One of the struggles about selling a large and diverse line of products on Facebook and Instagram is getting eyeballs on all your products. Traditional image/carousel/video ads can only contain a limited amount of information. Plus the landing page you need to send users to may not be the exact page the user wants. Luckily Facebook offers a solution! Catalog sales campaigns (or dynamic product ads) will help you advertise your full product line. But how do you get the most out of catalog sales campaigns? Let’s take a look.
1. Set up a catalog
The first part in using this campaign type is setting up a catalog which houses all your products. Along with that is setting up tracking appropriately to match products on your site to products in your catalog. There is some upfront work in doing all this but if you’d like to learn more, read Bahador’s post 4 Tips For Facebook Catalog Sales Campaigns Efficiency where he breaks down QAing tracking.
2. Segment Products Into Sets
This is where you’ll be able to start segmenting your line of products into very specific groups, which will help you be more targeted in your ads and audiences. There is no correct answer here but let’s think of some ways that might work for you.
- Segment by product type – if you sell shoes, it might make sense to segment by the type of shoe: gym shoes, dress shoes, outdoor shoes, heels, boots, etc
- Segment by gender/age – if you sell clothes then segment by women’s, men’s, and kid’s
- Segment by profitability – if you have high profit margin on certain products and low profit margin on others then perhaps it makes sense to segment them out so you can put specific budget behind them
- Don’t segment at all – if your entire line is very similar, you could just advertise all products together.
A few things to keep in mind when you segment:
First is that you make sure each of your product sets contain enough products. It would most likely not be beneficial to only have 5 products in a set. But 50 products is much better. This gives Facebook enough data and products to learn and optimize for ad delivery.
Second is that when it comes to remarketing, you may not want to segment at all. Since the remarketing is dynamic, you want the products shown in ads to be the ones that people looked at and interacted with on your site.
3. Set up your campaigns
If you think about how you set up your product sets, this will guide you towards how you should set up your campaigns. You’ll definitely want to keep prospecting and remarketing separate but should also think if different campaigns for different products lines/genders/profit margins also make sense.
When setting up your ad sets you’ll be forced to choose a product set and whether the campaign is going to target broad audiences or remarketing. From there everything else is very similar to any other campaign type. It’s highly recommended that you do not use any lookalikes or detailed targeting on your ad set when prospecting. The reason for this is Facebook will use information from your product catalog to target relevant users based on what they have been engaging with across the web. A broad audience also ensures there is enough data for the algorithms to learn. Now if you find that performance isn’t good with very broad audiences after some initial testing, then you can start layering on audiences. But to start, stick with just relevant product sets, location, age, and gender. Also don’t forget proper exclusions to make sure you are building a good funnel (purchasers/site visitors/etc).
When it comes to remarketing, like previously mentioned, you should most likely be using a product set of all your products since it is dynamic remarketing. Though you may have concerns unique to your business about doing so, like profit margins for example. A good place to start is anyone who viewed or added to cart over the last 30 days. This will give you a sizable audience you can put budget behind. From here you can experiment with smaller or longer look-back windows.
4. Don’t Stop Advertising After A Purchase…Cross sell!
A great feature of catalog sales campaigns is the cross sell feature. If you know people who purchase pants are more apt to also purchase belts, then this is something you advertise on Facebook. All you need to do is some work on product segments. Just define related categories/products in your catalog and then tell Facebook to cross sell these items based on what the user purchased. This is a great way to increase revenue from existing customers.
