What do you expect from an ecommerce advertising campaign?
A lot of advertisers are not willing to pay more than 10% of the value of a customer as advertising costs. Yes that would be fantastic, but it is not the norm. If you advertise with that attitude, you are not making yourself any favors over the long run.
All ecommerce advertisers should have an initial target to break-even on initial customer acquisition.
This means spending on ads exactly how much your customers are making you money. This way, the goal is to acquire as many early adopters and new customers as possible.
Learn more about programmatic advertising here.
However, before starting off advertising your ecommerce business, you have to cover the following essentials so that you get your head in the game:
1- Get Your Analytics Setup
Data is one of the greatest advantages that ecommerce businesses have over brick-and-mortar storefronts, and the following setups will provide you with exactly that:
Google Analytics
Ecommerce analytics is essential to understanding your traffic sources, which pages and products customers engage with, and ultimately what drives conversions on your website.
You can access Google Analytics’ robust set of reports to see which products sell well, and the products which are best suited for your consumers. You can see figures like revenue per transaction and the number of products per transaction, helping you to make informed decisions about sales, coupons, and shipping costs.
Installing Google Analytics into your website for ecommerce tracking is quite easy.
All it takes is your Google account and some time to set up tracking code onto each page of your website or through the global header.
Enhanced Ecommerce offers flexibility that truly fits the vast majority of websites. It is basic to implement out of the box, with standard performance metrics and dimensions but offers great extendability to customize for most businesses.
Ad Manager Pixels
Ad Manager Pixel, is an analytics tool intended to give you an accurate view of the effectiveness of your ad campaigns by measuring behavior on your website. It’s also super useful for retargeting, and you can create a Custom Audience based on website visits. At its most basic, this pixel tracks actions taken on your website after viewing a post or ad and collects information like user location, browser, device, and so on.
2- Connect Your Catalogues to Your Ad Managers
A Product Catalogue is a container that holds a file (or multiple files) with a list of all the products you want to promote. This file is called product feed because it “feeds” the product catalogue with information on the products. Any changes made in the product feed will automatically be reflected on your catalogue and subsequently, your ads.
Use Catalogue Sale Objectives
Use the Catalog Sales objective when you have an ecommerce store and would like to promote products from your catalog.
To use this goal, you have to connect your ecommerce store to Ads Manager and create product feeds.
During the setup process, you can choose from advertising to new customers or retargeting existing prospects. You can also opt to target customers who have viewed but not purchased products or upsell related products to customers who have already purchased from your brand.
To optimize your Catalog Sales ads further, you can add dynamic content.
Provide product set, creative, and copy options and let the Facebook algorithm combine them to serve the best possible ads to your target audience.
Customize Your Product Feed
For your product catalogue, the more information you can provide, the more likely you are to convince your audience to make that crucial purchase decision.
If your ad contains a basic title, image, and the stock description for that product, they might be left asking questions:
- What size is the product?
- Is it for men or women?
- Does it come in different colors?
Adding all this extra info into a product feed makes you stand out above competitors and is worth it in the long run.
3- Activate Dynamic Advertising
Dynamic Ads are one of the most successful ad formats available today. These ads use a dynamic template, allowing them to draw product data from your entire product catalog and automatically generate product ads. That means brands, retailers, and advertisers of any kind can dynamically create ads and target users with relevant products based on their previous actions.
Facebook & Instagram Dynamic Product Ads
Using Facebook Dynamic Ads, advertisers can build an ad template that automatically populates and serves images and other details of products from a catalog. This eliminates the ad hoc process of creating ads individually for each separate product. Facebook Dynamic Ads use Facebook Pixels or their SDK to determine what ads are to be shown to people who have already exhibited an interest in the seller’s products by taking some action on their website.
Dynamic ads are especially useful for advertisers that have multiple products or services to offer their customers. Facebook’s legacy multi-product ad serving mechanism, called Carousel Ads, will display up to 10 product images with details. Dynamic ads are, therefore, most applicable for sellers that wish to offer more than 10 products. Unlike Carousel Ads, however, Facebook Dynamic Ads provide the ability to either feature multiple products at once (like Carousel Ads) or feature products relevant to customers in specific stages of the sales funnel using the single image ad format. Thus, unlike Facebook Dynamic Ads, multi-product ads cannot change depending on the audience. Carousel ads display the same ad to all audiences whereas Facebook Dynamic Ads change according to the current sales-funnel stage of the customer.
Dynamic ads allow for the promotion of a wide range of products employing unique creatives without the need to configure each ad individually. This enables a campaign to continually reach people with the right product at the right time.
Google Display Dynamic Product Ads
Dynamic Display Ads are a feature within the Google Ads display network that allows a website to dynamically display advertisements to users, based on products they have previously browsed on the website.
To take advantage of Dynamic Display Ads the website first needs a Google Merchant Center account and feed, which is tied to the Google Ads account you wish to show these advertisements on.
Once the feed has been submitted to Google and available within the Google Ads interface, the next step is to create your campaign and implement the remarketing tags required.