How To Set Up Facebook Ads Campaign For Your eCommerce Store [The Step By Step Guide]

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

Facebook Ads Campaign Set Up

Setting up Facebook ads for your eCommerce store is relatively easy and much more user-friendly compared to Google Ads. If you’re not getting good ROAS from your Facebook ads campaigns, chances are you have the wrong settings. This article dives into the basics of some of the most important settings for eCommerce Facebook Ads.

If your ads are already set up, you’ve followed all of the steps below, and are not achieving a desirable ROAS, then you might benefit from some of my other guides on Facebook ads here.

Facebook Ad Targeting: Conversions Campaigns Are The Key

Conversion Campaign Objective

From my experience, one of the most important settings when it comes to creating great-performing Facebook ads is the optimization for Conversions.

Choosing a Conversions campaign objective essentially means that you’re asking Facebook to display your ad only to those people who have a history of completing a certain step that’s important to your online store such as a purchase.

Facebook tracks user behavior and it knows whether the user just tends to look, click, browse or actually pull out a wallet and buy. And for your eCommerce store, you of course want more of those people who are more likely to buy.

The Right Facebook Ad Campaign For You

You’ll find some opinions out there suggesting running a Traffic or an Engagement campaign first. Because it’s cheaper and then retarget (display again) the ad only to those who are interested. But from my experience, this is not as effective as running a conversion campaign straight away.

Don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of successful businesses and digital marketing agencies that have pulled off this strategy really well. But from my experience and the data I’ve collected after working with thousands of businesses across the world, it’s just easier and faster to focus on conversions straight away.

Creating a Traffic or an Engagement campaign first is something I refer to as a ‘billboard’ or a ‘big brand’ strategy. Because it can require bigger budgets and essentially plays a ‘prospecting’ role.

RELATED: The 5 Things You MUST Know When Creating The Audience Size On Facebook

Facebook Ads Set Up: The Secret To Targeting Is In The Ad Sets

Audience Definition Scale

After the campaign objective, the most important part of the Facebook ad campaign is the audience. Also how it’s set up. What you need to bear in mind here is that the interests you’re targeting trump demographics. 

There are a lot of mistakes I keep seeing out there is that eCommerce businesses. They take so much time to define who their customers are. Or how old they are, where they live, what income they earn.
Even what level of education they have, and so on and so forth. But don’t spend enough time researching what are they interested in.

Yet, defining those interests is so simple. All you have to do is just type in an interest related to the products you’re selling. And hit the suggestion button. The Facebook tool does the rest for you.

Pro Tip: Keep it simple. Only test ONE interest in ONE ad set, this will be the fastest way to find out what’s working. And eliminate what’s not and help you achieve your ideal ROAS much faster.

Detailed Targeting

And how many ad sets should you have running at the same time? Start with a minimum of two. Make sure that the only difference between those two is the interest they’re targeting. This will make it easy for you to evaluate it.

Don’t just run one ad set because if it won’t work. You won’t have anything to compare it to and won’t be able to draw any insights from it.

RELATED: 7 Examples Of Highly Effective Facebook Video Ads You Can Create At Home Even If You Are A Non-Creative Person

Facebook Campaign Setup: Visual Beats Text

The actual Facebook Ads live inside the Ad Sets (audiences). These are also referred to as visuals or creatives. They’ve always been super important but since the iOS14 Facebook update, the importance of these ads has dramatically increased. Because the Facebook auction bidding process is now much more competitive (more on that topic here).

This is what you need to remember. No matter what, your image or a video will be always more important than the text inside your Facebook ad. In other words, the visual bets text inside your Facebook ad. Other than that, setting up the ads is once again super simple.

All you have to do is make sure that you have Two to Four different product images or videos. So that you can test in parallel to one another.

RELATED: Facebook Ads For Ecommerce: The Truth About Getting Ridiculous ROAS Even After iOS Updates [New Method]

What About Calls To Action?

The rest is quite easy. The text inside the ad can be very simple and it can but doesn’t have to contain a shortened URL leading to the product or the collection page. Make sure the text in all of the Facebook ads is identical to one another when inside the same campaign.

When it comes to the call to action (CTA) button, for best results, just select ‘Shop Now’ for eCommerce stores. Some people prefer the ‘Learn More’ button. But that’s more suitable for service-based offerings or a campaign that’s collecting leads and not focussed directly on sales.

Once you set up the ads, you’re good to go and all you need is to press the ‘Publish’ button. And if this is confusing, don’t panic, I’m taking you through the step-by-step Facebook ads campaign set up in this video too so you can start and pause as you need to.

Remember: Setting up your ads and publishing them is not the end of your involvement with Facebook Ads. To achieve the best results for your eCommerce business, this is just the beginning.

From this point onwards, you’ll need to keep an eye on the 4 most important metrics for your Facebook ads so that you generate the maximum ROAS (return on ad spend) for your eCommerce store and make more money with your business.

– Silvia Myers

PS: Comment below if you have any more questions or any thoughts on this. I’d love to help.

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Silvia Myers

Silvia Myers

Traffic Ninja & eCommerce Coach

Silvia is co-founder of Traffic Ninjas, teaching product makers and brand builders how to sell their incredible products online without having to discount or spend their hard-earned cash on things that don’t work.

Together with her husband and co-founder, Kristen, Traffic Ninjas equip eCommerce stores with an underground Ninja method specifically designed for small business owners, teaching them how to be profitable and sustainable and actually earn an income from selling their products online.

The Traffic Ninjas community has grown from Sydney, Australia to 35+ countries around the world with small business owners achieving amazing results.

2 Comments

  1. Don Bennett

    Silvia, do you do this for people like me who cannot do it. I am not that computer literate so have trouble doing things technical. Don.

    Reply
    • Kristen

      Hi Don, thank you for your comment. We teach and coach entrepreneurs how to do this themselves and what to look out for in case they hire someone to do it for them. We don’t provide the service ourselves but inside our community, we always point out people in the right direction as to where to look for the right skill set and what to watch out for so that they can be in control of their businesses.

      Reply

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