Hey everyone, welcome to the Facebook Ad Hacks podcast. I'm your host, Rod Bland, and in this podcast, I talk about how to get better results from your Facebook and Instagram digital marketing, and the many lessons that I've learned from being in the business of e-commerce for the last 20 years. Enjoy today's episode.
If you own an e-commerce store and you've got a large number of products, which you'd like to advertise on Facebook, but you don't want to have to go create loads and loads of ads, or you're not sure which products you should use in your advertising because you've got a limited budget, then you should definitely have a look at creating a campaign with the catalog sales objective.
Not many people talk about this particular kind of campaign, but I find this is always a really good mainstay if you've got an e-commerce store. So that's what today's video is going to be all about. Now, because I recorded this as a video with screen capture, you might want to see the actual video itself, and I'll put a link to that in the show notes. Let's jump into it. Hey I'm Rod. I'm the owner of Rod Bland Agency. I'm a former e-commerce business owner.
I ran my own e-commerce business for 16 years, sold it to my competitor a couple of years ago. And now through my agency, we help people set up optimize, maintain, and generally do a lot better with Facebook and Instagram advertising. So in today's video, I'm going to talk about campaigns with the catalog sales objective.
This particular kind of campaign is one that's very handy where you've got a lot of products in an e-commerce store and you want to be able to set up an ad that will automatically show people products that they might be interested in from your store without having to constantly update your creative, create new ads all the time. It's a very handy campaign type and I don't see many people using it and I really don't know why.
So I'm going to show you how you set up a campaign with the catalogue sales objective, some of the prerequisites, things that you need to have in place, and also talk about some of the pitfalls that you want to avoid so you can get the best performance from your ads. So let's jump on the computer. I'm here in my demonstration ad account and just a couple of caveats. To be able to create a campaign with the catalog sales objective you have to have a catalog set up in Facebook.
I'm not going to cover how you do that in today's tutorial, but the way that you go about setting up a catalog is going to vary depending on which e-commerce platform you use. Shopify or Woocommerce or Magento, they all have built-in ways for you to set up a catalog that will automatically synchronize the products that you've got on your website with a catalogue that is set up in Facebook. You want to make sure that you've got good quality product photos.
You've got up-to-date pricing, you've got up-to-date stock levels. They're the main things that you're going to need to be successful with your dynamic product ads. So to get started, we just click on create, and we choose catalog sales. Next we choose a catalog. Now this is in my demonstration account so it's not actually connected to a pixel, but you want to make sure that yours is connected to a pixel. Then we're going to give it a name.
I like to use my initials, DPA standing for dynamic product ad and then the objective, which is catalogue sales, and the date. In the ad set, we're promoting view added to cart 180 days. I'll be able to explain that a little better once we get into the ads manager. For the name of the ad itself, we're going to give it DPA carousel catalog sales. Then we click the continue button. This takes us into the campaign set up screen.
So I'm going to turn on campaign budget optimization because I may have more than one ad inside so I'm going to want to take advantage of that. I'm just going to set the budget to $10, just depends on the volume of sales that normally would go through your website as to what sort of budget you would use. So now we're at the ad set level and this is where we choose what products we want to promote.
So by default, if you've just created a catalog, it'll have one product set inside it, but you can create additional product sets that contain a subset of the products within your catalog. The budget and schedule, we're going to leave that as is. In the audience section, this is where we want to decide who we want to show ads to. Now by default, this is set to find prospective customers even if they haven't interacted with your business.
What I find is really useful is to re target ads to people who've interacted with your products on and off Facebook. And here, the default option is to promote products from the All Products product set, which is selected up here to people who have viewed or added those products to cart in the last 14 days. It also includes people who haven't purchased, so it's a very specific retargeting type of setup, and you can change this up to 180 days. You've got all these other options too.
You can choose to promote products to people who have added to cart, but not purchased. You can upsell to people who have added products to their cart, and there's no distinction as to whether they've purchased or not. You can also cross sell products to people who have actually purchased from a specific product set, and you can also have any combination that you want.
Now, because we are essentially creating a custom audience through our option here, we don't need to include any additional audiences down here. In the placements, I'm going to leave that as automatic placements. In optimization for ad delivery that always defaults to link clicks for campaigns when you set them up from scratch with the catalogue sales objective. If you've got an e-commerce store, you're going to want to change that to conversion events.
And this is where you would choose your conversion event. Mine isn't connected, but you would typically have purchase as the event type that you want to optimize for. Then down here, the attribution setting defaults to seven days after click and you get charged by the impression. Then we click on next, and this is where we create our ad. So if you've got an Instagram account, you want to connect that too.
By default, the ad set up is dynamic formats, creative, and it's entirely up to you as to whether that's something that you use. I would experiment with this feature on and off, but I'm just going to leave this on for the moment. You may find that initially if you've just created your catalogue, that it doesn't feed into the ad. I find if you just turn off the dynamic formats and creative, and then turn it back on again, then you'll get some of your products showing up.
In the ad preview by default, it will contain the first product in your catalog, but will show products that people have looked at, or that it thinks that they might want to know based on their behavior. So no one person is going to see the same product every time. So let's go down to our primary text. So there's a little fish emoji, everything a fish keeping hobbyist needs for their aquarium, all in one place. In the headline, this is where we can include data from your catalog feed.
So by default, that would contain the product name. In the description, that's by default empty, but you might want to put in the price, if your price data is up to date. The website URL obviously points to your URL. If you leave all these as the default, each of the cards in the carousel will have a link that links directly to that product page on your website, which is very handy. And the tracking you want to make sure that you've got website events turned on and you've got your pixel chosen.
Mine is showing up with an error here because it's not connected, but yours won't be. Let's see how it will look on the different placements. So that's how it looks in the mobile news feed. Let's have a look at your Instagram stories. That's how it looks on Instagram stories. Once you are ready to go, you can then click on publish . So that's how easy it is to create a campaign with the catalog sales objective.
Now, some of the pitfalls with this that you want to watch out for, I've got some notes here. One is ad fatigue. If you don't generate very many sales from your website and you're using that option that I showed you, which is people who have viewed or added to cart, but not purchased over the last 14 days, there's probably not going to be very many people in that audience.
So you might want to make that period of time larger or just have a very low budget and keep an eye on the frequency of your ads to make sure that ad fatigue isn't setting in. People aren't seeing the ads too often.
Especially with a warm audience, I find anywhere around 10 to 20 frequency is fine, and they might be people who have added something to the cart and they've just forgotten about it, and they won't mind getting a reminder a few times during the day before they complete their purchase.
And just to reiterate, it's really important that you have good product images and good product data, so good product names and pricing as well, if you want to be able to use that data within your ads, like I showed in this example. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this episode useful, here's two ways I can help you grow your business for free. Firstly, subscribe to my YouTube channel at rodsyt.com.
Secondly, join my free group at rodsgroup.com, and finally leave me a five star review so that I can reach more people and I can get the attention of some amazing guests that I can bring on the show. I'll catch you in the next episode.