This is part two in our Facebook ads series. See part I for an introduction to Facebook ads.
As we talked about in our previous article, Facebook ads have become the go to marketing platform for eCommerce and retail businesses. Recently, Facebook has improved custom audiences, allowing users to retarget based on several factors and increased targeting capabilities so users can target a very specific audience of people who are most likely going to buy your product. With such pinpointed targeting, advertisers have managed to lower their new customer acquisition cost by as much as 73%
For example, if someone is selling a pasta strainer, not only can you target people who love to cook, you can narrow it right down and target people who love cooking Italian food. You can get so granular with your targeting that you can get your ads or your Amazon product in front of your exact target customer every day.
With 1.39 billion active users every month, every Amazon seller should be using Facebook ads to drive high quality, external traffic to their products. To succeed however, it all comes down to understanding who your target audience is, being able to reach them through your Facebook ads and understanding your advertising objectives.
Your advertising objective is the action you want people to take when they see your ads. The objective should align with your overall goals of what you want your ad to achieve.
- Awareness: Whether it be brand awareness, local area awareness, or the reach of your ads, (maximum number of people in your audience), this is the objective where you choose what interest you want to generate in your product
- Consideration: These are the objectives that get people to think about your products or business and look for more information about it. This includes traffic, app installs, video views, lead generation and engagement.
- Conversions: These are the objectives that are optimized for people who are likely to purchase your product or service. By installing the Facebook pixel, which we will discuss later on, you can use Facebook’s powerful machine learning algorithm to display your ad in front of your ideal customer
AD OBJECTIVES
Here are the main ad objectives you should focus on as an Amazon seller:
- Pay per engagement
- Clicks to website
- Website conversion
PAY PER ENGAGEMENT
Page Post Engagement (PPE) Ads are one of the least expensive ways to boost your engagement, and therefore, reach, on Facebook. They are optimized to be displayed to an audience who are most likely to engage with your posts. Engagement on a post includes likes on your post or page, post clicks, link clicks, comments and shares. It is a good way to gain insights and to determine if you are targeting correctly and whether you should scale your ad or not.
The ad creative can be in the form of a photo or a video. You can also create a slideshow from images from within the Facebook ad manager. You can create the ad by creating a post on your Facebook page and ‘boosting’ it or by creating a standalone ad with the ad manager tool. PPE ads should be created with ‘virality’ in mind. This means they work best when the content contained within is highly shareable.
When it comes to cost, a good rule of thumb is your cost per engagement should be under 5 cents by the time you have spent $10. Between 5-10 cents is acceptable, and if it is above 10 cents you might need to change something. You can also measure what Facebook thinks about your ad and targeting by looking at the relevance score in the ad manager. This should preferably be above 7.
Pay per engagement ads are great to measure how responsive and audience is to your ad and are very effective as a first ad in your Facebook strategy to gauge how effective your targeting and ad creative are. Most of the time these ads should not be ‘scaled’ (increasing ad-spend and audience set size) but just used as a way to confirm or reject if it is worth scaling your campaign in the future with another ad objective.
CLICKS TO WEBSITE
The next ad objective that Amazon sellers should learn about is Clicks to Website (CTW), otherwise known as website clicks. These are ads optimized to be shown to users who are likely to click on a link in your ad. Depending on your targeting and the relevance of your ad, you will pay a variable amount every time someone clicks on your ad.
The aim of this ad type for Amazon sellers is primarily to build pixel data. But you should also be getting sales if your offer/product is good. Facebook will show these ads to users who are likely to click on ads but maybe not purchase. However, if you do have a compelling product and offer you should be getting some sales from these ads. At this point in your campaign your aim should be to break even, even suffering a small loss is acceptable as the data you are gathering is invaluable. You will also be gaining valuable customer emails if you are sending your users to an AMZPromoter landing page.
This ad should not be scaled hard and its primary purpose is to built up data for your Facebook pixel.
UPDATE: We no longer recommend using CTW ads except for in retargeting ads. Facebook has upgraded their platform so users can now run Website Conversion ads optimized to clicks until Facebook gathered enough data to optimize for conversions. This is a better option for most campaigns.
Facebook Pixel
If you’re serious about using Facebook ads to grow your Amazon business, you should be utilizing the Facebook pixel.
The Facebook pixel is a snippet of code provided by Facebook. The code is installed on a specific web page, which sends a message back to Facebook when someone visits or takes an action. It allows you to measure and optimize your ads and also build custom audiences.
The Facebook pixel is used for three main purposes:
- Building Custom Audiences from your website for re-marketing efforts
- Optimizing your ads for higher conversions
- Tracking your conversions back to your ads to gauge effectiveness
Retargeting is a very profitable way to target your customers. Setting up the Facebook pixel correctly allows you to:
- Target people who visited your website
- Target people based on engagement with your content
- Target people who have visited your sales page or listing but didn’t purchase.
- Find new people to target your ads to who are similar to the people who have already engaged with (lookalike audiences)
- Optimize your ads: When using the Facebook in combination with pixel data, Facebook optimize your ads and display them to users who are most likely to convert and buy your product.
- Track conversions: Using the Facebook pixel you can measure the conversions, which allows you yo calculate your return on ad spend. That way you can immediately see what you’re spending for conversion and optimize accordingly.
To really get the most out of your money spent on Facebook ads, you have to be using the Facebook pixel for tracking your ads.
WEBSITE CONVERSIONS
This is the last objective you need to know about as an Amazon seller. This is where all the magic happens and where you make all of your money. Once you have figured out your targeting and ad creative, by running tests with a PPE ad, and you have build up some pixel data with your CTW ads, it is time to dive head first into Website Conversion (WC) ads.
These ads will be optimized based on pixel data. If you had a store (for example a Shopify site) you would put a main pixel on your website and a different conversion pixel on each of your pages (eg. product, add to cart, enter payment details and purchase page). Facebook provides you with standard conversion pixels so you don’t have to do any coding. Just copy the Event Code into your main pixel code and then put it on the correct pages.
If you are using AMZPromoter we recommend you add your primary pixel (ViewContent) to your landing page and the AddToCart Conversion pixel to your coupon page (the page your user will land on after entering their email address). You can do this easily in the AMZPromoter wizard.
When you are setting up your WC ad you should set the conversion event to AddToCart (you will need some pixel data to do this). This will optimize the ad to people who are likely to claim your coupon.
Keep the targeting the same as your PPE and CTW ad (if you are getting good response and cheap clicks) and start watching the coupon claims and sales roll in.
The next question now is: how do I scale my Facebook ads correctly? This is a topic we will discus in our next article.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, to really grow your Amazon business you should be harnessing the power of Facebook ads. Learning how to navigate the Facebook ads platform is quite complicated, but once you have mastered it the returns are enormous. We hope this article gave you more clarity on what ad objective to use and how the Facebook pixel works.
Learning how to drive traffic to your Amazon product pages is a long term strategy, that will propel you above the competition as long as you put in the effort.
If you have any questions please ask in the comment section!