Facebook Ads have become a great tool for businesses of all shapes and sizes to market their products online. Whether you are a small online hobby shop or a full-grown corporation, Facebook Ads are a cost-effective way to reach your target audience.
It doesn't matter if you are looking to boost your brand awareness or increase your conversions; Facebook Ads can help you to reach your goals!
However, if you don't believe me, this article is for you!
Here, you will find 11 reasons why every ecommerce business should use Facebook Ads.
For starters, let's take a look at what Facebook Ads are:
What are Facebook Ads?
Facebook Ads is a popular advertising platform that forms a way to market your business, drive traffic, and generate revenue. Using it, you can reach a wide range of people that are interested in your products.
If you have never used Facebook Ads before, you might be unsure about their actual effect on your business. However, let me tell you that if you know what you are doing, there is actually quite a bit you can do with the platform!
For example, you might think that Facebook Ads only allows you to place ads on Facebook itself. In reality, this is not true! Using Facebook Ads, you can place ads on various other placements like Instagram, Messenger, and more!
Tip: Are you interested in taking a look at some more Facebook Ad examples? If so, you will find 13 more in this article!
If you want to place ads in front of your target audience based on their location, age, interests, and more, you can purchase and manage Facebook Ads through Facebook's Ads Manager.
In the Ads Manager, you can set up Facebook Ad campaigns with options for the:
- Campaign objective
- Audience selection
- Budget
- Placement
Once you have these setup, you can create your own social media ad using:
- The product image or video
- An ad description
- A headline
- A call to action
- And a destination URL
You can create various types of Facebook Ads, but the most important ones for beginners are video ads and image ads.
As the name says, a video ad promotes the product or service with a video, and an image ad promotes a product or service with an image.
If you are interested in a beginner's guide telling you how to get started with Facebook Ads and run your first ad, simply check out this article here!
11 reasons why you need Facebook Ads for your ecommerce store
Now that you know a bit about Facebook Ads, we can jump into the 11 reasons why every ecommerce store should use them!
1. Promote products
First and foremost, you should use Facebook Ads to promote your products!
As an ecommerce store, it's crucial to get your products out there into the open world.
You can't expect to open up an ecommerce store that will generate thousands of dollars in revenue simply by having a website on the internet.
All ecommerce stores need to do some kind of marketing to get their products in front of their customers.
And guess what?
Facebook Ads is one of the best online marketing platforms to do exactly that; promoting your products!
Here is how it works.
First, you create a great Facebook ad for your product, like this one:
Then, if enough people buy your product after seeing the Facebook ad, you will be left with a profit in the end!
Note: Are you interested in finding out how profitable you are or will be with your product? If so, check out our profit margin calculator here!
2. Easily reach a detailed market
If you are a beginner with using Facebook Ads, you might think that your ad will get shown to any random Facebook user.
However, this is far from the truth!
In reality, you can set up your Facebook Ads to target a very specific part of Facebook (or Instagram) users.
In other words, if you know your target audience, you can target them with Facebook Ads! (And if you don’t know them, then you can check out this article here)
Facebook collects a lot of data from each user. And with that, I mean A LOT!
The platform can collect up to 52.000 data points for each user!
Because of this, you can fine-tune the target audience based on conversion goal, location, age, gender, demographics, interests, behavior, and language.
Due to these extensive targeting possibilities, Facebook Ads can provide a quick and effective way for you to reach your target audience.
3. Separate cold and warm audiences
Being able to separate your cold and warm audiences is another benefit of the extensive targeting possibilities of Facebook Ads.
Before we get into detail here, let me quickly explain the concept of cold and warm audiences first.
Cold audiences are all people who have not heard of or interacted with your brand, products, or social media accounts.
Meanwhile, your warm audience consists of all people who have already seen or know about your brand, products, or social media accounts. For example, they might have already seen a Facebook ad of yours!
The marketing rule of 7 says that people have to see or hear about your ad at least seven times before they make a purchase. Therefore, warm audiences will often have a higher chance of making an order from your ecommerce store.
