3 Ways to Leverage Facebook Ads for eCommerce Retailers
Facebook Ad formats are constantly updating and it can be difficult for businesses and advertisers to keep up with the latest features. As the number one social media platform, it’s important to stay ahead of the curve and utilise the most engaging, responsive ad formats the social media giant has to offer.
eCommerce advertisers have a key advantage when it comes to Facebook Advertising as the channel has created many of its ad formats specifically with this type of advertiser in mind to showcase brands and products to their fullest.
We’ve shortlisted the top 3 new and existing ad formats that can be best leveraged by eCommerce advertisers in retail today:
1. Dynamic Product Ads (DPAs)
Think Dynamic Remarketing banner ads from Google but on Facebook, combined with a Shopping ad look and feel. A product catalogue akin to a Google shopping feed is the main requirement of this ad type and, good news, existing Google feeds can be used!
Facebook utilises smart product grouping techniques to target audience lists of users who’ve shown intent to purchase specific products e.g. ‘Basket Abandoners over the last 14 days’. It also goes one step further enabling you to target products above a certain price threshold or targeting specific brands, giving you full control to push only those products you want to.
A custom ad template is dynamically populated with the product feed images showcasing a carousel of products to the user within their Facebook feed. The result sees a strong ROI return campaign for this highly relevant ad to a high intent audience.
2. Collection
A new ad format released just last month, the Collection ad as shown below offers a video format combined with product listings shown underneath the ad. This ad format shows similarities to YouTube Shoppable True View ads, though is a more immersive experience which takes the user directly into a Facebook page showcasing up to 50 dynamically visualised products before taking the user on to the product page on the advertiser’s site. This ad format gives consumers a great insight into the product collection before deciding which products interest them to go on to purchase.
3. Carousel Ads
An old favourite is one of the original ad formats – the product carousel. This ad format can utilise up to ten images or videos of your product range, each with a headline and description driving to a product or category page of your choosing.
The scrollable, thumb stopping experience drives users to view the full carousel of product offering, and if done well, can drive strong click through rates and conversions for advertisers.
To summarise, these are all great ad formats for retailers to use. If I had to prioritise I would be ensuring all retail clients are set up on Dynamic Product ads, with the ease of set up and the ability for these ads to automatically run targeting users who’ve taken specific on site actions, it’s a no brainer!
The Carousel ad certainly has its place for new collection launches or product category advertising for specific promotions or sale events. Facebook will even optimise the image cards to show your top performing first.
Collection is a new format so there is little data on this yet, but for big brands it’s a sure-fire way to create interest and buzz around new product launches. One drawback is that it does require a bit more creative time and investment and is limited to mobile devices.
Ad format types across paid social are now upping their game and will only become more creative, engaging experiences for customers so the key is thinking about your advertising objective and to continue to test and learn what drives results from your various ad types.