Facebook is and will continue to be a top dog in the world of advertising ecommerce stores, so it is vital as a business owner that you understand the way Facebook advertising works to harness its power and to have an advantage over your competitors. 

We’re going to let you in on a bit of a secret here… it’s completely doable. You just need a little direction. And that’s what we’re giving you here—a place to start.

These aren’t foolproof methods that will send your sales sky-high guaranteed, but these tools will help you get back in control of your Facebook advertising and improve your sales, ad spend, and your customer’s journey. 

These tools allow you to effectively employ the closed-loop methodology of digital marketing in your campaigns to get new customers into your marketing sphere and continue interacting with the customers you already have. 

You can learn more about the closed-loop methodology here if you’re not already familiar, but in the meantime, check out the below to learn the 5 best Facebook advertising tools that will help you grow your ecommerce business. 

1. The Facebook Pixel 

Growing your conversion rate is probably your main goal as an ecommerce brand because, quite simply, more conversions = more money. In order to know what your conversion rate is, you need to know how many people are looking at your ads and how many of these views turn into purchases. 

This is where the Facebook pixel comes into play. 

The Facebook pixel is a piece of HTML code that you can embed into your website to gather data on the way users interact with your website. It will directly capture the Facebook and Instagram profiles of everyone who visits your website, makes a purchase, abandons items in their cart, as well as many other events that you can specify. 

The Facebook pixel is an essential tool for all ecommerce stores because it gives you an accurate picture of who is interested in your brand, which is the beginning of every successful advertising campaign— knowing your target audience! 

Where this gets even better with Facebook advertising is when you get into lookalike audiences, something we will cover more below, so keep reading! 

You can install a pixel onto your website easily right from Facebook. Read here for more instructions on how to do that. 

2. Using Lookalike Audiences to Scale Up High-Intent Acquisitions

The first step of getting customers to buy your products is to get customers into your marketing sphere in the first place. In marketing terms, this is known as acquisition. Ideally, you want all your acquisition efforts to be high-intent, meaning there is a high chance that the new customers you are acquiring will convert. 

The general reach of Facebook is outstandingly extensive, but only a small percentage of its users are your potential customers. This small percentage is the audience that you need to find and target with your ads.

Facebook helps you do this with their lookalike audience feature. This feature lets you take the data you’ve gathered from your pixel about your current customers to create a database of new users who may also be interested in your products based on parameters that you can establish. Facebook will find these new users for you and target them with your ads. 

If you set up this lookalike audience to mirror an audience you already know is interested in your brand, you will be targeting a brand new group of people who are likely to be interested as well. You know from the start that these new prospects are likely to convert because similar customers have done so already.

3. Using Interests to Find New Users

Another way that Facebook helps you find new users that are likely to be interested in your business is through their interests feature. This feature allows you to target users that have expressed a specific interest through their actions across Facebook. 

By narrowing down the sphere of Facebook users by interests, you can find a new group of prospects to target that is already interested in what your brand can offer them. The more strategically you’re able to do this, the more success you will have.  

4. Using Custom Audiences for Retargeting Campaigns

Facebook’s custom audiences is an incredibly useful tool that allows marketers and business owners narrow in on different groups of users that are already engaging with their ads and products. 

By using Facebook’s custom audience feature, you can create campaigns specifically for retargeting purposes. 

Retargeting keeps users who have shown an interest in your products or services engaged with your brand through reminders and incentives until they make a purchase, making it an essential part of any marketing effort.

One of the best ways to do this is by creating a custom audience that includes users who have viewed your page while excluding those who have made a purchase. This gives you a list of people who may be interested in your brand but haven’t made it across the line yet, a.k.a. the perfect list of people for retargeting campaigns! 

The same can be done for users who have abandoned items in their cart. You can create a custom audience to isolate these users and deliver ads designed to encourage them to go back and check out. 

How you customise your ads and build these campaigns will change business to business, but everyone should be using the custom audience tool to generate the best results for retargeting.

Users who have abandoned carts or have viewed a product page but not purchased are among the most likely audiences to purchase an item from a Facebook ad, so they’re audiences that you cannot afford to forget. 

5. Custom Audiences… Again! But for Retention This Time!

We can’t stress enough how amazing Facebook’s custom audience tool is. Not only is it an essential tool for setting up retargeting campaigns, but it is also crazy helpful when you want to set up campaigns specifically for retention as well. 

Retention keeps users engaged with your business after they’ve purchased because if they’ve bought once, they can buy again. We’ve said it once, and probably a hundred times more, the cheapest and most effective way of growing your customer base is by not losing the customers you already have.

You always need to keep your existing customers at the forefront of your mind and serve them before you go on to serve others. (If you owned a brick-and-mortar bakery, you would want to serve those lining up outside your shop before trying to get more people in line, right?) Previous purchasers are the most likely audience to convert again, so they are definitely worth the ad spend. 

Facebook’s custom audiences lets you isolate users who have purchased from you in the past so you can create custom campaigns designed to keep them engaged. 

These can be video ads that tell a brand story or ads designed to upsell products based on your customers’ previous purchases. This is up to you— Facebook just gives you the means for these ads to be seen by the right users. 

Bonus— Facebook’s Ad Library

Did you know that Facebook lets you easily see every ad that’s currently running on Facebook and Instagram, including your competitors? 

This is an excellent tool if you’re stuck for inspiration when building your ads or if you want to do some market research. To see these ads, simply click this link, or go to facebook.com/ad/library. This loads a page that looks just like a search engine. From here, you can search brands or keywords to view every relevant ad. You can even filter by impressions, locations, and platforms.

If All This fails…

Are you still feeling lost? Don’t have enough time to do this all yourself? Then it may be time to speak to an agency. 

If you’d like a free consultation with The Growth Guys to find out what an award-winning digital marketing agency can do for you, click here.