31 Facebook Ads Trends for Ecommerce Brands
E-commerce is perhaps the most thriving industry that utilizes Facebook Ads. With so many different strategic elements, objectives, and audience enhancements, selling your product on Facebook should be easier than counting to ten. So why is it that so many companies struggle to reduce their costs, see a positive return, or even see any sales at all? In this article, we’ll dive into the latest Facebook Ads trends for the E-commerce industry and how companies in E-commerce can optimize their Facebook Ads.
TOC
Need-to-Know Statistics
Strategy Trends
Content Trends
Sales Trends
31 Facebook Ads trends you need to know to lower your costs and maximize your return in the E-commerce industry.
Before you start reading about the different trends occurring in the E-commerce industry for Facebook Ads, it’s important to understand which trends are applicable to your company. The best way to do this is by diving into some need-to-know statistics and unfolding what they mean for your brand.
Need-to-Know Statistics
Before pursuing any of the trends listed in this article, let’s dive into some basic statistics and what they mean for your Facebook Ads.
98% of users do not make a purchase on their first visit. That means that finding a way to reconnect with your website visitors is essential for producing sales, before they purchase from a different brand.
70% of “add to carts” turn into an abandoned cart. That means that finding a way to reconnect with those who were seconds away from purchasing your product could mean more than doubling your sales. This statistic also highlights the importance of leveraging promotional offers that are specifically for those who abandoned a cart. For example, if a user abandons their cart, but immediately goes to social media or their email to see a “limited time offer” for a discount if they complete their purchase now, you could see as many as 60% of your abandoned cart users make a purchase.
65% of business comes from current customers. This should highlight the importance of nurturing and upselling your current customer base. Target ads to them or email offers that promote different product lines, relevant discounts, and even your social content.
8 out of 10 users will read an ad’s headline, while only 2 out of 10 users will read an ad’s text.
Videos are 2.9 time more likely to encourage connection with a brand and are 1.9 times as likely to engaged with.
“Shop Now” is the most commonly used and clicked call-to-action on Facebook Ads, specifically within the E-commerce industry.
Facebook has 1.82 billion active daily users, while 74% of their total users visit daily.
The average user spends 38 minutes a day on Facebook.
There are 90 million Facebook Pages for small businesses.
78% of consumers claim they’ve discovered a product on Facebook.
The average Facebook user clicks on 11 ads a month.
The average content engagement rate on Facebook is 0.52%, with that number decreasing as the number of followers increases.
The average reach of a post on Facebook is 5.2% of a page’s total likes.
The average click-through-rate (CTR) for Facebook Ads varies based on age ranges. The average CTR for users aged 18 - 54 is between 1.05% and 1.35%, users aged 55 - 64 is 2.38%, and users over the age of 65 is 3.42%.
Videos optimized for mobile devices have an average of 27% higher engagement.
Now that we’ve revealed statistics concerning certain Facebook Ad strategies, platforms, and content, let’s dive into what this all means for your brand.
Strategy Trends
The biggest component of strategy besides your budget and objective is your audience. Knowing who to target will virtually determine the success of your ads, given that you are sending them the right message.
Lookalike Audiences
Retargeting Audiences
Specific Interest-Based Audiences
Knowing how to target and leverage each phase of your audience segments is vital for driving cost-effective conversions.
Lookalike Audiences
The biggest change in audience trends is the use of lookalike audiences. After creating a custom audience based on traffic, conversions, content engagement, video views, or specific actions taken on your website, you can use that audience to create what’s known as a lookalike audience. This lookalike audience essentially defines your ideal customer based on all the data collected from those who have completed whatever action you chose.
Facebook takes that ideal customer profile and matches it to users that have not engaged with your brand but share up to 99% profile similarities between the custom audience list that you provide.
From here, it’s essential that you create an ad that has proven to work among your custom audience. For example, if you create a lookalike audience based on sales, make sure that you use similar creative content and offers that got your original audience (current customers and those who completed a sale) to convert. If you’re creating a lookalike audience based on website traffic, try and identify what drove that traffic to your website, and create an ad with similar content.
A huge trend for brands looking to increase their organic audience is to create a lookalike audience based on current engaged users and promote content they would normally post organically.
When creating lookalike audiences, it’s important to note that the more data you provide Facebook (the more users), the more accurate your audience will be. Facebook requires audiences or data sets with at least 100 - 500 users, but we typically recommend no less than 1,000. We’ve seen the most success among brands with at least 5,000.
If your conversion audience isn’t large enough to create a lookalike audience from, try creating a lookalike audience based on everyone that added your product to their cart instead.
