How to Setup and Optimize Facebook & Meta ads to Increase Amazon Product Sales
Of all social media ads, Facebook or Meta Ads are one of the most powerful ways to promote your Amazon products.
Through the power of Meta’s user base across its platforms Facebook and Instagram and combined with the sophistication of its advertising tools, you can drive more traffic to your Amazon product listings. This will also help boost BSR and search rankings.
Why Many Successful Amazon FBA Business use Meta and Facebook ads
Many Sellers reach a point where they have exhausted their ability to cost-effectively scale their ad spend on the Amazon advertising platform. They are already investing in sponsored product ads and have also tried other Amazon advertising formats, but additional ad spend does not seem to drive incremental sales in a meaningful way (How to increase sales on Amazon).
Sounds familiar?
As a next step, many Sellers explore other ways to drive external traffic to their product listings and eventually try Meta ads / Facebook ads. Here is why this can a great way to scale your Amazon FBA business:
Scale & Precise Targeting: Facebook ads offer both scale (massive audience), but also the ability to narrow targeting down to reach users who are actually in buying mode.
Cost-Efficient: Cost-per-click (CPCs) can be lower compared to other advertising formats (i.e. Google search ads) while click-through-rates (CTRs) are still high enough (1-2% for well-optimized ads) to generate sufficient impact.
First-Party Customer Data: As well as a powerful channel for product launches and ranking campaigns, sellers can use Facebook Ads to build a list – capturing emails or other contact info from people interested in your brand, which you can use to ask for reviews, or launch new products.
Effective Creative Testing: Because it is easy to get meaningful readings, such as CPCs and CTRs out of Meta advertising campaigns (at reasonable cost), they are actually a great way to test your creative and also your communications. Do certain messages resonate better with audiences in your Meta ads? Try to leverage these findings to also optimize your Amazon Listing pages.
Many sellers think the learning curve is too big, and claim they don’t have the time or energy to learn how to run Facebook Ads. Also, many of the steps to optimizing Meta ads are somewhat counter-intuitive and the un-initiated may likely make costly mistakes. Here is what you need to be aware of.
Should you send Meta / Facebook Ad Traffic Directly to Your Amazon Listings?
While the idea of getting more traffic (at reasonable CPCs) sounds great, concluding that using Meta and Facebook ads to drive more traffic to your Amazon product listings is a big mistake. Here is why:
When you create Meta ad campaigns, you always define an optimization goal. Something like, awareness, traffic or sales. Ideally you would want this goal be something like a “purchase event” (i.e. product sales, or maximizing revenue). While this is possible for Meta ads that target a website that you own, it is not possible for ads that are driving traffic to a website that you do not control (such as Amazon). Let us explain why that is.
The Meta Pixel / Meta Conversions API for Server-Side Tagging in the Context of Amazon
Meta uses two ways to track and optimize its ads: The Meta Pixel and Meta Conversions API (A.k.a. Server-Side Tagging). Without going into technical details, both methods involve adding a tracking code to the backend of a website that shares marketing analytics with the Meta advertising platform. As a result, the Meta ad algorithm can “learn” what type of users are just click on your ads, but don’t buy anything as opposed to those who actually convert. Without the pixel or conversion API being set-up the Meta ad algorithm is essentially “blind” and has no idea what users are doing on a website. This is the case when you are sending Meta ad traffic to a page on the Amazon website: as you have no access to the Amazon.com backend, you cannot setup any tracking code on Amazon and Meta ads can therefore not be optimized for any specific actions (such as purchases) that users may take on Amazon.
Why Running Meta Ads “Traffic Campaigns” to Your Amazon Listings is a Terrible Idea
You may think that not being able to optimize traffic towards a sales conversion is not such a big problem. After all, you can still target “relevant users” based on demographic information and such and your Amazon Listings have great conversion rates.
This reasoning is flawed for one major reasons: Meta sells its “inventory” (all of us, their users) at different costs. When you tell Meta to optimize a campaign for a traffic objective, then you are optimizing for CPC. You are telling Meta to send you the least expensive clicks available.
The big insight here is that, anyone who has any experience with running Facebook or Meta ads is that there is a very significant correlation between CPC and conversion probability. In other words: users that are more likely to buy something don’t come cheap. Meta can sell these clicks at much higher CPCs to advertisers that are optimizing their ads towards a purchase goal (because these advertisers generally care much less about a high CPC as long as their ads are profitable).
This is the same logic as with Amazon ads: keywords with high conversion rates have higher CPC.
So, in conclusion the implication if this is that by optimizing a Meta ads campaign towards a “traffic” A.k.a. CPC goal you are excluding most of those users who are in buying mode (no matter how clever you are selecting a seemingly suitable target audience)!
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The Solution: Sending Facebook Traffic to a Landing Page
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The best Amazon ad sales funnels involve a middle or intermediate step, rather than sending people straight to Amazon.
This may seem counterintuitive, right? Won’t this extra step add extra friction and reduce sales?
An intermediate step like a landing page allows low-intent visitors to drop out of your funnel before they get to Amazon, leaving your conversion rates intact. Also, because on a landing page you can install the Meta Pixel / Conversion API, you can actually optimize your traffic. Not just in terms of minimizing its cost-per-click. You can optimize your Meta ad traffic towards a meaningful goal that is an effective proxy in predicting purchase intent (such as signing up to a newsletter).
Learn more about how external traffic can positive or negatively affect your conversion rate here.
In addition, your landing page lets you make use of retargeting and analytics, and allows you to capture valuable customer details like email addresses.
Setting Up Your Landing Page
LandingCube lets sellers make a professional landing page quickly and easily.
To make sure your landing page is compliant with Facebook’s terms, we recommend the following:
Include a link to your privacy on your landing page.
Include navigation elements that link away from your landing page.
You also want to optimize your landing page for sales. Remove or rewrite any parts of your copy that are only there for keyword optimization reasons, and make sure you emphasize the area at the top of your landing page, which shows up as soon as someone loads the page (known as “above the fold”).
For more on creating an effective landing page with LandingCube, go here.
Alternatives to a Landing Page
There are a few other ways you can set up your Facebook Ads funnel.
You can use Messenger bots or ManyChat in place of the landing page. This is a lower-friction option that works well in some cases, particularly when you just need quick sales.
You also have a chance to capture contact info here (you’ll want to try and get people to give you their email, since contacting people through Messenger is hard with Facebook’s TOS).
You could also drive traffic directly to your listing, if you’re confident the traffic you send is “warm” enough (for example, if you’re retargeting an existing customer list). In this case, it’s best to Facebook pixel tracking to your links (find out how to do this with LandingCube).
Using a landing page is recommended, however. This is especially important if you’re new to using Facebook Ads, as it will help you with tracking, optimization an split testing for your Facebook Ad.
Facebook Ads for Amazon: Setting up your first campaign
Let’s walk through the Facebook Ads platform, and how to set up your first campaign to promote your product on Amazon.
First, you’ll need to select the objective for your campaign. The objective you choose helps Facebook (specifically, the Facebook pixel) optimize your ads to show to the right people.
For most campaigns, you’ll want to choose Conversions.
On the next page, you’ll select your conversion settings – specifically which conversion your ads will be optimized for.
About the Facebook Pixel & Optimization
To track conversions, you’ll need to use the Facebook pixel.
The Facebook pixel is a piece of code you install on your landing page, which sends information to Facebook Ads Manager when people perform certain events on your page.
For example, the pixel will fire a signal each time someone views your page. You’ll be able to see how many time this event took place from within your Ads Manager dashboard, as well as the demographics of the people performing this event.
You’ll also be able to optimize your ads to show to users most likely to perform an event. This is probably the most powerful use of the Facebook Pixel, and is a great way to zero in on your target audience.
Bottom Line: to properly track and optimize your ad delivery, you’ll need to use Facebook pixel events. Since you can’t install the Facebook pixel on your Amazon product page, this is another important reason to use a landing page in your Facebook Ads.
Conversion Event
The ideal conversion event for a landing page campaign is Lead. This is the event that fires when potential customers claim a coupon on your landing page (if you’re using LandingCube).
If you’re running a campaign for the first time, this event will show a red dot (instead of the green dot on the image above), and it will tell you it does not have sufficient data to optimize for. The pixel needs an event to fire a certain number of times, within the last seven days, to be able to properly optimize your ads.
In this case, you may want to change this (“Optimization for Ad Delivery“) to “Landing Page Views”.
This way, the pixel will optimize for people most likely to click on your ad and visit your page.
Step 4: Targeting
Now you’ll define your target audience – i.e., who sees your ads. This is the most important part of your Facebook campaign. The more you know about your target market, the easier this will be.
You can create targeting audiences with an existing data set, Facebook’s audience builder, or both.
