it. But what’s elevating for your marketing purposes is the varied nature of its audience demographics.

Facebook’s audience roster is filled with baby boomers to Gen X, making it a stellar tool for advertising your brand with laser focus.

2.2 Pocket-Friendly Medium to Get Leads

One of the coolest things about Facebook is fetching relevant leads for a very economical rate using Facebook lead ads.

What are Facebook lead ads?

Facebook lead ads are pre-filled promoted forms that facilitate marketers to ask for details from the audience in exchange for heightened incentives, such as newsletters subscriptions, contest registration, free eBooks, product trials, etc.

What makes Facebook leads ads cheaper is also its cornerstone – Less Friction.

Facebook lead makes joining your email list easier for the audience because of its native prefilled form experience. It’s tap-tap-done. Lead ads are one of the best alternatives to traditional lead generation.

But what makes them cheap?

Because it’s a swifter process for a user to give information and get the gated content, it tends to improve the conversion rate. And as the conversion rates get better, Facebook lowers the cost per lead. And Facebook lead ads do have a reasonable conversion rate.

Don’t believe us?

Look at the study done by Wordstream to find out the Facebook ads benchmark across multiple industries. They concluded the average conversion rate across all industries to be 9.21%.

2.3. Customized Audience Targeting

It’s better to target a person with ads who had previously shown interest in your business than a stranger. And that’s what Facebook custom audience targeting does for your ads.

Facebook allows you to target a specific cluster of people who already have a relationship with your business as a past customer, app downloads, website visits, or engagement with your brand.

2.4. Advanced Targeting

Facebook psychographic targeting goes more granular than demographic factors. Frankly, demographics can’t be the sole parameter to describe someone’s lifestyle and buying behaviours. Age, country, occupation, and income level tell us many things but are limited to a certain extent.

For example, not every millennial with low disposable income makes inexpensive purchases, not every adult makes investment decisions, and not every boomer cannot learn a new skill.

That’s where psychographic targeting comes into play! Psychographic targeting segregated audiences based on their inspiration, beliefs, interest, behaviours, and other subjective psychological characteristics.

Keeping the Psychographic elements along with demographic targeting in mind opens up doors for:

Creating more empathetic ads
Strengthening your brand values
A/B testing marketing collaterals
Re-defining your buyer personas

2.5. In-Depth Analytics

Facebook analytics provides an extensive set of metrics to analyze the performance of your organic and paid marketing.

The Analytics section gives you deep insights into:

Content performance
Audience insights
Referral traffic
Profile engagement

Facebook’s ads manager gives you many metrics (e.g., CTR, CPC, CPA, and more) to determine your ad performance and calculate your return on investment.

Later in this guide, you will know the critical metrics to be tracked when using Facebook for marketing purposes.

2.6. Full-Fledged Funnel Targeting

Facebook is perhaps the only platform that lets you target and then moves a user through every stage of the funnel, i.e., Awareness, Consideration, and Decision (Conversion). With

With Facebook’s advertising features and targeting capabilities, you can move users from one stage of the funnel to another by catering for them with different ads that resonate at each stage of a buyer’s journey.

2.6.1 Awareness stage

At the first stage of the funnel, you aim to increase your brand’s reach and awareness. Here you try to pique your audience’s interest without being too pushy and turn them from strangers to prospects.

Facebook provides you with multiple ads options such as:

Sponsored posts
Sponsored stories
Video ads
Carousel ads

Then we move on to the Consideration stage.

2.6.2 Consideration stage

In the consideration stage, you will find people interested in your brand and decide to stay connected with it. You can quickly turn your prospects into leads by taking their email by offering a gated incentive, such as newsletters subscriptions, contest registration, free eBooks, product trials, etc.

Also, retargeting works best by tracking prospects’ visits to your site and then displaying a relevant ad when the same user visits Facebook.

2.6.3 Decision (Conversion) stage

At the Final Stage of the funnel, you show a particular offer for a very specific audience. Here, Facebook targeting gives you the means to target:

Custom audience (your leads)
Lookalike audience (people similar to your leads)

You got complete control over choosing the custom audience for targeting. Facebook allows you to select your custom audience based on the following segments:

Past website visitors
Leads generated at previous funnels
App users
Facebook engaged users

2.7. Exposure to Both B2C and B2B Brands

There is a common misconception among people that Facebook is only suitable for B2C businesses.

