An essential part of marketing is selling your products to those who have seen them but haven’t made a purchase yet. These people are aware of your offerings but just haven’t committed to spending any money. You can retarget this group of potential customers by using dynamic product adverts on social media.
The majority of your website visitors won’t actually buy anything – they need a little more persuasion or time to commit to a purchase. You can use Facebook and Instagram to remarket your products and services to this group of users to give them a slight nudge.
What are dynamic product adverts?
Dynamic product ads are targeted towards individuals who have visited your site, browsed your range of products and then left without making a purchase. This audience knows what you have to offer, but they need more encouragement to go through with their decision to buy.
Dynamic product ads are tailor-made for each individual and showcase the exact products that they’ve viewed. Ever wondered how the toaster you were looking at online keeps showing up on your social media? That’s dynamic product advertising in action.
These adverts remind the user of your product and increase the chance of them buying it next time they visit your website. Sometimes these ads show reviews, highlight special offers and focus on key selling points, such as free delivery.
These dynamic products ads are also likely to be the most profitable Facebook adverts that you run if they are set up correctly. Here’s how to do that…
Set up Facebook Pixel
The Facebook Pixel is an analytics tool that measures the actions taken by people engaging with your channel. It lets you look at their behaviour and see how your adverts are performing.
You can create a Facebook Pixel by visiting Facebook Ads Manager, clicking on the ‘Pixels’ tab and selecting ‘Create Pixel’. This will create a line of code that you can enter into the header of each page of your website to track your users’ behaviour. Find out how to set up a Facebook Pixel properly.
The Facebook Pixel ensures that your adverts are relevant to your audience. You can see if your Pixel code is working properly by installing the Chrome plugin called Facebook Pixel Helper.
Visit a webpage that you want to check and click on the Facebook Pixel Helper icon – it will show you what actions are working on the page. Your ad blocker needs to be disabled when using the plugin otherwise it will block the Pixel.
Create a product feed
This is a page on your website that contains all of the information that Facebook requires for your products. This information includes product names, the quantity of stock, price, images and shipping details.
This information is used by Facebook to automatically create the ads for the products that people have viewed. There are a few ways to create a product feed, you just need to choose the right one for your needs and your website.
Shopify offers two plugins that work well with most e-commerce sites. Their first plugin, Flexify, works best on sites with fewer than 100 products.
If you have a WordPress website, there are a few options available to you but the paid ones are the best, such as PixelYourSite. If you own a bespoke e-commerce store, speak to your web developers about building product feed for Facebook, or build a manual feed using Google Sheets and upload it to Facebook Business Manager yourself.
Once your product feed is complete and installed, you’ll receive a .txt link – add this link to your Facebook Business Manager to begin feeding data from the feed to Facebook.
Set up your Facebook catalog
A Facebook catalog contains the relevant information for the products to be displayed in adverts. This catalog will keep track of the products you sell, be used to create targeted ads and show users your product inventory.
To create the catalog, open Facebook Business Manager and click the menu icon in the top left corner. Select ‘Catalogs’ under the ‘Assets’ column, then click ‘Create Catalog’. Choose what catalog type you’d like (such as e-commerce) and click ‘Next’.
Next, select your business name from the dropdown menu, add a name for your catalog and click ‘Create’. Once your catalog has been created, click on ‘View Catalog’ to open the Catalog Manager homepage.
Then, you need to set up your product feed by opening the ‘Data Sources’ tab at the top of the page. Select ‘Add Data Source’ on the right-hand side. On the following page, choose the ‘Set a Schedule’ option to select when you want your feed to update. If your stocks change often, this is the best option to select.
Once this is complete, scroll down to the ‘Add a Data Feed URL’ section and paste your product feed URL in the box. If your product feed is not password-protected, then you can ignore the password field.
The next step is to choose how often you want your feed to update. Then finally, enter your feed name and choose the relevant currency, then click ‘Upload’. It might take a while for your feed to upload depending on how large your product list is.
The final stage of setting up the Facebook catalog involves connecting it to the right Facebook Pixel source. Click on the blue ‘Connect Event Source’ button. In the next window, choose the relevant Facebook Pixel for your campaign, or search for it using the search bar. This will complete your product catalog setup.
Create your Facebook dynamic product ads campaign
Open your Facebook Ads Manager and click on ‘Create’. Then, click on ‘Select Quick Creation’ to open the parameters window. Name your campaign and select ‘Auction’ as the buying type.
Choose ‘Catalog Sales’ as the campaign objective and select the relevant catalog that you want to advertise. Finally, click ‘Save to Draft’ to add the draft campaign to your Ads Manager.
Next, you can turn on the ‘Budget Optimization’ slider and set your campaign budget. Once this is complete, click on the small arrow in the top right and choose ‘Close’ to return to the main Ads Manager window.
The next step in the process is to create the Ad Set level by clicking on the ‘Ad Sets’ tab. Select the checkbox next to the Ad Set name and click on the pencil icon to open the audience options sidebar.
In the ‘Promoted Products’ section of this sidebar, choose the products you want to advertise and then set your budget and schedule in the section below. Scroll down to the audience section and select the relevant option for your needs, such as ‘Viewed or Added to Cart But Not Purchased’.
In the placement section, select ‘Automatic Placements’ as it is the recommended option. In the ‘Optimization & Delivery’ section, you can test different options but if you’re just setting it up for the first time, the best option for ‘Optimization for Ad Delivery’ is ‘Link Clicks’.
Once this process is completed, click the arrow in a circle at the top left of the sidebar to close it. Now you’re ready to create and activate your ad.
To get started, click on the ‘Ads for Campaign’ tab at the top and select the ‘Ad Name’ checkbox for the correct ad you want to run – you can also activate the little blue slider switch to see that the right ad is on. Once again, click the pencil icon on the right-hand side to show the ad options.
In the ‘Identity’ section, choose your Facebook page or Instagram account. In the ‘Creative’ section below, choose ‘Ad With Multiple Images in a Carousel’. These images will be automatically pulled from your website.
If you scroll down further, you’ll find a range of options for customising your advert. You can add your own text, choose what information you want to pull from your dynamic feed and choose your preferred call-to-action button.
Continue down and make sure that your Facebook Pixel is selected (by activating the small blue slider switch), then, when you’re done you can click ‘Publish’. Facebook will quickly review your ad and then publish it shortly afterwards.
Carousel ads are generally the most successful when targeting people who have viewed products on your website. They showcase all the products that the individual has previously seen on your site. However, you may want to test using carousel ads versus single image ads and see which option works best for your business.
And that’s that! You’ve successfully set up a dynamic product ad campaign on Facebook and Instagram. It’s a good idea to keep your first dynamic ad campaign running for a week or so to get some good initial data into your ad account. Afterwards, you can play around with different options and see which works best for your business.
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