If you are an Amazon seller who has never launched a Facebook ad, or even if you’re just looking for some tips to help boost your ad’s progress, you’ve landed on the right post.
This thorough seller’s guide will discuss all there is to know about Facebook advertising, its benefits, set-up guide, beneficial tips and much more!
Let’s break down the entire concept of Facebook advertising into small sections to get a clearer picture:
Why Facebook Ads? – 3 Main Benefits of Facebook Advertising
First of all, let me explain why Facebook ads work so great for your business.
Let’s start by explaining 3 main advantages of Facebook advertising:
1. Over 2 billion Monthly Active Users
Facebook is undoubtedly the largest social media platform where we connect with family and friends around the world and share updates.
It is a highly engaging space where there is so much content that everyone of all age groups can find something of interest. This is exactly what makes Facebook an advertiser’s dream.
On Facebook, it is nearly impossible to not be able to find an audience for your business. Facebook user base is not only massive (over 2.3 billion monthly active users) but is also quite consistent.
Facebook messenger is another important tool to use while advertising on Facebook. It opens up retargeting opportunities and several other options with impressively high open-rates.
Lastly, Facebook owns Instagram as well. This means that you can further expand your marketing to Instagram users as well through Facebook’s advertising platform. This means nearly doubled engaged traffic!
2. Targeting your own Customer Avatar on Facebook
Another great thing about Facebook is that users share their personal updates and information, new songs or interests and basically everything happening in their lives on Facebook and subsequently with your network.
The public doesn’t realize this, but information as plain as this is actually highly valuable for businesses.
All the connections and likes on Facebook and Instagram combine together to form detailed user profiles.
These profiles or avatars are essentially all a business needs to know in order to check whether or not a particular customer would be interested in their products.
Therefore, these profiles help advertisers target the correct audiences on Facebook. Businesses can match their products against a long list of users’ interests, behaviours and traits to improve the possibility of targeting ideal customers.
3. Build new Audiences
In addition to retargeting existing customers, you can create lookalike audiences or custom audiences on Facebook using your customer avatar.
This is great for brand exposure and to maximize engagement as well. It allows you to gain new followers for your brand page on Facebook, and subsequently for your company as well.
This is a great opportunity especially for Amazon sellers. Amazon’s strict Terms of Services barely leave any room for sellers to build new audiences. This is why Facebook can prove to be highly valuable to expand your Amazon business.
How to Set up your Facebook Ad?
Now that you know why Facebook advertising is so valuable for building and expanding your business, let’s explain how you can build successful Facebook ads the right way.
Let’s go through the entire process step by step:
Step 1: Create your Facebook Business Manager
The first step towards creating a successful Facebook ad is to set up your Facebook business manager correctly.
Business manager is the space where all your business pages and advertising campaigns reside on Facebook.
Most of the sellers give up their Facebook advertising efforts simply because they get overwhelmed by Facebook’s innumerable options and tools.
However, the process is quite simple. To create your Business Manager account, Select “Create Account” here:
Enter your name, email address, your business name and your Facebook business page:
Now, you’ll need to either add an existing advertising account or create a new one.
To do this, click on the drop down Business Manager menu in the upper left corner:
Select “Business Settings”:
Select “Ad Accounts” under “Accounts”:
Select “+ Add”. You’ll be given the option to either add an existing account or create a new account:
Click on the suitable option and follow the prompts.
Once you’ve got your Business Manager set up and connected to your business page and ad account on Facebook, your dashboard will look like this:
This is basically your Facebook advertising hub where you can find all advertising and business management tools.
Step 2: Use Facebook Pixels to Track your Ads
Do you want to be able to track your Facebook ad’s success and reach?
No, it is not impossible. Facebook pixels let you do exactly this and much more! You can check every person clicking on your ad using Facebook pixel.
Essentially, Facebook pixels are the connection between your landing page (Amazon product listing or your own business website), and Facebook. It is a tracking code that first needs to be created within your Business Manager Account, and then embedded in the landing page.
