Just in case you missed it, Facebook has become huge. Like, really, really huge. Like 2.6 Billion monthly active users huge. That’s more than half of the people on earth with access to the internet. It’s no surprise that more than 34% of all shopping journeys commence from Facebook – in one way or the other.

Today, Facebook has grown to become the leading source of traffic, customers, and in turn, revenue for eCommerce businesses across domains. And Facebook Ads have a very major role to play in the same. According to social media management tool Hootsuite, an average Facebook user clicks on 11 ads per month.

What’s more? Facebook earns 40% of annual digital display advertising revenue. That’s the lion’s share, with Google having the next largest share at 12%. Surely, Facebook Ads is one tchannel no eCommerce marketer can leave out of their mix.

That is why we are here to bring you 11 advanced strategies you need to leverage to grow your eCommerce business in 2021. But first, a little bit about the status quo of Facebook advertising.

Facebook Ads: What’s The Status Quo?

With Facebook’s massive reach and popularity among marketers, it’s no wonder that the bulk of Facebook’s revenue comes from advertisements. In the first quarter of 2020, the company brought in $17.44 billion in ad revenue.

On an average, a Facebook user comes across no less than 33 ads per day. With such a crowded and saturated market, some brands out there are merely copying others, ruining their chance to make the most that the platform has to offer.

Despite more than 86% of US marketers using Facebook for their marketing efforts, a majority of businesses do not have the right strategy in place to make their ads effective. According to Wordstream, the average cost per click of Facebook ads is $1.72 – a really low cost per click considering how effective Facebook ads can be (but only for those who leverage it right)

Advanced Strategies To Drive More Sales For Your eCommerce Business In 2021

Despite delivering a return on investment of more than 152% (that’s $1.52 returned for every $ you spend), not advertising on Facebook using its ads platform is a colossally missed oppurtunity.

If you’re unsure how to get started with Facebook Advertising though, read on. Here are some of the strategies we at Motif use to help online retailers increase traffic and conversions from their Facebook Ads.

Use Dynamic Product Ads To Bring Back Hesitant Shoppers

When it comes to marketing, context and relevance is everything that makes the difference between a consumer choosing to engage with your ads or not. Brands spend millions and billions of dollars each year to invest in tools, technology and resources which can help them gain better context into their users’ behavior, so that they can increase the efficacy of their marketing efforts. Dynamic Product Ads, or DPAs, are aligned in exactly the same direction.

Dynamic Product Ads are ad templates that are highly personalized according to the individual consumer’s data: making them more useful, more welcome, and significantly more effective – for eCommerce stores like yours, it is a chance to bring back hesitant customers by showing them tailored ads based on their activity on your site.

Leverage Multi-Product Ads To Give Your Audience Options To Choose From

It’s an established fact that consumers love choice. The more options you present to them, the better are the chances of them buying. Why? Because of the simple fact that different people have different likes, dislikes and other individual attributes which are influenced differently, and as a result of which, drives their behaviors in a different manner as well.

Multi-product ads enable businesses to showcase three products within a single ad unit, on desktop or mobile. Each product highlighted will have its own image, description and click target.

Say you’re an online retailer that’s looking to reach people that browsed your site without making a purchase. Combining the multi-product ad unit with Custom Audiences from your website, you can produce a carousel of different items — like handbags, sundresses and sandals — to show in News Feed to specific audiences.

Multi-Product Ads can give your customers more options to choose from, which gives you an opportunity for increased and higher conversions. The more number of relevant products a shopper sees, the greater the chance of them buying something they like. Moreover, you can also use them to show different benefits of a single product.

But do they work? Sure, they do. Ecommerce company Nomorerack used this approach and saw its click-through-rates increase as much as 42% and its cost per acquisition decrease between 42% and 45%.

In another report, Adobe discovered that their customers experienced a 50% to 300% increase in click through rate (CTR), up to 35% reduction in cost per click as a result of higher engagement, and an even more efficient cost per acquisition.

Install The Facebook Conversion Tracking Pixel To Track Your Shoppers’ Behavior On Your Website

Reiterating from the point we were trying to make above, the better you track your shoppers’ behavior, the better you would be able to solve their pain points and understand their needs and aspirations.

This is why it is super important to leverage all this information which is lurking in plain sight, to be able to supercharge conversions for your online store, even when they’re not present there, but are on Facebook. This is where Facebook’s conversion tracking pixel comes to your rescue.

You can use the Facebook pixel to track your website visitors’ actions on Facebook, this phenomenon is called conversion tracking. Tracked conversions in this sense appear in the Facebook Ads Manager and the Facebook Analytics dashboard, where they can be used to analyze the effectiveness of your conversion funnel and to calculate the return on your ad investment and campaigns.

You can also use tracked conversions to define custom audiences for ad optimization and dynamic ad campaigns. Once you have defined custom audiences, Facebook 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 Facebook has defined and that you can choose to 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, and
Custom conversions, which are visitor actions that are tracked automatically by parsing your website’s referrer URLs on Facebook

But to achieve the best results from your Facebook marketing efforts, we recommend installing the pixel long before you even run your first campaign. This way you’ll give Facebook time to learn the types of people who are converting into customers on your site even when they come from other traffic channels. If Facebook hasn’t tracked any conversion on your site yet, they’re going to have trouble optimizing your campaign for conversions when you do decide to launch one.

Keep General Retargeting Campaigns Running At All Times

As an online store owner or an eCommerce marketer, we don’t need to tell you how hard it is to generate traffic to your website. You already know that. It’s pretty darn hard, and even harder to generate relevant, high quality traffic.

Add to that pain the fact that, on an average, 75% of those shoppers who, first, visit your online store, second, add products to their shopping cart, end up abandoning their purchase and costing you sales and revenue. This is where retargeting campaigns come to your rescue. Without the presence of which, only 8% of all of your cart abandoners would ever come back to complete the purchase.

With Facebook ad retargeting, however, the average eComm site can bring back 26% of abandoners to complete a purchase by reminding people about the products they’ve browsed on their website, mobile app, Marketplace, instant checkout or IG shopping but didn’t purchase. When you retarget people with dynamic ads, people automatically see the products or similar products to what they saw previously.

According to Wishpond, the source of the data we shared above, above 70% of web visitors who are retargeted with display ads are more likely to convert on your eComm store. And the average click through rate of such retargeted ads is 10 times higher than standard display ads.

It goes without saying then – not retargeting your visitors is costing you massive conversions and sales. You can run retargeting campaigns via the Power Editor in your Facebook Ads Manager dashboard and target your visitors with general offers, coupons, single and multi-product ads, and so much more.

Find New Shoppers Through Lookalike Audiences

Facebook can help you to find new shoppers based on your existing customers’ dynamic characteristics and individual attributes. A Lookalike Audience is a way to reach new people who are likely to be interested in your brand because they’re similar to your best existing customers.

When you create a Lookalike Audience on your Facebook Ads account, you choose a source audience (this is simply a custom audience created with information pulled from your pixel, mobile app, or followers of your Facebook Page). Then, Facebook identifies the common qualities of the people in it (for example, demographic information or likely interests) and delivers your ad to an audience of people who are similar to (or in other words, a “look like”) them.

During the creation process of your Lookalike Audience, you can choose to configure the size of the same. Generally, smaller audiences more closely match your source audience. Creating a larger audience increases your potential reach, but reduces the level of similarity between your Lookalike Audience and the source audience.

Facebook recommends a source audience with between 1,000 to 50,000 people, and lays emphasis on the source quality, because that matters too. For example, if a source audience is made up of your best customers rather than all your customers, that could lead to better results for your segment creation. Here are some additional bits of information to consider when creating Lookalike Audiences from Facebook itself:

Your Lookalike Audience will only include people from the country/countries you select during creation
Your source audience must contain at least 100 people from a single country in order for Facebook to use it as the basis for a Lookalike Audience
You can create up to 500 Lookalike Audiences from a single source audience
People in your source audience will be excluded from your Lookalike Audience unless you use a pixel as your source audience
You can use multiple Lookalike Audiences at the same time for a single ad set. The ad set will target your ads to people who are in any of the selected Lookalike Audiences

Other than this feature, you can of course also use Facebook’s other interest and demographic targeting options to find relevant new customers.

