Insights from eCommerce Expo 2015: Using Facebook and Instagram to boost e-commerce sales
Having attended the eCommerce Expo on the 31st of September I wanted to share some of the fantastic insights provided by the keynote speakers on how to boost E-commerce / online retail sales. In this article I take a look at how Facebook recommends their retail customer use Facebook and Instagram for sales.
Full disclosure; this post is a write up of a talk on using Facebook and Instagram to boost e-commerce sales from Lynn Sutton who works for Facebook as ‘Client Partner Ecommerce - Facebook & Instagram’. So whilst the advice she gave is very valuable, it is rather like advice on AdWords from Google- There are valuable pointers on trends, but are not likely to concentrate on the disadvantages or other options.
Mobile is the future of e-commerce
E-commerce sales hit $60 billion this year up from $40 billion just two years ago. This huge growth in online retail of $10 billion a year, is in part, being driven by a major shift to Smartphone based purchasing. Smartphone’s don’t only drive e-commerce traffic, they are also important for in-store purchases. Many customers use their Smartphones to research products and make the actual purchase on a different device. 68% of shoppers use their mobile phone in store, often using them to discover products or check prices.
Given that mobile is a key component of the future of e-commerce, what should marketers from e-commerce businesses do to ensure their success on mobile? As one might expect from someone who works for Facebook, Lynn Sutton’s advice was use Dynamic product Ads on Facebook for re-selling and upselling and use Instagram ads for brand building. Although self-promotional, her arguments were not without merits. She rightly pointed out that 1 of every 4 minutes of time spent on the mobile web (including in-app traffic) is spent on Facebook and Instagram. You can’t find any sites that come close to that when it comes to mobile traffic. The top non-social network site for mobile web traffic is Buzzfeed, which gets 51 million users a month. Whilst that may seem huge, it is less than a tenth of the 844 million monthly active mobile Facebook users.
Dynamic Product Ads
So what can you do to utilise the massive mobile audience that Facebook has? Well according to Facebook, Dynamic Products Ads which we alerted to readers earlier in the year when they launcheed are the answer. DPAs enable you to re-target visitors to your site on Facebook. They appear as carousel ads in newsfeeds, showcasing your products to those who are most likely interested in them (given that they went to your site). These are potentially great for re-selling and up-selling, and can help to hoover up the low hanging fruit (appalling mixed metaphor) of those who were interested enough to visit your site but just need that little extra reminder to complete their purchase.
Setting up these ads is simple, you simply have to upload your product catalogue to Facebook Business manager, add a line of code to the tracking pixel on your site and then start the ad campaign in power editor. These ads work across devices, which is useful because often customers start their customer journey on mobile but then move to desktop to convert.
Although Dynamic product ads are at current only available on Facebook, they will soon be rolled out to other apps owned by Facebook, such as Instagram.
Taking your hand out of the cookie jar
According to Lynn Sutton, cookie-based measurement is flawed. It fails to give an accurate picture of mobile traffic and indeed is flawed in measuring all traffic given people can use blocking software. Instead she promotes a tool developed by Facebook that allows advertisers to target adverts to people based on the data that Facebook gathers. This includes your Facebook activity and your web-browsing activity, and is all associated with your unique Facebook ID. For Digital marketing officiandoes, you may be interested to know that this ability is thanks to the ad serving service called Atlas that Facebook bought off Microsoft in 2013 and rebuilt from the group up.
Lookalike audiences
This data means Facebook can construct ‘lookalike’ audiences which means you can target audiences will similar interests to the audience you have already gathered for yourself organically. You upload your email list to Facebook and the lookalike audiences tool (provided your database is big enough to ensure that themes can be established by Facebook’s algorithms) means you can serve ads to a large community of people that share the same interests as those people who are already buying your products. For example if you are an e-commerce site that sells climbing supplies, you might already know that your target audience is people aged 20-35 who are interested in climbing. You could target these via Facebook’s ad targeting products without using ‘lookalike audiences’, but Facebook’s data may reveal trends that you weren’t aware of. For example it may be that a very large percentage of your audience are also interested in hiking, and it may be worth serving your ads to those interested in hiking as well, even though you hadn’t considered marketing to that group before.
Be warned though, the ‘lookalike’ audience that Facebook generates for you will only be as good as the audience you have already been able to create. Therefore if you have built your email list via buying lists from 3rd parties that may not be relevant then the audience that Facebook will generate for you based off those people will not be any better than the original list was. Make sure to have your data looking shipshape before using ‘lookalike’ audiences to improve your reach.
Brand Building
All this is great for re-targeting and reaching a larger audience once an initial audience has already been created. But what generating an audience in the first place? For Brand building and Brand Storytelling Lynn recommends using Instagram. Hardly surprising of course given her day job, so take it with a pinch of salt, but she does make some good points as to why.
She argues that the highly visual nature of Instagram makes it the ideal platform for building brand recognition and telling compelling brand stories through pictures. When this is combined with the fact that Instagram is growing extremely quickly, surpassing Twitter in late 2014 and continuing to grow massively since then, it becomes a compelling option. Ads on Instagram can bought as guaranteed impressions for those looking to build brand recognition. Ads are relatively new to the Instagram platform, having only been rolled out to all users a few months ago. This means users will be as saturated with ads as those on other platforms, so engagement rates are often higher.
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