One of the most important aspects of serving your customers is meeting them where they are. For most of us, the place where we spend the most time online is Facebook.
Facebook remains one of the most popular social media platforms of all time, with 69% of American adults using it as of 2022. Overall, the percentage of adults using Facebook is higher than most other social media sites, with the exception of YouTube. It easily dominates platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Snapchat.
This popularity makes Facebook a necessity for eCommerce store owners and marketers. Developing a better sense of Facebook ecommerce best practices and metrics is key to ensuring that online business owners can meet their customers where they spend the most time. The average Facebook user spends 33 minutes a day on this platform. Without a presence on Facebook, business owners are letting critical opportunities slip by.
One of the reasons why Facebook is appealing is because it’s such a dynamic platform. It’s always changing, so a set-it-and-forget-it approach for Facebook ads or eCommerce strategies simply won’t work.
We want to take some time today to show you the latest changes that could be affecting your Facebook ads for eCommerce and illustrate a few metrics that can help you become more adept at harnessing the power of Facebook for your eCommerce venture.
There are lots of approaches that can help you take advantage of Facebook’s popularity to boost traffic and sales for your eCommerce business. The first is through Facebook ads for eCommerce.
Facebook ads are any type of ad that a business places on the site that targets a specific group or audience. Since so many people are on Facebook and the customization of ads is so effortless, it’s easy to run campaigns that target a hyper-specific group who are the most likely to visit your site or make a purchase.
Facebook ads come in various formats, which can be placed on your customers’ home pages, in different groups, or even embedded within their newsfeeds. Here are a few strategies we suggest when developing Facebook ads for your eCommerce business.
People who are scrolling through Facebook don’t spend a lot of time reading. Your ad should be comprehensive even if the customer only looks at it for a few seconds.
One of the most appealing aspects of Facebook for eCommerce advertisers is how many customization options it offers. The best ads are hyper-targeted to your chosen audience and written with them in mind.
Don’t forget to add a call to action! If you aren’t giving your customers information on what action to take next, they’ll scroll right by without giving your business further thought.
There’s more to a successful Facebook eCommerce strategy than simply running ads. If you’re serious about selling to customers on Facebook, you should set up a Facebook Shop.
A Facebook Shop is a feature retailers can use to display products they’re offering for sale directly on a Facebook eCommerce store. This provides a seamless, accessible, and friction-free shopping experience. Instead of navigating off the platform, Facebook makes it easy to accept payments and sell items right on their site or app.
Setting up your Facebook Shop is simple. All you’ll need is a Facebook business page and an account. From there, you’ll set up your shop storefront, which is simple when you use their templates.
Once you have your storefront looking the way you want it, you’ll have to agree to Facebook’s merchant terms, including that items will be shipped within three days of purchase. Once you’ve set up payments by linking your bank or PayPal account, you can start adding items to your storefront.
While the Facebook Shop feature is handy, Facebook ads remain one of the most popular eCommerce features of the platform.
Developing successful Facebook ads for eCommerce requires business owners to continually stay in the loop regarding changes to the Facebook platform. Even the most minor updates to the platform or popular operating systems can impact ad performance.
Recently, a scheduled update to Apple’s iOS operating system changed how Facebook Ad Manager worked for eCommerce advertisers and shop owners. The change, which was made in May 2022, offered users the opportunity to opt in or out of data tracking across the Apple app ecosystem. This includes Facebook, limiting the availability of data, attribution, and tracking information that is so vital to ad customization.
These changes that occurred as a result of the May 2022 iOS 14 update made it necessary for most Facebook advertisers to rethink their approach. Being successful now requires advertisers to re-optimize their ads and work harder to ensure they have the data they need to run successful campaigns now and in the future.
Here are some of the most significant changes they’ve noticed.
Before this update, it was easy to connect in-app information with actions tracked outside the app. Now, if people have opted out of tracking, much of their activity cannot be tracked.
Attribution on Facebook used to be categorized over two windows – 28 days from a click or one day from a view. Now, attribution is limited to seven days from a click and one day from a view, with no delayed attribution.
Using Facebook’s Pixel (a piece of code placed on your website to track the efficacy of advertising efforts) used to offer advertisers the opportunity to see a wide variety of default or custom events. Now, there is a much smaller menu of events that can be tracked with a Pixel.
The information owners and advertisers receive from data, attribution, and tracking on their Facebook ads is incredibly valuable.
Every time you put an ad on Facebook, it’s analogous to throwing a dart at a dartboard. Think of every user on Facebook as a microscopic dot on the dartboard. Throwing a dart doesn’t guarantee that you’ll hit a dot or that the one you hit will be the one you were aiming for. However, the more data you have, the easier it is to hit the dots you want.
The more you understand these metrics, the easier it is to make more sensible, data-driven decisions regarding your Facebook eCommerce strategy. Having this information gives you a better sense of which ads are performing well and where your plan may need to be tweaked.
If you know what works, it’s easy to replicate your successes and move forward with ads that are more effective. If you cannot track these metrics or don’t know what to look for, you’re stuck doing time-consuming trial and error until you notice what works.
Plus, the customer information you can pull from Facebook’s attribution and tracking data is incredibly valuable to your business overall. Developing a better understanding of your ideal customer will enable you to offer services and products that are more appealing to them, boosting customer satisfaction and revenue.
Improving your understanding of Facebook metrics like data, attribution, and tracking is only set to get more difficult. Apple’s iOS 14 update is one of the first times that user tracking has been limited, but with the growing rise of the data privacy movement, this change won’t be the last.
Marketers and business owners can no longer rely on platform metrics to give them the information they need to create dynamic, high-performance ad and marketing campaigns. That’s where resources like Triple Whale come in.
Our suite of tools gives you deep insight into your customers, providing practical data that you can put to use in developing better ad campaigns. Triple Pixel, one of our most popular offerings, allows you to gain unprecedented customer clarity, integrating with first, third, and zero-party data to offer you a unified approach to your data.
Want to see how it works for yourself? Book a free demo today.