By being able to separate cold and warm audiences in your Facebook ad campaigns, you are able to create ads specifically with those audiences in mind!
And this is why Facebook Ads is great for the following:
4. Retargeting
Retargeting!
By creating Facebook ads specifically for your warm audience, you are able to retarget those potential customers.
As I said, this is possible because Facebook keeps track of everything. They not only follow consumers on their own platform, but they also keep a watch on people's behavior after they have clicked on your ad!
For example, Facebook keeps track of the visit time, add to carts, initiate checkouts, newsletter signups, product views, and buys. (However, this is only the case if you have a Meta Pixel installed on your ecommerce store!)
Related article: Learn more about the benefits of installing a Meta Pixel here. That article will also go in-depth on how to install it correctly!
You can use all of this data to your advantage with retargeting. For example, you can make tailored ads specifically for people who added your product to their cart but didn’t initiate checkout or purchase yet:
This allows you to show a certain audience a retargeting ad, like this one:
5. Get more product reviews
Good product reviews are known to increase your conversion rate since they show social proof and other happy customers.
However, getting product reviews from your customers isn't always an easy task.
Customers won't often go back to your product page after their purchase to write a product review. Sometimes, it's not because they don't want to write a review, but because they don't know you will appreciate it or they have simply forgotten to do it.
The majority of customers will only write a product review if they are reminded or asked to do so.
Using Facebook Ads, you can get more product reviews by creating specific ads for people who have already made a purchase.
In these ads, you could ask them to leave a product review for you, and you can even give them a discount code in return!
Note: Check out more ways to get product reviews for your ecommerce store here!
Doing this is a small effort. Besides that, it's cheap to do as well since the audience that has already purchased your product will be one of the smallest custom audiences you will have.
In conclusion, it's an easy and effective strategy to boost your product reviews!
6. Use Facebook's artificial intelligence
Facebook wants to make money. Therefore, it makes sense that Facebook wants you to spend as much money as possible on Facebook Ads.
But how do they accomplish this?
Well, they don't try to do this by selling you overpriced ads.
Instead, Facebook develops systems and tools that are aimed to make it easier for you to make a profit using Facebook Ads.
Because if you are profitable with Facebook Ads, you will continue using them, and you will spend more money on them!
As such, Facebook has been spending years developing its AI system for Facebook Ads. The goal of this system is to predict which users will take which actions.
After years of development, this system has become extremely good and brings along many benefits for using Facebook Ads.
Because Facebook kind of knows which people will take which actions, you are able to choose a marketing objective at the start of setting up your Facebook ad campaign:
Do you want people to like your post? Select the engagement objective.
Or do you want people to buy your product? In that case, you can select the conversions objective.
And as you can see, those aren’t the only marketing objectives!
If you want to learn more about how Facebook uses machine learning and AI to deliver its ads, check out this article.
7. Lookalike Audiences
Here is another reason why you should use Facebook Ads for your ecommerce store, Lookalike Audiences.
Lookalike Audiences are one of Facebook Ads' most powerful features.
The feature uses Facebook's Artificial Intelligence, which I talked about earlier, to generate new audiences that are likely to behave similarly to a sample audience that you provide.
In simple terms, if you give Facebook an audience of people that have bought something from your store, Facebook will generate a new audience that you can target with people that ‘look like' your customers.
Therefore, the people in this audience will have a high chance of making a purchase as well!
Furthermore, you should know that Lookalike Audiences can be used for various sample audiences.
For example, if you don't have a lot of paying customers yet, you can also make Lookalike Audiences for all people who have viewed your content:
By utilizing this feature, you will likely be able to lower your Cost per Content View and therefore your Cost per Purchase!
Facebook can even take the value of each event into account, so characteristics of people who have viewed content and later made a purchase will have a higher weight than people who have viewed content and left afterward!
If you are interested in Lookalike Audiences, you can read more about them here.
8. Test different ad variations and find the best performing one
As said, Facebook tries to develop all kinds of tools that increase your chances of being profitable.
