Conversion opportunities on Facebook

January 25, 2021

We all know that Facebook Ads should generate sales.

Which means that many people unfortunately only partly understand the actual conversion options that can help generate continuous sales in the long run and thus grow your actual business.

Facebook advertising is not a sprint but a marathon—the better you perform over time, the better the final return.

Conversion ads

But yes, you need to get something out of our money here and now—which might often result in you working away at the Conversion and Catalog Sales objectives optimized toward the buying event.

The buying event is, after all, where we make money.

Once it has been "activated," you are guaranteed money in the coffers—which makes it the most obvious opportunity to advertise.

Optimizing against buying is also not entirely stupid.

However, you have to keep in mind that it could turn into a costly affair if the data source (the event) that you optimize against does not have enough data.

Unfortunately, we often see this in the case of ad accounts from webshops with less spend. 

So, how do we make our dynamic product ads better and optimize for the right conversion events? What are the current conversion events, and where should they be used in an optimal setup? How do we train our advertising to become marathon runners and not just sprinters?

And it’s sadly not as if there’s one simple solution.

There is no correct formula, and it depends on each account—depending on budget, business area, geographical location, etc.

But if there is one thing that dynamic product ads are good for, it is building sensible funnels with goals that substitute each other and using conversion options in different ways so that you can fulfill what both your and Facebook's goals are—namely, to sell for you.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ZdkaRipzyhc

Conversion points to track

The conversion options (events) we are talking about are the following:

  • PageView

  • ViewContent

  • ViewCategory

  • Add To Cart

  • Initiate Checkout

  • Purchase

A dynamic product ad is most often seen used in three stages, which are very common: Prospecting, static remarketing and dynamic remarketing.

In addition, you can work with retention, upselling, cross-selling, and so on…

Nine out of ten times we see all of the three stages work towards the conversion event "Purchase."

This, however, might not always be wise.

Facebook provides several conversion options, which is a good reason. An example of how to use the conversion options to support the dynamic product ads at multiple stages is shown below:

Setting "Purchase" as a goal for its DPA ads—without actually having the size of the data source in place—is hardly as profitable.

The two campaigns have created a fairly small turnover, sales and ROAS compared to the top two campaigns, where we have made sure to give the data source that will pull the purchases more data.

A simple change in the text constitution and the conversion event, which has been made on the basis of the Pixel data, has meant that the return on the ads—both in Prospecting and in the dynamic one—was improved by 4 and 5 in ROAS!

"Well, what have you done besides spending more money?" you might ask.

We have just taken a step back and told Facebook that we do not want all our new customers (Prospects) to buy immediately—we have seen in previous campaigns that are WAY too expensive, but how often do you actually catch a new buy-ready customer without it costing an arm and a leg?

We would actually rather have them tell us what they are interested in—because then our direct remarketing can take over (DPA) and create the conversions, as well as a much better customer experience.

In this way, we "feed" our pixel data at the stage of the final conversion,which complements our remarketing DPA really, really well.

It gets in shape, so in the end we have some self-propelled campaigns that only need to be optimized continuously, but never drastic changes are made.

This means that they get a stable return and you get more time to concentrate on other parts of your business!

Or create new campaigns

This little tip can be used all the way back to the Pageview event, because you can never expect people to buy your products directly, but you can always expect that the more data is created, the greater your chances of actual conversions.

 

In short, if you compare it to building a house, lay a solid foundation (PageView), set up walls (ViewContent), lay a roof (Add To Cart), and finally get to decorating your home (Purchase).

If you ignore one of the upcoming events, you can’t expect the house to last forever but only for a short time.