3 eCommerce Facebook Ads Adjustments To Test in 2020

After thousands of Facebook ad testing and a record-breaking revenue year for many of our clients in 2019, we wanted to shed some light on what worked and where we believe your focus should be this year to scale your business using Facebook ads for eCommerce businesses.

1. Park your ego at the door: CBO works if you give it time

It’s been covered at length throughout the year, Facebook doesn’t believe manual bidding and human adjustments is the way to go. They want marketers to let go and trust their own optimization ways.

With Facebook’s Campaign Budget Optimization, you give up control on how much budget each ad set/audiences get within a campaign. As scary as that sounds, after running hundreds of campaigns with and without CBO in 2019, our conclusion is that it does, in fact, stabilize campaigns in a positive way.

The more you spend, the more likely it is to help your performances. It may take several days for CBO to show its worth so be patient and trust the algorithm.

2. Add Buzzfeed-like video and DPAs to your prospecting campaigns

Video remains the hottest ad type on Facebook. Engagement rates remain very strong. What a lot of eCommerce companies tend to do rather badly when they come to us asking for help is how they introduce their brand to a cold audience.

We typically focus on building out two types of content for Top of Funnel Efforts:

Buzzfeed-like videos

This type of ad feels native to the platform and sucks users into consuming the clips. The brief is simple: introduce your brand as BuzzFeed or Business Insider would. Make sure it conveys momentum by using headlines like “This clothing company revolutionized travel by…”

Need inspiration? Check out this video we made for Anatomie.

DPAs to your Top of Funnel

As much as people love an introduction, we’ve also noticed that some shoppers fall in love with tangible goods, so don’t be shy to feed your Facebook ad funnel with Dynamic Product Ads, or DPAs that showcase your best sellers, new arrivals or a collection that resonates with the time of year.

Historically, Facebook has encouraged DPAs for Middle of Funnel/Bottom of Funnel retargeting but we’ve seen success with this ad type throughout the funnel, even at the top.

3. Try worldwide targeting

Most US businesses focus on targeting the United States market. Few logical reasons for this: doing business in your own country is rather straightforward and, as most business owners know, it’s also the one market where you’ll most likely find impulse buyers. Rather important when introducing strangers to a brand they have never heard about!

But here’s the problem: everyone thinks that way and your CPMs continue to climb every year. More advertisers bid on your best-performing audiences and your ROAS becomes underwhelming.

Ready to drop CPMs like it’s 2013? Open up your targeting to worldwide targeting to enter the time machine.

Several steps need to be taken before you start shipping to the world:

• Logistically speaking, make sure that you can ship internationally. If there are countries you simply cannot ship to, don’t forget to add them to the exclusion list in your targeting.
• Be clear about who between your company and consumers will be covering duties at the border. If you put the burden on shoppers, don’t be surprised by packages being refused. The best balance we have seen so far is rolling in duties into international shipping fees. Another way of doing this is covering duty fees after a certain amount purchased.
• Make sure you are not charging too much to the eyes of the consumer for international shipping. This will only create huge drop-offs during the checkout phase.

The best way to scale Facebook campaigns in 2020

Once you’re confident you can run Worldwide targeting, start testing interests, lookalike models and broad targeting. You will see significant (and inexpensive) traffic coming to your website and soon enough conversions coming from everywhere in the world. With our clients specifically, we’ve seen success in Canada, Mexico, Sweden, United Kingdom, China, Singapore, and beyond.

We believe that worldwide targeting is perhaps the biggest way to scale your Facebook campaigns in 2020. The underpriced traffic and growing global economy will help you reach qualified customers at lower costs rather than solely relying on the US market.

At Evestar, we are committed to helping eCommerce businesses strategize their Facebook ads in 2020. Have follow-up questions on this article or want to discuss your own objectives? We’d love to chat, schedule an intro call with our team of experts.