When To Use Which Facebook Campaign Type For Your E-Commerce Business: A Guide [Blog Series - Part 2]

In this blog, we will be talking about three types of Facebook campaigns that are crucially important for e-commerce business owners. We will be learning about when to use what campaign type by targeting which audience. The trio of campaign types I will focus on are:

• Conversion Campaign
• Dynamic Product Ads Campaign (DPA)
• Traffic Campaign

But before moving on to these campaign types, let’s have a look at three types of audiences that are used in these campaigns.

1. Get Familiar with Audience types

Audiences for advertising campaigns necessarily split into two: those who have in some way interacted with your business and those who have not. These two groups can also be split into further subgroups as well. Not everybody who has interacted with your business will have the same amount of interest in your products or likelihood to convert to customers. Some visitors will display behaviors that indicate a greater tendency to buy, whereas some have only come to the website to look around.

Similarly, not everyone who has never interacted with your website would remain just as uninterested if they ever see it as an advertisement. Also, not having been to your website does not mean that your brand isn’t heard about. It is always the case that some people may have never been to your site but they are already acquainted with your brand, maybe they actively shop from your physical store. You can reach out to these types of people to attract them to your website and later have them convert. Now, let’s list audience types starting from those who have never been to your website to those who displayed the behaviors of a potential customer.

  1.1. Lookalike Audience

Lookalike Audiences consist of people who have never been to your website. This does not indicate that they do not recognize your brand or that they will be uninterested in what you sell. So, these audiences often carry a good potential.

A lookalike audience is a group of people who share certain characteristics with your existing customers, recent customers, website visitors, or other custom audiences, even if they have never interacted with your business or visited your website.

This makes Lookalikes a powerful tool in targeting for your Facebook Ads as it allows you to reach out to new people who are not completely irrelevant to your business.

To create Lookalikes, you first need to select a source audience. The source for Lookalike Audiences can be any audience you like. It can be a Custom Audience, a pixel-based audience, or even your Enhencer audience. Facebook will then analyze the demographics, interests, or behavior patterns of the people in the source audience and create a Lookalike that you can use to reach new potential customers.

  1.2. Remarketing Audience

The common denominator of the people in a Remarketing Audience is that they are, in one way or another, familiar with your business. They might have visited your website, browsed among products or maybe you collected their info elsewhere (like in your physical shop). The aim of remarketing audiences is to have the old visitor re-engage with your business, to remind them of yourself, show your discounts or special offers and have them converted.

  1.3. High Intent Remarketing Audience

This audience type, known as "High-Intent Remarketing Audience," includes individuals who are not only acquainted with your business but have also demonstrated significant interest in it. They may have added a product to their cart and they can be a few steps away from purchasing. They may have visited a specific product page several times. These people differ from the people in remarketing audiences in the way they have interacted with your website. Their behavior through your website funnel is conversion-wise meaningful. They are not just looking but considering making a purchase.

2. Facebook Ad Campaign Types And When To Use Them

  2.1. Conversion Campaigns

As its name says, conversion campaigns are all about conversion. These types of campaigns aim to get your website visitors to complete a desired action. This action can be making a purchase, filling out a form, or even downloading your app.

You can create conversion campaigns with one, two, or all of these three objectives in mind: sales, engagement, and leads. Your e-commerce business will definitely want to make sales. Conversion campaigns will help you get your visitors to make a purchase. If you wish to get various types of engagements for your business like promoting a Facebook or Instagram post, boosting your business page, boosting an event, or if you want your potential customers to reach you through Messenger, Instagram, or Whatsapp, you can also use conversion campaigns.

Your objective may involve leads as well. Your website and business format may be interested in collecting contact info, getting visitors to fill out a form, or encouraging newsletter subscriptions. In such cases, too, conversion campaigns will help your business.

These three objectives can go along together. For example, you may be making online sales and publishing a weekly newsletter about offers and catalog updates.

Conversion campaigns will especially have a good impact when you use them with remarketing audiences or high-intent remarketing audiences. These audiences consist of visitors who are already familiar with your business and products. They will be much closer to taking the action you desire them to take.

