4 Steps to Successful Ecommerce Campaigns on Facebook

Get More Conversions, While Spending Less

Running ads on Facebook – especially with ecommerce goals in mind – can be intimidating because there are so many different targeting styles and campaign objectives to choose from. However, mapping out four simple steps prior to launch will help you be more successful and achieve your advertising goals.

One of the most effective ways to see success on Facebook (success = high conversions & low cost), is using an ad sequencing strategy. With ad sequencing, each campaign’s targeting and objectives follow your customers seamlessly through their journey, from initial awareness to completing a purchase.

Following the customer funnel will often save money because cheaper actions like video views are a focus earlier in the funnel when users are less qualified, while more expensive actions like website clicks are reserved for more qualified individuals further in the funnel.

A customer’s journey (funnel) should look something like this:

1. Create Awareness of your product or service.
2. Educate the audience by explaining your benefits.
3. Remarket and remind them to buy.
4. Close the Sale with a deal or benefit statement they can’t resist.

By utilizing this funnel to inform your Facebook ad objectives, targeting and messaging, you can increase your ecommerce sales while reducing spend. Read on to discover how to build successful Facebook campaigns for each step in the customer funne

Create Awareness

The goal of this campaign is to get your name in front of people who haven’t heard of you before. This campaign is best suited to a video ad. Video ads are very popular on Facebook and make up a vast majority of Facebook content. If you don’t have a video, you can now create a video ad out of static images, using Facebook’s relatively new Slideshow ad format.

This type of campaign should use the “Video Views” objective, which will ensure your campaign is optimized toward people who are likely to engage with the video. You should also use the bidding option of 10-second video views, which ensures you will only pay when someone watches at least 10 seconds of your video (a great way to cut down on cost).

Videos should be anywhere from 15-60 seconds (ideally, you would test 15 seconds, 30 seconds, and 60 seconds if you have the content available). Videos should also be highly brand-focused with the branding visible in the first 3 seconds.

This campaign should use interest or behavior targeting, along with demographic targeting.

You want to make sure you are focusing on your main target demographic for these initial ads. If you are unsure who your target demo is, you can use the Facebook Audience Insights tool to discover your customer’s traits.

You also want to ensure you are excluding all website visitors from this campaign. Website visitors will be targeted in the Remarketing campaign, and you want to ensure you aren’t overlapping efforts (which will help control costs).

Educate

After reaching your target demo with video ads, you want to reach back out to those same users to encourage them to learn more about your product or service. This can be done by retargeting users who have viewed your video.

To create a video views audience, select “Engagement” from the Audience menu, then “Video Views.” You will then be able to pick the desired duration someone must have watched of the video and choose the specific videos you want to be included. You typically want to target users who have viewed at least 25% of the video, which shows they are more engaged.

This campaign should use the objective of Website Clicks and should also bid on Link Clicks. You can include many different ad types for this campaign, including video, image, GIF, carousel, canvas, etc. Test different ads to see what works best. Ad copy should be focused on what your benefits are, with a call-to-action of clicking through to the website to learn more.

Remarketing

Remarketing is where you should see the bulk of your conversions/purchases coming through. This campaign will target website visitors who have not yet purchased (make sure you exclude converters/purchasers so you aren’t paying for additional clicks from people who already purchased from you).

Remarketing campaigns should use the Conversions campaign objective and should also use Conversion optimized bidding. Again, you can use many different ad types, but keep messaging focused on making a purchase and reinforcing your main benefits statement.

You should also be excluding website visitors from all campaigns before Remarketing in the funnel. This will ensure you aren’t overlapping efforts.

Close the Sale

If there are some users for which the Remarketing campaign doesn’t close the deal, you can create a second remarketing campaign. This campaign could target people who have hit the order form or cart page, but didn’t convert.

This means they are deeper in the funnel and maybe just need an extra nudge to complete the purchase.

If you’re able, you can also consider offering a small discount or gift at this point, since they got as far as filling a cart, but didn’t purchase.

This campaign would use similar ads to the Remarketing campaign, but with a more urgent message or a discount.

To summarize, a Facebook ads funnel should look like this:

Still feeling overwhelmed? Contact us here at Rocket Clicks! We breathe, eat, and sleep this stuff and would love to help you find success on Facebook. 

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