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When you’re starting out, eCommerce advertising can be time consuming and expensive. If you’re in the eCommerce business, you understand how hard it can be to target the right audience. Even after you gain some experience, you may still be targeting the wrong people. Luckily, Facebook has many of the tools you need to be successful.
If you’re not already using them, Facebook ads are good for eCommerce, like really good. But there’s some groundwork needed before you start. Building proper audiences can mean the difference between paying for a bunch of wasted clicks and actually generating sales.
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Before you can get started, make sure you have your Facebook pixel up and running. If you’re on a platform like Shopify, it’s a pretty easy setup. Just plug in your pixel ID number and you’re ready to go.
If coding isn’t your strong suit, fear not! Facebook currently integrates with additional platforms like Magento, WooCommerce, Wix and even Squarespace. Unfortunately, if your site isn’t listed, you’ll have to manually install the pixel code yourself.
Now that your pixel tracking code is installed, we can dive right in.
When working with Facebook ads, Custom Audiences are your best friend. If you haven’t set up a Custom Audience before, head to your Facebook Business Manager, from there you’ll select the account you want to use, then under the “assets” section click “audiences.” This is where you’ll be able to set up your Custom Audiences.
Once you’ve installed the Facebook Pixel on your site, you can then build audiences based on your site traffic. These audiences are based on behaviors specific to your site. You can build an audience list from something as simple as visitors to your site, or as advanced as someone who hasn’t visited your site in more than X amount of days.
We’ve all been a window-shopper at one point or another. In terms of eCommerce, window shoppers are those who visited your site and did not add anything to their cart. You want to know who this audience is and why they visited your site without making a purchase. Did the product not resonate with them? Were they out of your target demographic?
To set up this audience, you’ll first need to decide your criteria. Are you interested in specific page views, or general content views? You’ll also have to decide your date range for this audience, as well.
By setting up this audience, you’ll have a better idea of who’s not making purchases when on your site. This information will also help you target who is more likely to make a purchase on your site.
This audience includes those who visited the site, added some product(s) to their cart, and for some reason, didn’t end up purchasing. You can also segment this audience further to include when the action was completed. We typically recommend having 7, 14 and 30 day segments for this audience.
Why is that? We’re so glad you asked. This is a great audience to have for retargeting purposes—you already know they were close to converting, but they just need an extra little push to take them over the edge. You can select this audience and entice them with some offer (a free shipping coupon, percent of a purchase, a buy-one-get-one offer, etc) to encourage them to complete their purchase.
After you’ve created window shopper and cart abandonment audiences, you should set up a purchaser audience. Your purchaser audience is something you should leverage for exclusion lists. This means instead of wasting ad spend on someone who recently purchased your product, you can instead remove them from any current ads, or future ads, that may no longer apply to them.
Your purchaser audience can also be used to build lookalike audiences. While you may not want to flood your current customers with retargeting ads, you will want to be able to target people similar to them who are likely to also make a purchase.
Similar to the cart abandonment audience, you can also use the purchaser segment to re-engage visitors. Consider setting up a campaign that targets purchasers every so often after they completed a conversion.
If you have a consumer product that has a shorter life cycle, 30 days may be the best option for setting up this audience. If it’s a bigger purchase item with a longer product life, 180 days might make more sense instead. Staying in front of your audience at these points gives you a better chance at re-engaging them, especially since they’re already warm.