To create your Facebook pixel, go to your Ad account settings and select “Pixels” (remember, you only need one Facebook pixel per ad account):
You’ll be given the option to “Create a Pixel”:
Select “Create” and follow through the prompts to successfully create your Facebook pixel:
Keep in mind that you can create a Facebook ad and even boost it without using a Facebook pixel (and it may even turn out to be successful), but it would be no different from a wild goose chase.
You would not even know whether or not your ad was able to draw any sales or not.
Facebook pixels show you your ad’s results in detail, and also tell you which particular audience group contributed the most to your sales. The pixel basically informs you of all the actions taken by visitors coming to your website via your Facebook ad.
Step 3: Create your Facebook Audiences
Like we said, Facebook has largely over 2 billion monthly active users and while some of them would definitely be interested in your product, all of them are not.
This is why it is important to ensure that your ad reaches out to the right, interested people and is not wasted on uninterested audiences.
Targeting the right people is the key to a successful Facebook ad. By “right” we mean audiences that have interests matching to your products.
But how can you find them?
You can’t, but Facebook can. All you need to do is to tell Facebook the interests or characteristics you’re looking for in your audience, and Facebook will find matching audiences themselves for your ad.
There are two broad categories when it comes to the options available while targeting Facebook audiences: retargeting and prospecting.
Retargeting Current Audiences
By “current audiences”, I don’t just mean your existing buyers on Amazon or on your own website, but also everyone who has ever visited your site, added something to their cart or even those who follow your business on Facebook or Instagram.
These are “warm” audiences – people who are already interested in your products and only need a little encouragement or push from your side to make a purchase.
You might have noticed that after browsing through a brand’s website, their ads start appearing on your Facebook feed where they weren’t before. This is exactly what “retargeting” is!
It is notably among the most effective Facebook advertising strategies.
How to create retargeting audiences? Simply use the “Custom Audiences” feature within the audiences section of your Facebook Business Manager. You can plug in all the data gathered via your Facebook pixel or other channels here:
The two most widely used options while creating Custom Audiences are: Website Traffic and Customer File.
Let’s look into both of these individually:
1. Website Traffic
This is a list of all those people who have visited your Amazon page, or added something to their cart, or viewed a particular item or have performed any action on your page.
You can create different lists of different categories and target the people of each list separately according to their category.
For example, if a group of people have viewed an item or have added it to their cart, you can advertise that particular product and target them with it.
In my experience, sellers who have interacted with my page within the last month convert particularly well while earlier audiences don’t show a response as well.
2. Customer File
Customer file is a collection of customers’ contact information (email addresses, phone numbers or any other data that they might have provided you).
You can gather such information easily by asking for sign-ups to various offers like giveaways or warrantee extensions etc.
Facebook will take this information and match it to users on their platform, find out matching users’ Facebook profiles and allow you to retarget them directly with your ads.
This is a great way to maximize engagement of past customers with your business page, and also to solicit product reviews via messenger. It also is the perfect cross-selling opportunity.
Finding New Audiences
Finding and building new audiences is an even better way to expand your business and gain brand exposure.
Instead of converting existing website viewers and browsers, this strategy focuses on targeting people for the very first time and informing them about your product and its value.
These are the people who have never visited your website or your Amazon page, nor have they ever interacted with your business in any way. This process of looking for new customers is usually called “prospecting”.
In order to find potential new audiences on a platform with billions of users, there are two tools that will help you out the most:
1. Creating Lookalike Audiences
This is almost a fool-proof way to gain consistent buyers because they are the lookalikes of your existing consistent buyers.
“Lookalikes” refer to people who share similar interests with your existing customers. Facebook uses the data from your Custom Audiences to match it against other Facebook users and then creates a list of closest matches.
This new list is a valuable asset for you. You can target them and introduce your product in the best way possible to convert them into regular buyers!