By using both high-intent and regular remarketing audiences in your conversion campaigns,

• You can retarget the visitors who abandoned their cart at the last step.
• You can upsell previous customers, that is you can show them ads of products or services that are related to their last purchases.
• You can retarget the visitor who did not convert and only browsed through product pages.

Conversion campaigns also work with lookalike audiences as well. With conversion campaign with lookalike audiences:

• You can reach out to a larger customer base, which will help you get conversions from a new group of people who did not visit your website before.
• You can target people who are likely to become high-value customers
• You can scale your campaigns that attracted attention and did a good job in converting your already existing remarketing audiences.

In this Facebook ad example, we see two main good aspects to get previous visitors to convert:

• It refers to a GQ quotation that praises the brand.
• It attracts the audience to an offer (free contact lenses) with an engaging activity (completing a quiz).

Such simple ad ideas can spark the previous interests that your audience showed before to your products.

You can find the link for the website where this ad example was taken at the end of this post.

  2.2. Dynamic Product Ads Campaign (DPA)

Dynamic Product Ads Campaigns (or DPAs for short) are highly specialized ad campaigns that carry a lot of conversion potential for e-commerce businesses. DPAs let businesses showcase their products to visitors who were interested in them before.

To create a DPA, a business first needs to create a product catalog that contains product information, images, and prices. DPAs work in accordance with the visitors’ website behavior and show the most relevant products to their audiences automatically. They are also both easy to set up and easy to maintain afterward.

DPAs can be structured as a Carousel, Single Image, Single Video, or Slideshow which carry a lot of potential for people to interact with the catalog. This easy browsability and high specialization with the previously engaged products and its similarities make DPAs a very powerful tool for e-commerce businesses.

You can create DPAs with good results by targeting remarketing audiences, high-intent remarketing audiences, and lookalike audiences.

• By using remarketing audiences, you can target the product page viewers and those who abandoned carts with the exact product they showed an interest in.
• As high-intent remarketing audiences are composed of those who are a few steps away from purchasing, DPAs will create easy access to the product and their shopping process.
• You can retarget these people by showing them offers or discounts, as well, to have them convert much easier.
• Using lookalike audiences enables you to direct your advertising efforts towards individuals who exhibit similar interests in products similar to yours on other online platforms.

The Allbirds ads above are a simple and strong DPA as it showcases its most prominent products in a very simple manner and with concise information.

You can find the link for the website where this ad example was taken at the end of this post.

  2.3. Traffic Campaign

The traffic objective in Facebook Ads aims to draw visitors to your desired destination which can be your website or your app. By employing traffic campaigns, you can:

• Increase the visitor number,
• Increase brand awareness and visibility,
• Promote a new product, draw visitors to the new product’s page,
• Attract more followers for your brand’s social media accounts,
• Collect a wide audience’s info (if you require to create a mailing list etc.)
• Promote events regarding your business and content on your website

As the main goal is to increase traffic to the website, traffic campaigns are not especially powerful in converting visitors. As we know, remarketing audiences are composed of those who have previously interacted with our business and maybe completed a set of behaviors that leads to purchasing. Targeting these people in traffic campaigns may end up in conversions (maybe, the visitor forgot to make the purchase in the rush of the previous week and your traffic campaign reminds them of you) but certainly, these audiences will have better use in conversion campaigns and DPAs.

However, Lookalike Audiences will provide you with fresh visitors, those who had never visited your page before. This way you can increase your traffic and have more people interact with your website for whatever reason you want.

Any form of a campaign can actually be used for traffic campaigns. You can showcase your products, give simple visual and written information about your brand or products, and with the right targeted audience and creatives, all these methods will bring traffic to your website or to the page of your desired product.

3. Conclusion

Facebook Ads is an ever-changing platform and upgrades itself and its advertising methods over time. Also, there is no one true way to advertise. You can always try new things, experiment and have a look at how your business does. But, if you have an e-commerce business, you can always trust these fundamental sets of audience and campaign formats to scale and increase your sales.

Happy spring and see you in later posts. 😀