When it comes to getting decent results from Meta Ads it's all about having an accurate campaign setup. I will share the best practices that we found to be working for ecommerce accounts to generate online sales.
Campaign Objective: Conversions
Right at the very first step of setting up your campaign Meta asks for your campaign objective. If you want to generate sales through your online store you should always select conversions as the main objective.
Meta ads have the capability to bring people to your website based on exactly what you defined as your campaign objective. If you select traffic as your goal, your ads will be served to users who will generate traffic for the lowest cost possible. However, that doesn't necessarily mean they will make a purchase and in most cases they don't.
My recommendation is to select traffic as your campaign objective only if you are trying to generate brand awareness just make sure there is some decent traffic to your website especially if you are just starting out, or see how people interact with your website.
At all other times you should select conversions at the campaign level, and purchases at the ad set level.
Managing Your Budget: Campaign Budget Optimisation
To maximise the learning it is always best to have a consolidated approach to your campaign and even ad sets. That's why it is recommended to have the campaign budget optimisation on, so the learning happens at the campaign level and the budget can be automatically distributed across ad sets based off of the performance and audience signals.
I would only recommend using ad set level budgets if you are testing different audiences at the same time before making them part of your always on targeting strategy. This way you can make sure each target group gets to spend sufficient amount of the campaign budget.
Top Audiences and Targeting Tactics
There are 4 main types of audiences or targeting options on Meta:
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Interest based: Try to think about the brands, influencers, and magazines that your audience is interested in. You can try product related interests such as "body scrub" but this would generally be too broad for conversion focused campaigns.
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Demographics: It is recommended to keep this as broad as possible, narrow it down to the geo locations you'd like to target and maybe by gender if your products are relevant to only a specific gender.
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Custom Audiences: These are YOUR lists and audiences that you will pass on to Meta. Make sure to have your website visitors (generally not longer than last 30 days), cart abandoners, Instagram page engaged audiences and newsletter subscribers here as a custom audience. These are the audiences with very high intent compared to other prospect audiences.
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Lookalikes: Once you have some user activity on your website or your social you can tell Meta to find people that are similar to those users. Generally I would recommend generating the lookalikes of your recent customer list and your newsletter subscribers as they have actually performed an action and have shown genuine interest in the brand.
Once you know what audiences you will target the next question is how to organise the audiences. Your ad sets are where you define your targeting and select audiences, however if your audience sizes are too small then your ad sets will never exit the learning phase. You will want to consolidate similar audiences under one ad set as much as possible.
Exclusions - Don't Skip This
Once you have installed the Meta pixel on your website you will be able to dynamically create a custom audience of people who have made a purchase on your website. Make sure to exclude them from your targeting, as it is an important action to keep your account from wasting money and to stop exhausting your audiences.
Creative and Copy
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CTA - First of all your call to action should reflect what action you want people to take on your website. Don't underestimate the importance of this, an accurate CTA can take people one step further in their journey to make a purchase. Always make sure to select "Shop Now" from the dropdown and send people to an appropriate PLP or PDP.
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Create Videos - It is becoming more and more challenging to capture the attention of your audiences within less than a few seconds while they are scrolling down their feed. Videos have proven to be working better when it comes to grabbing the attention. If you don't have any video creative then you can start out by turning a few static images into a video as if it was a slideshow.
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Human Element - Try including a person that is using or experiencing your product in your creative. Product focused imagery can also do a very good job and it is essential to make sure people can understand what your product is, however when the imagery has a human element to it then it makes it easier for your prospects to relate to the brand and picture themselves using the product.
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Offers and Discount Codes - Not everyone will be ready to make a purchase when you reach out to them, especially if they don't need the product today. It's good to give your audiences a little push to make that purchase by giving them special offers or discount codes. If you are running this kind of a promotion then make sure to include in your copy the details of the promotion as well as the discount codes they might need to use.
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