How & Why To Set Up Facebook Product Ads

Facebook has this week launched dynamic product ads on their platform, meaning that advertisers can target users who have been on certain pages with dynamic product ads based on a product feed. This is another development following in the footsteps of Google, after Facebook also emulated Google’s quality score with the launch of ‘relevance score’ last week.

However, this is a welcome move from Facebook and another good step forward in the advertising platform becoming more sophisticated for serious advertisers.

There’s a lot of reasons why you should get set up straight away. Facebook converts particularly well when it comes to eCommerce anyway if you target your ads right and are granular enough in your set up - this is largely due to the amount of traffic you can drive relatively cheaply compared to other platforms. Dynamic ads always perform well on other platform - so combining the audience and visual elements of Facebook with the best of dynamic product ads based on a feed gives eCommerce companies a great chance to deliver real return on investment.

First, let’s have a look at how to get set up:

Step 1: Get a Facebook business manager account

The first step is for you to get a Facebook business manager account. Facebook business manager is hugely useful anyway in terms of managing access, sharing Facebook pages, and having multiple users manage your ads account.

Business manager is the place where you’ll need to set up your product catalog, so get yourself over to business.facebook.com to get your business signed up to get started.

Step 2: Create a product catalog

Once you’re all set up, on the left hand side of your settings you’ll need to click the Product Catalogs section. Click ‘add a product catalog’ to get the below view:

Choose whether to request access to a client’s product library, or to create your own. All you’ll need to do at this stage is give it a name that makes sense to you.

Step 3: Add a product feed

Once your product catalog is set up, go back to the home section of your Facebook business manager, and find your product catalog amongst the pages and ad accounts that you manage. Click in to it, and click the button that shows like below:

 

Once you do this, you’ll get the following set up instructions:

Hopefully this is all fairly self-explanatory. If you use an auto-uploading feed that uploads at regular intervals you’ll be able to manage your ads better as they will contain the newest products, images, and prices - if you manually upload you’ll need to keep doing this at regular intervals to ensure that your ads are up to date.

It may take a bit of testing to make sure that your feed works with Facebook, but from our tests standard Google Merchant Center style XML feeds pulled from Magento and WooCommerce in WordPress worked just fine. When you do get an error, Facebook shows you the number of errors and tells you what they are, and your feed dashboard looks like this:

Once you’re happy with your feeds and you can see product information within it, then it’s time to move into the next phase.

Step 4: Time For Power Editor

For step 4 you’ll need to head to Power Editor. Create a new campaign using ‘Product Catalog Sales’ as the advertising objective. In the product catalog section you’ll see the name of the product catalog you set up in your business manager in step 2:

Now your campaign is set up, it’s time to get the main ads up. Head into the ad sets part of your campaign, and create a new ad set. You’ll be asked to add a product set, by creating filters on your feed. You can create product sets by price, availability, brand, and category with all of the filtration options you’d expect.

Best practice at this stage would be to filter the product sets as aggresively as possible. By creating multiple product sets you’ll be able to optimise later according to what is and isn’t working.

Step 5: Targeting

Targeting by product set is done via website custom audiences integrations. So before you move into targeting you’ll need to make sure you have website custom audiences configured. To do this, go into the audiences section of Power Editor and set up your custom audiences (learn more here > https://datify.co.uk/making-website-custom-audiences-facebook/). The key thing at this stage is to make sure you can segment by product and categories - this will allow you to target your product sets with relevant products based on the actual products that your audience has viewed.

Back in your product set, you can target in the following ways:

This allows you to test different customer flows that will then see your ad. Also, those that have added to cart but not bought will be much more likely to buy when you target them as opposed to those that have just viewed the product. We’d recommend setting up two ad sets per product set - the first based on those who have added to cart but not bought, and the second based on viewed but not bought. The option that is both is a bit of a cover all for those in a hurry - separating both allows you to bid higher on the added to cart audience who are more likely to convert, and bid lower but get more reach on the viewed but not bought category.

Step 6: The Ads

Once all of the above is complete, you can move into setting up your ads. At this stage, you get the option of using a single image and link per ad, or using multiple images and link which appear in a carousel like below:

Facebook’s guide on these types of ads are:

• Image size: 600 x 600 pixels
• Image ratio: 1:1
• Text: 90 characters
• Headline: 25 characters
• Link description: 30 characters
• Your image may not include more than 20% text.

You’re able to pull product feed details into your advert headline and news feed description. This includes details like name, product description, and current price and can be useful for dynamically generating this content based on your feed.

Once you’ve created your ads - you’re done! We’re just starting to test the different formats and different ways of running these ads - but will share our results and the best practice that we discover as a result.

 

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