What Are Meta Shopping Campaigns?
Shopping Campaigns, formally known as Dynamic Product Ads, allow advertisers on Meta platforms to showcase their products in a visually appealing and engaging way, and drive sales directly from the platform. These campaigns are designed for businesses that want to boost sales, increase product visibility and drive traffic to their e-commerce websites.
Image source: facebook.com
To create a Shopping Campaign, retailers first need to set up a product catalog, which can be done straight from Meta’s Commerce Manager. This catalog can include all of the products that a business wants to promote through their campaigns, as well as relevant product information like pricing, descriptions, and images.
Product Catalogs can be created manually, through Meta, or through a businesses website platform. Once the product catalog is uploaded and set to refresh daily, go to the ‘settings’ tab and input the pixel ID for the ad account.
Connecting the pixel with the product catalog is incredibly important because this is what will allow the advertiser to retarget based on the products audiences interacted with.
💡 Pro Tip: Within the ‘settings’ tab, check how images are cropped to make sure products aren’t inappropriately cropped.
With Shopping Campaigns, retailers are also able leverage a number of different ad formats including single image ads, carousel ads, and collection ads to showcase their products in the style that is right for their business and creative capabilities.
Re-Engage with your Existing Customers
Shopping Campaigns offer advertisers the ability to retarget people based on products they've viewed, products added to cart, or recent purchases. If the advertiser would like to retarget past purchasers, there is the ability to up-sell or cross-sell products based on the previous products purchased.
💡 Pro Tip: Test different times-frames after the identified conversion action occurred to discover what works best for your unique audience and tailor ad copy based on what action the users has completed.
Reach New Prospective Customers
Shopping Campaigns also have options for businesses to easily reach new and prospective consumers. Within this audience type, Meta will show products to people who have expressed an interest in similar products from related industries and businesses. These users automatically see products from your catalog that are likely to be relevant to them.
💡 Pro Tip: Meta Pixel and Product Catalogs are requirements for utilizing broad audiences
Optimal Conversion Events
Within each Meta Pixel, the following standard events should be tracked on each e-commerce website to curate and manage the optimal user journey:
- Page View
- View Content
- Add to Cart
- Initiate Checkout
- Add Payment Information
- Purchase
💡 Pro Tip: Within the ‘Pixel Manager’, check the ‘diagnostics’ tab to make sure there are no errors associated with the pixel.
Leverage Machine Learning with Advantage+ Shopping
This feature is currently only available to qualified advertisers and may not be available to you yet.
Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns utilize machine learning to help retailers reach engaged customers with reduced setup time and increased cost efficiencies. Meta’s suite of Advantage+ products are perfect for businesses looking to lean into and leverage performance-focused machine learning in campaigns at scale.
Image Source: about.fb.com
- Simplified campaign set up and management allows for a more hands off approach to retailers and businesses who have limited internal resources for managing advertisements.
- Machine learning can oftentimes easily identify and reach your highest value customers across all of Meta’s family of apps and services, with minimal manual optimizations.
- Easily serve and curate the highest performing ad variation to the most engaged consumers.
However, we have found that sometimes machine learning and simplified structures do not drive optimal performance. Clients who have more unique products with niche audiences or strict goals would benefit from a more tailor structure and approach.
Meta Shopping Campaigns are an effective way for retailers and businesses to reach new and engaged customers on social media and drive increased sales and revenue. Set them up in your ad account or contact us to learn more and start driving more revenue!
If you have additional questions about this campaign type or paid social in general, sign up for the Seer newsletter, contact us, comment with questions/thoughts, and subscribe to our channel on YouTube.
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