Do you feel the same way? It’s understandable. Businesses with long-sales cycles and specific clientele remain reluctant to the idea of marketing on Facebook. But things have turned with the introduction of Facebook pixel and lead ads in the past few years. 43% of B2B marketers named Facebook their most important advertising channel.

B2B aligned demographics you can target with Facebook:

Employer name;
Job title;
Employment industry;
Interest industry;
Employer company size;
Business travelers

Of course, the B2B market is competitive, but you can astronomically grow your B2B business on Facebook with proper Facebook ad targeting.

2.8. Chatbots

Who knew that talking to a business would be on the list of people, especially young people. But we can’t deny the statistics that say: 63% of Gen Z surveyed wished they could communicate with more businesses via messaging.

People exchange around 2 billion messages with companies on messenger per month. Chatbots are an inevitable choice to instantly and automatically interact with your audience on Messenger. They allow you to include images, videos, and links in your broadcast messages.

According to the Search engine Journal, Facebook Messenger boasts 70-80 % open rates within the first hour, which is way better than average email open rates ( 5 -10 %). The evidence is astounding! Messenger chatbots are one of the cheapest and most practical solutions to attract, nurture, and convert customers.

2.9. Customer Feedback

One of the central pillars of a brand’s success is meeting with feedback and criticism from its audience. In the old days’ customer feedback was limited to emails and cold call surveys, but not anymore.

With Facebook, you can easily connect with your consumer in Facebook groups or the comment section of your business page and ask for their feedback, thoughts, and experience.

Listening to your customers is a proven way to understand their needs and wants. It helps to improve the quality of your product and drives customer satisfaction.

2.10 Everdeveloping Platform

Finally, one thing you can consistently accept from Facebook is continuous growth. In the last couple of years, Facebook has doubled up in its audience size. With new people joining the platform daily, you will have a larger audience to advertise and engage.

Recently, Facebook has introduced a new UI to give streamlined access to create events, pages, groups, and ads on Facebook.

Businesses have never had such a prolific tool to manage all nine marketing yards in one place. But having outstanding features and capabilities at your disposal will not be enough to create a great marketing campaign on Facebook.

But you need a proper marketing strategy that effectively utilises all these features.

3. Advanced Facebook Ads Tactics: Retargeting

People seldom convert on their first visit to your website. Research suggests up to 98% of first-time website visitors don’t. Well, that’s a lot of people.

Unless someone makes an impulse purchase, they research their options, refine their preferences, decide, and then purchase.

The length of time this process takes varies based on your business, product, or service.

So you need to bring those initial 98% of non-purchasers back, maybe multiple times and convince them to convert. This is called retargeting.

In this chapter, we’ll cover everything you need to know to create successful Facebook retargeting campaigns.

3.1. What Are Retargeting Ads?

Retargeting ads are where the target audience of your ad campaign are people who have already interacted with you. They, therefore, know your brand and, in theory, have a higher level of intent than general prospecting audiences.

Most people think of retargeting as solely website-based—retargeting people who have visited your website to bring them back.

While this is the core tactic of retargeting, Facebook allows you to retarget people who have engaged with you in other ways. They may be on an email list, have watched one of your videos, or engaged with your mobile app. There are lots of possibilities.

These involve collecting user engagement data, creating target audiences based on these interactions, and building campaigns targeting these audiences.

You collect the necessary data for website retargeting by installing a pixel on your website.

If the person visiting your website is logged into Facebook, that website visitor will be connected to the user via your pixel. You can then populate various Custom Audiences with this data. We’ll get into more detail on how to do this in later sections.

3.2. What Are The Benefits Of Retargeting?

The opportunity to win back potential lost revenue is the only benefit you need to know to start retargeting. Your bottom line demands it.

But if you need a little more convincing, take a look at some of the statistics:

Retargeted website visitors with display ads are 70% more likely to convert to your website.
69% of shopping carts are abandoned without ever completing a purchase.
Retargeting can increase ad response by up to 400%.
Retargeting ads are 76% more likely to be clicked on than regular display ads.

3.3. What You Need To Get Started With Retargeting

Depending on what kind of retargeting campaign you want to run, there are a few things you need to set up to get started.

We’ll run through the essentials below.

3.3.1 The Facebook Pixel

To retarget people who have visited your website, you need to set up the Facebook Pixel. It’s a little snippet of code that you install on every website page and will track visitors.

You can begin setting up your Pixel by navigating to the Pixel menu item from your Business Manager. Click the green Create A Pixel button if you haven’t already created your Pixel.

Then paste the Pixel Base Code in the <head> tag on every page of your website. Once you’ve done this, you can add additional code to each page that marks an event you want to track.

