Facebook Ads are one of the most powerful ways to promote your Amazon products.
By utilizing the power of Facebook’s user base and advertising tools, you can drive more sales to your products on Amazon, resulting in a boost in BSR and search rankings.
As well as a powerful channel for product launches and ranking campaigns, Facebook Ads allows to to build a list – capturing emails or other contact info from people interested in your brand, which you can use in the future for a wide range of uses.
Despite the benefits, a large majority of businesses on Amazon never use outside traffic sources like Amazon. That means if you do run Facebook Ads effectively, you’re likely to get a big leg up on your competition.
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. However, setting up a campaign is actually pretty easy.
Read on, and we’ll help you start reaping the benefits of Facebook Ads for your Amazon store.
Advertising Amazon Products on Facebook – The Basics
Let’s start with some best practices. Setting up a Facebook Ads campaign is simple, but running a campaign that produces results is what we want to be aiming for.
Before you begin running Facebook Ads, there are two things (outside of Facebook) you need to take care of.
Setup Task #1: Optimize Your Listing
Whenever you send people to your Amazon product listing, make sure your listing is already in top shape.
You want to properly optimize your detail page in two ways:
optimize for conversions, to increase the chance of people you send to your listing actually buying your product.
optimize for keywords, to maximize the positive impact on your search rankings you’ll get from your Facebook Ads campaign.
You should consider it a waste of money any time you pay to send someone to your product page (as you do with Facebook Ads) when your listing is not optimized.
Setup Task #2: Make a Landing Page
It benefits you to send people who click on your ad to an intermediate step, before your product listing.
This may seem counterintuitive, right? Since this an extra step add extra friction and reduce sales?
Well, you actually want a bit of friction with your Facebook Ads funnel. You might get a few people drop out who would have bought your product, but you’ll get many more drop off who aren’t interested in buying just yet. This is the important part.
People on Facebook don’t have the same buyer intent as people on Amazon. This is a given, since one is a shopping site and one is a social media platform.
That means you’ll have a higher conversion rate (sales per views) from on-Amazon traffic than from people who click to Amazon from your Facebook Ads.
As a result, when you send people straight from Facebook to your Amazon listing, a lot will take a look, decide they’re not in the mood to buy just yet, and leave. Dropping your conversion rate, and your rankings too (conversion rate is an important ranking factor).
The landing page gives people the opportunity to make this decision before they get to Amazon, and only those who are really ready to buy will go on to your listing. You’ll get a higher conversion rate from your Facebook Ads funnel instead.
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/analytics pixels, and capture emails from your customers (one of the big benefits we mentioned earlier).
Setting Up Your Landing Page
Use LandingCube to create 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 to convert people into buyers. 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, 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 need quicker 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 send people 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 add Pixels and track your links (find out how to do this with LandingCube).
I’d recommend creating a landing page funnel though, especially if you’re newer to Facebook Ads, as this will help you better optimize your ads, and protect your conversion rate on Amazon.
Advertising Amazon Products on Facebook: 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 one of the reasons Facebook Ads can be so effective.
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 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. 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 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, 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/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 this 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 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.
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 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 people 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 get 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 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.
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.
For help using Facebook’s business manager, go here.
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 – get 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 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 the data from both channels.
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, to eventually get the best results possible. This is where you’ve got a golden opportunity to do better than your competitors, who claimed “Facebook ads don’t work”.
This article only scratches the surface on how to run Facebook Ads for Amazon products. As you get more experience, we highly recommend you continue learning more. Here are some great resources:
