Facebook Ads are a must for eCommerce businesses that want to stand out among the competition and grow their online business. The problem is, that many eCommerce businesses have no idea where to start. They’re not sure which strategies to implement, where to focus their ad spend, or how to create an ad in the first place! But in today’s post, we’re going to share seven effective Facebook Ads strategies for eCommerce to help you get your campaign off the ground.

Strategies eCommerce marketers need to implement for their Facebook Ads today.

1.Use dynamic product ads

Dynamic product ads are a feature on Facebook Ads you can’t afford to not t o use ! If you sell a large number of items in your eCommerce store, this feature will be invaluable to you. It uses machine learning to show unique products to each user based on their specific interests, activities, and demographics. So, rather than setting up thousands of separate ads, dynamic ads help you accomplish the same goal with a single ad set. 

Are you already using the catalogue sales objective? Then you’re also using dynamic ads— awesome!!!

But take a look at what Facebook says about dynamic ads and the targeting options available to users:

• Dynamic ads for broad audiences reach consumers who have not yet purchased from your business or visited your website but may have shown interest in the types of products or services you are offering.
• Dynamic ads for retargeting reach consumers who have expressed interest in specific products on your website or app and encourage them to complete the action.

Benefits of dynamic ads

Now, if you’re still not convinced dynamic ads are a must-have, take a look at these four benefits:

1. Personalized: The beauty of dynamic ads is that they are just that: dynamic! This means they automatically can deliver relevant content to consumers based on their unique behaviour’s and interests.
2. Always on: Dynamic ads are constantly updating all on their own. There’s no need for you to create and launch multiple campaigns because machine learning has this taken care of for you.
3. Retargeting: When users visit your website or app but don’t make a purchase, dynamic ads can be incredibly helpful for retargeting them and moving them farther down the sales funnel.
4. Find new shoppers: Some users may show interest in your products or services (or those similar to the ones you offer) even though they have never visited your website or used your app. Dynamic ads help you target these users thanks to broad audience targeting! 

2. Facebook Multi-Product Ads

Facebook Ads for eCommerce will also benefit from utilizing Facebook multi-product ads. The amazing thing about these ads is that they let you show multiple products within the same ad. So, if a consumer spots one pair of rain boots in your multi-product ad, they can scroll through and see similar products they might be even more interested in. 

Alternatively, you can use multi-product ads to show different features of a single product, rather than showing multiple products. You can incorporate these as Dynamic Ads or create unique ad sets for yourself. 

3. Install the Conversion Tracking Pixel

Another strategy worth implementing is installing the conversion tracking pixel. What is this, you ask? As confusing as it sounds, the idea is pretty simple: this pixel is a small piece of code you add to your website to track users’ behaviour. It can tell you things like how that user got there, the pages and products they visit, and much more. 

See what Facebook offers up about this eCommerce strategy:

“Tracked conversions appear in the Facebook Ads Manager and the Facebook Analytics dashboard, where they can be used to analyse the effectiveness of your conversion funnel and to calculate your return on ad investment. You can also use tracked conversions to define custom audiences for ad optimization and dynamic ad campaigns. Once you have defined custom audiences, we can use them to identify other Facebook users who are likely to convert and target them with your ads.

There are three ways to track conversions with the pixel:

• standard events, which are visitor actions that we have defined and that you report by calling a pixel function
• custom events, which are visitor actions that you have defined and that you report by calling a pixel function
• custom conversions, which are visitor actions that are tracked automatically by parsing your website’s referrer URLs”

4. Run retargeting campaigns

How many times have you been browsing products online and adding items to your cart, only to abandon the cart altogether and move on to something else? After doing this, you might start noticing you see Facebook Ads for the specific items you had in your cart. This is probably due to that business utilizing a Facebook Ads for eCommerce strategy known as retargeting.  We like to see this number around the 7-10 times someone sees your ad controlled through frequency in Facebook

These retargeting ads are a helpful reminder to people who have already shown interest in your product. Perhaps they got busy or distracted but had every intention to make a purchase. Your retargeting campaign could be just the push they need to finally make that purchase. 

5. Create a Lookalike Audience

Facebook is incredibly clever. They know what consumers like and what they want based on similar people’s actions and online behaviour. Luckily, you can utilize this cleverness to your own advantage. When you create a Lookalike Audience for your Facebook Ads, you’re putting all of the data Facebook collects about users to work for you.

Based on past customers’ behaviour, the algorithms know which other users might also be interested in your products or services. Then, you can create an ad campaign to specifically target those individuals. 

6. Tell Your Brand Story with Video Facebook Ads for eCommerce

No t every ad needs to be pushing a specific product or service to users. Did you know you can also use Facebook Ads to connect with consumers and tell your brand story?

We don’t recommend overwhelming users with lengthy backstories. But a short video that tells your brand’s story can work wonders in establishing your brand presence and recognition. 

7. Custom audiences are a great way to strengthen customer relationships

Just because someone has purchased your products once, doesn’t mean your work is done. You can keep working on connecting and engaging with them through the use of custom audiences for your Facebook Ads campaigns. 

As Facebook explains :

“A Custom Audience made from a customer list is a type of audience you can create to connect with people who have already shown an interest in your business or product. It’s made of information – called “identifiers” – you’ve collected about your customers (such as email, phone number, and address) and provided to Facebook. Prior to use, Facebook hashes this information.

