The ultimate guide for campaigns in Catalog Ads

Having the power of personalisation and data that Catalog ads provide, mixed together with the urgency of a campaign, is a super powerful mix.

It goes like "Oh, this is the exact product I'm interested in, and it's on a campaign right now, I should buy otherwise I will miss out".

Here's how showing on-sale designs on average influence Catalog Ads:

It also help synchronise your funnel, so the customer journey from your beautiful top funnel ads talking about the new campaign matches the bottom funnel Catalog Ads, that also matches the offer on your website.

Campaigns are also a powerful weapon against ad fatigue - instead of seeing the same ad design again and again, making your ads boring and thereby losing performance over time, it can refresh the ad and put it in a new light.

Since campaigns can be scheduled with the right tool, they can automatically switch over to a campaign design when it starts - and back to normal when it ends. No need to stay up all night editing ads again.

Changing the designs for Catalog Ads also doesn't restart the learning phase on Meta, since you're changing the product image in the catalog instead of information in the Facebook ad itself. So especially for shorter campaigns, this can be really powerful.

Running campaigns in Catalog Ads

The majority of brands periodically run campaigns in one way for another, but not all advertisers also create campaign-specific Catalog Ads, which creates an incoherence between their bottom-funnel retargeting, and the rest of their marketing.

Even though sales more often than not will perform better, then sales are especially effective in your bottom funnel and retargeting - making consumers that already know about you very likely to buy.

The more bottom-funnel your ad is, the better a sale will work.

• Top-funnel ads see a +39% improvement in Return on Ad Spend when showing on-sale designs
• Bottom-funnel ads see a +68% improvement in Return on Ad Spend when showing on-sale designs

Seeing a TV ad talking about the campaign - to getting a Catalog Ad with the specific product you're interested in, shown in a campaign design - to landing on a website with the same campaign - now that is a great and consistent customer journey!

A campaign most commonly refers to discounts, but it doesn't have to stop there. Any special offer, for example a 2+1 offer, can become a campaign.

From our dataset, we see that Catalog Ads promoting a special campaign reach 48% higher ROAS on average. This improvement in performance is obviously temporary, only lasting as long as the campaign is running.

We also found the following when running campaigns:

• 22% lower Cost per action
• 26% lower Cost per click
• 11% lower on-site Conversion rate
• 2% higher Click-through rate

A campaign is more than just a sale - the theme, recency and urgency of it account for a major part of the performance boost.

You can read more about using discounts and savings in Catalog Ads here.

Different ways to run a campaign

When running a campaign, you can get as creative as you want to. Different messages and offers may bring varied results for different brands and industries.

The lower prices you have, the better on-sale designs will typically perform.

• Affordable shops see a +97% improvement in Return on Ad Spend when showing on-sale designs
• Mid-end shops see a +48% improvement in Return on Ad Spend when showing on-sale designs
• High-end/ Luxury shops see a +25% improvement in Return on Ad Spend when showing on-sale designs

You can learn more about showing on-sale designs during campaigns in your Catalog Ads right here and see a lot of sales and campaign Catalog Ad examples here.

A campaign generally has two aspects:

• The theme, or reason: This could be Black Friday, Christmas, or even celebrating your brand's birthday.

• The offer: Most commonly, this is a percentage discount, but can also include an X for Y deal, free shipping, gift with an order, competition, and so on.

But in our experience, there's three basic types of campaigns we most commonly see.

Let's jump right into it.

Shopping holiday campaigns

The first option is running a campaign when people most expect it - during shopping "holidays" such as the Black Month, "back to school", Christmas or Boxing Day.

During Black Friday for example, customers know that the clock is ticking and are actively looking for black-and-yellow ads.

Users are simply much more likely to purchase - a spike in average performance each year, namely during November and December.

Within these time periods, you're shooting yourself in the foot if you don't customise and tailor the design. This is when users want to see relevant and recent offers.

However, that also means that all your competitors are trying to get these users to buy from their webshop.

During these events, competitiveness and advertising costs are much higher than usual, so it's definitely worth it to put in a bit more effort to make the ads stand out.

Seasonal campaigns

The next way is quite similar, but gives you a lot more freedom to choose the dates that best fits you.

While the previous campaign type primarily takes advantage of users' tendency to buy more during certain dates, this one creates a performance boost by being relevant and specific to the period.

Common examples of this include the four seasons (spring, summer, autumn and winter), New Year, or Halloween customised campaigns.

This is also a good opportunity to create product sets with the most relevant items. For example promoting waterproof shoes during autumn - making your offer even more relevant.

Independent campaigns

With this last option, you can let your creativity run free.

Is it your company's birthday? Want to run an archive sale? How about discounts on a selected category?

Here, you're not depending on a specific date or event, mostly relying on an attractive offer combined with urgency and the fear of missing out to give you a performance lift.

It's also a great tactic to make your brand stand out from your competitors by running creative and not-often-seen campaigns.

How to create and schedule a campaign for your Catalog Ads

Here at Confect, it's our mission to make it as simple as possible to reach higher performance through improved designs for Catalog Ads.

Normally, preparing an important campaign can be quite the chaotic sprint. But with Confect, you can create and schedule your sales and special promotions months ahead of time. It takes just a few steps...

1. Create a campaign-specific design in Confect

2. Save the design

3. Add a schedule design rule to your feed, for the period of your choice

4. Voila!

Read about  how to create designs - or learn how to  customize your Catalog Ads designs with Confect here.

If you want all the data and insights we have about designing Catalog Ads, based on billions of impressions, you can see it right here.