Facebook provides multiple ad formats that can be implemented into various stages of a full funnel strategy. Each ad format has its own set of benefits and drawbacks that may impact its efficacy.
Custom audiences created from your email list, purchase data and website visitors can help drive conversions and revenue growth in your ecommerce business.
Boost your website traffic
Facebook ads can be an effective tool to increase website traffic and conversions, by targeting specific people with tailored messages tailored for them, while offering special features such as location-based targeting or mobile-first experiences tailored specifically for mobile users. Before running campaigns however, it’s essential that a clear strategy and goals are defined beforehand.
Select an objective such as ‘get more website visitors’ or ‘conversions’ and Facebook will optimize your campaign for maximum performance against that objective. If you select “get more website visitors”, Facebook will prioritize increasing clicks to your ad and if selecting conversion goals it will prioritize increasing conversions at an acceptable cost to generate more conversions.
Next, set your budget and determine how long the campaign should run for. Bear in mind that as it progresses, costs will become increasingly costly. To manage costs effectively and stay within your budget, use Facebook’s automatic bidding or manually set your bid price; automated bidding can help beginners focus on crafting ads while leaving bidding decisions up to Facebook; with manual bidding you have full control over how much per action completed as well as its delivery.
Once you’ve determined your objective and budget, create a custom audience based on email list subscribers, interactions with your business or website visitors. Sharing data from CRM or autoresponder with Facebook through the Meta Pixel (formerly the Facebook pixel) can also improve targeting, either manually or automatically through LeadsBridge partners like LeadsBridge – then use that data to build lookalike audiences of people similar to your existing customers.
Increase conversions
At the center of your ecommerce funnel, Facebook ads targeting product views and page visits can help convert interested prospects to leads. As users become familiar with your products, they’ll become ready to evaluate them and make buying decisions – you should encourage this journey by offering incentives or discounts that increase conversions and allow leads to transition into customers.
If you select conversions as your campaign objective, Facebook will optimize your budget to deliver ads that lead directly to purchases on your website or app. Furthermore, using cost per result or ROAS bidding option you can also set how much each ad you run that meets conversion threshold costs you.
Consistency should be of utmost importance between your ads and landing pages, including their designs and language used within them. Doing this can help eliminate discordance among customers while keeping things clear for business operations.
Add the Facebook Pixel to your ecommerce website in order to track user actions and build targeted audiences on Facebook, enabling you to retarget ads with more relevant content, thus increasing ROI over time. Custom audiences and the Conversion API also give more accurate data on what drives conversions while automated integrations between CRM or autoresponder applications such as LeadsBridge can share user action data directly with Facebook to increase ad efficiency.
Retargeting
Retargeting with Facebook ads is an effective way of reaching specific audiences who have shown an interest in your products or services, helping you build stronger relationships while moving them further along your sales funnel by offering promotions, discounts or incentives that entice purchases.
Your ads should reflect the goals at each stage of the funnel, with Facebook helping to optimize them by providing accurate data that allows you to segment audiences by their behavior and scale efficiently.
An effective top-of-funnel ad should focus on increasing brand recognition by raising visibility of your products and services, not only advertising them directly but also emphasizing their benefits to your target customers. When Steve Jobs pitched the iPod, for example, his pitch didn’t focus on its design specifications or inner workings but rather how this product would provide music lovers with joyous entertainment experiences.
Middle-of-the-funnel ads should focus on turning prospects into leads by cultivating their interest and emphasizing your unique value proposition. Testing multiple ad variations regularly is vital to this phase of the funnel’s success; regular monitoring and adjustments must also take place.
Bottom-of-the-funnel campaigns must focus on driving conversions by reaching visitors who know your products and are ready to purchase them. This may involve retargeting abandoned shopping carts, offering special promotions like discounts or limited time offers, or creating urgency with limited-time bargains that compel a final purchase decision.
Retargeting with Facebook ads requires first having an existing customer list that can be imported into Facebook’s Custom Audiences tool – this may be email addresses from CRM systems or autoresponders, website visitor data from an autoresponder, etc. To use lookalike audiences effectively, target Facebook users who share similar traits as your existing buyers/visitors (this method will increase campaign reach without spending unnecessary money on unnecessary clicks).
Custom audiences
An essential element of an effective ecommerce funnel is being able to target specific audiences using custom audience lists. These groups represent people who have engaged with your business through interactions on your website or email list or by purchasing from you – targeting these audiences with ads that generate revenue is an effective way to move people through your sales funnel.
To create a custom audience in Facebook Ads, log into your account and navigate to “Audiences”. From here you can click on the arrow next to “Create Audience”, choose Customer list from the drop-down list and upload an array of email or phone numbers that Facebook will match up against their user data and target with ads.
Once you’ve created a custom audience, you can turn it into a Lookalike Audience. A Lookalike Audience finds people similar to your existing audience; this may include people from within your Custom Audience itself or from Pixel Data such as those who visited your website/post-click landing page/mobile app data/Fan of page data etc. A smaller Lookalike Audience may better match up with your core target group and yield optimal results.
Once your ad is set up, Meta offers two strategies for optimizing its performance: automatic bidding (Facebook’s default option) or manually setting bids at the campaign level. Automatic bidding provides great scaling potential while manual bidding enables you to control how much per action completed you’re willing to pay and thus can help keep ad budgets low while maintaining optimal conversion rates. You also have two delivery types to choose from: Standard or Accelerated delivery which show ads throughout the day while Accelerated is more aggressive so can help reach audiences quickly for time-sensitive offers or quickly reaching audiences quickly when needed.
Lookalike audiences
Facebook’s lookalike audiences provide an effective way to target potential new customers with similar characteristics as existing customers, from prospecting all the way through conversions.
To create a lookalike audience on Facebook Ad Manager, log into and click on “audience”. Next, provide an existing custom audience as the basis (you can build one within “custom audiences”) before selecting “lookalike audiences”.
Choose the size of your lookalike audience; this reflects how closely its traits match those of your source audience; smaller numbers indicate greater similarity. Add conditions requiring that at least some members of this lookalike have purchased from your business in order to make it a value-based lookalike and thus improve performance by only showing ads to people likely to have positive lifetime values.
Your lookalike audience also allows you to add geographical targeting elements into your campaigns (though state and city level granularity cannot be achieved, manual targeting may still work well). Finally, give the lookalike audience a name and select it as the source for your ad.
By building an effective ecommerce advertising funnel, you can ensure your messages reach only those most appropriate at each step of the sales process. Furthermore, tracking audiences using Facebook Pixels and Ad tags allows you to identify which types of ads work best in each phase.