Creating a New Audience
Facebook’s audience builder lets you target people based on a number of characteristics, including age, gender, location, interests or behavior. It’s incredibly detailed and powerful.
Here are a couple of things to consider when building your audience:
Create an audience of at least 10,000 people. You need a big enough audience so you don’t run out of people to show your ads to.
While a large audience is good, don’t go too broad. You’ll have better results by targeting a specific set of users.
Be as specific as possible. Use detailed targeting, as we’ll show in the image below.
Interest targeting is particularly powerful. Make sure you include “Amazon.com” as an interest to ensure they’re enthusiastic Amazon customers, and try to find as many interests relevant to your product as possible.
If I wanted to sell bodybuilding supplements, I’d probably target like this:
Or, if I wanted to sell a “Happy Birthday” plush cat, I’d target people like this:
As you can see, I’d target Women aged 18-40 who have an upcoming birthday, and who are interested in Amazon.com, cats, and stuffed toys.
Targeting Lookalike & Custom Audiences
Another option you have for targeting is using an existing list of people.
This could be:
An email list.
A ManyChat/Messenger audience.
People who like your Facebook page.
An audience made from Facebook pixel data (e.g. people who have bought from your site, or opted in on your landing page).
You can essentially use any data set, as long as there is enough info (such as names, addresses, phone numbers and/or email addresses) for Facebook to be able to match to users’ profiles.
To do this, you will upload your data to Facebook and create a Custom Audience.
You can then either use this audience for your ad targeting, or create a Lookalike Audience, with which Facebook finds and targets people with a similar profile (location, demographics, interests) to your original audience.
You can also use a combination of a custom audience or lookalike audience and detailed targeting.
For example, you create a lookalike audience based on your email list. Then, on top of that, you target only people interested in cats, within this audience.
Lookalike audiences are one of the most powerful targeting methods available to Facebook advertisers. It takes away a lot of the guesswork involved with interest targeting, by letting Facebook’s sophisticated algorithm do the heavy lifting.
The ability to add specific interests, behaviors or demographics on top of your lookalike audience is even better, as it allows you to get incredibly detailed with who you are reaching with your ads.
Pro Tip: if you have a history of sales on Amazon, you may be able to use this data to create custom & lookalike audiences on Facebook. Access your reports from Amazon Seller Central, and download past order reports, which should include names & addresses of your customers. If you have enough data, upload to Facebook to create a custom audience.
Do not Forget Optimizing your Amazon Listings Before Driving Ad Traffic
Whenever you send people to your Amazon product listing, make sure your listing is already optimized.
You want to properly optimize your detail page in two ways:
optimize for conversions, to ensure people who click to your product listing are likely to convert.
optimize for keywords, to maximize the positive impact on your search rankings from your Facebook Ads campaign.
Driving traffic to your Amazon listing without optimizing the listing first can be a huge waste of money. You’ll end up spending thousands on ads, with few Amazon sales to show for it.
Facebook Ad Targeting Resources
Here are some more resources to help you with audience building for Facebook Ads.
This post goes into more detail on how to create lead-based audiences on Facebook, and best practices when doing so.
This video walks you through some key tips for building cold audiences (audiences using only demographics, interests and behaviors).
This Google sheets automation helps you format your Amazon customer data to upload to Facebook as a custom audience:
If it’s your first time running ads, you may want to set a reasonably low daily budget to begin with ($5?).
In time, you’ll need to increase this budget, as this is not enough to see any meaningful results from your ads.
How much do I need to spend on my ads?
The exact ad spend necessary varies, depending on the assets (email list, pixel data) you have, the different audiences you’re targeting, and the amount you’re willing to spend for each conversion.
However, you should go into Facebook Ads with a decent budget, as you’ll need to spend a bit of money testing, until you get things right.
This image shows the average cost per click for Facebook Ads, separated by industry.
You’ll see that for the retail industry (one of the cheapest), it averages $0.70 spent just for each person to click on your ad. And you can expect higher costs when first starting out, before split testing your ads to improve effectiveness.
Bottom Line: I frequently hear Amazon sellers say “I spent $50 on Facebook Ads and didn’t get any sales, I don’t think this works”. Facebook Ads take time and money to optimize and see results. If you don’t have the budget to spend a few hundred dollars at least, you’re probably best off concentrating on Amazon PPC for the time being.
