The race for advertising space is on and E-commerce businesses are competing head to toe to get into the customer’s head-space.
Learn how to stay ahead of the curve. Discover these 9 tips for advertising effectively on Facebook in 2019.
Create Dynamic Facebook ads from your E-commerce Store
Dynamic ads are essential tools for e-commerce businesses in 2019. The feature is available to advertisers after setting up your inventory in the section of the catalogue in ad manager. Once you have all your products integrated with the catalogue manager Facebook can auto-generate ads in either image or carousel format ready to display to people who have shown interest in your inventory.
Up sell to existing customers
Take dynamic ads one step further with an up sell campaign. Your existing customers are more likely to be returning customers to your e-commerce store and up sell is one way to bring them back again and again. When up selling, think of complementary goods like Shoes and socks or Gaming consoles and games. Products like these usually follow a buying pattern where someone buys one item he is very likely to purchase a complementary product from your store. In this case, anyone who bought a Gaming console is also likely to be buying games to play on his console in the near future.
Use bid caps on your advertising campaigns
Facebook has recently upgraded its bid caps feature to include more control over how you bid for ad space. You can choose to display ads the lowest costs possible or keep a steady bid and ensure a constant reach of your ad. Both methods have their perks but you need to vary yours based on your requirements. Keep the bids low whenever possible. This would ensure that your customer acquisition costs are always low but for more competitive markets, a target cost strategy is more viable as it ensures that your customers see your ads.
I’ve been guilty of letting Facebook automatically adjust bids on my ads. This was fine on most days and I didn’t face too many problems early on. However as my budget grew and the market became more competitive, I was noticing that my ads either became very expensive (churning high CPM/CPC) or just wasn’t reaching too many people. That’s when I started using the manual bid options. Note that the bidding feature has gone through a lot of change lately (mostly for the better) but its easier now to control your bids (ensuring that your CPC/CPM doesn’t go over a set limit) and also ensure that your ad reaches out to people when you address a target cost (which averages out your bids) and keep both costs and reach a healthy constant.
Don’t forget to adjust your bids as you move along the campaign as well. Even with the new features, it is possible that your Ad is reaching fewer people near the end of your campaign. At this stage, you might want to either stop your ads or increase bids so that your ads may start reaching out again.
Plan ahead with automated rules
The key to great social media marketing in 2019 is automation, automation, and automation! While dynamic ads do most of the work creating ads, monitoring them can be a heavy duty when you have hundreds of campaigns running together.
Use automated rules to keep your costs in check, make decisions to stop ads that aren’t performing well and automatically increase bids when your campaign reaches a certain stage. As a rule of thumb, it is generally advisable to stop ads when the customer acquisition costs rise to a level higher than the price at which you’re selling your product.
Use Facebook pixel and conversion objectives in your ad campaigns
I couldn’t stress the importance of implementing pixel enough. By now your entire website should have pixel code on every page of your website and set up for multiple different conversions. From keeping track of people who have only visited your home page to people making a successful purchase, set up a conversion for every stage of the buying process.
Set up 'events' to bring your customers to the next stage of the buying process
Did you know that the average rate of abandoned carts was over 80%? While there are several reasons why people abandon shopping carts right before making a purchase, what’s important to know is that recovering these lost customers is definitely possible. If your pixel is set up for tracking people with abandoned carts, then you can easily set up ads reminding people of their abandoned products.
Mix up your ad objectives
According to this article by Neil Patel boosting your Facebook ads for likes might not actually equate to sales. Instead, opt for the ‘Conversion’ in your ad objectives and accurately keep track of how well your ads are resulting in actual purchase in-store.
Use instant experiences to generate leads
Instant Experience is a full-screen experiential ad on Facebook. The Facebook ad feature displays ads on a full-screen display on your smartphone and boasts amazing capabilities to engage the audience. You can use instant experiences to display a video ad or a collection of your inventory in an interactive format that just isn’t possible in regular social media ads. Add a contact form to your instant experience to receive email addresses of your customers (and add them to your newsletter) or use the pixel function to extract an audience of people who viewed your Instant experience.
Create an audience out of your video viewers
Hurrah! You can create a Facebook audience out of the people who viewed your videos.
But why is that good news?
Videos are a great way to engage people. It’s a medium that is memorable, hence great for brand awareness and allows a lot of creative freedom for you to revel in
But what’s really great about videos is that it tells you who’s really interested in your brand. Let me explain! Unless your video is full of celebrities, has great comic value or provides a reason other than your product for people to watch your content then you can only assume that people who watch to the end (or at least come close) have a genuine need/interest in your product and is most likely to make a purchase.
Start writing Blogs
Back in the day, blogs were only written by people wanting to share a personal story. Whether it's their hobbies, passions or interesting snippets of their daily lives. However, as the blogosphere evolved businesses jumped in to write blogs and connect with audiences in all sorts of new and different ways.
But where do blogs and Social media advertising collide?
While blogs serve as a great content on its own. It also holds amazing value as a lead magnet for your business. If written with an audience in mind, blogs can attract your target audience and set up a tidy Facebook audience (via pixel) that you can use to target with products that are displayed on your blogs.
So there you have it. 10 Amazing tips to increase your advertising ROI for e-commerce businesses. As new updates are dispatched and newer strategies are developed I will be writing new blogs to help your e-commerce business do better.