Another important aspect of a lookalike audience is knowing when to import a customer list or base your lookalike on a Facebook-created audience from your Pixel or Conversions API. If you want to target similar users to those that have purchased your product, you should do whichever option allows value-based targeting. Value-based targeting will tell Facebook to target users that are most similar to customers that have spent the most money with your brand. You can also leverage this data to target ROAS limited bid strategies.
Retargeting Audiences
Retargeting audiences allow you to target ads to users that have previously engaged with your brand in some way. Those most common form of this is by retargeting to users that have abandoned shopping carts on your website. These retargeting ads should promote a limited time offer, most often a discount on the specific products they abandoned.
Retargeting is also a great way to leverage the increasingly popular trend of upselling current customers. Retarget active customers to promote different products, discounts. or other offers. Since 65% of business comes from current customers, you should leverage this method as a quick and cost-effective way to generate revenue.
Another way retargeting is used is to target website visitors in general. Maybe your ad or content was interesting enough to drive them to your website, but maybe the timing of offer wasn’t quite right to result in a sale. You can retarget your website traffic to promote different offers or to provide additional value to encourage action.
You can also use this same method for retargeting video viewers, users that engaged with your ads or page, and your followers.
Specific Interest-Based Audiences
This trend has been around for a while but is often still misused. If you don’t have a custom audience large enough that you can leverage retargeting or lookalike audiences, you’ll most likely have to stick with interest and behavioral targeting.
The reason so many advertisers misuse these targeting parameters is because of a few things.
They target too many characteristics.
They target too few broad characteristics.
They narrow their audience characteristics by too much.
Their audience characteristics lose sight of their ad creative and offer.
Their characteristic targeting restricts their audience size.
You should only target interests and behaviors that you know are relevant to your ideal customer and do not negatively impact the size of your target audience. But how do you know if you’re doing this correctly?
Adding certain keywords to your audience characteristics can help narrow down your audience to specific interests without adding too many narrowing levels.
Let’s use an example. Our client Mark sells his book to Christian parents of young adults. Instead of targeting a ton of different Christian interests, we target a few broad ones and narrow it down by specific ones. When we were done, his audience looked a little bit like this:
Females aged 40 - 65+ that have children or are interested in parenthood or motherhood
AND must be interested in God, Jesus, The Bible, or Christianity
AND must be interested in The Shack, Christian nonfiction books, or Christian music
This was the first audience we ran for him and it produced around a 375% return on ad spend. From there, we were able to reduce his costs with lookalike audiences and scale his return by retargeting. In short, don’t use more than one or two narrowing parameters, never use more than three or four characteristics on each narrowing level, and don’t be afraid to try excluding certain audiences, such as those that have already purchased your product.
Content Trends
The type of content being used for Facebook Ads is still widely dominated by static images. Even though videos are proven to increase engagement, produce more conversions, and reduce costs, nearly 55% of all Facebook Ads still use static images.
For E-commerce ads, carousels and product images are widely popular. Some brands try to leverage videos, but most of the time they are only found effective when they are used to tell a story. When videos are used, they are generally between 15 and 30 seconds long.
It’s essential to use images and visuals that look professional, original, and authentic. The more appealing your visuals, the more effective. Especially when relying on images of products, you are fighting against tens of thousands of different pieces of content a day for the attention of your ideal customer. If you’re going to spend money on an ad, make sure it counts.
Limited time offers and discount sales will always be popular among E-commerce brands but knowing when and how to leverage them will determine the difference between success and failure. Using limited time discount offers are great for retargeting abandoned cart users and generating instant purchases among a cold audience (depending on the price point of your offer).
Most E-commerce brands also create a gallery for their products on their Facebook Page so that their organic audience can look through and click links to purchase or learn more about each item. While promoting your product should most certainly not be your priority with your organic audience (providing value should be), it can be helpful to promote limited time offers and sales without having to spend money on ads.
Another type of content that is increasingly popular is email subscriptions. Offering a one-time discount code in exchange for a user’s email address can help increase your organic audience and contact list, promote offers organically through email marketing, and leverage lookalike audiences to promote similar offers among similar people.
Another way that you can promote an increase in your organic audience is by leveraging contests. Offer users a free prize if they share your content on their page and with their friends. Every time they share or tag a friend, they get an entry to be randomly selected to win. Their friends that see it will then follow you and tag their friends to get a chance to win as well. This cycle will continue on until your contest ends, so make sure to give it enough time to gain traction.
Lastly, a common trend for increasing your organic sales is by promoting a referral program among your current customers. Offer them a limited time discount for every friend that they refer to your brand. If you offered a discount to every customer you had, you could, in theory, at least double your current customer base, depending on how many friends they share it with.
Carousel ads are great for increasing engagement on static images and featuring different product lines.
Overall, here’s the most popular content trends:
Static images account for 55% of ad creative, but videos are proven to be more cost-efficient.
Carousel ads featuring different images of products are commonly used to increase engagement for static images.