The final step before moving on to setting up the ad itself is choosing your placements. There are many places your ads can be shown, such as in stories, within Messenger, and on news feeds. You can also show your ads on Instagram (which is part of the Facebook Ads ecosystem).
To start with, just choose automatic placements.
As you go forward, you can test different ad sets with different placements.
Step 6: Setting up your Ad creative & launching your ad
Ad creative – the images and text in your ad – is another vitally important part Facebook Ads. This is what will make your audience stop scrolling and click on your ads.
Karl Kangur, founder of marketing agency Business Media, advises: “You want to use colors that stand out within the white and blue Facebook color scheme. Orange, red, and black backgrounds with contrasting text are often the most attention-grabbing. On the ad copy side, you’ll want to err on the side of giving more information instead of creating curiosity or being clickbaity – after all, you’re paying per click so you want them to actually be interested instead of fooled.”
Under Identity, make sure the Facebook and/or Instagram page for your brand is selected.
You can choose from several ad formats, such as image, video or carousel.
In the future you may want to experiment with different ad formats. Video is especially effective (though it takes more time, money and effort to produce). For now, just choose a single image ad.
Add the destination URL (the link to your landing page), a compelling headline, and a short snippet of text.
When you add a landing page link, Facebook should automatically pull up an image from it for your ad. Otherwise, you can hit add media to upload your own.
Use the Facebook Ads preview feature to see what your ad will look like on various placements:
Split testing is an important part of running Facebook Ads, especially for the creative elements. Moving forward, you should create and test variations, such as different headlines, long-form versus short-form copy, and different images, to see what gets the best results.
(You should also test different audiences, to find the most profitable target audience for your ads).
Once you’ve created the ad, just hit Confirm to launch your ad.
Step 7: Tracking results
“What gets measured, gets managed”
It’s important to track your Facebook Ads’ performance. You need to know what you’re spending on ads, and what return you’re getting for this ad spend.
For example, you might see you spent $100 and got 10 conversions (let’s say email signups), making it $10 per conversion. You’d assess whether that’s within what you’re comfortable spending in deciding how to move forward with your ads.
We’ve mentioned several times in this guide the importance of testing, and tracking results is obviously a necessary part of proper split testing. You’ll use the data provided to see which variation you’re testing (whether it’s your audience, images, copy, or anything else) provides the best cost per conversion, and stick with the winning option.
Extensive testing and reporting is vital for all kinds of digital marketing, and selling on Amazon Facebook Ads is no different.
Tracking Conversions on Amazon
Using a landing page, you can use the Facebook pixel to track a conversion event, such as an email optin or a click to Amazon. But can you track final sales (on Amazon) with the pixel?
Unfortunately you can’t use the Facebook pixel to track right through to Amazon. The best you can do using the pixel is to track and optimize for people who click from your landing page to Amazon.
If you want to match your ad spend against final sales, to see how much you’re spending for each sale, you may have to calculate this manually.
You can use promo codes to do this – take the total number of times your code was redeemed from your Amazon reports, and match this against your data in ads manager.
You can also use Amazon Attribution to give you valuable customer data in conversion metrics on Amazon, which again you can compare to your Facebook data.
Another option is to use a third-party tool like Zontracker to link up and optimize data from both channels.
The Meta and Amazon advertising partnership
In recent years, Meta and Amazon have collaborated and started integrating their advertising solutions. This allows Meta users to shop directly from Amazon through Instagram and Facebook (without having to leave the platform). While this feature is currently limited to Meta ads operated by Amazon directly, we believe that it will eventually become available for third-party sellers. Meta has similar advertising solutions in place for other markets and other third-party e-commerce platforms (i.e. Meta collaboration ads for Asia’s eCommerce giant Shopee that can be optimized towards sales objectives). This partnership means that in the future, sellers can likely run Meta ads directly from platforms like Instagram and Facebook, making it even easier to convert social media traffic into Amazon sales.
Conclusion
If you break it down piece by piece, setting up a Facebook Ads campaign isn’t that hard.
The hardest part is testing and optimizing your ads, and achieving results that are worth the ad spend. This is where you’ve got a golden opportunity to do better than your competitors, who claimed “Facebook Ads don’t work”.
The reward for your hard work is the opportunity to capture valuable customer data and contact information from your audience, which is a huge advantage for any business selling on Amazon.
This article only scratches the surface on how to run Facebook Ads for Amazon products. As you get more digital marketing experience, we highly recommend you continue learning more. Here are some great resources:
