Sales oriented campaigns – how to use Facebook Ads to generate revenue?

Since the appearance of new advertising goals in Facebook Ads campaigns, campaigns under conversions have been separated into two types – campaigns under lead generation and campaigns under sales. Today we will discuss the latter.

Facebook Ads in this case not only offers solutions based on well-defined creatives, but also allows you to base your audiences and content on your product feed, and what products users are viewing.

When to choose a campaign under sales?

Naturally, if the goal of our activities is to generate revenue – for example, in an online store – a campaign with a Sales goal is the most appropriate choice. However, this doesn’t mean that it can only be used for this purpose – subscriptions can also be selected as an event for optimization, which can be useful if these activities have a specific value for us that we want to monitor. Especially if subscriptions or trial periods vary in value depending on the user, for example, due to the length of the chosen subscription.

If we are talking about an e-commerce store, it is also worthwhile to find out from our store solution provider what the implementation of product feed and dynamic remarketing looks like. Sometimes you need special plug-ins, which are often paid additionally, sometimes dedicated solutions, but some technologies make it significantly easier and the whole implementation can be handled on the side of the store engine or account manager.

If we are talking about an e-commerce store, it is also worth finding out from the provider how the implementation of the product feed and dynamic remarketing is handled.

Configuration of campaigns with Sales goal

In the new campaign wizard for the Sales goal, we need to select the option at the very bottom. As for the other goals, here we also gain a hint about the recommended uses. Particularly noteworthy is the Sales from Catalog option, which has been moved from the old goal categories to this very place, and is also a campaign form available only in this setting.

Whether we are going to promote a product catalog and use it in a campaign, we already choose when configuring this one. The system will then ask us to indicate the catalog from the resources available to us within our own permissions or permissions within Facebook Business Manager To use a given directory, we must have personal access to it.

The rest of the settings are already defined at the ad set level. Here we have two scenarios. If we chose ads without a catalog, the configuration of the ad set does not differ significantly from what is usually available. In the case of campaigns under Sales, we can then generate conversions on the website, in the mobile app, promote donations on Facebook, as well as target Messenger, WhatsApp and phone calls.

The available conversion events mainly relate to sales – this is where we will be able to select a purchase or add to cart, if of course our Facebook pixel collects such data.

At the ad level, we can still select Catalog, if we have not done so before, and use it only as a source of advertising material. Standard choices as to the type of creative, here affect the display of products from the catalog. We can choose from a single image or video, a carousel ad, which will consider several products at once, and a collection, or instant material, formerly also known as canvas.

There are quite a few options for advertising materials, and it’s especially worth looking into automated text. Where we normally place our advertising text, we will now find a plus icon that will allow us to add dynamic fields to these contents. Then, depending on the product or category being shown, the campaign will populate the content with the product name, price, or many other fields available in the catalog. The ad preview is then our helper – instead of dynamic fields, it will substitute actual examples from our catalog and we can preview how our template will behave to the target customer.

Facebook catalog and product sets

At the ad set level or the ad itself, if we use the catalog, we will also preview available product sets or create new ones. As a rule, the catalog is one and it is assigned to the company profile, so most often such a catalog is created by a person with administrative access. Later, however, he can share it with another company or a specific person.

Interestingly, Facebook and Google have very similar product feed requirements, so if our store generates and refreshes once a day a file on the server with a list of products, we can use such a file in both environments. Regular synchronization of prices and stock levels is essential for ads to be effective – we wouldn’t want to promote a product for which we are just waiting for a new delivery.

I will also point out that catalogs are not assigned to advertising accounts, so we will always have all the resources assigned to us to choose from, regardless of the advertising account.

One very important thing when promoting store products, is to categorize them properly. The quality of the product feed is of great importance. If our products do not have well-assigned additional characteristics, such as product brand, category, or type, segmenting ads will be significantly hampered.

Meaningful use of the available fields in the product feed is also useful for the product sets themselves. Of course, we can use the full product feed for our campaign, but if we wish, we can also create a sub-folder – here called a set, and filter it by specific criteria that are important to us. We are talking here, for example, about the price of the product – if we have some add-ons with low prices, we can thus ensure that such small products do not show up in the ads.

What’s more, Facebook allows us to combine or separate rules. If we choose the matching mode for all the given rules, we can significantly narrow down the set of products, for example, to products of a certain brand, above a certain price. If, on the other hand, we choose the matching mode that a single condition is enough, we will be able to put products with different parameters in one set, for example, products of several brands at once, or products from several categories in the store.

Facebook Ads campaigns based on catalog

If we have selected a Directory-based campaign in the first step, Facebook will consider the website as the default conversion site, and will not give us the option to choose the conversion site. The exception may be if we have Facebook ads, in which case we can also target them.

The management of the catalog and product sets itself is no different from that in the previous section. However, when we choose the catalog as the basis of the campaign, and the Facebook pixel on the site is configured in a way that collects the id of the viewed product (for example, through the aforementioned plugins or off-the-shelf solutions), at the ad set level, we can choose to retarget to people who have viewed the products.

The ad set can be retargeted to people who have viewed the products.

In further configuration, we can choose whether we are interested in customers who:

• have displayed or added a product to the cart, but have not purchased it
• added the product to the cart but did not purchase it
• they displayed a product from our selected product set
• purchased a product from our selected product set

We also have the option to skip the prompts and ready-made Facebook templates, and go to a custom combination, where we choose whether we want to include or exclude from our audience people who have viewed the product, added it to their shopping cart or purchased it.

For each of the above categories, we can also specify the number of days since the event we are interested in, thus taking into account the characteristics of the store in question, how often customers return, and how long they take to make purchase decisions.

If our audience is large enough, in targeting we can also take into account the expansion of reach through an automated group of similar audiences.

On the other hand, if we choose to find potential customers when creating an audience, even if they have not interacted with the company – Facebook will take into account users who are interested in products with similar characteristics.

Evaluate campaign results with the goal of Sales

Evaluating advertising efforts with a Sales goal is worth basing on specific revenues. Even if we run our activities under Shopping Cart Additions, if we modify the columns by standard Purchase conversions, we will see how the different segments of our strategy translated into ROI – and not only campaigns under Sales, but also those with other optimization goals! It is also very important not to overlook value in the choice of columns as well – this is the middle column in the standard event rows, in the column configuration.

It is worthwhile in the course of the campaign to experiment, test, see what brings good results. Modify ad templates. We can also use our own remarketing groups created within the Facebook Ads account and similar users. It happens that a lookalike based on shopping cart additions is more effective than one based on Purchase, because the source group is more numerous, and thus the system can more accurately pinpoint their actual commonalities.

Summary of Facebook Ads Sales campaign

Campaigns with a Sales objective are worth choosing when our business goals revolve around sales, profit maximization and ROI. Campaigns based on the product feed are characterized by high effectiveness and provide the ability to dynamically inform about the price of products.

By choosing a proven digital marketing agency, you will benefit from the experience and knowledge of specialists, so you won’t have to blaze these trails on your own. And in the long term, too, your campaigns will be improved in line with current recommendations.