We’ve previously talked on this blog about how eCommerce businesses can make the most of social commerce, looking at Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest. In that post, we briefly touched on Facebook’s Dynamic Product ads, which is what we’ll be going into more detail about today!
What are Dynamic Product Ads?
Facebook describes Dynamic Product Ads as adverts that help you:
“promote relevant products to shoppers browsing your product catalogue on your website or mobile app”.
If you’re familiar with Google Adwords and RLSA ads and/or Shopping remarketing lists, it’s essentially the same concept.
For those of you unfamiliar with Adwords and remarketing, these ads allow you to advertise to users who previously visited your website right within the user’s’ Facebook feed.
Ever been shopping for a t-shirt online, decided against it and then suddenly saw the same t-shirt popping up in ads wherever you browsed? That’s remarketing.
The key thing about these products ads is that first word – “Dynamic”. After you’ve uploaded your product catalogue (more on that later), Facebook will automatically format the ad based on what it thinks the user will be most interested in.
If a user browses the Game of Thrones t-shirt section on your site, they’ll see an ad for Game of Thrones t-shirts, or your range of Game of Thrones merch.
If you change prices or if a product goes out of stock, Facebook updates the ads too, so that ads are never out of date!
Sounds good, how do I get started?
First of all, in order to get started, you’ll need to get yourself a Business Manager account, if you haven’t got one already. Just head to business.facebook.com to get signed up with that. Then it’s just 4 steps:
Upload your Products
Next, you’ll need to upload your product catalog to Facebook. To do that, just head to Business Settings > Product Catalogue > Add New Product Catalogue. Once that’s setup click ‘Add New Product Feed’ and Facebook will take you through the steps to add your product feed. I’d recommend choosing the option to auto-upload with URL, this way you can be sure that all your data is up to date.
Add your Custom Audience Pixel
Compared to Google, Facebook’s pixel for tracking is very straightforward – just one pixel to track pretty much everything on your website. It still requires a little technical know how – so if your codings not strong, ask a developer to take a look at this for you.
Create your Ad Templates
Before we can set the ads live, we need to create a dynamic template for you ads. These templates will pull in the information from your product feed in the format you want them presenting in.
Create your campaigns!
With all that done, set your budget & bids, organise your products into sets and you’re off. That’s it! You’ll not need to configure any ads, they’ll be shown across different devices and the Facebook pixel will make sure the ads are highly relevant to the user.
Dynamic Product Ads are showing some pretty good results for the brands using it so far, with Shutterfly having a 20% increase in click through rate and The Honest Company seeing a 38% drop in cost per purchase. So what are you waiting for?
Let us know if you use Dynamic Product Ads and how they worked for you. 🙂