Is Social Media shifting the advertising landscape?
With an ever increasing amount of time spent on the internet, it’s estimated that any one person picks up their phone and checks Facebook an astonishing 14 times a day and stays on average just over 2 minutes each time. Do you know what that means? There’s an opportunity to promote and sell your products to each person for 30 minutes every day! And that is just one Social Media platform.
Let me explain.
With Facebook Dynamic Ads, advertisers can now reach out to those pesky website visits that never turned into conversions, i.e. sales, by re-targeting those opportunities within Facebook.
What is Facebook Dynamic Products?
Facebook Dynamic Ads, is a new type of advert specifically designed for retailers. It enables E-commerce businesses to upload their full list of products (known as product catalogue or product feed) to Facebook’s users in a single, multiple or carousel advert format. This new advertising platform within Facebook is an opportunity to retarget customers based on past website visits and the products that they have interacted with or demonstrated some interest in. It makes sense to invest your advertising efforts on people that you already know that are interested in your products.
If you are familiar with the Google Product Listing Ad, Facebook Product Ads works in a similar way, but it’s much more accurate as to who it targets because of Facebook’s wealth of data on its users. Combine the data with their advanced targeting capabilities and their vital ability of reaching the right people regardless of where they are or what device they are using, and you’re in for a winner!
How is this achieved?
By submitting your product catalogue to Facebook, containing all the relevant information on the products you wish to advertise such as, product ID, name, brief description, landing page URL, availability and so on, you go on to create Product Sets based on the data feed information, this then can be applied to a Product Catalogue Sales Facebook Campaign.
This is THE solution to help you to automatically promote relevant products from your entire catalogue. It provides you with a way to retarget a customer using highly refined targeting data allowing you to display only products that you know they are interested in, increasing the chances of website conversion.
These dynamic ads are so comprehensive that they even allow you to tie conversions back to the original interaction regardless of what device was used. An excellent way to understand how mobile sales fare in comparison to desktop sales, if you ask me.
A great thing about these ads is that they are now located within the news feed on mobile devices (but you still have the choice of location on desktop) but overall feel the same. The difference lies on what goes behind the scenes, these ads are feed based, and although they’re not individually created, at the same time, they possess a very personal feel as they’re based on each individuals interests and likes, site behaviour, app interaction and in-store purchase behaviour as well.
This is only possible because each person uses one account and through that it’s possible to track where they first clicked to where the sale was finalised.
Another great benefit of this advertising tool, is that when an item is marked out of stock, Facebook will automatically stop the ad from being shown (dependent on how your product feed was submitted), preventing you from spending money advertising a product that isn’t available. No more advertising money down the drain!
These are highly relevant and personalised ads that have demonstrated massive conversion rates and sales all the while leaving you with the power to curate your ads at any point. You can even set the Dynamic Products Ads to automatically reach to cart abandoners when they visit Facebook regardless of using a different mobile device or desktop, directing them to the page to finalise the purchase.
I’d now like to ask you to have a look at the graphs below which are the annual revenue stats of Google Advertising and Facebook Advertising; between 2007 and 2012 Google was doing incredibly well and it seemed like their growth would never stop, those were the days where everyone was making money. Click through rate was very high but the CPC was still relatively low; unfortunately since then a lot of changes have taken place (you can find out more on the changes here) and they became too greedy, their prices sky rocketed and click through rate started dropping. The big players, smart guys and affiliate marketeers realised this and they left.
But by looking at the growth rate on Facebook’s Product Listing Ads on the image below, its possible to observe that the growth rates in between 2014 and 2015 are identical to those of Google back in 2007. So those who see the similarities, know that Social Media is the next big place to advertise. There, is where you will find the big players, smart guys and the affiliate marketeers these days. There is a lot of money to be made and Facebook Product Ads is where the next big gold rush is at.
Saying this, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying for you to stop advertising on Adwords, I’m not saying that at all! There’s still money to be made on Adwords, what I am saying is that there is an opportunity taking place on Facebook and other Social Media channels now and that you should be advertising there too!
Bottom line is, with Facebook Dynamic Product Ads you will be able to:
- Promote your products in a unique and creative way that is highly targeted = Increase chances of conversion;
- Set-up the campaign and it will automatically reach people with the right product at the right time = Saving you time and money;
- Reach people across any devices they use = One ad across mobile and desktop platforms;
- Out of stock products will automatically be removed = Positive ROI;
- Additionally, ads for two or more products are available = SELL, SELL and SELL.
Retargeting with social media is the future, are you going to wait and see the dust of your competitors or are you going to be the one leaving the dust behind?
Stay tuned for the next blog post, Part 2 – How to Implement Social Media Advertising: Facebook Dynamic Product Ads which will be released later this week. We will take you on a step by step journey and at the end of it you will know how to set up a Pixel and very importantly how to avoid rookie mistakes.
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