Facebook Dynamic Product Ads: The Game-Changer to Captivate Your Audience and Drive Sales

How Do They Work?

In a nutshell, Facebook dynamic ads work similarly to Google's Shopping (Performance Max) campaigns. You can use this ad format to promote multiple products (also known as a product catalogue) simultaneously instead of creating a separate ad creative and campaign for each product. All you need to do is add products to your product catalogue and write a headline and description for each product.

Facebook will automatically target specific products to audiences based on their behaviour, position in the marketing funnel, and how they interact with your website.

Before dynamic ads, advertisers could use carousel ads to include multiple products and links within a single ad. It yielded great results, but it had one drawback. They were static, so you couldn't tailor them as per the audience. Facebook's dynamic product ads solve this issue. They show personalised ads to users by pairing the right products to the right people.

Careful Customer Segmentation

Facebook Ads allows you to divide your audience into segments based on various demographics and characteristics. Hence, you can show ads to a specific audience and ensure ad relevance. For instance, you can create dynamic ads to target a user from the UK who visited your site and checked a particular product.

Ad Personalisation

Personalisation is the key to ad relevance. Since 91% of customers will shop with brands that show relevant offers, showing personalised ads is essential. Facebook DPAs help you harness personalisation to make your ads more targeted.

Improved Ad Engagement

Like carousel ads, Facebook DPAs let you use a unique image, headline, and description for each product in the catalogue. This brings more engagement to your ads and helps you get more clicks and conversions.

Better Monitoring

Facebook Ads Manager allows you to monitor the performance of your dynamic ads closely. You can check which ad versions are getting more engagement. You can run A/B tests to find the best-performing ad versions and make your advertising more effective.

1. Install the Facebook Pixel on Your Site or use the Facebook SDK for Mobile Apps

A Facebook pixel is a piece of JavaScript code you can place on your website. It helps you track the actions people take on your website and measure the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns. It works like Google Analytics code.

The pixel code fires up when a user visits a page on your site with a pixel code. Once it fires, it records the users' actions. This helps you understand your audience well and create a relevant audience network. For instance, the pixel enables you to segment customers that viewed a product but didn't buy it.

If you want to target mobile app users, you can use Facebook SDK. It helps you track ads engagement, data trends, user behaviour, and more.

2. Create a Product Catalogue

The next step is to create a Facebook product catalogue. Every eCommerce site has a product catalogue that has the following information about all products:

1. Product ID

2. Title

3. Link

4. Description

5. Product image

6. Product category

7. Product type

8. Condition

You can either manually export this catalogue as an XML or CSV file or automate the process by integrating your store with a cataloguing tool. Every major eCommerce platform has catalogue integration functionality. If you do it manually, you'll need to export a CSV/XML file and import it into the Facebook Ads Manager.

3. Create Product Sets and Segment Products Accordingly

If you want to retarget all people who have viewed a product, you can include all the products in your product set. However, it's also important to concentrate your ads on a specific audience by carefully curating product sets. You can also create product sets for up-selling and cross-selling. For example, you can create a product set for repeat website visitors by showing them new products added to the store.

4. Decide Which Audience to Use

An enormous benefit of running dynamic ads is you can target different audience types. Facebook even allows you to create custom audiences, so you can target an audience sharing specific characteristics. Apart from custom audiences, Facebook lets you choose from the following pre-defined audience sets.

Boost Your Sales with Facebook's Up-Sell and Cross-Sell Ads

1. In up-selling, Facebook shows different products than what users have seen. Up-sell ads could include discount product bundles to encourage users to spend more.

2. Cross-sell ads target existing users, and their purpose is to increase the customer lifetime value (LTV).

5. Setting up a Dynamic Ads Campaign

The last step is to set up a dynamic ads campaign from Facebook Business Manager. Once you have selected the products and audience, you can create a campaign. You'll need to choose an ad template, select the campaign objective, and enter the headline and description for your ads.

✓ Proper Conversion Tracking

In order to maximise the effectiveness of Facebook dynamic ads, proper conversion and event tracking is crucial. By implementing accurate tracking mechanisms, businesses can gain valuable insights into the performance of their ads and optimise their campaigns accordingly.

Tracking conversions and events allows advertisers to measure the success of specific actions taken by users, such as viewed product, added to cart, purchases etc. This data empowers businesses to make data-driven decisions, refine their targeting, and deliver more personalised and relevant ads to their target audience, ultimately driving higher conversion rates and ROI.

