Every business type is different. From a digital marketing perspective, that also means a different strategy is necessary. Of course, every brand should be unique with its own story and values.
This is exactly the first step in determining a strategy for your business. Understanding who you are and what makes you different from the competitors. Knowing this will make your marketing efforts much easier.
Creating Ad Campaign for an online store is specific and different from other business types.
In fact, it’s so specific and popular that both Facebook and Google have ad types specifically for online stores. Google even has a Google Merchant Center specifically created for eCommerce. Of course, Google Shopping Campaigns are a natural choice for making successful ad campaigns for your store. I will talk about them in more detail later.
Know Your Audience
Yes, this is the most important step in setting goals for your campaign. First, you need to know who is interested in your products.
You need to answer these questions:
Who are you addressing?
What is your message?
How do you measure your success?
It’s important to define a quantitive part: audience number and their geographic location for example.
Qualitative part: what content your audience likes and interacts with, what are their interests and behavior habits on the internet.
One of the best tools to define your audience and achieve the best possible targeting is Facebook Pixel.
I believe that most of you know what it is. Therefore, I will focus on the best way to utilize its marketing potential.
Having a Pixel on your main page is a must. It will give you the opportunity to have a detailed statistic of your store visitors.
Even more important is to put one on your shopping cart and thank you page. If you don’t have a thank you page, create one now!
Thank you page is important because only people who purchased one of your products will see it. Therefore, trough your pixel, you will get detailed information about people who purchased your products.
Facebook has a database for all of its users. They follow everything a person does on Facebook: what are you posting, pages and groups that you are following, what do you like, share, click of news feed…
Facebook algorithms will try to find common interests among your customers. More customers that you have, more precise are the results.
The same goes for Facebook Pixel on a shopping cart page. It will collect info on those who left the chart and track them down when they visit Facebook. A perfect tool for retargeting potential customers.
So, thanks to Facebook Pixel, you can create an effective Custom Audience. Having a custom audience is key for precise targeting and having awesome ROI.
Facebook Audience Insights is a great tool for audience research. It’s especially useful if you are getting started, promoting someone else’s store and such. Simply a good starting point to see what interests your audience, who is popular in your niche, learn about demographics…
Google Merchant Center has a lot of data about your online store. Incredibly useful for not just audience insights but to learn about trends in pricing, what products from your store are popular or not.
Facebook Ad Library– it gives you an opportunity to look at the ads from your store’s industry.
If you have Facebook pixel or Google Analytics on your site, it can be useful for achieving more salles using promotions. Target people that visited your store in the last 60 days. This includes those who made the purchases, left the shopping cart or just spent some time browsing your store. They already have shown interest in your products, so its a bigger chance that they will be interested in your promotions than those that do not know about your stores. This is also a good strategy for getting more engagement, customer retention, referrals and getting more reviews.
Topic Research tool from SEMrush – I use it for copywriting to get more variety for the main keywords of my article. It can also give you some ideas about keywords that you can use in Facebook Audience Insights.
What are the most effective ads for eCommerce?
It is well known that dynamic ads are most used in everyone’s eCommerce ad tactic. If you have 1000+ products, it takes a lot of money and time to present them all individually. With dynamic ads, you get to create a template that will be used for all the products.
Although, this is done automatically, your most popular products and those appropriate for a person that will see the ad will be displayed.
It sounds good but this should only be a start. We want more control and interesting, engaging ways of promoting our products.
A great option for more customized ads is Facebook Collection Ads. Those ads are mobile-only. There are different templates that let you present your products in the most appropriate and logical way for a certain group.
For example, Instant Storefront looks like a magazine where you can show off your accessories. Wile, Instant Lookbook is more suited for clothing. But you can combine those two and see what produces the best results.
You can learn about all of them on Facebook. What’s important is that you be careful about products and combinations of different categories that you want to use. Collection ads present a great ad type for retargeting. They can remind and inspire a person that was on your site and was close to buying a product.
Instant Experience are also Collection or Category ads that are shown in full screen. A fantastic way for your potential customers to browse through your catalog.
Also, make sure that you enable tabs in Facebook Manager. So, if you’re showing products from different categories, people can easily scroll through them.
All these ad groups if done right, have great CTR and CPC rates.
Facebook Messenger has a much higher opening rate than emails or anything else. Therefore, messenger ads can be a powerful tool for promotion and customer engagement. This is a good way to engage people with, discount offers, chat games, to ask for feedback and get referrals.
Facebook Offer Ads are made specifically so you can promote offers and discounts.
Also, try to utilize the power of Google Merchant Center. There are more than a few useful fixtures for the owners of any online store. It works as a data center for your store. It is a sort of a bridge between your store and Google Ads Shopping Campaigns.
Google Ads Shopping Campaigns. First and for most, on a google search engine, your products will appear along with prices. They appear when someone searches for a particular product. The best thing about this is that when a person clicks on your ad, they will go directly to that product page. It will significantly increase the chances of that person buying the product.
I will soon create a guide with a lot more details about the Google Merchant Center and Shopping Campaigns, as well as how to get the most out of it.
In general, use dynamic targeting on Google Display and YouTube network.
When we are at the Google search network, there is an interesting extension of rich search results. It is called Google rich cards. With them, you can portray some of your products as cards in Google search results. I use schema markup testing tool to analyze a particular product and its availability to be shown as a card. If not, it will show you what to fix.
Use Shopping on Instagram. You need to set up a business profile on Instagram. Since Facebook is the owner, you need to upload your products from your product catalog on Facebook. Now, you can tag your products to make them a part of your Instagram organic feed and stories.
