What do people do during the holidays? They spend time with friends and family, and they do a lot of shopping. As for the time in between? They’re scrolling through their Facebook feed.
Your eCommerce brand needs to interrupt their scrolling and bring them to your site. To do that, you’ll need a strong Facebook holiday advertising game.
Did you know 60% of holiday shoppers say Facebook and Instagram influenced their holiday shopping decisions? Here are five Facebook ads best practices your eCommerce brand can use to influence shoppers and boost Black Friday sales this holiday season.
Sections
1. Bump your budget.
Picture this: You’re running your Facebook ads and watching the sales roll in. Suddenly, momentum stops. You log in to Facebook to discover—horror of horrors—that your ads were turned off.
This can happen if you reach your ad account spending limit. Independent of any budget you set for a particular campaign, your account has a top spending limit. Many eCommerce advertisers forget they ever set this number because during the rest of the year, you typically never reach it.
Navigate to Payment Settings in your Facebook Ads Manager to find and adjust your limit before the holidays arrive. Increase your ad spend now, so you can avoid devastating interruptions later.
2. Schedule ads ahead of time.
Just like setting your ad account spending limit, another surefire way to avoid hiccups is to get your ads scheduled and approved in advance. Facebook can randomly require a manual review of your ads, and when that happens, you’re stuck waiting until they give it the go-ahead.
How long will you have to wait? Up to 24 hours. By that time, Black Friday is over.
Rest assured that when it’s launch time, your ads actually launch. Schedule your holiday ads at least a few days early so there’s ample time for approval.
Get Your Black Friday/Cyber Monday Checklist
Is your marketing strategy ready for the biggest shopping days of the year? Download a copy of our advertiser’s checklist so you can prepare to crush your BFCM sales!
Yes, I want the FREE Checklist!
3. Target your customers and their lookalikes.
The holidays are the most wonderful time of year … for using Lookalike Audiences.
Prioritize ads that target your current customers first. Create custom audiences using your customer email lists.
Then, create audiences targeting shoppers who look like your customers. Upload a list of your customer emails and ask Facebook to create a Lookalike Audience. These are people who have similar purchasing and engagement behavior to your current customers, so they are the most likely to be interested in shopping from you. At Your Marketing People, we’ve found Lookalike Audiences deliver a 3x increase in conversion rate, for about half the cost per lead!
4. Use Offer Ads.
The big holiday sales—Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Boxing Day—are all about saving big. Customers are looking for deals first and foremost.
Give them what they want with Offer Ads. These allow you to offer special discounts to shoppers, whether it’s an online promo code or a barcode they can scan in-store.
With a clear “Get Offer” CTA button, these ads are already optimized to speak to savings-seeking shoppers. To maximize your conversions, stand out in the News Feed with a compelling visual and persuasive ad copy.
5. Bypass the learning phase.
Facebook advertising works so well because it relies on Facebook’s algorithm. This algorithm adapts to your ads over time, adjusting the delivery to display your ads to the people most likely to engage, based on your particular ad goal and ad history.
For the Facebook ad algorithm to work, each one of your ad sets must undergo a so-called learning phase that takes about 50 conversions to complete. Each time you make a “significant edit” to your ad, this learning phase starts over.
Ultimately, that’s a good thing: the learning phase is a necessary step for your ads to enjoy the full power of the Facebook mighty algorithm. But it can be a major handicap during the holidays, when you’re busy making real-time adjustments to your ads to optimize performance.
During the holidays, you can’t afford to sit through the learning phase. To bypass it, follow these tips:
-
Avoid making significant edits to your Facebook ads. These include any change to targeting, ad creative, or optimization events, as well as adding a new ad to your ad set, pausing your ads, or changing the bid strategy.
-
Only make small, incremental budget changes. Depending on the amount, any changes to your spending limit, bid control, or budget can also count as significant edits and restart the learning phase.
-
Up from double- to triple-checking your ads during the holidays. Make sure you love the creative, there aren’t any typos, and the targeting all looks good. Set realistic budgets from the outset that give your ads room to grow (aim for higher vs. lower amounts).
-
Finally, combine your ads into similar ad sets where possible. The more ads and ad sets you have, the harder it is for Facebook to complete the learning phase for each one.
Facebook Ads and Your eCommerce Holiday Marketing Strategy
Facebook ads are just one element of eCommerce holiday marketing. For your brand to succeed, you need a comprehensive strategy that checks off all the boxes. Stay on track with our Black Friday/Cyber Monday Checklist for eCommerce.
Partner with the Experts
It’s never too early to start planning next year’s digital marketing strategy so you can stand out from the crowd. Contact Your Marketing People for a FREE consultation!