For example, add the Make Purchase code snippet to the thank you page a visitor is directed to after purchasing a product from your website. Or add the Initiate Checkout code snippet to the first stage of the checkout process.

This will record everyone who triggers these events on your website and has completed a purchase or initiated a checkout. The single line of code you need to add to these pages looks as follows and needs to be added to these pages in the Base Code:

Even if you don’t want to retarget people who take these actions, you should set up these events, as they’ll enable you to track the conversions that people make directly back to your ads.

Alternatively, you can utilize Facebook Custom Conversions. These only require you to add the Base Code to your website. You’ll create URL-based conversions directly on Facebook that will record a conversion every time someone visits a specified URL, such as yourwebsite.com/thank-you-for-purchasing.

Add the Facebook Pixel Helper extension to Chrome to check that you’ve correctly installed your Facebook Pixel.

3.3.2 Offline Events

You can retarget people who purchase in your physical store. To do this, you just need to utilize Facebook’s Offline Events. Setting them up involves uploading your purchase data to Facebook directly.

You can do this manually, via API, or via a partner integration. If you can automate the data syncing process, you’ll be able to map your purchase data back to your campaigns and create custom audiences from your offline conversions.

3.3.3 Product Catalog

If you want to create dynamic retargeting ads—where you retarget people with specific products they visited on your website—then you need to set up a Facebook Product Catalog.

The catalogue is a data feed that contains all the details needed to dynamically populate your Facebook ads, including an ID, name, category, availability, product URL, image URL, and other product attributes.

You can create your product catalogue in your Business Manager. Once you’ve completed your product catalogue, you can create a product feed to populate your dynamic ads.

We have you covered if you don’t know much about dynamic ads. You’ll find out everything you need to know about them in the next chapter.

3.3.4 Custom Audiences

Facebook Custom Audiences will power all your retargeting campaigns. They allow you to build your lists of Facebook users to target. This is where all the data you gathered from your Facebook Pixel or Facebook SDK will be utilized for retargeting.

You can begin creating your Custom Audiences from the Audiences menu in Business Manager.

Click Create a Custom Audience to begin creating your first audience.

Customer File: This allows you to upload a .csv or .txt file, copy and paste your customer data into Facebook or sync your email CRM to Facebook.
Website Traffic: Create lists of people who have visited your website, specific pages within your website, or have completed one of the standard events you set up. You can add a timescale to ensure only recent visitors are included. To use this option, you need to set up the Facebook Pixel.
App Activity: Create lists of people who have downloaded the app or carried out specific actions within your app. To use this option, you need to set up your SDK.
Offline Activity: Create lists of people who have interacted with your business in-store or through other offline channels. To use this option, you need to set up Offline Events.
Engagement: Create lists of people who have engaged with you on Facebook. This includes people who have visited your Page, watched a video, responded to an Event, or opened a Lead Form or Canvas.

I won’t go into the details of each one here. But to create a website retargeting audience, click the Website Traffic option. You’ll be presented with the following options for your website traffic custom audience:

After you create your customer audience, give it 30 minutes, showing you the number of people on your list.

From the Audience Manager, you can create, edit and delete as many custom audiences as you want and include and exclude them when setting the targeting for your campaigns. This gives you some powerful campaign targeting options, which we’ll get into in the tips and strategies sections.

3.4. How To Set Up A Facebook Retargeting Campaign

Once you’ve set up your custom audiences, running a Facebook retargeting campaign is easy. Go through your usual campaign creation process, and at the Audience stage of creating an ad set, just select the relevant audience from the custom audience drop-down box.

Your ad set will now target everyone from the custom audience you created. You can still refine your target audience the same as always, by demographic, interest, behavioural, and connection data. Doing so will mean your target audience must exist in your custom audience AND match your other criteria selections.

You can both include and exclude custom audiences from your targeting. This will come in handy.

3.5 Final Thoughts on Retargeting

Retargeting is one of the easiest ways to reach out to engaged audiences that already know your brand and have shown a degree of intent.

While no one likes to be followed around the Internet for the rest of their lives once they’ve visited a website, taking innovative measures and building targeted campaigns will ensure you’re not one of the brands doing this.

On the contrary, you’ll be one of the brands that customers enjoy being retargeted by. Moreover, you’ll ensure you’re not leaving any potential revenue untapped. If you’re not retargeting, it’s time to start.