One of these tools is that you are able to test different ad variations and find the best-performing one.
When creating your ad under the “Ad Creative” section, you can add options (variations) for all of your ad components:
By doing this, Facebook will automatically test all of the combinations of options at the start of your campaign and gradually optimize towards the best-performing one.
Sounds awesome, right?
9. Track your ad campaign performance in real-time
When advertising on Facebook, you will see the Facebook Ads Manager dashboard overview, which looks like this:
Here, you will be able to track the performance of your ad campaign in real-time.
As such, you will be able to easily see metrics like:
- Impressions
- Click-Through Rate
- Cost per Click
- Cost per 1000 Impressions
- Cost per Purchase
- And more!
By analyzing these metrics, you will be able to easily see which ads are profitable and which ones are not!
But that's not all.
You will be able to see why some ads are profitable, and why others aren't.
For example, some ads will attract people who just want to take a look at your product page, while others will spark a genuine interest for people in your product, which leads to more purchases.
10. Stop and start any time
When a Facebook ad is not performing as you have expected, you won't have to worry about wasting ad budget.
Facebook allows you to stop and start ads at any time!
So, if you see an ad that isn't performing well at all, you can always decide to stop it by clicking the on/off button:
Furthermore, Facebook allows you to set up certain rules. This way, an ad will automatically turn off when a certain metric of your choice is underperforming.
Similarly, you can choose to automatically increase your campaign's ad budget when the metrics are looking great!
11. Advertise on multiple platforms
When deciding on whether or not to use Facebook Ads for your ecommerce store, you may think that the ads you will create will only appear on Facebook.
However, that's not true!
Since Facebook owns Instagram, it is also possible to place ads on the Instagram feed, stories, and more using Facebook Ads. Besides this, you will have even more placement options, such as on the Audience Network and Messenger platforms.
If you are new to advertising with Facebook Ads and you can't choose where to place your ads, I recommend starting off with using the Facebook News Feed and the Instagram Feed.
These are often the most popular ad placements and will get you good results.
Don’t forget that you don’t need to combine them in one adset; you can also split it up into two adsets with the same targeting, but both on a different news feed!
How do you get started with Facebook Ads for ecommerce?
There you have it! 11 reasons to start using Facebook Ads for your ecommerce store.
I hope you are excited about using Facebook Ads now as well. If so, then pay extra attention now because I will show you how you can get started with Facebook Ads!
When seeing the Facebook Ads Manager dashboard for the first time, it may look very complex.
However, after spending some time using it, you will realize that it's not so scary after all.
Creating and running your first Facebook ad campaign is actually pretty simple if you follow the proper steps. Here they are:
- Create a new ad campaign
- Choose a campaign objective
- Set up your campaign settings
- Name your ad set and select a conversion event
- Set your daily ad set budget
- Select the audience
- Select the placements
- Continue with the ad setup
- Create your ad under the ‘Ad Creative' section
- Publish your ad
Unfortunately, the details of these steps will be too much to cover in this article.
So, if you are looking for a detailed beginner's guide where all of these steps and more are explained in detail, simply check out our article here!
This step-by-step Facebook Ads beginners guide will cover everything you need to know about starting your first Facebook Ads campaign.
From the working principle of Facebook Ads, to the payment methods, to the steps of creating your first Facebook Ad, everything will be covered!
Conclusion
With billions of users on Facebook, Facebook Ads have become an extremely valuable marketing tool.
No matter what the niche of your ecommerce store is, there is a good chance that you will be able to greatly benefit from Facebook's data-driven approach.
Facebook Ads allow you to promote your products quickly and with high efficiency.
So, what are you waiting for?
Why not start using Facebook Ads for your ecommerce store today?
If you're still second-guessing now, then check out this Google Ads vs. Facebook Ads comparison article here.
And remember that if you are interested in more articles about Facebook Ads like this one, we have plenty! For instance, check out the articles I mentioned below!
Good luck with your ecommerce store, and have a great rest of your day!
