ShareI’m sure you’ve heard of them before, but just in case you haven’t, let me set the scene…
You’re scrolling through your favourite website, looking for a new outfit for your summer holiday, checking everything out but you just can’t decide what to grab. You decide to take a break from shopping for a few minutes and check out what your pals are up to on Facebook.
You see a cute cat, someone’s moaning about their other half again, then all of a sudden those shorts you were just looking at are right there, in your news feed! This is more than likely the very handy work of a Catalogue Sales ad.
So, what is a Facebook Catalogue?
A Facebook Catalogue is a very handy feature that contains information about the products you want to sell across Facebook and Instagram. Think of it as the Facebook version of your online store.
You can create catalogues for different types of inventory, such as products (e-commerce), hotels, flights, destinations, home listings or vehicles. You can also create product sets or collections within your catalogues if you wanted to group together certain items. For example, if you sell clothes, you may what to create product sets for your seasonal items.
Now you’ve created a catalogue, what next?
When you go to set up your campaign optimised towards catalogue sales, you have two options. You can create a prospecting audience, or you can choose to retarget existing customers. Although, it’s probably best to utilise both types of targeting here as they’ll really complement each other.
If you chose the prospecting route, you can reach people who’ve expressed interest in your products (or products similar to yours), even if they haven’t visited your website or app yet. When you target a broad audience, people in this audience automatically see products from your catalogue that are probably relevant to them.
With retargeting, you get a few different options. You can:
- Show products to users who viewed or added the item to their cart, but didn’t purchase it within a specific timeframe
- Show products to users who added the items to their cart but didn’t purchase within a specific timeframe
- Up-sell products from a certain product set to users who viewed or added similar products to their cart within a specific timeframe
- Cross-sell products from a certain product set to users who viewed or added similar products to their cart within a specific timeframe
- Or a custom combination of the above, you could even automatically create a Lookalike Audience based on your retargeting audience
Long gone are the days of trying to build a product or category-specific retargeting audience and constantly updating ads with new products – kick back and let Facebook do the hard work for you! This really is an incredibly powerful way of getting the right products in front of the right people, at the right time.
What will the ads look like?
You get a few different ad format options with catalogue sales:
- Dynamic Formats and Creative – Facebook automatically optimises your ad’s format, creativity and destination for each person when you use a catalogue. This lets you personalise your ads on a larger scale.
- Carousel Ads – This shows products over multiple images or videos that people can scroll through, each with its own link. You can choose to fill the carousel cards dynamically with items from your catalogue.
- Collection Ads – This is an ad format that shows four items from your catalogue under a hero image or video. People can click on items to learn more or browse similar items.
How effective can it really be?
If you’re not already taking advantage of this, it has the potential to be game-changing for your paid Facebook ads.
We trialled catalogue sales ads with one of our e-commerce clients using dynamic retargeting and saw an incredible 54.24% decrease in Cost Per Action (CPA) and a huge 86.46% increase in Return On Ad Spend (ROAS)! After seeing how successful the ads became, they went on to become part of their always-on strategy.
Now if that doesn’t convince you to give this a try, then I don’t know what will! Get in touch with our friendly team today to start reaping the benefits now.
