Facebook ads are one of the most powerful external traffic sources for Amazon sellers.
A successful Facebook Ads campaign will benefit you by way of increased sales velocity, which leads to a higher BSR, better rankings and more profit.
You can also collect leads with Facebook Ads, and build a powerful list of potential customers.
All this helps you get an edge over your competitors. The vast majority of Amazon sellers never use outside traffic sources like Facebook Ads.
Best of all, setting up your first campaign is actually pretty easy.
Reviewing the basics
As discussed in previous chapters, the best practice is to drive your Facebook ad traffic to a landing page, instead of straight to your listing.
Sending Facebook traffic straight to your product listing often decreases the chance of your campaign being a success. You’ll end up sending a lot of low traffic with low buyer-intent to your product listing, and you’ll miss the chance to capture vital contact and retargeting information.
You’ll want to use a sales funnel such as this:
LandingCube’s landing pages & Messenger bots are tailor-made to help Amazon sellers grow sales and rankings from external traffic.
Making your landing page compliant with Facebook’s terms
To make sure your landing page is compliant with Facebook’s terms, we recommend the following:
Host your landing page on your own website.
Include a link to your privacy on your landing page.
Include navigation elements that link away from your landing page.
You’ll also want to make sure that your product listing is in top shape and fully optimized before you start paying money on ads to send traffic to your listing.
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, we will walk you through setting up your first Facebook ad campaign.
Setting up your first Facebook Ad campaign
Step 1: Setting up a Facebook Page
First, you’ll need to set up a Facebook page for your business. Without a Facebook page, you won’t be able to run Facebook ads. Before you proceed, invite a couple of friends to like your page for some extra social proof.
Step 2: Setting up a Facebook Ad account
Next, it’s time to set up a Facebook ad account. Go to facebook.com/business and click “Create an Ad”.
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 regular campaigns, you’ll want to choose Conversions.
On the next page, you’ll need to select your Conversion settings – specifically which conversion your ads will be optimized for.
About the Facebook Pixel & Optimization
One of the really powerful things the Facebook Pixel does is track the type of people performing an event, so the Facebook ad delivery system can make sure your ads show to people most likely to convert.
To do this, however, it needs a big enough data set to work with. That means it needs a certain number of conversions within 7 days to properly optimize your campaign.
This means, at first, you may be best optimizing for page views, rather than conversions. Once you start getting conversions, you can change your ads to optimize for this event instead.
Conversion Event
The ideal conversion event for a landing page campaign is Lead. This is the event that fires when someone claims 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.
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 through and visit your page.
Step 4: Targeting
Now you want to define your audience targeting. This is the most important part of your Facebook campaign setup. The more you know about your target market, the easier this will be.
Creating an audience essentially lets you target people based on a number of characteristics, including age, location, interests or behavior. It’s really powerful.
Here are a couple of things to consider when building your audience:
Create an audience of at least 10,000 people. The more people exposed to your ad, the better.
Be as specific as possible. Use detailed targeting, as you shown 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
You can also use specially made audiences for your Facebook Ads based on people who have bought from you in the past, opted into your email list, engaged with you on ManyChat, and more.
To do this, you will upload your data (email list, ManyChat audience etc) to Facebook to create a Custom Audience.
You can then either use this audience for your ad targeting, or create a Lookalike Audience, wherein Facebook finds people with a similar profile (location, demographics, interests) to your original audience.
You can also layer detailed targeting on top of a custom audience. For example, if you wanted to target a lookalike audience based on your email list, but narrow that further by adding “Amazon.com” as an interest.
This post goes into more detail on how to create lead-based audiences on Facebook, and best practices when doing so.
For help formatting your Amazon customer data to create custom Facebook Audiences, you can use this Google Sheets automation:
Set a reasonably low daily budget to start ($5?), and make sure you set an end date that matches the expiration date of your landing page.
Leave most of the other settings to default, and continue to ad creation.
Note: while you should start with a low budget if it’s your first time creating an ad, you need to be ready to spend a bit of money to get any meaningful results.
The above 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.
So, don’t go in expecting to pay $50 for a week and make a ton of sales. Facebook Ads take time to optimize.
Step 6: Setting up your creative & launching your ad
When creating an ad creative, use compelling images and text for maximum results.
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.”
Once you’ve created the ad, just hit Confirm to launch your ad.
Step 7: Tracking results
It’s important you track your campaign’s performance. If you don’t stay on top of your campaign stats, you could end up spending a lot of money on something that doesn’t work.
In the early days of your ad campaign, make sure to check your results daily. You can check your results by following this guide.
Image source: Facebook.com
Facebook Ads for Amazon FAQs
Can you put a Facebook Pixel on Amazon?
No. With no access to the base code on Amazon, you can’t install any kind of pixel or analytics. The only way to utilize the Facebook Pixel for Amazon products is by driving traffic to a landing page.
Can you run Facebook Ads to Amazon?
Yes! There is nothing on either Facebook or Amazon’s terms that stop you from running Facebook Ads for Amazon products.
How can I retarget Amazon customers on Facebook?
Technically you can’t, since you can’t embed the Facebook Pixel on Amazon, but there is a workaround. You can download your past Amazon customer data to create a custom audience on Facebook, and show ads to this audience. For more, read this post.
How do I target Amazon customers on Facebook?
You can’t explicitly target Amazon customers, however you can target people based on “Amazon.com” as an interest with Facebook Ads. This is a great way to narrow down your audience to people who are likely to buy products on Amazon.
How can I track Amazon sales from Facebook Ads?
Tracking your customer’s journey through from Facebook Ads to Amazon is tough, as you can’t embed a tracking pixel on Amazon. The best way to track final sales is with Amazon Attribution, an analytics tool for brand registered Sellers and Vendors. Alternatively, if you are running a discount code promotion, you can view reports on how many of your promo codes were redeemed to see how many customers from your Facebook Ads converted.
Conclusion
As you can see, setting up a Facebook campaign isn’t that hard. It’s important, however, that you check your stats often, and that you improve & optimize your campaign further.
This article only scratches the surface on how to run Facebook ads. As you get more experience, we highly recommend you continue learning more about Facebook ads. Here are some great resources:
