Facebook as an advertising platform has grown over the past few years and the total revenue from ads totalled $26bn in 2016, which is an impressive 57% increase from $17bn achieved in 2015. Running effective social media marketing campaigns on platforms like Facebook has become important to marketers and businesses.
15 steps and tips to creating effective Facebook product catalogue ads Share on X ACC, in this case, stands for awareness, consideration and conversion. Conversion (lead generation), product catalogue sales and store visit are the three campaign types that can be created at the conversion stage of the customer journey. Our focus will be on providing useful tips in setting up your first Facebook ads product feed. Let’s dive right into the useful steps and optimisation tips.
Steps in creating Facebook ads product catalogue
Creating the product feed is the first step in creating an effective Facebook product sales campaign. The Facebook product feed is a bit similar to the shopping feed on the Google merchant centre but there are certain differences.
1) Visit the product catalogue section of your Facebook ad account or business manager and click on the product catalogue drop-down.
2) The next step is to create the name of the product catalogue and indicate if they are physical products sold online, travel tickets or holiday destination deals. Additionally, it is quite important to select the appropriate owner of the product catalogue. This issue arises if you have an individual Facebook ad account and are also linked to the Facebook business manager of your agency account. If you make your agency’s Facebook business manager the owner of the product catalogue, you’ll have to be an administrator of your agency’s Facebook business page in order to upload the feed.
3)The next step in creating your product catalogue will be the completion of the currency information. This is the currency of the actual product and Facebook supports a variety of currencies. You also indicate if the product feed will be a onetime upload or recurring uploads.
4)The next step is to upload your product feed which could be any of the following formats: CSV, TSV, RSS XML or ATOIM XML. For this blog, we’ll be we’ll focus on how to create an effective product feed in CSV.
5)You’ll have to create a product feed that meets Facebook’s guidelines. Some marketers make the mistake of replicating their Google merchant centre feed on their Facebook product catalogue account and they end up with a disapproval. It is important to use string (text) in certain fields like ‘product condition’ and ‘availability.’
6)You’ll need to leave the column titles empty for fields that are not relevant to your business. For example, if you manufacture unique and customised products and there is no GTIN (Global Trade Item Number) or MPN (Manufacturer Part Number) available, you can leave those columns empty.
7)The Facebook product feed guide indicates the required fields but creating a simple CSV file with the following fields – ID, title, description, link (product landing page or link), condition, availability, price, brand and Google product category – is needful. The Google_product_category column simply utilises the same taxonomy you use for your AdWords shopping campaigns. The below screenshot gives you an idea on a sample product catalogue in CSV.
8)You do not need to include the shipping cost on the Facebook product feed. This is quite different from what is required on Google or Bing.
9) It is also essential that the price fields do not include the currency symbol or the currency acronym or initial (e. 25.00 and not £25.00 or 25.00 GBP).
10) You should ensure all product images have a resolution of 600 x 600 pixels. Once all of the columns have been completed, you can then upload the feed and Facebook immediately informs you if there are any errors or not. Within a few minutes, your product feed is ready to be used for your new campaign.
Tips to optimise your Facebook product catalogue
11) Product events: It is important your product catalogue is linked to you Facebook pixel. This helps you view the product performance against the set of custom conversions. It highlights the products that have sold the most and those with the highest cart abandonment rate. These findings will help you make improvements like adding an attractive offer/discount or tweaking the ad copy of certain products.
12)Product sets: These are quite similar with product groups on Google’s shopping campaign. Facebook enables the creation of product sets or groups based on category, brand, gender, condition, size or price. Creating a variety of product sets will help improve your campaign performance by targeting a set of audience with relevant products. There are several parameters that can be used to exclude or include products such as ‘contains,’ starts with,’ ‘is not,’ ‘is any of these,’ and a few more. Also, it is important to know that once product sets are created, they cannot be edited; hence, it is important to add all the required products in a set before saving.
13)Diagnostics: It is important this section is constantly checked for any errors that require urgent attention. Some of the common errors you can discover in this section include image resolution issues and Facebook pixel compatibility concerns.
14)Products: The products section is quite useful in presenting a complete snapshot of all your products in your feed. You can easily spot products with errors and fix appropriately. There are filters you can use to determine what products are displayed to prevent viewing your entire catalogue.
15) Product catalogue settings: You’ll need to review the catalogue settings to ensure that images are displayed appropriately for dynamic product Facebook ads.
These are the steps to creating a CSV product feed and optimising the catalogue to ensure the campaign delivers a great return on investment. A properly set up Facebook catalogue ensures the campaign creation and delivery are smooth and perform at an optimal level.
