All you need to know to optimize your Facebook remarketing campaigns

Anyone who has ever scrolled through Facebook has seen Dynamic Product Ads. Basically they are personalised ads generated from an e-commerce product feed that automatically changes and adapts the content and the message specifically to each user based on their preferences.

A simple example of dynamic product ads is when you visit a website for example looking for a new watch, you click on a product page but you aren't ready to buy it yet. The next few days you are going to see the ad of that exact watch everywhere. Dynamic product ads are often used in remarketing as they make it easy to promote the product that the user has already engaged with.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Optimize your product feed before setting up your retargeting campaigns

• The power of Dynamic Product Ads campaigns to remarket your audience in Facebook

• Challenges of using Dynamic Product Ads in your remarketing campaigns

• An example: Retarget your audience effectively with Optimized Feeds and Dynamic Product Ads

Optimize your product feed before setting up your retargeting campaigns

What is the e-commerce product feed and why do you need it to retarget your audience?

Let’s start from the beginning: The product feed. It is also known as an excel.txt, or .xml, that contains all of your product information. It is a file that contains a list of all the attributes of these products organised in a way that each product can be displayed and advertised or compared in a very unique way. You can find dates such as price, name or description image URL, product URL, inventory and so on in the feed. 

We can get these product feeds in many ways, one of the most common ways is through a URL. Having a product feed is necessary to create all sources of product related ads like Google shopping ads, Facebook, Pinterest or even Snapchat. When advertising platforms have access to the product feed they can automatically pull the information and create the ads that put your product in the center. Remarketing advertising formats such as Facebook’s Dynamic Product Ads use machine learning technologies that are incredibly powerful. That makes it possible for the platforms to generate higher conversion volume and return on your ad spend by delivering relevant product recommendations or products people have seen to users based on their interests, intent or previous actions.

Tips to optimize your Product Feed for remarketing your audience

1. The more product data the better. Facebook and other challenges make decisions based on this data, they have different mandatory fields. If you include things such as the product category in your ecommerce, a pattern, the collection name, the gender… the platform will match with a lot more precition your product with the right person.

2. The image is the element that compiles the message, so use images that shine. In many feeds there are products that lack quality images and as a consequence the resulting ads do not catch the users attention.

3. Categorise your product with the google product taxonomy. Not only in Google, this is already a market standard. It’s a key for retargeting performance and it will boost the quality of your product matching.

4. Avoid greyhacks such as, for example, filling your product title with capital letters or with repeated characters such as spam. You will get penalised for that.

5. Keep your data and structure clean and tidy. Keep a clean title; it is much better to have clear information such as in the title only the name of the product, in the brand only the brand… Than having already merged information in certain fields. It will really help you to deploy a much more adapted feed strategy based on each channel’s best practices.

6. Include all your products, even those out of stock. Based on the strategy you are following, you may need all your products, for example for retargeting purposes. If you include products out of stock which is a preference for a customer, Facebook will show a related product.

7. Align your images with the platform requirements. If you leave it on the channels to handle the image cropping and to adapt them to the placement, you are going to lose a lot of ad effectiveness.

8. Don’t use the complete product catalogue impact on new potential customers.  Concentrate on products that can really make a difference, that will make you stand out.

9. Adapt your message to each audience target.

The power of Dynamic Product Ads campaigns to remarket your audience in Facebook

Why use Dynamic Product Ads to retarget your audience 

1. Manage thousands of personalized ads at scale. They allow template based ads adapted to each strategy. Rather than creating multiple ads for the same product for different strategies or thousands of different simple ads.

2. They allow you to show the right product to each potential customer based on its specific preferences. With a personalized message based on the relationship between that person and your brand.

3. This personalization will have an impact in ad performance measured in return of ad spent and overall conversions.

Although dynamic ads are a great marketing tool it can be a bumpy ride to set them up. Bloom and Adsmurai have successfully faced these challenges in the past with various clients and turned them into competitive advantages. - MARIA EGOROVA, Performance Supervisor at Bloom

Challenges of using Dynamic Product Ads in your remarketing campaigns

1. Data gathering & integration: How to gather the right data into and from Facebook for example at the right time and to maximize your chances of conversion of each potential lead.

2. New platform updates 

3. Keeping the product feed updated and creatives management: If the feed is the engine, the creatives are the ones that allow you to do your strategy.

4. Workflow integration: How can your marketing and business team transform their needs and goals into a digital strategy.

5. Execution: How to control this raw energy into transforming into an implemental KPI that generates a real and measurable business impact.

One of the main challenges is data gathering & integration. The goal is how can we maximise the number of conversions with the highest possible conversion rates. To achieve this, there is a series of integrations or steps that we strongly recommend, and in some cases they are mandatory. 

1. Data gathering from online activity

1. Pixel: will allow you to measure web activity. If there is a mobile app it is really relevant to integrate the SDK to get a measurement as well from this user behaviour.

    

2. Conversions API: this is a solution that Facebook is offering to address signal resilients on the web, especially when the pixels stop working. That is very useful because it will help you to improve your results. It will be mandatory by the end of the year, so we have to keep it in mind. 

To retarget your audience and deal with Dynamic Ads is not enough with a simple implementation, it is necessary a higher level of detail that can be able to match different product elements with the e-commerce structure, so we need to know which are the CTA that we have to understand the funnel that we have to link that also with a lot of product information within the data layer.

2. Data gathering from offline information

The second element would be gathering offline information, and this is really relevant based on the nature of your own business. All these signals occur at a physical point of sale, or maybe in a call center, and this integration is not trivial. However, it can offer impressive insights of campaign optimisations. Since we go from working with a partial view of what is really going on to a full picture of online and offline behaviour of our customer. 

Collecting these signals has a direct impact, to offer the right product to the right person and to make advertising more relevant. 

If we track properly the product activity that the browsers use in our websites we would be much more accurate with our advertising. Also addressing the right business objectives instead of marketing objectives and optimizing them. Let’s remember that digital marketing is just a business tool that allows us to achieve our business goals. 

Recently Apple launched the updates for the iOS14 operating system. These changes represent a paradigm shift as they include strict privacy restrictions that directly affect companies and digital marketing strategies with a special focus on e-commerce and Paid Media campaigns.

But how does Apple iOS 14 update affect your Facebook retargeting campaigns?

Apple iOS14 update requires apps to ask users to opt-in in order to track them across the web, which reduces the opportunities for remarketing. 

It’s a fast-paced world and we have seen clients adapt and adjust, we have seen great results from brands that have adapted to the changes and they have used dynamic product ads for prospecting and building up their audiences.

Let’s see how it works. Platforms algorithm can find the best audience for brands based on who their desired demographics are. That way you can reach people who express interest in your product or products similar to yours, maybe your competitors. Even if they haven’t visited your website or app yet, people in this audience will automatically see the products that are relevant to them from your catalogue. 

3. Feed and Creative management to optimize your Dynamic Product Ads campaigns

The next challenge you will face is managing your product feeds. It’s a file with updated information related to your products, whichever they are, from clothing to properties, to courses… It has to include “name”, “description”, the URL of the product page, the price… and other relevant metadata such as new collection or top performer or last units.

This is the foundation of Dynamic Product Ads strategies and retargeting your audience, Facebook and other channels algorithms can match specific persons with the right product. Having the right and updated info will boost your results, as you provide Facebook with all the raw material it needs. 

We can help to generate a product feed from different sources, even human-based, to include all the necessary data to achieve a Dynamic Product Ads strategy based on scaling ads with clear and differentiated messages.

Also, there’s another challenge that brands often face: creatives. Often the images of the products are very simple. Some platforms like Google will require a withe background shots, on other platforms it can be very difficult to make a product stand out with such a simple creative. That is where Adsmurai creative management tools come in.

With the right management tool you can really enhance your images and adapt them to the different relationships between consumers and your brands. The messages you can share are very different. This tool can really help you to generate ads at scale based on tested and proven creatives with a message tailored for the person that is on the other side, and include contextual information. Those are the key drivers for conversion. 

All these creatives will be branded, totally aligned with your brand guidelines to create a seamless and identical experience across all channels. We have seen so many times brands that pay a lot of attention to every pixel they put in an ad and suddenly when they go into Dynamic ads they go with blanck and unpersonalised ads. So there is not a continuity in the experience that the person sees from the frand from one channel to another. 

4. Workflow integration

Another challenge that you will face is integration with your existing workflows. Based on how the product feed is generated we have worked with our partners in different ways to allow all relevant actors to naturally make changes that can change the message, the products that go into different product sets or they are using different campaigns for strategies, with different target audiences, etc… We can get information from CRM, from analytics, from the ecommerce itselfs…

As important as the product data is the product metadata. This metadata will empower you to create high performance campaigns, such as retargeting with the top performers or the most visited. You have your standard product information, and that will allow you to make a very limited set of the situations, but what can be better: to do a retargeting campaign than actually using those products that are being sold the most yesterday? What can help you better to react to the changes in the market than retargeting you assisting customers with the most visited product from last week. This is what we can empower you to do. 

Also we can help you to align business objectives with marketing objectives such as: what products have priority to be sold at the moment, what products have too much stock before sales season and we want to get them as much as possible. So we can use this product in campaigns that have maybe a lower return on investment. 

How to measure your retargeting campaigns’ success?

We measure success first with a clear lift on retargeting performance KPI, and then also when the elements of the digital strategy quickly self adjust based on changing business goals and priorities.

5. Execution

The last challenge you will face is execution. This is where all of this comes together, there is a way to find dynamic ad campaigns based on whatever goal you look for (performance or lead generation). That responds to the specific characteristics of your business strategy and your target customers, to make the best of your offering and make you achieve your business goals to flow focused on nurturing the user experience in a full funnel strategy designed for success and experimentation for measurement of online and offline events. 

An example: Retarget your audience effectively with Optimized Feeds and Dynamic Product Ads

It is one of the best ways to optimize your dynamic campaigns and we encourage brands to test it out for this Holiday Season. 

We have a product management solution which is part of AMP to create dynamic ads at scale through the whole funnel and in multiple markets and multichannel environments. In other words, we take the feed file and we transform it for you to exploit it in your digital marketing strategy. We combine this with our creative tool based on design templates which adapt images related to your product to be exploited as dynamic ads generating thousands of ads adapted to your brand image, channel and strategy to create a dialog with your target customer. 

This dialog takes the forms within these templates, you can create specific templates adapted to different characteristics of your product in your own feed. In one feed we can have a lot of different templates for different product characteristics. Based on how you want to differentiate your product within your feed and how you want to differentiate yourself from your competitors you can create different templates and apply them automatically at scale. 

Dynamic Ads are an efficient way to drive conversions for an e-commerce store as it gives the ability to retarget a user with products they previously showed interest in. But, to have a real impact, this highly personalised ad format relies on a well-structured product feed, which is often overloaded as it’s extremely time consuming. 

We partnered with Bloom, a Canadian digital marketing agency that manages top-tier digital advertising campaigns for e-commerce, to grow La Canadienne sales. 

To resolve the issue of low new user flow and also to grow their Facebook catalogue sales, La Canadienne used Adsmurai Marketing Platform the brand returned on ads spent over 3 times on their main brand audience in less than six months. 

Bloom and Adsmurai collaborated to bring La Canadienne’s Dynamic Product Ads to the next level and increase effectiveness in their retargeting campaigns.