Lookalike audiences range from 1-10% in terms of similarity, with 1% being the closest match (easiest targets for your prospecting campaigns) and 10% being the farthest.
2. Using Demographics to Target New Audiences
If you’re starting from scratch and don’t have any existing or past customers data to find out matching lookalike audiences, this option is for you.
Using the saved audiences option, you can use 3 of Facebook’s most powerful tools to build potential audiences. These tools are:
- Interests refer to the pages and relevant content that users have interacted with (liked, commented or shared) on Facebook. For example: pets, exercise, cooking, etc.
- Behaviours are all the user actions recorded by Facebook. These include watching a movie, going to a place, having a baby, celebrating birthdays, moving to a new place, etc.
- Demographics refers to your “About” section on facebook that includes profile information. For example, newly weds, doctors, students, etc.
Based on these 3 factors, there would be several audiences that you’ll want to target. In order to narrow down options and identify various categories, you can use Audience Insights tool on Facebook. It is present in the “Plan” section of your Facebook Business Manager main menu.
You can use this tool to learn more about your potential audiences, like which Facebook pages they are likely to follow and where do most of them live.
This valuable data can be used to identify and test new audiences and ad types on Facebook. Once you find out the right demographics, you can further expand your audience and reach new people by adding further layers of interests and behaviours etc.
Step 4: Set up your Facebook Ad Campaign
Every Facebook ad is part of an advertising campaign.
Look at it this way: every campaign has ad sets which are the targeted audience groups. Since you may want to target people of multiple demographics and interests, an advertising campaign can have more than one ad sets.
Within each ad set lies ad creatives or ads. Ad creative is the appearance of your ad (description, images, videos etc). The way you design your ad creative will determine how it appears on audiences’ feed.
Every advertising campaign needs an objective. To help you choose the right campaign objective for your ad, let’s discuss objectives in detail:
Choose your Campaign Objective
To create a campaign, go to the Ad Manager within your Facebook Business Manager and select “Create”:
From here, you will be asked to select an objective. There are three main categories of ad objectives: conversions, consideration and awareness:
Each category has a further list of options that you can choose from for your campaign objective.
To choose the right objective, ask yourself the following questions:
- What are your business goals?
- What do you want to achieve with your Facebook ads?
Let the answers guide you!
To make this easier for you, let me explain how some of the popular campaign objectives can help achieve your business goals:
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If you aren’t selling a product yet and only want to create some social hype for your product launch, choose “Brand Awareness”. This option works great for new sellers who want to excite audiences about their product
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If you’re not making enough sales on your online listing, “Add to Cart” objective can help you improve your sales volume. “Conversions” objective also helps to increase sales but the former option costs a bit less
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If you want to improve the reach of your posts (likes, comments and shares), try using the “Engagement” objective for your campaign
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If you want to drive more traffic to your website or to your Amazon listing, the “Traffic” objective will help you achieve this goal
Campaign objective acts as the backbone of your entire Facebook advertising. Make sure to select the right objective so that Facebook can optimize your ad accordingly to help you reach your goals.
Another thing to make sure is to select a suitable campaign name. Use meaningful naming conventions for your campaign, ad sets and ads. This will keep your account organized and will also help you identify campaigns at just a glance.
Step 5: Set up your Facebook Ad Set
Now that you’re done with the campaign, let’s move down to ad set level.
There are three main sections on this level:
- Which audience do you want to target?
- What is your budget?
- Where do you want to place your ad?
Facebook may ask you further about your chosen campaign objective to understand your goals better and to optimize the ad accordingly. For example, if you choose “conversions”, you would further have to choose the type of conversion event you’re aiming for:
Keep in mind though, Facebook will only let you choose the conversion events you’ve already achieved on your website. For example, if you haven’t ever received any purchases or add to carts, these options won’t be available to you
In such cases, it is best to first use “Traffic” as your campaign objective. Once you drive more people to your website, you’ll soon receive purchases as well and those options would become available to you.
