Best practices when creating e-commerce sales ads

Sales ads for e-commerce businesses are one of the easiest ways to drive more revenue.

If you pay attention during holidays like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, etc. you’ll notice all the big e-commerce businesses running tons of sales ads.

However, just because you’re simply running a sales campaign, doesn’t mean it will perform well.

In this article, we will look closer at a few excellent practices you can use to make your sales ads work better.

Let’s go!

Sales are the most effective messaging as an eCommerce

E-commerce ads with sales messaging have a 45% better performance than the average.

This shouldn’t be too big of a surprise.

Usually, when you sell something for a cheaper price, people are more likely to buy it!

Mention that in your content.

A sales message ad has a better chance of driving higher conversions - even more than ads about news or shipping, which are the next best-performing messages.

The messaging with the worst purchase rate is social proof messages.

Social proof is great in theory, but they don’t make people make more purchases, rather, they influence the whole buyer journey!

E-commerce ads with sales are the best-performing message for e-commerce brands.

Learn to create the best possible sale campaign.

If sales messaging has a much higher purchase rate than the others, what exactly should be in your sales message?

What exactly should be your sales message?

Just because you’re running e-commerce sales ads does not mean they’re all the same!

The kind of sale you run will have a different impact on performance, so don’t treat them equally.

Some of the best-performing types of sales we found were VIP and X for Y sales.

VIP sales are sales that only a specific group has access to.

This type of sale is the top-performing sale at a 40% higher purchase rate than the average ad. But unfortunately, it’s often forgotten.

X for Y sales are sales that have offers like “buy 2 for $50” or “buy 3 for the price of 1”.

These types of sales often give the buyer a sense of “playing a game” in search of finding 3 buy-worthy products.

It’s also likely to increase Average Basket Size, since people have to buy multiple products.

On the other hand, some of the worst-performing types of sales ads were about having a “sale on everything”. It’s too general to have any significant impact.

The two best types of e-commerce sales ads evoke emotion in buyers.

They create a sense of “getting the most I can from this value”, which means “I need to buy more!”.

Consider the kind of sale you are running and try to focus on VIP and X for Y sales messages.

If “VIP” and “X for Y” sales messages are so effective, it would probably be a good idea to take a look at what you should specifically mention in those ads.

Mentioning savings in sales ads increase performance

If your “big sale” is that “big”, but you can’t even mention how much you’re saving, then it’s probably not that great of an offer…

Consumers in general don’t like being tricked and will be skeptical when seeing a Facebook ad that says “big savings”.

“Well, how much will I be saving? Is it just going to be 5%? 1%? Are they actually lying?”

Be specific about how much your buyers are saving, otherwise, you could be missing out on a lot of revenue!

Facebook Ads that are specific about how much you can save see 63% more sales per impression.

Be specific and show the savings in your e-commerce sales ads for a potential increase in the purchase rate.

And the best way to do this is by using Confect to include relevant information on your product ads, so that your viewers will know precisely what types of sale they're looking at!

You might be thinking, “Is it just as easy as mentioning how much they’re saving?”

In short…yes!

However, there’s one more thing that might make your sales ad stand out…

Sales ads with high text amount performs the best

It’s no surprise that the better offer you have, the more likely people will buy from you.

This is why we suggest using more text in your sales message.

The more text you put in, the better the sale or offer seems to the consumer.

For example, you could take two e-commerce sales ads talking about the same thing:

The first one says, “Big Holiday Sale”.

The second says, “Big Holiday Sale - save up to 50% - only through this weekend”.

The two ads are basically saying the same thing, but the one with the higher text amount feels like a much better offer.

When comparing the different text amounts in sales ads, we found that higher text amounts outperform all other text amounts.

Find out how text amount impacts other types of messages.

Try these best practices for yourself

To summarize the best practices for your e-commerce sales ads:

Use sales as the main message
Run the correct type of sale (VIP, X for Y, etc.)
Mention the savings in your content
Use high-text amounts
Remember, just because e-commerce sales ads are meant to drive revenue, doesn’t mean that they’re always effective.
Try these best practices and see what kind of results you come up with based on your business/industry.

Data section

The dataset from this article is based on 5.6B+ impressions and 6k+ pieces of individual content on Meta (Facebook) platforms. It takes into account data from all countries and only e-commerce brands, with the campaign objective of Conversions. The period is from 1st of September 2021 - 16th of September 2021. Numbers are looking at correlation only, not causation. Remember to check your own data: numbers for different brands, industries, and contexts will vary. If you were intrigued about a specific insight, you can go in-depth into the various dimensions and how data can be segmented in Confect, here.