06 Oct 5 Effective Facebook Advertising Techniques for Ecommerce Website
As an agency we have worked with hundreds of ecommerce businesses and I believe there are some effective Facebook advertising techniques for ecommerce website you should consider using.
Let’s face it, having a beautifully designed ecommerce website does not bring you sales, you need good digital marketing.
While you can find millions of articles talking about hundreds of ways to drive traffic to your ecommerce website, in my opinion nothing beats Facebook advertising in terms of driving instant, relevant, cost effective, traffic to your ecommerce website.
I’m sure you realise that organic reach on Facebook means almost nothing now, you have to spend on Facebook advertising. Now the question is: how to spend your Facebook advertising dollars effectively?
Let’s take a look at the 5 effective Facebook advertising techniques for ecommerce website we have been using to help our clients.
1. Install Facebook Pixel
Without having your Facebook Pixel installed, you’re only unlocking 30% of the power of Facebook advertising, or less. It allows you to connect your visitors to your Facebook advertising campaigns via Custom Conversion & Custom Audience and more, which allows you to build meaningful customer journey to guide your customers towards achieving your business goals.
Installing Facebook Pixel is easy, you only need to create it once in your Facebook Ads Manager and paste it between <head> and </head> of your website. You can either get your website developer to do, or you can simple use plugins like Tracking Code Manager for WordPress to setup easily.
2. Setup Custom Conversion
Once you have Facebook Pixel installed in your website, the fun part begins. First thing you need to do is to start defining the actions that people take in your website that matters to you – I call it conversions.
Conversions don’t have to be just completed purchases, but meaningful actions like “add to cart”, “initiate checkout” even by browsing a specific page that has got huge potential conversion value, you should have a custom conversion for it. Doing so allows Facebook to learn over time and start populating “people who are more likely to take that action based on historical data” for you.
I call this “train the Facebook Pixel” and it is powerful if you do it right.
3. Setup Custom Audience
Once you have defined your custom conversions, next thing you should do is to start creating custom audiences based on custom conversions, or anything in between such as lookalike audience, audience based on your existing mailing list or database and more.
Custom audiences is a powerful way to start grouping your audiences, usually warm audiences, together so that you can create meaningful and highly targeted ads to “retarget” them towards certain actions that are meaningful for your business, such as making a purchase, or visiting a promotion page because you know for fact these people have visited you before and they are interested, say in a specific category of product you’re selling because they visited your site before.
I’ve put together a guide to Facebook custom audiences, read it here.
4. Segmentize Your Audience
Once you have your custom audience setup, next thing you should do is to segmentize your audience into different groups according to different criterias that are meaningful for your business.
Let me explain with an example. We created multiple custom audiences based based on different categories of our website visitors. Among the custom audiences, we have a general custom audience of everyone who visited our website in the past 180 days. To expand from this list, we create a 1% lookalike audience based on this custom audience, and place it at the top of our funnel. We will then create top level ads to drive new visitors to our site.
Next thing is we will group our site visitors into different segments, for example those who visited our ebook page and quiz page, we know they’re interested to learn more but probably not yet started, we will create an audience based on this group. We know for fact those who visited our Master Class page and proceeded to checkout are those who are probably more interested and ready, we then group them up as another custom audience for next level of advertising to guide them through our customer journey.
5. AB Test Everything
Last but not least, you must AB test everything. I’ve seen many business owners or marketers simply assume whatever they throw into the ads (copy and visual) will just work, I hope too.
Unless you already have advertised for awhile and know your average CPC well, you can then judge based on the average. Or else you MUST AB test everything. AB tests can be at the level of targeting (please do different copy for male and female, because they are simply different species that reacts to different CTA), ads design and copywriting. Now that Facebook offers more ads combinations, the possible combinations is almost endless – test everything.
What are you testing for? Lower cost per result and higher conversion rate. Everything business will have a different set of result sheet, stick to your numbers and keep optimizing it.
Now your turn.
Any effective Facebook Advertising techniques for ecommerce website you’re using? Share with us in the comment.
If you wish to learn more, consider joining our Master Class.