Using Facebook Ads to Drive Traffic to Your eCommerce Store: Best Practices

Danil Chernukha
ILLUMINATION
Published in
5 min readJun 29, 2023
Using Facebook Ads to Drive Traffic to Your eCommerce Store | vend.agency, Image by author, all rights reserved

Facebook dominates the social media landscape with its 2.95 billion monthly active users. In 2023, YouTube is behind with 2.6 billion monthly active users. These statistics justify that Facebook is the choice of over 93% of marketers for reaching out to potential audiences.

Because Facebook has such a large audience, marketing on Facebook by selecting the right audience can be complex, even for marketers who have been running Facebook ads for ages. However, with such an audience to reach, Facebook ads are the best choice for generating traffic and conversions on your eCommerce store.

Facebook Ads — Best Practices

Facebook ads are critical to driving traffic to your eCommerce store, but only if used correctly. So, you need to set the right audiences and select the most engaging times for marketing. And also try and test which content works best. These best practices can help boost traffic and get you the sales numbers.

So, here are the best practices for Facebook Ads in detail:

Use Meta Pixel For Data Analytics

Meta Pixel is a piece of code on your eCommerce website that allows you to track the user journey after they land on your page by clicking on a Facebook advertisement. An Episerver study revealed that 92% of customers do not purchase on their first visit. Also, according to another study, an average consumer visits a webpage at least nine times before purchasing the product. It is twice the average of 7 visits noted in 2019. This increase reveals that customers are faced with several choices for online purchases.

Therefore, the Meta Pixel is critical to understand the audience. It also helps in retargeting them so they can make that purchase decision rather than buying from the competitor’s website. If the customer journey reveals that the customer likes a specific collection or product, the ads could display the same product, so the brand stays on top of the mind.

A/B Testing

No matter how much money you invest in your Facebook advertisements, you cannot possibly gauge what the audience likes and reacts to more without testing. For example, you might feel that a “Visit Website” button can trigger more responses, but the A/B testing reveals that a “Learn More” button on the same ad gets more traffic.

You could also test out different headlines and ad copies to see which one performs the best. Another way testing helps is that it helps gauge the audience. If the audience converts more with a certain headline, it means that the headline is more effective than others, even if you feel that others are better.

Use Simple Images and Captions

Potential customers don’t visit Facebook to make a purchase. They scroll through their news feed to get updates from their friends, get to know about the latest fashion trends, and keep up with their interests. So, overly complex images and long captions don’t cut.

If the imagery is simple but eye-catching, it will work wonders on your traffic and sales figures. But even if the image is simple but the content is long, people won’t stick around to read it. So, make sure that the photo you post for ads does not have other elements distracting it. A plain background can work quite well as it will draw attention to the product.

Use Carousels for Advertising Multiple Products

When given multiple choices to select from, customers often click through. Statistics prove that the CTR of carousels is 300% higher than single images.

If you are a clothing brand, images from your collection in a carousel might drive the interest of the user. Also, if they don’t like one piece from the collection, another piece in the carousel might interest them, prompting them to visit the website.

Keep Tracking Ad Performance

Facebook ads are not the same for every brand. Every brand’s audience is different and reacts differently. So, it is critical to keep tracking the ad performance. If the ads perform well on weekends, you could allocate a higher budget to ads on weekends. Additionally, if you see one ad with the same picture perform better with a brand story, you know that you need to engage customers through it before they become loyal customers.

Also, one ad might work initially, but users might lose interest in the concept. So, you need to revamp your strategy, your ad copy, and your visuals to re-engage the customer with the brand. So, you should keep testing your ads and strategies.

Use a Lookalike Audience

As critical as it is to retarget people who have engaged with the ad and visited your website once, it is also critical to prospect new audiences. If you are reaching the right audience through a few ads, you could use the lookalike feature on Facebook ads to reach audiences that are similar to the ones the ad is working for.

So, if you choose an audience that is a 1% lookalike, it means that Facebook will show your ad to audiences most similar to the audience you are reaching currently. While this is a straightforward way to reach new audiences, a good practice is to explore the audience insights tab to make sure that you are reaching a narrowed-down audience, so the ad seems personalized. It also helps you to develop new ads based on the new audiences.

Final Words

Facebook is one of the top-most social media platforms. So, whether the eCommerce business is targeting a Gen Z audience on TikTok or a more refined audience on Instagram, Facebook ads are a must as well.

The best practices outlined in this article can help businesses to maximize the ROI for Facebook ads. Not just this, it can help businesses to discover new audiences, retarget those who have engaged, and even figure out which ad their audience likes.

A third critical point to note is that Facebook ads are always a work in progress. So, even if you are getting huge conversions from one ad, it is critical to test it out on other audiences or give the existing audience new content to sustain engagement levels.

Our website: https://vend.agency/

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Danil Chernukha
ILLUMINATION

CEO Vend Agency. Generating revenue for Ecommerce Shops, Online Schools, SaaS via Facebook Ads and TikTok.