4 Facebook Dynamic Ads

Facebook introduced Dynamic Ads to help online businesses increase sales for their product catalogue. They achieve this by allowing marketers to promote their entire product catalogue without creating thousands of individual ads.

More and more of your potential customers are becoming immune to traditional online advertising techniques. These dynamic advertisements leverage customer browsing data to make intelligent promotions more sense than ever.

Facebook dynamic ads automatically promote products to people who have expressed an interest by visiting your online store or viewing your products elsewhere on the Internet.

Getting started is simple; you just upload your product catalogue and set up your campaign. It will continue working for you for as long as you want – using the right target audience for your products and up-to-date pricing and stock levels.

Facebook’s Dynamic Ads are designed primarily to help online retailers increase their product catalogue sales.

Dynamic ads use your Facebook pixel or SDK to show ads to people who have already shown interest in your business.

Reach your audience anytime, anywhere via mobile, desktop, and tablets on the wider Audience Network.

Now we have some insight into what dynamic ads are, how they work and why they can be effective. In the following chapter, we’ll outline how you can get started on Facebook by importing a high-quality data feed, ready to create your effective dynamic ads.

4.1 How do Dynamic ads automate your marketing efforts?

Facebook Dynamic ads take all relevant product information from your product catalogue and insert it into a pre-made template, saving you the hassle of manually setting up hundreds of ads. And once you’ve set up your product feed for Facebook, it requires little maintenance as information will automatically be kept up-to-date.

Implementing dynamic ads means targeting your specific ad messages depending on your audience’s location in your sales funnel – offering them more relevant products from your catalog.

For example, you can choose to filter by category, brand, or price. Targeting options for Dynamic Ads let you filter by different categories like brand or price to give you an extra layer of support in helping you reach higher conversion rates and ROI.

4.2 Set up a Dynamic Ad Template

Facebook’s Dynamic ad templates let you map the data fields within your product catalogue to specific places in the text of your Facebook ads. So you are extracting specific data from your catalog (like name, brand, price, etc.) and adding it to these ad templates.

These work across all devices and can be in a carousel, single-product, or collection format, and you can send them directly on Facebook Newsfeeds or in the right-hand column.

Once you have established your templates, you can build the accurate audiences you want to target.

4.3 Establish your audience

You probably already know that building your audience should be at the forefront of any online advertising campaign. At first, it might be tempting to look for new prospects through your new Facebook Dynamic ads.

However, sticking to what you know through reaching out to previous buyers makes the most sense, as they know your product and are more likely to convert – at lower costs.

You can build your audience initially and then start to expand to new users with the help of Facebook’s algorithm. This will use the data from your existing audience to establish similar potential customers who are also likely to convert.

4.4 Retargeting with Dynamic Ads

You will have several options in the audience section of your dynamic ads on Business Manager. This is where you can decide which selected product set to display to certain audiences who have interacted with your specific products in a period. (e.g., the last seven days).

Show them products similar to their previous purchase(s) from the same or a different product set. By setting up this first custom audience of past purchasers who have already bought your products, you know they are a valuable audience.

The most common way to create a Custom Audience is to use “Website Traffic” as a data source. In the drop-down menu provided, you can then select the pixel event.

“Purchase” and set a specific time when the event occurred (e.g., website the IMAGEmetricsic in the past 50 days).

After selecting the purchase event, you can add several different factors to your Dynamic Ad, including:

Specific website page(s) where the event has taken place.

Define the parameters of your pixel code:

The purchase value in question – Select the maximum, minimum, or average.
The number of items that audience members purchased to be included.
The device used to perform the event action (computer, tablet, mobile)

4.5 How to use Custom Labels with Dynamic?

Product Sets let you organize your products in different groups. Facebook currently allows group products filtering according to their: Category, Product Type, Brand, Current Price, Product, Retailer, Product Groups Id, Gender, Condition, Size, Age, Group, Color, Material, Pattern, Availability.

Custom Labels on Facebook Dynamic Ads

Custom labels are five optional, additional columns that can be added to your product catalogue. Their value can be anything from a number to an ID or text. As stated above, you can use custom labels when you need to add some product information that couldn’t fall under any other product feed field.

The custom label’s value can be anything of your choosing, numerical or text. Some examples might include seasonality, clearance, year of release, or the name of a specific promotion for certain products. The most efficient and straightforward way to add Custom Labels is straight to your product feed.

The other option is to use Facebook’s Data Feed Rules in their Business Manager. This is intended to set up solutions to minor issues while importing your data. So to set up your custom labels easily, without hiring costly external developers, the best option is to use a data feed management tool.

