Facebook is more than just a social network: it is a place where people post about their lives, buy and sell goods and keep in touch with people around the world. Billions of people use Facebook each month, so how can you best tap into this market with your e-commerce site? Read on to understand how you can make Facebook ads work for you.
What are Facebook ads?
Facebook ads come in many varieties, from videos to carousels, simple banner images to boosted posts on pages. There are a plethora of options available to you, but they all revolve around catching a user’s attention and (hopefully) converting that in some way. Whether it be clickthroughs, call to action goals or sales, understanding how you can leverage Facebook ads to help your e-commerce site can unlock a huge potential market for your business.
How do Facebook ads work with e-commerce?
Fortunately, Facebook comes with some pre-built tools specifically made for advertising e-commerce products and websites. These allow you to tailor the ads you put up on Facebook beyond generic image banners or videos. You can still use those of course, and they can be very beneficial with the right focus. However, there is an ad type purpose-built for e-commerce: dynamic product ads.
What are dynamic product ads?
As the name suggests, dynamic product ads are ads for products that are dynamic, as in the product information is updated in real-time from a specified data source. That source is usually your e-commerce site, but it doesn’t have to be. The advantages of using dynamic product ads are that you can directly market your products on Facebook quickly and easily by not having to manually input all the product information yourself, like pricing, imagery and product descriptions. Should any of this data change, you need only change it on your e-commerce site and the changes will automatically be pulled through on your Facebook ads. This can avoid some nasty and potentially legally sticky issues where your ads claim one price for your product, but your website uses a different price.
How do I use dynamic product ads?
In order to use dynamic product ads, your e-commerce software must output your product data in a way that Facebook understands. By default, most of the well-known, mature e-commerce software already comes with this capability, or the functionality can be added with a plugin. This list of software includes popular e-commerce packages such as Shopify, Woocommerce and Magento.
If you’re using bespoke software or a software suite that doesn’t have any support for Facebook dynamic product ads, you’ll need to contact a software developer to help build you the tools you need for successful integration.
Marketing and remarketing with Facebook
In addition to simply advertising your products, Facebook dynamic product ads is also an incredibly useful tool for remarketing purposes. If you have a Facebook pixel installed on your site, Facebook will know what pages your users visited on your site and what products they browsed.
Facebook can use that information to then later show them those specific products when they browse Facebook, reminding your customers of your products. This increases the relevancy of your ads to your audience and creates another opportunity to sell your products to customers.