The second one is below

Everything You Need to Know about Google’s Performance Max Campaigns

Google has announced a major update to Smart Shopping campaigns, transitioning over to an entirely new format, Performance Max, from July 2022.

As with anything digital marketing this will take time and below is a detailed explanation.

Okay Google, Let’s see what’s changing?

Performance Max is a new campaign type that aims to drive maximum performance from Google Ads.

This campaign type will serve on all existing Smart Shopping campaign placements with the addition of YouTube, Text Ads, and Discovery formats. New insights and reporting will be available, including “Audience Signals”, and we’ll also be able to utilise additional tools in order to steer automation.

Audience Signals allow advertisers to influence automation by directly indicating the most relevant audiences to their business with the highest likelihood of conversion. Providing these signals will help speed up the ramp-up period while also steering automation with your own insights.

Conversion Value Rulesallow advertisers to value conversions differently, depending on specific insights (audience, device, geo) in real-time using Smart Bidding.

Why is Smart Shopping becoming Performance Max?

Marketers have to constantly evolve to keep up with the speed of the shifting behaviours if they still want to drive results and captivate users. Performance Max combines multiple touch points within Google’s advertising landscape to ensure that attribution gaps across campaign types are covered.

For example…

A user searches for a product that you offer and clicks on a Shopping ad but doesn’t purchase right there. Later, they are retargeted with an ad on YouTube, and then later searches more specifically for your product to finally convert via a text ad – completing this purchase with multiple touch-points across campaigns. Machine learning via Performance Max will attribute all of these touch-points within the same campaign, leading to a much clearer picture of the customer journey, and using this data to serve your ads across the formats that matter to your business the most.

What are the similarities between Performance Max and Smart Shopping?

Like Smart Shopping, Performance Max is goal-based. Utilising machine learning and automation to achieve business goals is at the core of this new format.

Existing goals set on Smart Shopping will transfer across when Google rolls out its “one-click to convert” feature. Probably this is in place at the time of reading this.

Suppose you target product sets within Smart Shopping at a target return-on-ad-spend (ROAS), historical conversion data will be transferred across, along with targets and active products to serve within this campaign.

How can I prepare for Performance Max campaigns?

1. Maximise results with creative optimisation: ensure that assets are available on your account to include within Performance Max campaigns.
2. Solidify exact-match keyword strategy: Google will still serve ads via Search if a keyword matches a user’s query. Therefore, it’s crucial to map out any queries within your existing Search structure that you would like to continue running via Search specifically.
3. Video assets: Performance Max will ask for video assets to serve through YouTube placements for accounts not currently running YouTube Ads. We would therefore recommend uploading any recent videos to your YouTube channel.

What do the experts think of Performance Max (PMax)?

Not sure bout the name, but the results that Google have quoted for early adoption of their newest campaign type – an average 12% increase in revenue at the same or better return-on-ad-spend. We’re certainly keen to test out this new campaign type across our clients’ accounts as they become available. Remember Test everything.

5 EFFECTIVE LEAD GEN STRATEGIES

Lead-gen is the process of generating leads into your sales flow or user funnel. For ecommerce, the end goal may be purchases, however leads for every business category is an important layer to growing the overall business. ​​Lead-gen can nurture qualified prospects from users showing tentative interest to becoming loyal customers. 

1. Fill The Funnel With Paid Media. Meta advertising or top off funnel paid search marketing can help to drive qualified leads to your site. Target users based on different buyer personas, demographic data and interests to hone in on leads that will have a higher propensity to take meaningful action. Through a platform like SEMRush, pull search volume estimates relevant to your business’s product or service. Use this data to build Google search campaigns that bring in-market activity to your site.
2. Landing Page Optimizations  So what happens after you’ve done the work of driving qualified leads to your site? It’s now the job of your landing page to convert users (converting in this instance generally means, providing user details, like an email address or phone number). According to Omnisend the highest converting number of fields within a lead form is 3. However, this is all relative to your product and if those three fields drive quality users or if you need more fields to prequalify the user. Also consider behavior triggered pop-ups to capture abandoned web users. 
3. Email/SMS Marketing Automation Flows. Email marketing and SMS help marketers solve the leaky bucket problem once leads are generated. The most fundamental way to repair those leaks  for email and SMS automation is audience segmentation. Segmenting by opt-in date, specific user actions taken onsite, interests and more enable you to personalize the content for highly targeted messages. SMS marketing is becoming increasingly vital in marketer’s lead gen strategy. Afterall in 2021, 56% of web traffic took place on mobile phones.
4. Strategic Free Incentives. According to Hubspot, 55% of top landing page submissions come from their eBooks.  Offering an incentive, or value-add to potential leads help boost conversion rates, but it also an opportunity to better understand your audience by testing different offerings to find out what resonates most with your target demos.
5. Re-engagement and Customer Retention Campaigns. Brands focus the majority of their efforts on lead gen, and tend to spend less time on nurturing their existing audience or re-engaging a more latent audience. This is essentially a way to lose customers, the effect that we’re trying to repair in the sales funnel flow. Keep the conversation going with your audience by providing thought leadership, exclusive incentives, and a sense of community. Nurtured leads make 47% more purchases than non-nurtured leads.