How to Run Facebook Ads for Ecommerce – Facebook Custom Audiences

Hey, everyone is Julie Bee here with BeeSmart Social Media with another tip for your e-commerce brand.  E-commerce and ecommerce advertising has come a long way over the past 10 years, and we use it for several of our eCommerce clients. Now, we’re going to talk today about the Facebook and Instagram platforms. When we’re talking about running ads for an eCommerce store, we really like to focus on two very specific types of ads, but it’s really more about the audience around the ad,  not necessarily the type of ad itself.

Utilize Your Email List

The first type of audience that’s really great is if you have an email list. You can actually upload that email list into your Facebook audience account. That enables you to show ads on a different platform to your email list. It’s good to show advertisements and promotions in various places, not just an email.  Not all of us check our email and not all of us look at email newsletters from even our most favorite brands. Sometimes we get busy. We don’t have a chance to look at those emails. Facebook email retargeting  gives you the ability to show your ads to them on social channels, and also on other sponsored pages.

Facebook Pixel & How To Run Facebook Ads for Ecommerce

The other type of retargeting we really like to do involves using your Facebook pixel. If you don’t have a pixel on your website set up already, I highly recommend you get that set up. A pixel gives you the ability to retarget people who have come to your website from any source. You can retarget people who have come to your website through a Google ad or through search engine optimization. Maybe somebody found your website directly through a friend or family member and they weren’t willing to purchase yet. So they left. The idea with retargeting is that no matter where they come from, once they leave your site, you can show them ads.

Benefits of Retargeting

There’s a lot of different things you could do with that information. For example, maybe you only want to show ads to people who have been to your site within the past three days. Or maybe within the past 60 days. There’s a lot of options and you can narrow it down based on your other types of targeting options such as location interest. Having that pixel on your site enables you to be able to say, “Okay, I want to retarget people who came to my site within the past week, went to this page, but didn’t purchase anything.” That’s a really powerful group to be able to retarget to. Clearly they showed interest in something, but for whatever reason they left. They didn’t purchase. It’s possible they might’ve just gotten busy and forgotten about it. A lot of the times I hear some, some feedback on this that it’s a little bit creepy. It’s a little bit stalkerish. I understand that. I get that. But it’s also the nature of the world we live in. I do think that it’s less creepy than, when you’re talking about something with your spouse and then an ad for that thing shows up on Facebook. It’s less creepy than that because at least these people have already been to your site. They’ve already seen your site and they’re familiar with your brand. You’re just trying to get them to come back at a time, that is more convenient for them to make a purchase.

Facebook Business Manager

To recap, make sure you have your Facebook Business Manager set up, and also put a Facebook pixel on your website. Those are the two tools you really need to kind of do both of these types of advertising. These two tips about your advertising can make your advertising more effective. It can make your entire marketing plan more effective. So if you’d like to learn more, if you have questions about either one of these things or anything really about e-commerce and social media marketing, don’t hesitate to reach out. We’re happy to answer your questions. And I look forward to helping your business grow.