5. Track the Performance of Your Facebook Ads for eCommerce

Facebook ads manager gives you tons of metrics to monitor your ad campaign.

Measuring the results of your Facebook ads campaign(s) is mandatory. Otherwise, you will not be able to see what works for you and doesn’t. Also, you will be unable to make changes and improve your ad performance.

But the sheer amount of data can be overwhelming for anyone. So the trick to getting the most out of your Facebook ad metrics is to keep your marketing goal in sight while evaluating them.

We have touched briefly on some of the most common ad metrics businesses need to track.

When using Facebook to market your business, it is crucial to have a data-driven strategy derived from your key metrics that align with your marketing goals.

You must properly analyze all your key productive facebook metrics to avoid the listed setbacks. o without further ado, let’s dive into the key metrics you need to track for growing your business on Facebook

Where to track them?

You will get every metric related to your ad performance inside the Facebook ads manager.

5.1 Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)

ROAS is an acronym for Return on Ad Spend, simply the revenue from the ads divided by the amount spent on the ads. If your campaign’s goal is increasing conversions (in this case, purchases), one of the most important metrics is purchase ROAS.

Why should you track the return on ad spend?

This metric gives you the best idea of your campaign’s performance and measures the profitability of your advertising based on gross revenue resulting from your ad spend.

If you want to grow your business, when spending money on advertising, you want to ensure that you generate a positive RoaS (Return on ad Spend). So, focus on RoaS.

5.2. Ad impressions

The Facebook ad impression metric shows the number of times the audience viewed your ad.

Why should you track ad impressions?

Tracking ad impressions is particularly important for those running a brand recognition campaign, as it reveals the level of exposure of your brand. Impressions may not always yield conversions, but they can take one powerful appearance with a thoughtful, creative design and a strong call to action (CTA).

5.3. Relevance score

This is another trusty metric to keep an eye on. The relevance score is a rating from 1 to 10 that estimates how well your target audience responds to the ad. The higher the score, the better your ad reaches your targeted audience.

Why should you track the relevance score?

The score is essential as it tells how your target audience perceives your ads. If you have a low relevance score, Facebook will charge you a premium to serve that ad, leading to higher CPMs, CPCs, and conversion costs.

5.4. CTR

Click-through rate (CTR) metrics show you the percentage of people coming to your landing page after clicking through your ad.

Why is the CTR an important Facebook metric?

CTR is one of the most crucial metrics to evaluate your ad campaign’s effectiveness. It gives you an overall view of your ad’s performance in attracting users. A good CTR tells you that your ad is of quality and has an excellent relevant score. So if your CTR is hitting rock bottom, make some ad copy changes and make it more appropriate for your targeted users.

5.5 CPC & CPM

So on what basis do your Facebook ads get charged? Facebook ads manager gives you multiple options to be charged: cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM).

CPC metrics tell you how much you are paying when someone clicks on your ad, and CPM shows how much you are paying for every thousand impressions on your ad

Why should you track these metrics?

Both CPC and CPM align with your objective to create better reach and brand awareness on Facebook.

Instead of monitoring your whole budget, it will be more informative if you peek at these two metrics to evaluate the worth of your spending.

5.6. Cost per result

The Cost per Result is the total amount spent divided by the total number of results, which results in the genuine evaluation of whether your campaign worked well or not so well.

It is essential to evaluate if Facebook is the right platform for your client and performs well to support their objective and budget.

This ad metric shows how cost-efficiently you have accomplished your objectives in a specific ad campaign. The lower the cost per result, based on the landing page views or link clicks, the better we see!

5.7. Ad Frequency

Ad frequency refers to the average number of times your targeted audience sees a specific ad on their Facebook feed. For example, your ad frequency will be four if your ad is seen by the average targeted audience four times.

Why should you track the ad frequency metrics?

You might be thinking, the more the frequency, the better. Well, no. According to ad espresso’s report, as the ad frequency increases, it decreases the CTR and gives a hike to your average CPC.

Conclusion on Facebook Ads for eCommerce

Facebook Advertising management is a full-time job, so an eCommerce business shouldn’t be dabbling with Facebook Ads if they can’t afford to bring a new hire or agency to manage this.

However, missing out on advertising benefits with Facebook is a substantial competitive disadvantage, especially since Facebook makes eCommerce one of its focuses. That’s why It should be a top priority for retailers to take full advantage of Remarketing and Dynamic Ads.

Relevant case studies of Todays.Agency

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