✓ Pay Close Attention to Your Product Catalogue

A healthy product catalogue is a key to success when you run dynamic ads. Ensure that you have the right products in your catalogue. It's equally important to check your pixel configuration and make sure it's capturing the product correctly.

PRO TIP

Here are two things you can do to have an excellent product catalogue:

1. Check if each product in your catalogue is associated with the pixel when setting up the campaign.

2. Make it a daily habit to review your product catalogue and edit the products if needed.

✓ Have a Reasonable Budget

Don't be frugal with Facebook dynamic ads. Bidding low on DPAs will restrict you from reaching a broad audience. Besides, dynamic ads take some time to show results. You'll need to run the ads for a few days to get the best results. So, it's important to start with a reasonable bid and budget.

✓ Customise Your Creatives to Show Relevant Ads

Facebook Ads Manager offers various templates to improve content on your DPAs and better engage your potential customers. Use those features to make your ads stand out. Instead of showing single image ads and standard carousel ads, show multiple images of relevant items to get better results. Experiment with the headline and ad description to find the best-performing ads.

While your catalogue automatically retrieves imagery, product title, price, you have the opportunity to incorporate distinctive creative elements to enhance purchases. Consider using videos to showcase how your products are used, instead of just showing still images of your inventory. Additionally, you can provide shoppers with information by incorporating overlays into your dynamic ads to showcase prices and discounts.

In the case of using carousel ads as your chosen ad format, you have the ability to include stationary cards at the start or conclusion of your dynamic ads, which can assist in presenting a message, concept, or theme related to the products you are promoting. You can also consider adding a fixed intro card for the ad, which would present your brand and encourage viewers to swipe and explore the range of products you have to offer.

✓ Target Visitors that Show Intent

Facebook DPAs allow you to target visitors who have expressed interest in your products. Retargeting these visitors with relevant products will increase your chances of getting sales. With Facebook pixel, you can determine which visitors have shown intent. Always target such audiences first and then move to new audiences.

What kind of visitors can you consider "interested?" Here are two characteristics to look for:

1. Visitors have visited a product page multiple times (and not added the products to the cart).

2. They have added a product to your cart but have not finished a purchase.

✓ Avoid Overlapping Audiences

When you run multiple campaigns, you may include the same target audience in two or more campaigns. When you do this, your ads will compete against each other, degrading the performance of each other. Therefore, it's essential to avoid overlapping audiences. When creating multiple audiences, manually verify that each campaign has an exclusive audience with no similarities.

Consider time in your audience segments

Visitors who accessed your website or app within the last 24 hours might hold more significance for your business compared to those who did so 2 weeks ago. To optimise their worth to your business, it would be beneficial to categorise your audience based on the duration since their last interaction. This will enable you to adjust bids according to their value. Segmentation criteria may involve various factors such as the type of action, timeframe, device utilised, and product categories. Develop an ad set for each audience segment in order to:

Vary bids

1. Decide when each audience will see your ads

2. See metrics by audience.

✓ Don't Overlook Your Mobile App Audience

We're not talking about the Facebook mobile app users here. If you have a mobile app for your business, capture the audiences using your app and cross-target them on other apps and desktops. Facebook SDK allows you to pass app event data to Facebook and use it to target your app users.

✓ Identify and Eliminate Worst Sellers

Not all of your products will perform the same. Some products will be highly popular among your target audiences, whereas others will receive no interest and engagement. It's essential to identify and eliminate such products from your product feed. This is a useful ad strategy that helps you remove clutter from your product data feed. Your ads are more likely to convert if they show products that people want to buy.

✓ Create Feeds for Product Clearance

You must've heard physical apparel stores organising clearance sales to sell the very last products remaining in stock. You can do the same for your eCommerce store. Create a separate campaign for stock clearance and run special discounts on them. Use labels like "End of Season Sale" or "Last Chance to Buy" and change your ad copy accordingly to make your ads more effective.

✓ Test and Compare Your Ads

A/B testing is the holy grail of advertising, regardless of the platform and ad type you use. It's essential to create multiple versions of an ad and run them simultaneously to see which one works better. You can test multiple images, videos, headlines, and landing pages for the same advertising products to find the best performers.

✓ Patiently Wait for Results

Finally, be patient. If you set up automotive inventory ads for a particular product, give it some time to show results. It could take at least five business days for your campaign to work properly and show up on Facebook feeds. So, once you launch your campaign, let it do its magic.

Keep monitoring your third-party eCommerce platform for changes in traffic or sales. Almost all eCommerce platforms allow you to see the traffic source. This way, you'll know your DPAs have started working.