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7 Tips to Getting Started with Facebook Advertising for your online store
Updated: Dec 17, 2021
How to get set up for successful ad campaigns
So you think you're ready to start running Facebook Ads for your online store.
While this can be an exciting development for many store owners, I'm going to stop you right here and now and ask you if you are really ready. Like really truly ready to go all in and genuinely invest in the time and effort and money to make this work.
Most store owners are not ready for this. In fact the majority of store owners I see tend to put some money into a boosted post and then when they aren't flooded with sales they throw their hands up in the air and proclaim that 'facebook ads didn't work for me'.
Facebook advertising is far more than running boosted posts and traffic campaigns. They also aren't a silver bullet for any underlying issues in your store.
They take time often months to get right, and they take money that you are willing to invest in testing all the different options of copy, creative, campaign types and structure to find your winners. However once you find your winners, then you will start seeing the returns that Facebook Advertising can give you.
So here is a rundown of all the things you need to have ready before really getting down and dirty with paid advertising.
Have You Got Business Manager Set Up Correctly?
Facebook Ad strategy requires more than just boosting posts and using ads manager on your phone.
For long term success, you are going to need the following set up in Facebook Business Manager.
Set up your ad account
Link it to your facebook and instagram pages
Set up and connect your pixel
Set up events tracking
Set up saved and custom audiences
Verify your website
Add additional people to your pages and accounts
Set up Commerce Manager and catalogues
Turn on 2 Factor Authentication
Facebook also has lots of resources to step you through your account set up which you can find over at: https://business.facebook.com/overview
Do you have your pixel set up and installed correctly on your website with aggregated events completed?
The facebook pixel is the tracking code on your website that tells you what actions visitors are taking when there are on your site.
Without this installed and set up you are essentially flying blind.
You won’t be able to build custom audiences and therefore retarget visitors who have abandoned their cart or been on your sales page but not purchased from you yet.
You will also need to set up aggregated events management found in the ‘events’ section in your ad account.
In here you essentially rank the events you wish facebook to track from the most important to the least important.
Facebook will know to optimise and report on the events you have ranked as the most important.
Do you have interest based audiences set up and saved that align with your customer avatar?
You should aim to have at least 3-5 (sometimes more) cold interest based audiences to use in you ad campaigns, along with a lookalike audience you can use on its own or within your cold interest based audience.
In addition you can set up custom audiences such as people who visited you website, added to cart, purchased and followed you on socials.
This will be a smaller audience already familiar with your brand that you can use in conversion and retargeting campaigns.
Do you know which conversion objectives you should be optimising for to suit your needs?
There are a lot of things you can ask facebook to do in ad campaigns.
You can run a campaign for reach, brand awareness, post engagement, traffic and purchases just to name a few.
All of this can be confusing and overwhelming for people but you do need to understand what you are asking facebook to do for you.
A traffic campaign will simply tell facebook to send traffic to your website – this might be good quality traffic or it could be poor quality traffic. Most likely a bit of both, what this doesn’t guarantee is that any of the traffic will purchase you product/opt in to you list or buy your service.
Whereas a conversion campaign set up for purchases or for people to hit a specific webpage will generate less traffic but will be better quality traffic and more likely to convert in the way you wish.
Have you got custom audiences set up for retargeting?
Your custom audiences are your warm audiences, and in business these are the people most likely to buy from you.
They already have an awareness of your business, know who you are and what you are about.
This is the low hanging fruit and if you do not have custom audiences set up you are missing out on getting your business directly in front of these people.
Remember it takes on average 5-7 interactions with your brand before people buy, so you need to be getting in front of them at different stages and with different ads.
What you show them as a cold prospect needs to be different to what you show them as a warm prospect.
Is you catalogue set up for DPA ads?
When we talk about low hanging fruit this is the lowest of the low.
Having your catalogue set up and linked to your advertising account allows you to run ads to people who have been in your store and added to cart but not purchased.
Catalogue ads show potential buyers the exact products they were looking at and had added to their carts but not purchased.
Are you across the core metrics that need to be tracked so you can troubleshoot any issues with your campaigns and sales funnels?
Facebook can tell you everything you need to know about your campaigns – the reach, the frequency, click through rate, cost per acquisition and return on ad spend.
If you do not know how to find these metrics and what they mean, then you won’t be able to troubleshoot any issues with the audiences, the creative, the offer etc.
Plus you won’t be able to scale your campaigns for greater success.
If you want to run ads for your online store, but aren't sure where to start make sure you grab our FREE Ad strategy swipe file. In this guide I will show you the exact strategy we use in the agency to grow our clients brand awareness and increase sales in their online store.
