‍About Facebook Ads

Millions of small, medium and big businesses are out there fighting for attention of Facebook users every second. Google and Facebook ads are the 2 domineering marketing channels, that have unparalleled powers in helping ecommerce business owners reach their audience.

Facebook ads - is paid marketing content in the form of images, video, carousels, stories, placed by advertisers in their Facebook Business Manager to be featured across Facebook, Instagram and Messenger, that appears on the platforms based on chosen audiences parameters /location, gender, age, interests, behaviors, etc/ on an auction basis.

In case you still needed that to know:) Facebook explains it with much simpler words:

Reasons to use Facebook advertising

With over 2 billion users and 140 million businesses already using Facebook Inc. platforms to reach out to each other, there is little more reasoning needed to start deep diving into this multi-functional marketing channel.

More than half (52%) of the surveyed Facebook users admitted that their purchasing decisions online and offline were influenced by Facebook!

A piece of stats by Mashable states, that consumers are 79% more likely to complete a purchase with the business if they are fans of the Facebook business page.

The structure of Ads Manager

Ads Manager by Facebook is a complex tool, designed to reach your select audience in the most comfortable of the digital environments – social media,  that may be quite intimidating at the beginning. If you are a newbie to the platform, we recommend 2 things to ease you into the process:

1. Start with boosting a post.
2. Watch at least 3-5 videos on the topic on Youtube. We found this step-by-step beginner to expert video below quite comprehensive.

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How is Facebook Ads Manager structured? Ads Manager has 3 main levels:

1. Campaigns 

• name of the camping
• marketing objective /brand awareness, lead generation, reach, traffic, engagement, etc/ 
• budget settings

2. Ad sets 

• budget & schedule 
• audience 
• placement 
• optimization & delivery

3. Ads 

• content of the ad – image, video, carousel, etc. 
• tracking – Facebook Pixel settings

What do you need to advertise on Facebook?

To advertise on Facebook, a business needs to set up:

• Facebook business account
• Facebook Manager
• Instagram business account if applicable /great for B2C in fashion, jewelry, accessory retail, food and dietary, yoga classes, etc – not so popular for B2B/

Last but not least, some funds to start experimenting with your Facebook ads.

But we would like to highlight the NON-technical must-haves, that are vital to success in Facebook marketing and advertising:

1. Creativity – if anything, any Facebook advertiser is competing in creativity: the ad has to be powerful enough to grab and keep a potential customer’s attention in the feed full of exciting news, cute kittens and yet another session of bath time of TuckerBudzyn. What a tough competition.
2. Extensive previous exposure to the niche – yes, talent is not the only warrior in this battlefield – experience will help. If you are familiar with the law of the passage of quantitative changes into qualitative changes, this is one of the embodiments of this principle of dualism: the more ads you have seen in your life, the more competition you have checked out, the more likely you are to be good at creating a great ad yourself.

Types of Facebook ads campaigns: marketing objectives

Right as you start creating your campaign, you have to make one of the most crucial decisions: what marketing objective to choose. There currently exist 14 Facebook ad campaign objectives, as in the print screen below:

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Brand Awareness

This algorithm is the right one to choose if you are looking to get your name out without explicit purpose to get people to take action with your content or your website. 

The Facebook algorithm may not necessarily include users, who have demonstrated high shopping intent or high engagement rates in this case – it will target all people, whose attention is the lowest cost per bid as per specified criteria. It will try to hunt for cheapest attention basically – so you get lots of reach and spread your name to the biggest audience possible.

Consideration

The consideration stage is more advanced down the conversion funnel and the algorithm will be targeting people who are known to Facebook to readily interact with the content and have higher than average engagement rate. 

A Facebook advertiser gets to decide where to direct all that engagement: towards a website, app, videos or a Facebook page.

Conversion

Conversion campaign is when Facebook targets users with higher purchase intent and such, who have already shown interest in your product. Advertisers may choose from conversions, product catalog sales, and store visits.

How to set up successful advertising on Facebook

Setting up a successful Facebook campaign is just about as easy as to graduate Harvard to a bloke from a broke home in the Bronx who attended a public school. Just joking successful ad campaigns do look complicated, but in many cases, they are pretty intuitive in set up.

There are some secret ingredients though:

1. Ads have to be trendy. Trends change by the minute. Make sure to hire a designer with lots of experience and diverse projects in the portfolio. The more clients he or she has dealt with, the more diverse and universal the experience is going to be, the more recent her or his tastes are.
2. Ads have to stand out, better even - jump out: if due to the aesthetics of it or the shock value – they have to capture the attention and keep that finger from scrolling along.
3. Make sure to check out the competition: who likes, shares, comments on similar posts, events, products of the competitors? What are the sales offers? Creatives? What formats do they mostly use? What time do they prefer to post?
4. Targeting and ad settings have to be based on what's worked most for similar products, niches, geolocation. Make sure to deep dive into the stats for your specific niche and location – every industry and region has its own rules and tendencies.
5. Monitor, test, adjust – make sure to keep an eye on the Facebook ad performance and adjust accordingly. AB tests are ideal for longer campaigns with higher budgets for optimization.

We really love A/B tests (Split tests) for our Facebook Ads. You just duplicate campaign/ ads set / ad and adjust it how you like. Then Facebook runs split test with these two options and helps you decide which one worked out better. For example now we are testing an ad set with the video of our CEO, Alex:

Retargeting with Facebook Ads

Retargeting with Facebook involves using the database of users, who have interacted with your Facebook page, website or Facebook event previously. So retargeting is advertising to the audience, who have already had some kind of interaction with your digital products by using the data, they left during previous interaction to target them in the future.

Imagine, that a person has identified, she or he is interested in your event. Or a user watched 3/4th of the video you have shown on your page. Or a user is a fan of your page. You will want to expose such users with different messages than messages to total newbies. 

It is vital to have a Facebook Pixel installed on your website/Shopify store pages to utilize all the possibilities of the FB remarketing. This way it is possible not only to target specific people, who have interacted with your product in a specific manner but also to create lookalike audiences, based on specific parameters. 

Metrics for Facebook ecommerce campaigns

While a Facebook Business manager can get somewhat complex at times, you better use its sophisticated interface to the full. Specifically, all the reporting that comes with it.

While developing your ecommerce advertising strategy and creating a Facebook ad campaign, it is good to know what you are trying to achieve and what specific figure will be a break event point for your campaign. This way, you can always detect early signs of failure and fine-tune the settings without losing too much money. Tracking allows ad creators to keep enhancing their ad performance – so taking advantage of all the Facebook metrics is a must.

The metrics you are looking into depending on the marketing objective you are trying to achieve. When we talk about running a successful ecommerce ad campaign on Facebook, there are 3 main metrics to looks out for:

1. Cost per acquisition /also referred to as cost per website purchase/

This metric will tell an advertiser how much was spent to gain an average lead in a campaign, ad set or an ad. Keeping your CPAs as low as possible is a given, but keeping it such, that allows for-profit margins is a matter of life and death for a business – any business can get thousands of clicks per hour, but not any business can afford to.

2. Website purchases 

This metric merely measures how many purchases have been made per campaign, audience, ad set. To have the info tracked, it is important not only to install the Facebook pixel but also to make sure you have set up a Purchase event in the system.

3. Return on ad spent

The formula for ROAS is fairly simple: ROAS = Revenue / cost.

This is a good metric to choose if your shipping and production costs do not constitute a lion share of the product value. As the metric combines both worlds, it is a preferred metric for many digital marketers.

Just to illustrate, if you spend 10 dollars on your ads and make sells worth 35 dollars, your ROAS is 3,5 (which means, that for every dollar spent on ads you made sells worth 3,5 dollars). Anything below 1 is negative, you are losing money on such ads.

We also created custom conversion via Facebook Pixel and using them as metrics of our ads performance. To do so, we ran through our customer journey, and created a bunch of conversions a person usually make before become our beloved client! It includes free trial, creating an ccount and placing an order. Take a look:

Ads testing and analysis

AB tests in Facebook ad manager allow advertisers to run up to 5 ads simultaneously with all similar parameters but 1. The one tested parameter may be an image, text or audience. This is extremely useful to find the words or images that most resonate with your ad.

There is no better service you can do for your dollar than to monitor and tweak your campaigns based on results. Keep an eye on the best performing campaigns, pause the ones performing poorly and keep experimenting with every parameter there is for best optimization and higher marketing returns. 

How to create a successful Facebook ad: Examples of Facebook ads

Keep your clients engaging with your brand just because – with no purchase intent

Don’t bombard your fans with all-commercial messaging. Give them a break. Have fun with them, share the excitement of a holiday. 

Show off the details that deserve to be shown off: close up shorts

Close up is extensively used in jewelry ecommerce photography as well as for gadget product images. Chanel here made the back of the clock transparent so that potential buyers could see what's inside. Nothing to hide.

Use the power of a personal brand

If you happen to have some personal following before creating a brand – it is perfectly OK to use its power to boost your newly created brand. 

Zoom in on unique features of your gadget in a hi-tech video

Use a carousel ad for fashion, jewelry ecommerce, and accessory online stores

Carousel is great for many reasons: one of them is that it offers a client an opportunity to scroll in a different direction. So not only you are offering a change of direction, that the user has gotten bored of by now – you also get to showcase multiple products.

Don't be shy to use a giveaway once in a while

Sweepstakes and contests are a great way to give an engagement boost to your page as well as increase a number of fans of your page.

Add a splash of chic to your product photography

Notice an amazing use of shimmering gold in this d’Yquem 2016 vintage release. 

Pets and kids? Sure thing!

Check out the engagement that Casper managed to garner with this cutest pajama-dressed puppy. 

Use a marketing dollar to promote a social cause

Millennials are specifically sensitive to social responsibility – so this a case when doing good may strengthen client loyalty.

Do a Geo-specific campaign

It speaks to many psychological triggers: scarcity, FOMO, feeling of belonging to a community and being special.

Where to get good photos for ecommerce?

If you liked the examples above and you are an ecommerce store owner, you might be in the need of product photography company. 

We at Squareshot love getting new clients on board and made this process very straightforward and intuitive. We offer product photography services with a quick turnaround time and transparent pricing. As a result, you receive product imagery that drives your sales up.

Advertising in ecommerce: getting the most out of Facebook ads

Whilst we hope out amazing examples of Facebook ads inspired you, every business is different and needs an individual recipe for success.

One this is for sure: when promoting your online store on Facebook, you will need to put a good amount of creativity and professionalism for the recipe to succeed.