Let’s discuss all three sections of this level individually:
Budgeting & Scheduling
This is the part where you specify your ad budget. You can choose between a daily budget or a lifetime budget:
Always try to invest in Facebook ads as much as you can (at least for the first time) to give them a fair chance. Facebook uses the allocated budget to maximally optimize your ad in order to successfully achieve your goals.
If you’re unsure about how much to spend on your Facebook ad, here are a few factors to consider to make an easy decision:
- Keep your objective in mind. Remember, sales-aimed ads will always cost more than awareness-aimed ads.
- Your product’s sale price is also an affecting factor here. Higher cost items generally require higher budgets to create effective ads
- If you have a past record of customer acquisition costs from earlier advertising campaigns, you should apply it here as well.
- Last but not the least, keep your marketing budget in check. Spend only what you can afford!
Audience
Next, you will have to choose an audience type for your ad.
We discussed creating retargeting or prospecting lists earlier in the Audiences section. You can now select any one from those lists, and further refine it by providing characteristics like ages, genders, languages etc:
After this, you ‘ll find the option of “detailed targeting”. You can use behaviours, interests or demographics to provide additional details of your audience here. For example:
You can simply use a custom or lookalike audience that you had created earlier, or create new audiences by adding a layer of more details over an existing audience:
Another way to target a prospective audience is to use “Connections” based audience. This refers to all the people who like your business page, or events etc. along with their Facebook friends as well.
Here are all the options you have under “Connections”:
Placement
Lastly, you have to choose a placement for your ad. You have to decide where you want your ad to appear and interact with audiences.
There are two ways to go about this. You can either choose a placement yourself, or you can let Facebook find a suitable placement for your ad.
I recommend using Facebook’s recommendation because that not only saves you from filling out another section, but also lets Facebook optimize your ad placement according to your set goal to produce the best results.
However, if you want to choose a placement yourself, you’ll have a number of options to choose from:
Since Facebook owns Instagram, you can also place your ads there in addition to Facebook’s own news feed in order to maximize brand exposure.
Step 6: Choose your Creative
This is the final step of your Facebook ad creation.
Facebook Ad Creative is the ad itself. You can design your ad however you want here by adding images, descriptions and call to action buttons. Facebook provides an ad preview on the side as well, so that you can keep an eye on the final look of your ad as you design it.
For example, here’s how an ad looks while you design it:
How to use the Funnel Marketing Strategy?
The funnel marketing strategy is based on the simple fact that all audiences require different forms and extents of encouragement to buy your products.
For example, someone who has never even heard of your brand would be more reluctant to make a purchase as compared to someone else who has already visited your site and browsed through your products.
Funnel advertising aims to start at the base level: generating traffic to your site. Once you’ve gained substantial traffic, you can retarget these past visitors through ads with “Add to Cart” objective.
Similarly, once you’ve got a significant number of people adding items to your cart, you can retarget them to encourage checkout (if they haven’t already).
This process not only provides you with a systematic way of advertising, but also saves your budget from being wasted on cold audiences.
For example, if you target prospecting audiences (who are relatively colder than existing audiences) through “Add to Cart” ads, they are very less likely to make a purchase. You need to first target them with “Traffic” ads in order to first introduce and showcase your brand.
This is exactly what funnel marketing strategy is for.
To understand the stages of this strategy, take a look at these individual funnel levels (top to bottom):
How much does Facebook Advertising Cost?
This is probably the most commonly asked question about Facebook advertising.
Contrary to the common belief, Facebook ads do not cost a lot.
In fact, you can begin advertising on Facebook even with a budget of $5!
As discussed earlier, your budget depends upon your business goals and ad objective.
According to a research by AdStage, the average costs-per-metric for Facebook ads in 2018 were recorded to be:
- $0.48 – cost per click (CPC)
- $11.20 – cost per thousand impressions (CPM)
- 2.36% – click through rate (CTR)
Best Facebook Ad types for Amazon Sellers
Now that we know how to set up Facebook ad campaigns successfully, let’s discuss some popular ad types to use for your campaigns.
I’ve created a list of the 6 most powerful ads that will help your business grow:
1. Facebook Image Card Ads
Image card ads are the simplest of all Facebook ad types but still highly effective.
Facebook users rarely want to make an effort to go through lengthy ad descriptions. This is why image card ads simply combine a picture and a call-to-action button to replace lengthy texts with descriptive images.
In fact, it is the simplicity of these ads that differentiates them from other ad types and presents a very clear call to action. The fact that their creative is quite similar to other Facebook posts makes them feel native to your feed and helps boost engagement.
Businesses can use these ads to showcase their products with a single image and draw traffic to their Amazon listing via customized call-to-action buttons.
For example:
2. Facebook Instant Experience Ads
This type of ads is particularly good for improving conversion rates. The best thing about them is that they cover a mobile’s entire screen and provide advertisers with ample space to showcase their products.
These ads load almost instantly and grab the audience’s attention right away without making them wait.
They are straightforward, to the point and visually compelling.
3. Facebook Carousel Ads
Carousel ads are perfect for sellers that want to advertise multiple products together. They appear right on the audience’s newsfeed, thus significantly improving click through rates!
Here’s what a Facebook carousel ad looks like:
Combined with attractive images and an engaging description, these ads can really take your campaign to the next level.
You can get creative with this ad type by showcasing a single product in multiple variations. Viewers would be able to interact and browse through the whole line of showcased products and would eventually visit your store to make a purchase.
They are also mobile friendly. Here’s an example of a carousel ad:
4. Facebook Video Ads
Many businesses are hesitant to create video ads simply because they don’t know the first thing about making videos.
However, video ads are probably one of the best ways to advertise your products professionally.
The conversion rates of these ads are awesome because viewers tend to trust businesses with video ads more.
In today’s mobile world, video ads are becoming more and more effective. They are also the best type of ads for creating retargetable audiences.
As far as the video making part is concerned, there are several user-friendly online software that you can use to create excellent videos.
However, if you don’t want to spend time and effort on video making, simply get someone else to do so. I like to use freelance video makers for my ads and they have been great to me so far!
Like I said, video ads are particularly effective for retargeting purposes. They can help you build custom audiences that can later be retargeted in future campaigns.
This is why putting in effort or money into these ads should not be considered as an expense, but as a profitable one-time investment.
Consider this example:
5. Facebook Dynamic Ads
Dynamic ads are basically used for remarketing purposes. They allow advertisers to reach out to existing audiences (of their own website or on their Amazon product listing) on Facebook, and target them with their ads.
You can further hyper-target by marketing different content to different types of audiences based on their preferences. For example, if someone had bought a gym gear item from you, you can market other gym-related items from your store.
Similarly, if someone had bought an item from pet-care category, you can target them with ads of similar products.
Here’s an example of a Facebook dynamic ad:
You can convert many one-time customers into regular buyers through dynamic ads.
Facebook users are always reluctant to leave the platform. This is why dynamic ads let you bring the shopping experience to audiences on Facebook.
In this way, they will be able to browse through your product store without actually having to leave Facebook.
6. Facebook Lead Ads
Lead ads are best to gather sign ups and customer information.
They are designed particularly to make mobile sign-ups easier. They do so by automatically filling out viewers’ contact information that they have provided to Facebook (including their email addresses).
This saves viewers’ time, thus making them more willing to sign up for newsletters and follow-up calls etc. This also provides businesses with great retargeting opportunities and allows them to improve customer interaction and expand customer-base.