Use Ads To Communicate Your eCommerce Brand’s Story And Value Prop

Facebook has half the world’s internet users using the platform for one thing and one thing only – indulge in their interests and follow them. And surely, your eCommerce brand would have its own champions spending hundreds of hours every week, month or year on the platform, only you might not have been able to reach out to them yet. This is why Facebook is the perfect platform for you to indulge in brand advertising. What is it, you might ask?

Brand advertising is a form of advertising which helps establish connections and build strong, long-term relationships with consumers over time. Companies that use brand advertising aim to get long-term positive recognition. These companies establish brand identity, credibility, and loyalty with their prospects intellectually and emotionally.

And you can do it by using Facebook Ads to communicate your brand’s story and value prop. As one study by Facebook and Adaptly showed, creating a sequence of ads conveying your key brand message instead of selling improves overall conversion rates for your online store. In one study example, the difference in conversions between standard and sequence of ads was a staggering 87%. On similar lines, you can use a video to tell your brand’s story.

Failing to incorporate brand advertising into your overall marketing strategy could be detrimental to your bottom line. Brand advertising may be considered the long game compared to direct response ads. But a well-executed strategy can pay off in more ways than one. By combining brand ads and with direct response, your brand can capture both immediate return on your investments while also driving future sales.

Strengthen Existing Relationships With Your Customers Through Custom Audiences

A Custom Audience made from any eCommerce store’s customer list is a type of audience which eCommerce marketers can create to help build their reach and impact on Facebook. It’s made up of information – called “identifiers” that you have collected about your shoppers (such as email, phone number, and address) and provided to Facebook, which they hash prior to using it to uphold data protection laws.

Then, Facebook uses a process called matching to match the hashed information with Facebook profiles so that eCommerce marketers can advertise to their customers on Facebook, Instagram and the Facebook Audience Network.

The more information you can provide, the better the match rate (which simply means Facebook’s ability to make the matches with the targeted, relevant people). Here’s how Facebook’s Custom Audiences feature can be used and leveraged by eCommerce marketers like yourself for higher efficiency and results of their paid marketing efforts:

Get Existing Customers to Become Your Facebook Page’s Followers

Custom Audiences allow you to reach out to existing shoppers of your online store and try to convert them into Facebook followers. To get started, you have to simply upload your customer list into the Custom Audience Tool and target them with relevant Page Like ads. However, be sure to exclude current followers from your campaigns.

Target Your Top Customers with Relevant Offers, Promotions, And Other Campaigns

Another way you can leverage Custom Audiences is to create a segment of your past customers and newsletter subscribers to target them with relevant offers or discounts to reward their loyalty. In our humble experience, brands have seen amazing responses to campaigns like these with Facebook Ads.

Reward Your Store Evangelists With Exclusivity And Make It Even For Them

Every brand has people devoted to it. They share news about it, recommend it to others and proactively spread the word about it. By identifying them and rewarding them with exclusive offers or a chance to be the first to purchase items from a new line, you are simply giving them what they really deserve.

Create A Product Gallery From Your Store Catalogue

When you’re investing in advertising on Facebook, the impact of your efforts would surely depend on how rich is the experience you’re providing your audience. Generally, when shoppers are interacting with your brand on your online store, they have everything and all the information that they’d ever need in terms of learning more about your brand, its products and so on. But on Facebook, however, you really don’t have that kind of an experience to provide to them. This is why you should use Facebook Ads to showcase your products directly to your target audience, and this is possible through a Facebook Ads’ feature, ‘catalogues’.

A catalogue is a container that holds information about all the items you want to advertise or sell on Facebook and Instagram. You can connect your catalogue to different types of ads and sales channels to show people your items, including Shops on Facebook and Instagram, dynamic ads and more. This type of gallery allows you to display photos, prices and buy-buttons for each product you want to promote.

