Facebook could be a worthy option to market and sell your products. Not only will it grow your sales, but it will also increase your brand awareness. Organic traffic on the other hand can be long, tedious, and bring insufficient growth (especially at the beginning). Therefore, you need to blend your organic efforts with an efficient e-commerce Facebook ads strategy. The results could be way better than you expect if done in the right way.

If you are ready to invest money on Facebook Ads, you must do that wisely. In addition, you must have a thorough Facebook ad strategy for e-commerce to rely on. Without it, you will be left clueless about where to start and what to do.

Are you experiencing that frustration? Well, let’s put an end to it by letting you know what you must include in your e-commerce Facebook ads strategy.

Setting Up Product Catalog and Product Feed

Creating Product Catalog- First Step in Our Ecommerce Facebook Ads Strategy

The product catalog is an organized place where you can add all the products that you sell on your online store. By using the product catalog, you can create dynamics ads: your store’s visitors will be retargeted with the same product that they saw on your store.

You can add a product catalog by going through the business settings present in your Facebook Business Manager.

Setting up a product catalog will help you to define different segments of your products. Besides that, setting a product catalog will enhance your advertising efforts. Now that you created a product catalog, it’s time to add products into it.

Setting up Your Product Feed

In a product catalog, you can create multiple feeds, and you can select a set of items in a feed according to a category that you have on your Shopify store. If you are an e-commerce clothing store, you can create feeds with t-shirts, jeans, winter wear, scarves, etc.

There are two ways to create a product feed: auto-upload and manual.

The auto-upload way integrates your Facebook Account with your e-commerce website. Therefore, whenever you make a change to a product on your website, it gets reflected on the feed. We highly recommend that method as you don’t want to loose time with manual work.

Another method is the manual upload, which you must only use if you find it difficult to integrate your e-commerce store with your Facebook account. If you are using Shopify, it should be pretty straightforward. You need to add each product manually, with no bridge between Facebook and your online store. Therefore, we don’t recommend that method.

Setting your product feed strengthens your e-commerce Facebook ads strategy. Now, you can experiment on each segment, making it easy to analyze performance. Here is an example of a dynamic Facebook Ads that has been setup thanks to a product catalog:

Install the Facebook Pixel to make our E-commerce Facebook Ads Strategy Successful

Facebook Pixel is the best way to retarget customers. Facebook will display advertisements according to customers’ activities on your website. Such a method delivers a highly-personalized experience to the user which increases conversions and decreases cost per action.

Let’s say that your visitor was browsing for a product on your website or added a product to cart but didn’t purchase it. He then left your store and started happily scrolling his Facebook feed. All of a sudden, he see the related products on his feed. That’s the power of retargeting.

There are high chances that the ad will cause the purchase. Consequently, not adding the Facebook Pixel as a part of your e-commerce Facebook ads strategy is a terrible mistake. To learn more about how to install the Facebook pixel, you can check out our blog on how to install the Facebook Pixel for your Shopify store.

Targeting the Right Customers

There are several ways to target your buyer personas on Facebook. Finding the right Facebook ads audience makes the branding and selling effortless. Finding the right audience is key to make your Facebook ads successful. You should also keep in mind that broad audiences work better for e-commerce businesses.

Targeting Using the Facebook Interests

The most basic form of targeting on Facebook Ads is Interests targeting. Try to select a broad audience based on an interest (for example: people that are interested in Cats). You can even combine multiple interests to achieve that. You should always run only Purchase conversions campaigns because the Facebook ads algorithm is so powerful that it will find you the people that are more likely to buy from your store.

Finding out Lookalike Audience

Your e-commerce Facebook ads strategy must include ways to find out new customers. It may appear tough, but with Facebook’s lookalike feature, you can grow exponentially if you hit the right chord.

Based on your current audience, Facebook will find out people with similar characteristics. Lookalike audiences are likely to convert as they have the same interests and following as your seed audience, and consequently there’s a high chance for them to convert.

Focus on All the Elements of Your Ad

After you set up your Facebook ad account and created different audience segments, it’s time to create your Facebook ads copywriting. The gold of your e-commerce Facebook ads strategy is your advertising creatives.

Captivating Images and Effective Copy

Why image’s so important? Because that’s how you will catch people’s attention while they scroll down through their feed. It is recommended to use bright images, images having positive vibes, and most importantly, having the right ratio.

There’s an option to add text on the image, but it should not cover more than 20% of the total ad area. Therefore, a few words perfectly fitting your images with a triggering message plays a great role in having a high click-through-rate. Take a look at an image that Nike used for one of their Facebook ads, it grabs attention:

Why not add a Carousel?

By using the carousel format, you can empower your e-commerce Facebook ads strategy with one ad showcasing multiple products.

People will get a chance to view up to five images in one go. That will provide them with an option to choose the product that they like the most which can decrease your cost per click. You can add color variants or similar products in one carousel.

Embed A Call to Action (CTA)

The call to action is important as it lets the customer know what he exactly needs to do now. Facebook offers nine different CTAs. You can choose one among them, and for an e-commerce shopify store, we recommend the “Shop Now” CTA.

You must ensure that the CTA goes with the goal of the campaign. If you want someone to get your ebook, the CTA must be “Download” and not “Shop Now.”

Retargeting in Every Possible Way- The Key to a Successful E-commerce Facebook Ads Strategy

In e-commerce, more than 65% of earnings come from returning customers. They are easy to convert, as they already trust your brand. Here are some tips that you can add to your e-commerce Facebook ads strategy to easily converts your visitors and retain them.

Providing Offers

“Facebook Offers” is an exclusive feature for e-commerce websites to provide discounts and promotions. When a person clicks on the offer, he will be redirected to your website. Then, he will find the product in his cart with offer ready-to-use, consequently there’s nothing stopping him from getting the deal.

Build a Referral Program for Your E-commerce Facebook Ads strategy

The referral program may not be exactly a part of retargeting, but it’s tremendously important. With Facebook’s referral program, you can turn your customers into promoters. With each new customer they bring, you can offer them discounts.

Upselling and Cross-selling Campaigns

Such tactics must be a part of your e-commerce Facebook ads strategy as they can increase your Shopify AOV and your net profits. If a person is already interested in a product, you can make the deal more appealing by suggesting an upsell. Besides that, you can recommend related products and make your customers buy both – that’s cross-selling.

Creating Custom Audiences for Different Buyer Stages

Audience segmentation is crucial. One way to do it is to follow the buyer stages: acquisition, retargeting, and retention. You need to adapt your messaging based on each stage.

The person who is in the first stage is unlikely to buy your products because they do not know your brand yet. You can take the person into the retargeting stage by exhibiting your wide range of products. Lastly, if the person bought from your store, you can run a retention campaign, and convert your existing customers with ease.

Remember, the more you segment, the better your e-commerce Facebook ads strategy will be.

Analyze and Enhance Your Ecommerce Facebook Ads Strategy

It is tremendously important to experiment and optimize your Facebook ads continuously or you will not see great results. When you run ads for the first time, not all of them will work. You need to find out which ones are not worthy of your investment.

Monitoring your ads will help you to take the customers forward in the buyer’s journey. With time, you need to introduce multiple ad campaigns and test new creatives along the way. If you keep analyzing them, your conversion rate and conversion volume will keep increasing.

Conclusion- Ecommerce Facebook Ads Strategy

Setting up the right e-commerce Facebook ads strategy is essential and the strategy will always vary depending on your niche and your audience, and so you need to adapt accordingly.

There is no right or wrong way to proceed but you can start by setting up the catalog, feeds, and Facebook pixel. Also, by setting all of those only, you will be way ahead of the competition.

Start experimenting by targeting various buyer personas in the ways listed above. Moreover, you can conduct A/B tests to find out which copies works better for you.

Simultaneously, retarget the present customers by offers, segmentation, etc.

The key to building a winning e-commerce Facebook ads strategy resides in the analysis. In addition, you must never be afraid of experimentation because the golden rule of Facebook ads is to test as much as possible.

A few bucks lost in testing new audiences and creatives will return exponentially.