For example, this is how these ads work:
6 Tried & Tested Tips to take your Facebook Ads to the Next Level
In the last section of this post, let me share a few factors that sellers usually overlook, but that nonetheless have a great impact on your ads’ success:
1. Create Engaging Ad Creative & Copy
Your ad’s appearance is responsible for your product’s first impression. If the audience sees an ad created with barely any effort, they are less likely to believe in the advertised product’s quality.
Choosing the right creative and messaging for your ad is vital. It should be in keeping with your product’s category as well as your marketing objective. This includes product photos, videos and descriptions as well.
Testing different creatives is important to land on a fool-proof creative that best achieves your business goals.
2. Keep a Check on your Tracking Pixel
This is extremely important.
The Facebook pixel is a major game changer when it comes to tracking down your ad’s reach, conversions, CTRs and overall success. It is the key to getting the most out of your Facebook advertising.
Make sure that you have activated your Facebook pixel on all necessary checkpoints: your Amazon product listing, your website, application and basically everywhere possible.
3. Improve ROI & Minimize Wasted Ad Spend by Refining your Targeting
Targeting the right audience is vital for your ad’s success.
Refine and narrow down your custom audiences as much as possible. Broader audience is less likely to generate conversions and they also cost more.
While refining your targeted audiences, keep the two factors of frequency and recency of purchases under consideration.
Another important thing to do here is to create as many segments of your audience as possible. Keep them organized. The reason behind is exactly what we discussed in funnel strategy: every audience requires a different type of push to make a purchase.
Instead of just targeting the entire audience with the same ad campaign, target each segment with suitable campaign objectives.
For example, create different segments for repeated purchasers, one-time purchasers and non purchasers. This will help improve the efficiency of your ads significantly.
4. Use A/B & Split Testing
Facebook split testing means to create different creatives for your ad and launch them all in order to learn what works best and with which audience.
This helps advertisers optimize their future campaigns to avoid past mistakes and generate faster, better results.
A/B testing your Facebook ads can significantly improve your progress rates. They save you both time and money that would otherwise have been wasted on fruitless campaigns.
Carrying out this testing before holidays is a great idea. It saves you the headache of figuring out what’s wrong with your ad later at a time when you could have been making massive sales.
5. Optimize your Facebook Ads for Video & Mobile
More and more sellers are starting to believe in the power of video ads.
In fact, 1 in 3 mobile shoppers consider videos to be the best way for them to discover new products!
In order to keep up with mobile and video trends, you need to optimize your ads accordingly. Here’s a few things you can do in this regard:
- Use organic as well as paid video content to attract audiences
- Keep video ads short and catchy
- Use mobile-friendly creative and copy. For example, shortened headlines, readable overlays etc.
6. Keep an Eye on your Competitors’ Facebook Ads
Last but not the least, it never hurts to keep an eye around.
Copying someone else’s idea is one thing but learning from a good idea and being inspired is another.
Facebook has made the task of auditing competitors’ ads much easier through its “Facebook Ad Library” section. This tool allows anyone to view all active ads on someone’s page. You can view:
- Page’s creation date
- Page’s name history
- All active as well as inactive ads on the page (You can even see how long each had has been running for)
All you have to do is to select the page you want to check, and then select “active ads” or “inactive ads” from the filter dropdown menu. You will then be able to see all ads from that page that fall under your chosen category.
For example:
This is a highly valuable tool that can help new sellers learn from big competitors and brands who are running successful Facebook ads.
Wrapping it Up – Making Progress with Facebook Ad Campaigns
If you managed to read through the entire post, congratulations! You can now easily:
- Set up a Facebook ad
- Build new audiences and retarget existing ones
- Choose suitable campaign objectives to achieve all your business goals
- Achieve maximum results in minimum budget
- Monitor your ad’s progress with the Facebook pixel
Trust me, this is all you need to know to run a powerful Facebook ad campaign. The key to maximize results is consistency. Don’t let initial setbacks shake your confidence.
If you invest some time into learning and experimenting with Facebook advertising, you will see major improvement in your conversion rates in no time.
