How To Create an ECommerce Facebook Ads Strategy – Your Step-By-Step Guide

If you’re an eCommerce entrepreneur and you’re interested in adding Facebook Ads to your digital marketing strategy, you’re making a great choice. Whether you want to appeal to new customers or sell more items to existing customers, Facebook campaigns are an ideal tool.

But how can you get started, target people who are interested in your products, and maximise conversion rates to drive traffic and drive sales on your eCommerce website? In this guide from Australian Internet Advertising, we’ll be giving you a step-by-step overview of the process.

Create A Facebook Product Catalog For Your Business

To get started, you’ll need to begin by creating a new product catalogue for your business on Facebook. To do this, you will need to have:

A Facebook page or Facebook Business page
An active Facebook Ads account
A Facebook business manager (can be you or anyone else). This account will have ownership over your Facebook ads page and account.

Additionally, you’ll need to have an eCommerce website with items that your customers will want to buy – but that goes without saying! You can view detailed setup instructions on the Facebook website here, and set up your Facebook product catalogue in just a few minutes.

But what is a Facebook product catalogue? Why do you need it? Well, it’s exactly what it sounds like. A product catalogue is meant to hold all of the items that you want to promote on Facebook.

These catalogues function similarly to a physical product catalogue. For example, if you sell sporting goods online, you could create multiple catalogues for basketball equipment, baseball gear, hockey accessories, and any other type of gear you sell.

You can create as many product catalogues as you want, and organise them however you prefer. Next, you’ll need to add products to the catalogue – using a “product feed.” Let’s discuss this now.

How To Get with Facebook Product Catalog

1. Set Up A Product Feed

This is where you’ll actually add products to your Facebook product catalogue. Your product feed is a list of products – automatically pulled from your eCommerce website – which can be used to fill out product catalogues.

You can choose to make just one product feed, or you can set up multiple feeds for different types of items – or different stores. It’s up to you. There are a few ways to do this.

The easiest way is to connect your eCommerce platform directly to Facebook. You can do this with Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, and OpenCart.

Connecting your platform to Facebook will allow you to automatically pull products from your store, and use them in your Facebook product catalogue. This is great because the price, stock information, and other details about each product will automatically be updated – there’s no need to make manual adjustments, which saves you a lot of time and energy.

However, if you don’t use one of the above eCommerce platforms, you can add items manually, add them in bulk using a CSV, TSV or XML file, or use a Facebook pixel to add items to your product catalogue. You can learn more about these methods from Facebook here.

2. Plan Your Audience Targeting Strategy

Once you’ve set up your product catalogue, you’re all set, right? Well, not quite. It’s also important to spend time thinking about the Facebook users who are the most likely to buy your products, or who can benefit from higher brand awareness of your eCommerce company.

That’s why audience targeting is so important. Using audience targeting, you can create Facebook ads that will be served directly to people who conform to certain demographic factors, such as:

• Geographic location
• Income level
• Education level
• Hobbies and interests
• Family and friend connections
• Past behaviour when interacting with Facebook ads

And so much more. You can even import a list of the current names, email addresses, phone numbers, and other contact information from customers who have shopped with your store in the past – and market directly to these people.

You can even use a “lookalike audience” to build a new custom audience for your ads, based on the demographic information of your existing customers – expanding the reach of your ads without requiring you to create a new audience manually.

Audience targeting is a very powerful tool. When used in conjunction with other tools like a Facebook pixel on your website, you can even do things like serve ads to people who have visited your website but have not yet made a purchase!

3. Design And Implement Your Facebook Ads

The next step is to design and implement your ads. There’s a lot more to this than you may think – you can’t just click “create,” serve up an item to a Facebook user, and expect them to buy it.

You need to follow best practices to create ads that appeal to users, boost traffic to your website, and encourage them to convert.

4. Choose the right ad type

If you just want to promote a single product in a customer’s newsfeed, you have the option to create an ad for just one product. However, it can also be useful to use a “carousel ad” to advertise multiple products.

Carousel ads are especially useful if you want to cross-sell or up-sell a previous customer. If you track someone’s purchase using a Facebook pixel, for example, you may be able to see that they bought a soccer ball from your store – and you could recommend other related products like shin guards, socks, soccer boots, and more.

5. Write engaging and concise ad copy

The headline and ad copy you write may not be the focus of your ads – but well-written, interesting, and eye-catching text can definitely help you boost sales. Not sure where to start or how to improve your ad copy? Check out this article from Wordstream for a few tips!

6. Use clear calls to action (CTAs)

No matter what products you’re selling, your CTA (call to action) must be clear in the headline and description of your ad. We recommend catchy, simple CTAs that will clearly communicate the value of shopping at your store, such as “Limited Time Sale,” Free Shipping,” and other value propositions that will encourage social media users on Facebook to interact with your ads.

7. Use high-quality photos

When your eCommerce products are being displayed, the photo of each product will be front-and-center. Facebook ads are very visual – so you need to make sure you’re using high-quality photos that make your products look great.

If you can follow these basic steps, you’ll be able to come up with engaging, effective, click-worthy Facebook eCommerce ads.

Monitor, Analyse, And Improve Your eCommerce Facebook Ads Strategy

The next – and final – step for creating your eCommerce Facebook ads strategy is to monitor the performance of all of your ads, and analyze this data to see how you can improve future ads.

For example, if you notice that one of your ads is outperforming the others and getting more clicks, you can imitate the design and style of this ad in your other ads – and boost the performance of your ads across the board.

Facebook Ad Manager has a powerful suite of analytics tools that make it easy to measure and track the success of all of your ad campaigns – so take advantage of this to gather insights that will help you build better ads in the future.

Need Help With Facebook Ads And eCommerce? Contact Australian Internet Advertising

If you don’t have the time or desire to run your own Facebook campaign for eCommerce, you’re not alone. Digital marketing isn’t easy – and the time that you spend learning about this complex topic takes away from the time you can spend managing your store, uploading new products, responding to customer questions, and other day-to-day eCommerce operations.

So what’s the best option if you want to run Facebook eCommerce ads, but don’t want to handle the job on your own? You should hire a Facebook Ads specialist like Australian Internet Advertising. We have years of experience with Facebook and other social media platforms – and we have the tools and expertise you need to run a successful Facebook ad campaign for your eCommerce store.

So don’t wait, and don’t try to go it alone. We’ve been serving customers in Sydney and the rest of Australia with expert internet advertising services since 2014. If you want to benefit from the power of Facebook ads for eCommerce, contact Australian Internet Advertising online for a consultation, or feel free to give us a ring at 1300 304 640