Using Facebook for e-commerce inbound marketing

Using Facebook for e-commerce inbound marketing

Native advertising
Out of all of the native (social) advertising opportunities, Facebook unleashes the largest potential amount of downstream traffic and have diversified into many different options to monetise their high engagement social network. This shift is down to negative PR about the advertising effectiveness of Facebook.com and the ever growing pressure since the IPO.
How it works
Their advertising product range has more depth in terms of inbound marketing solutions and is comparable to Google AdWords in how they quantify key online actions. The following actions are how campaigns are defined at the top level:

• Clicks to website
• Website conversions
• Page likes
• Mobile App installs
• Mobile App engagement
• Desktop App installs
• Desktop App engagement
• Offer claims
• Event Responses
• Video views
Website conversions
If we focus our efforts on website conversions, we can then pick to measure the following aspects:

• Checkouts
• Registrations
• Leads
• Key Web Page Views
• Adds to Cart
• Other Web conversions
Creating custom audiences
You can create custom audiences with one of the four options:

  • Data File Custom Audience
  • MailChimp Custom Audience
  • Custom Audience from your Mobile App
  • Custom Audience from your Website

 

Custom Audience from Your Website
If you are most interested in getting people back in purely based on previous clicks then you can generate audiences based on a particular page or web pages. As you can see, you can also tailor your audience to exclude a particular web page by selecting ‘doesn’t contain’. It’s always advisable with re-targeting to not pester or creep – so you might want to consider excluding people that have already bought for example.

Creating custom audiences
Creating custom audiences

Creating Lookalike audiences
One of the big sells of Facebook advertising is the massive amount of ‘big data’ that the website possesses. Based on whatever action(s) or audience(s) you are tracking, Facebook can monitor this data and then remarket individuals that have very similar profiles which normally leads to a higher potential inventory of traffic.
Ad creation (Domain ad linked to your website)
When creating adverts, it’s worth creating at least 2-4 variants within an ad set, like you would do with Google AdWords. The ads comprise of:

  • URL
  • Headline (25 characters)
  • Text (90 characters)
  • Image (recommended size 1200×628 pixels – but will show at only 206 x 137 pixels)

A respectable display clickthrough rate to aim for would be in excess of 0.25% CTR. With Facebook, you need to rotate your images (and potentially ad copy) at least fortnightly to prevent any ad fatigue from occuring which can happen on a site like Facebook that enjoys average dwell times in excess of 40 minutes.

How could this work?
For most ecommerce websites that need to be quite tight with their targeting, I would recommend 3 potential routes:

  • Checkouts – build up lookalike audiences and target with a range of 5-10 different ad types
  • Key Web Page Views – simple retargeting based on people that have visited your top 3 preferred categories but not added to cart
  •  Adds to Cart – simple retargeting based on people that have not checked out but have added to cart.

These activities should prove cost effective from a brand marketing viewpoint and then you can benchmark the cost per conversion data against your other inbound marketing channels.