6 Key Success Factors for Your Online Shop
What are the key issues that online retailers should resolve to prosper? We identified five key areas that will help you to enhance your profits.
Facebook ads are an excellent way to attract the attention of new customers. While many online retailers are already successful with Facebook ads, others are struggling to use them to generate more sales. Check out this blog post and discover our 7 tips on how to optimise your Facebook ads.
Tip 1: Use appealing copy
Most successful campaigns have one thing in common: They tell the target audience exactly what they can expect or indeed what they have to do.
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Keep in mind that the last thing potential customers have in mind is your ad. This means that you need to find a way to attract their attention even if they don’t directly know what it’s all about.
Tip 2: Use the right call to action
Facebook provides different calls to action (CTA). Instead of just placing the correct link in the ad, you should also make sure that you choose the right CTA.
Any reason for confusion can lead to users just scrolling past your ad without visiting your online shop.
If you want to boost traffic for a sale you are having, you should use the CTA Buy now. If you're going to promote a newsletter or a sweepstake, you should use the Subscribe now button, whereas if you want customers to download something, you should choose the button Download.
Tip 3: Don’t get too specific with your targeting
At first, finding a very particular target group might seem like the right strategy. Even though this is usually the case, highly specific targeting might backfire.
An example:
You have chosen “Yoga fans” as your target group for the sale of a DVD for beginners. Your ad is seen by many yoga fans but doesn’t generate any sales...
Why? Many people who are interested in yoga are no longer beginners, so why should they buy a DVD for beginners? The best option would be to extend the targeting to include more general interests like stress management, health, and fitness.
Tip 4: Include mobile users in your targeting only if your landing page is mobile-ready
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Smartphone users have all been there.
Something (perhaps your nice ad) catches their eye and is clicked on immediately. Now, something frustrating happens:
The font is too small, the pictures are not recognisable, and the called-up page loads very slowly.
Not many users have the patience or willpower to fight their way through an online shop that is not optimised for mobile devices.
What could have been a sale gets abandoned and you pay for a click that brought nothing to your online shop.
Now, you have two options:
- You make sure that your online shop looks extraordinary on mobile devices, too (which takes a long time and might cost a lot).
- Alternatively, you don’t show your Facebook ads to smartphone users by excluding smartphones from the devices you want to target (which is fast and saves money).
The first option makes more sense in the long run, but if you don’t want to pause your ad until your online shop is made fit for mobile devices, option two is the right choice.
Tip 5: Choose the right campaign objectives
It’s in Facebook’s best interest to make sure that your ads work. Indeed, only if you earn money through Facebook will you continue to invest in ads. Logical.
This is why Facebook asks you what you want to achieve with your ad. Do you want to improve conversions, generate awareness, or encourage interaction?
By choosing your objective, you let the Facebook algorithm know what is important to you so that it can optimise your ads accordingly. If you don’t want to waste money, don’t insist on doing things the hard way and choose the right advertising objective.
Tip 6: Best practices
To make sure that your ad looks good on all devices, you should stick to the following layout rules:
- Write a text of about 90 characters
- Write a link title of about 25 characters
- Keep an aspect ratio of 1.91:1
- Use images of 1200 x 627 pixels
- Use attractive lifestyle photos or product images
- Make sure that texts don’t superimpose the entire image, i.e. that they occupy no more than 20% of the image.
By sticking to these rules, you make sure that your Facebook ads will look good on every device – be it on the desktop or smartphone.
Tip 7: Be better than Amazon
When promoting the products you sell on your online shop, you should take advantage of the agility you have as a small provider. Instead of redirecting the target to a standardised product page as Amazon does, you should create a landing page for the products featured in the campaign.
An example:
Oivo, a small charger for iPhone, presents its product with storytelling, a product video and lifestyle pictures, instead of just redirecting users to the product page.
This way of presenting a product is far more attractive than the quite dull product pages used by Amazon.
Refold uses the same strategy:
You can’t beat Amazon in many respects, but when it comes to the presentation of products and emotions-based marketing, your online shop can definitively clinch the pole position.
Want to find out more on how to be successful with your Facebook ads? Just download our whitepaper on this topic:
