The two major social media, rather the social market giants Google and Facebook have had a stiff competition in the domain of product selling and ads. Facebook played a new bet in the form of product ads which looks like a counterpart against Google Shopping ads.
Nonetheless, this service allows marketers to advertise multiple products at once and even display an entire catalog of products and spread them as per choice. It is like the marketing campaigns that Facebook also provides for pages and endorsements.
With the advent of product ads, customers can now discover products better and retailers can showcase products better. Not like retailers could not advertise before on Facebook but what was lacking was doing it to scale. The options advertisers have include automatically reaching people who have visited their website/app or reach people based on specific interests or locations.
The idea behind product ads, Facebook said, is that they allow marketers to shine a light on an entire product line even as they make it easy for Facebook users to find products they want. product ads were designed so that if they’re used with Facebook’s Conversion Pixel, a tool for conversion measurement, the ads can be dynamically optimized for every individual who might see them.
Facebook thinks that consumers will end up seeing the ads that are best for them, and that marketers will benefit by seeing much higher return on their advertising investment.
A Sample test
In a test of product ads with a large e-commerce client, Brand Networks, a Facebook preferred marketing developer, found that the new ad initiative paid big dividends.
The test “was able to demonstrate clear success with this effective, mobile-friendly approach to re-targeting over the key holiday season,” Brand Networks said.
During that test, the retailer got a return of several dollars per dollar of media spend. At the same time, mobile CPMs cost 52 percent less than on the desktop feed, which resulted in 22 percent “more scale at equivalent ROI,” Brand Networks said.
All told, Brand Networks added, 40 percent of revenue during the test was driven by mobile ads.
In the end, Brand Networks concluded, Facebook’s product ads yielded 360 percent higher return-on-ad spend, a 100 percent higher conversion rate, and 10 percent higher average order size. The giant retailer Target, too, has seen a big return after using product ads. According to Facebook, Target saw a 20 percent increase in conversion rates compared to other Facebook ads. And that was especially true on mobile devices.
According to Facebook, product ads will let businesses highlight their products in a number of new ways. “Marketers can quickly and easily upload their product catalog and let Facebook manually create campaigns targeting certain products to specific audiences, or choose to let Facebook automatically optimize their campaign to deliver the most relevant products to people.”