5 Tips for Scaling Your E-Commerce Facebook Campaigns

Facebook Ads can be a powerful tool for both reaching new audiences and interacting with your existing customers. Here, we’ll provide 5 tips on how to improve performance in your e-commerce campaigns. We’ll explore a range of capabilities, from which audiences you should consider targeting to ad type recommendations.

1) Create lookalike audiences to obtain new customers

First up is using lookalike audiences to reach high intent users. With lookalikes, Facebook helps you find new people to advertise to based on your existing customers’ demographics and interests. By advertising to people who have similar characteristics to your actual customers, you are more likely to see higher engagement with your ads than you would with a broader audience, and in-turn, more conversions.

Lookalikes are created from your custom audiences. Audiences such as website visitors and converters can be used as a seed audience to generate a list of similar users that can be used for targeting. To be eligible to use this feature, you’ll need to have a minimum of 100 people in your source list. You are able to expand your lookalike audience size using percentages, these range between 1% and 10%. An audience list utilising a 1% percentage is likely to be smaller and more closely aligned to the seed list than a 10% match. Generally, we’ve found around the 1-3% mark is the sweet spot, but if you want to reach a larger number of people, test a higher percentage.

Now, if you’re not already utilising customer lists on Facebook you’re missing a trick. By uploading 1st party data into your account, you’re able to leverage additional lookalike and remarketing opportunities that would otherwise be unavailable. You’ll need to prepare the customer file in advance, filling out as many identifiers as you can to have the best chance at a high match rate. As Facebook uses the data uploaded to find relevant matches, the more detail you provide the better the match rate will be and ultimately, the better the performance is likely to be.

2) Reach relevant users using interest, demographic and behavioural targeting

Grow your account and existing customer base further by using Facebook’s interest, demographic and behavioural targeting options. With this function, you are able to target users who have similar interests and behaviours as your target audience. For example, a company who sells skincare products is able to target users who have expressed an interest in “skincare”. From this, you can infer that those users you’re targeting are likely to be interested in what you sell, even if they aren’t familiar with your brand. Additionally, if you know your target audience is within a certain age bracket or gender, you can use demographic targeting to filter the most relevant users.

If you would like to be more specific with these audiences, you can use the “narrow audiences” feature to include users who meet all of your chosen criteria. Using the skincare example above, you could combine an interest in skincare with an interest in cooking to target people who are interested in both. Essentially, this gives you the capability to create personas based on who your target customer is.

3) Encourage website visitors to convert & existing customers to repeat purchase

Through remarketing, you are able to reach high intent users who have already shown an interest in your brand, and encourage them to take action. Creating conversion events such as add to cart and initiate checkout will help you to re-engage with these users. Specifically targeting these people with personalised ads will help ensure your brand stays front of mind during their purchasing journey.

Don’t forget to target existing customers too. Continuing to invest into this pool of people, and to keep them as customers through repeat purchases, is pivotal to a successful strategy. Acquiring new customers will help to grow your account, but remarketing to previous customers is more likely to generate the strongest and most efficient returns.

4) Test different ad types

Ad format testing is key to figuring out what resonates best with your audience. Carousel and collection ads consist of multiple media assets within one ad and so can be powerful for showcasing a variety of products at once. These can lead to strong engagement amongst users in the consideration phase.

We find video ads tend to lead to a higher click through rate (CTR) than single image ads. Ensure you’re maximising your chances of success by utilising videos in your campaigns. For the best results, create an engaging concept, optimised for sound off, that captures the attention of the user early. Consider testing different creatives for your prospecting and remarketing audiences as what works for your existing customers is unlikely to translate as well to prospecting users who aren’t as familiar with your brand or products.

For any e-commerce account, one ad type not to be overlooked is Dynamic Product Ads. These are specifically available for advertisers with a product catalogue. Utilising intent signals that customers have shown browsing online, the system aims to show the right products to the right people to help target those most ready to convert.

5) Set up the Conversions API

The Conversions API connects your website data to Facebook, which enables you to provide personalised ads to your audience in a cookieless world. This is because the Conversions API is a server-side tool that shares web events, rather than a web browser, which relies on cookies. When combined with the Facebook pixel, this can lead to more accurate measurement across your campaigns as you are provided with a more holistic view of customer interactions.

With any testing, be cautious of making too many changes at once. Utilise a phased approach and focus on what you anticipate will generate the best results for your marketing objectives first, and then expand to other capabilities on offer from Facebook as this is likely to be more impactful on performance.