Using professional and original visuals is essential for brand perception.
Limited time offers and discounts for abandoned cart users can work on average 45% of the time.
Creating a gallery for your products with a link to each product page is a great way to promote your product line among your organic audience.
Leveraging email subscriptions in exchange for a one-time discount offer can help promote your organic sales, increase your organic audience, and build your contact list.
Hosting contests is a very efficient way to reach new customers, increase your following, and increase engagement of your content. It also promotes users to share your content with their friends, so you can reach more people without spending money on ads.
Establishing a referral program for current customers is a great way to encourage your active customers to share your brand with their friends in exchange for a discount. This is just another way to promote your brand and reach new users without spending money on ads.
Sales Trends
There are a few different trends being leveraged to increase sales in E-commerce today. We’ll break down the trends by each of the following techniques:
Landing page content
Email marketing
Growing and leveraging your organic audience
Retargeting for low-cost conversions
Let’s dive into each technique.
Landing Page Content
Since 82% of Facebook users strictly use the mobile app, your landing page has to be mobile-friendly. When users click on your ad, your website has to load quickly and be visually appealing, or they’ll back out quicker than they clicked on it.
Your headline has to transition seamlessly from the ad and sometimes should even match the headline from the ad itself. Make your landing page easy to scroll through, easy to read, and easy to find the call-to-action.
Since users on mobile are generally constrained by time, it’s essential that you make your landing page quick and easy to get through. Even more importantly, your conversion action has to be no more than a one, maybe two step process. Promote the call-to-action, get their credit card information and contact information, and call it a day. You can send them through a click funnel after that or follow up with email offers from there, but make sure the conversion is an easy, single step process.
A unique trend that some brands are trying out is separating their ads by mobile users and desktop users. Desktop users generally have more time (at least outside of work), so landing pages and content can be a little longer. If you want to test out long versus short content, offers, call-to-actions, or conversion processes, try targeting your mobile audience and your desktop audience separately.
Overall, the most important aspect to your landing page is making sure that it’s easy to get through.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is essential for following up with users that abandoned their cart and for upselling to current customers without spending money on ads. If you can get email address and sort them by abandoned carts and active customers, you could see a major increase in organic sales.
For abandoned carts, send an automated email a couple of minutes after they submit their contact info reminding them of the items they forgot to purchase and offering a limited time discount if they purchase them within the next few hours. On average, follow-up emails create a 45% conversion rate, and with an industry that has a 70% abandoned cart rate, you could see as high as a 32% increase in organic sales just from creating an email automation.
By adding an email automation that targets abandoned cart users within 15 minutes of leaving your website without a purchase, you can see up to 32% more conversions.
For current customers, focus on upselling different product lines. See what else your active customers would be interested organically, so you can avoid wasting money advertising products they aren’t interested in buying right now. This method can also help you test out different offers before using them in ads, especially when targeting lookalike audiences.
You can also leverage email marketing to promote your referral program without spending money on ads. That way, you are not only increasing your organic sales, but increasing your organic audience and your contact list.
Growing and Leveraging Your Organic Audience
It can take years to grow a substantial following organically. That’s why many E-commerce brands promote their value-providing content among similar audiences that match their current followers and customers. Instead of promoting a sale or a website visit, they promote a Like or Follow for their page. That way, they can nurture that audience with value until they are ready to convert into customers.
You can also leverage your organic audience to promote different offers, contests, referral programs, and limited time discounts. While you should primarily focus on providing value to your organic audience, promoting an offer once in a while doesn’t hurt.
You should note that only about 5% of your followers see each post, so you could be posting multiple times a day, depending on how large your audience is. Staying active on social media will help your audience grow overtime, but you should never rely solely on organic content to scale your business.
Retargeting for Low-Cost Conversions
This trend is perhaps the most popular, yet underused. If you retarget your website visitors as a whole, specifically those that clicked on your ads, you can convert previously engaged users that have already shown interest in your product without spending much.
I have personally seen clients cut their costs in half just by retargeting their website traffic for conversions. This is an audience that has already shown interest in your brand and products, so why not pay a little money to show it to them again?
If you’re going to run retargeting ads, you should account around 20% of your budget for them. For certain clients, we’ve allocated as much as 30% and as low as 10%. It all really depends on the size of your budget, but you should always leverage retargeting.
If your website doesn’t get enough traffic, you could try leveraging a traffic campaign to generate clicks, then create a lookalike audience from there, or just target your website visitors for inexpensive conversions.
All-in-all, knowing when and how to apply each of these trends to your brand will help you scale faster and more successfully than any of your competitors. It’s important to understand the value of your current customers, your almost-customers, and your website traffic. Use each of these different groups to promote relevant offers and target similar users across Facebook.