Giving your audience the convenience of simply clicking on a “buy now” button without ever having to leave Facebook can help you capture impulse buys in a jiffy. If you have a Shopify store for your eCommerce account, you can easily integrate it with Facebook’s product gallery and voila!

You can set up your entire store for sale on Facebook in just a few steps, and so much more. This feature allows you to add products to your online store and make changes in real time, without having to pull your hair out.

Invest In A Robust Analytics Tool (For Optimization Of Your Campaigns And More)

Advertising on Facebook is just one part of the bigger story. Optimizing your advertising and getting an amazing return is a totally different one (and surely, the more trickier one as well). If you fail to constantly improve and maintain your Facebook campaigns, chances are that your results will start declining pretty fast. It may even happen in a couple of days after setting up a new ad campaign, and you would have no idea before your money is just going down the drain.

If you want to achieve a higher campaign ROI, lower your advertising costs and increase the number of conversions, you definitely need to invest in a robust analytics tool which can help you achieve the same by the way of letting you optimize your ad campaigns.

By investing in an analytics tool that lets you continually monitor the performance of your ads easily, you will get to learn more about your customers’ behaviours and create customer segments based on your best-selling and cold-selling products – so that you know when to stop a campaign and when to not. Moreover, you would also be able to choose which products you need to continue promoting and to whom. All of it, like clockwork!

Ace Your Ads’ Copy For Higher Conversions

Did we mention that Facebook makes more than $16 billion each quarter in ad revenue? With so many brands and companies using Facebook Ads, anything you can do to get an edge will help you stand out from the crowd.

And one of the best ways to achieve this is to focus on your ad copy. In fact, the success of your Facebook ad campaign will depend on the copy you write and how well it resonates with your target audience.

While you do need strong visuals in your ads to help capture users’ attention, they’ll typically be pretty irrelevant if you don’t have a strong copy to add context to the image, really explain what you’re selling, and persuade users to take whatever action you’re focusing on. Here are some more tips which would come handy:

Keep your Facebook Ads’ copy short and sweet (basically, don’t beat around the bush)
Give your audience as fewer choices with the words you use, in order to not confuse or overwhelm them
Show your discount in dollar numbers rather than percentages, for the obvious reason that the human brain is able to quickly see the value in money being saved as more tangible
Really know your audience, and choose their words and their language, not your brand’s

Downloadable Checklist To Get Started With Facebook Ads

Are you getting excited to run your campaigns? You could approach digital marketing agencies, like Motif, to take care of things for you. Or, scan this comprehensive Facebook Ads checklist that will help you optimize your ads on the social media network with ease.

Set up Facebook Pixel to properly track your ads, as well as the audience on your eCommerce store.
Choose the right marketing objectives for your Facebook ads, to ensure that just in case you don’t go off the rails with your efforts.
Choose and properly segment your audiences for maximum efficiency, the lack of which could be detrimental for your campaigns.
Use multiple Facebook Ad formats for maximum impact.
Check your ad’s copy if it’s compliant with Facebook’s rules.
Check if you’ve setup Facebook product catalog correctly and if it’s in sync with your eCommerce platform.
Check if you’ve connected your Facebook Product Catalog with the appropriate pixel.
Test the event manually if it’s showing up in pixel analytics.
Have you uploaded your customers or subscriber list to Ad manager (if you’ve any)
Have you created your website custom audience based on website conversion data?
Have you created your lookalike and Lifetime Value based lookalike based on above list?
Have you confirmed the budget you’ll be allocating for the campaign?
Optimize for placements and delivery to ensure you generate the biggest bang for your Facebook marketing buck.
Make sure you optimize for bid and budget for the same reasons.
Get creative with the design of your ads.
Always A/B test your ads for better result.
Analyze your data. Rinse and repeat.

And when you get stuck or see your ads plateau, don’t be afraid to reach out to eCommerce growth experts for a consultation!

PHONE

EMAIL

BLOG

Drive Those Sales Home: 11 Advanced Strategies To Leverage Facebook Ads For Your eComm Biz t(+ Downloadable Checklist)