Facebook ads are one of the most powerful external traffic sources for Amazon sellers. If you set up a successful Facebook ad campaign, your Amazon listing will benefit from increased sales velocity, which leads to a higher BSR, better rankings and more profits.
Not only that, you’ll also 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, make sure you drive your Facebook ad traffic to a landing page, instead of straight to your listing.
Sending Facebook traffic straight to your product listing massively decreases the chance of your campaign being a success. You’ll end up sending a lot of low buyer-intent traffic 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”.
Choose Conversions, and give your ad campaign a name.
Now you’ll need to select a conversion event. If you use LandingCube, choose “Lead.” LandingCube triggers this event when your customer enters their email address. (If you don’t see any events here, make sure you’ve set up your pixel and requested a coupon at least once, so Facebook knows of the event.)
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.
Step 5: Setting your budget & schedule
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
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:
