E-Commerce Facebook Ads: 8 Tips to Increase Sales for Online Sellers

First things first – you don’t need to be a charming or spectacularly business-savvy marketing expert to make Facebook advertising work for you.

On the contrary, e-commerce Facebook Ads are something that you can put into action quite quickly, without much experience, and at very little cost.

For those of you who haven’t heard so much about how Facebook advertising works or why it’s useful, you’ve come to the right place. And for those of you who do have some knowledge of Facebook advertising, you’ll find 8 top tips to increase your sales.

Keep reading to get it all!

Why you should use Facebook for advertising

There are numerous advantages for online retailers to use e-commerce Facebook ads, some perhaps more obvious than others. While reading through the reasons why you should use Facebook for advertising though, keep in mind that this is the Age of the Internet that we’re living in – and it’s still early on.

The influence of Facebook is enormous and continues to grow, which is the main reason that any/every e-commerce seller who’s striving for success should make Facebook advertising a key component of their marketing strategy.

Here’s a brief history of Facebook:

• Launched just 16 years ago in 2004
• Started Facebook Ads (and went mobile) in 2007
• Introduced the “Like” button in 2009
• Added video chat capabilities in 2011
• Went public in 2012
• Acquired WhatsApp in 2014
• Started supporting GIFs (super important) in 2015
• Announced Libra cryptocurrency in 2019

With that in mind, let’s dive into the top reasons why e-commerce Facebook ads are something you should take advantage of!

1. One-third of the world population is active on Facebook

First and foremost, it just makes sense on the face of it. If you’re running an online business, your customers will almost certainly be active on Facebook. When you consider the fact that roughly 70% of Americans use Facebook and spend an average of nearly 40 minutes on Facebook daily, it’s a no-brainer that it’s a prime way to reach your target audience.

Still not so sure about the advantage of increased market reach? Think about this: Facebook reported more than 1.73 billion daily active users in the first quarter of 2020, and more than 2.6 billion monthly active users. That’s nearly double the population of China, and 33% of the entire population of earth (7.8 billion people). All of these facts make it quite obvious that Facebook advertising offers e-commerce businesses with the possibility of reaching an audience they’ll be hard-pressed to find anywhere else.

2. Facebook advertising makes it easy to target specific audiences

Investing a portion of your business’s budget in marketing is important, but if you’re not focused on how you do it, you’ll be throwing money away. Yes, Facebook provides a massive audience at your fingertips, but the question remains: how can you target your Facebook advertising to reach the relevant people (or rather, the people who will find your goods & services relevant)?

Fortunately, this question has not been lost on the programmers over at Facebook. In response, they’ve made audience targeting an integral part of their e-commerce Facebook ads platform. You can target an exact audience by specifying a preferred age group, set of interests, patterns of behavior, and location.

If you’re not so familiar with how audience targeting works or who your target audience actually is, Facebook also provides a tool called Facebook Audience Insights that’s “designed to help marketers learn more about their target audiences, including aggregate information about geography, demographics, purchase behavior and more.”

Reaching your intended audience has never been easier!

3. Facebook advertising is cost-effective

Speaking of including social media marketing in your budget, it’s no secret that you’ll want to make your advertising strategy as cheap as possible. That’s not hard to do when you use Facebook advertising; with roughly $20-$40, you can reach an audience of around 1,000 people. When done right, this can help your online business drive down lead acquisition costs and even reduce the overall investment in marketing over the long-term. Plainly put, Facebook advertising is a good move for e-commerce businesses trying to save money (which is basically all e-commerce businesses).

4. Facebook advertising is easy to track and measure

It’s true that there’s no one-size-fits-all answer as to what makes a successful advertisement successful. But, what Facebook can do is show precise data on how your e-commerce Facebook ads perform.

That means you’ll get in-depth insights into how different campaigns do, how certain changes result in more conversions, how other changes increase click rates, and much more. By using those data points you can continuously find new ways to improve your e-commerce Facebook ads and get more bang for your buck.

Side note: Do you run a Shopify store? If so, you can easily track and measure your ad spend (including Facebook Ads) by using the BeProfit Shopify profit calculator.

BeProfit seamlessly syncs with top ad platforms – Facebook, Instagram, Google, Snapchat, and Tiktok – so you can accurately track your profit and expenses.

Your dashboard will give you a full breakdown of all your expenses including marketing, shipping, production, and more. Eliminate confusion and optimize your profit margins with this Shopify calculator.

Try BeProfit – Profit Tracker, here.

Better ads = better funding odds

The ability to track, measure and improve the performance of your Facebook ads will ultimately create one other notable advantage: increased chances of securing an e-commerce business loan.

Those detailed Facebook marketing performance reports are of great interest to lenders, as they also reflect the health of your business. E-commerce lenders that specifically work with Become use metrics like the return on investment (ROI) for your Facebook ads as an indicator of your business’s strength.

But why would lenders looking at your Facebook ads be a good thing? Simple, more details about your business’s financial health and stability means that lenders face less risk when lending and can offer even larger loan amounts, better interest rates, longer repayment periods, and so on.

Here’s a simple example:

Lender 1: looks at your credit score and monthly revenue. Your Credit score is excellent but your monthly revenue isn’t so strong – lender 1 decides not to fund your business.

Lender 2: Looks at your credit score, monthly revenue, Google and FB ads as well as your e-commerce platform sales. Despite your monthly revenue not being strong, lender 2 finds that your ads are doing well and sees potential in your business. Lender 2 decides to fund your business.

Using API technology, Become is able to gather data from multiple metrics to create an accurate picture of your business for lenders to assess. When you apply for e-commerce loans through Become, you’ll be asked to link your Facebook Ad account, provide other basic business info, and then let technology do its magic so that you can get matched with the e-commerce funding provider best-fit to your business’s needs.

See if you qualify

By now, you should be asking how to set up a Facebook advertising strategy for your online business. We get to that just below, keep reading!

Side note: While we aren’t an e-commerce seller, here at Become we also use Facebook Ads to introduce business owners to our online lending marketplace where they can find the business loans that best fit their needs. The list above is just a small sample of the reasons that Facebook Ads work for us – we touch on a few more in our Facebook advertising tips below.

How to set up Facebook Ads

Setting up an e-commerce Facebook Ads account is a fast and easy process that you can complete in a matter of minutes. Before anything, you’ll need to make sure you have a Facebook Business Manager account since all of the following steps can only be taken from your Business Manager account. Once you’re ready in that regard, Facebook outlines the process like this…

Steps to set up a Facebook Ads account:

1. Go to Business Settings.
2. Click Accounts and click Ad Accounts.
3. Click + Add.
4. Choose Add Ad Account.
5. Follow the prompts to select people and access levels.

8 Facebook advertising tips for e-commerce sellers

If you’re looking to use Facebook Ads to increase your e-commerce sales, look no further. Just below, we list the top 8 ways that your online business can improve sales. Scroll down!

Here are the top 8 Facebook advertising tips for e-commerce sellers:

1. Focus on mobile users
2. Be creative and try different kinds of ads
3. Check your competitors’ strategies
4. Look for new trends, but be selective
5. Use short-and-sweet videos
6. Convert high-quality content into ads
7. Track qualitative metrics
8. Search around for friendly insights

1. Focus on mobile users

An astonishing 98.2% of Facebook users around the world are accessing the platform on their mobile phones. There’s no question that tailoring your e-commerce Facebook ads to be optimized for mobile viewing is absolutely a must-do.

Start off by making your ads fit mobile screen dimensions (taller than they are wide, usually an aspect ratio of between 100×400 and 400×100). Then make sure the images are bright and eye-catching. You’ll also want to make the selling point stand out and include a clear call to action.

2. Be creative and try different kinds of ads

There’s no shortage of places and ways to implement your Facebook advertising strategy – explore the different options available to you! Places to post Facebook Ads include messenger inbox, the news feed, the right column, and more. Depending on the objective of your e-commerce Facebook Ads you may prefer certain placements over others.

Be sure to also try different ad formats including video ads, photo ads, carousel ads, dynamic product ads, lead form ads, slideshow ads, and more. Take it from Jonathan Aufray over at Growth Hackers who highlights the fact that different ad formats have different impacts:

“Videos are better for views, engagement (Likes and comments) but images are actually better for clicks. People will watch videos and spend more time watching your ads but images are more easily scannable.”

3. Check out your competitors’ strategies

Why should you reinvent the wheel when you can simply improve on it? One of the top ways to disrupt the market is to find what sort of Facebook advertising strategy (or strategies) are working well for your competitors and then do it even better than them!

Not only will it save you the time and effort of coming up with an entirely new Facebook advertising idea on your own, but (if done right) you can also gain the attention and business of your competitors’ customers. Of course, you won’t want to be piggy-backing on every successful ad that your competition comes out with. But, there’s no underestimating the importance of staying aware of how other businesses in your industry are marketing themselves on Facebook as a way to keep your own Facebook advertising strategy fresh and attractive.

4. Look for new trends, but be selective

Similarly to the point above about competitor advertising practices, it’s important to make sure that your e-commerce Facebook Ads are tuned-in to current trends and at the same time to keep your business from looking like just another sheep in the flock.

Take the current coronavirus crisis as an example. Many businesses started tuning their e-commerce Facebook Ads to address the real concerns relating to COVID-19 outbreaks and shutdowns, but not all of them offered real value for the audience. In the immediate aftermath of coronavirus, a significant amount of Facebook advertising had a message basically saying “Hey, we also know what’s going on!” It’s nice, but not always practical in terms of bringing in leads.

Relating your Facebook Ads to current trends is useful and important, but you must be careful to ensure that you’re still providing your audience with real value. Creating campaigns just because others are doing it is a quick way to tell your audience that you’re just riding the wave to capitalize on it. Don’t do that!

5. Use short-and-sweet videos

This is one of the most fundamental Facebook advertising tips we can give. Video ads are a powerful tool to begin with, generating 1,200% more shares than text and images combined, and leading 64% of consumers to make a purchase after watching a branded social video. But one of the key parts of a successful video ad is to ensure that the audience doesn’t lose focus. The best way to avoid that? Keep it concise! In fact, 66% of video ads at the end of 2019 were just 30 seconds long.

Of course, keeping your e-commerce Facebook Ads short means being super efficient with what time you do have. You’ll want to be careful not to jam too much info into your video ads – relay the necessary information and then you can provide more details in the video description.

6. Convert high-quality content into ads

Of all these Facebook advertising tips, this one may be the quickest to put into action for the average e-commerce business owner. An easy way to come up with strong e-commerce Facebook Ads is to take the content (or posts) that audiences connect & engage with the most and turn them into advertisements. We know that the more the audience relates to an ad, the more likely it is for that ad to succeed. Don’t think too hard – use what’s already working for you!

And, surprise surprise, Facebook advertising has made that simple to do with the ‘Boost Post’ button.

7. Track qualitative metrics

When it comes to developing a precise Facebook advertising strategy, tracking your Facebook advertising metrics is key. You don’t need to be an expert either, although having someone good at data analysis on your team will help.

The basic idea here is to understand what you’re really getting back in exchange for the money you’re putting into running Facebook advertising campaigns. Metrics to keep an eye on include:

• Engagement
• Clicks
• Impressions
• Reach
• Click through rate (CTR)
• Cost per click (CPC)
• Cost per action (CPA)

Keeping track of those metrics alone is not going to cut it – it’s also important to set realistic goals for improving your e-commerce Facebook Ads metrics. In order to do that, you’ll also need to look at industry benchmarks, patterns in how your metrics progress over time, and the way the broader economic health of your business plays into the worthiness of the investment in Facebook advertising.

8. Search around for friendly insights

If you’re brand new to the world of e-commerce Facebook Ads, one of the best ways to get started is to look for places where people who are more experienced can lend you their advice.

You can find plenty of groups on Facebook, for example, where people congregate to share best practices in Facebook advertising. Youtube is another extremely valuable resource for learning about how you can get off on the right foot with your Facebook advertising strategy. And one other way to go about it is to reach out to other people in the e-commerce community who aren’t direct competitors, but who can give you some insights into how they developed their own Facebook advertising strategies.

Now go for it!

The world of e-commerce Facebook Ads is full of possibilities, so don’t hesitate to get creative with how you advertise, where you advertise, and who you reach out to for guidance. Get started today with Facebook advertising and help your e-commerce business grow its brand, its reach, and its sales. And be sure to bookmark this article for you to refer back to as you go about putting these Facebook advertising tips into action!