With Covid and all the shifts we have seen, we all know that online shopping has exploded. Facebook is working to keep up with the trends. While other channels have a stronger hold for everyday purchases, their presence isn’t as strong at the discovery phase. Facebook is looking to deepen its discovery experience and recently announced some updates and also outlined what’s on the horizon. Let’s take a look at some of these features.
Existing Shopping Opportunities
Shops
Features on Facebook and Instagram will vary depending on if you have a shop on each channel. If you don’t, you’ll want to strongly consider adding these online storefronts to showcase your products and collections. If you’re already on Shopify or other partner platforms, then you can import and sync directly into Facebook. You can even set up a “test” shop to see what the experience is like for your customers and prospects. Shops give you more visibility on Facebook and allow purchases right on the channel.
Product Tags
Product tags allow you to showcase your products in your post or ads. They are linked to products in your catalog. You can add numerous tags but you only should add up to three to ensure your image doesn’t become too crowded. When someone clicks on the product, they are taken to the product page in your Shop. Viewers can tell there are products tagged in the post or the ad when there is a little shopping bag icon in the bottom left of the image (see the third image below). Product tags are currently only available for Instagram, but are coming to Facebook soon.
To add these to your ads, you’ll need to click the edit pencil in edit mode of the ad.
Then, under Creative Tools, click on the plus sign to the right of Product Tags.
You can then select your catalog and your products. There is a search feature to make this a quick and easy process. Once you select your product, you can drop the black product label around your image to have it placed in the right position.
Shopping Custom Audiences
If you haven’t created Shopping audiences yet, now is the perfect time to start. In the audiences tab, select Shopping.
From here, you can create a wide variety of Audience options based on the actions your shoppers took. You can create countless options for either Facebook or Instagram or both.
Audience selection options include people who:
- viewed products
- viewed products and navigated to site
- saved products
- viewed Shops page
- viewed Shops collection
- added any products to the cart
- initiated checkout for any products
- purchased any products
You can use the “And” and “Or” options here to broaden or segment your audience creations between these options also. The key is creating audiences that you can use for retargeting, exclusions and lookalikes. If your Shop is new, start with a broad audience to get a feel of audience size before you start creating too many smaller audiences.
For retargeting, you can also run dynamic ads to be sure to get the right products back in front of your shopper for reconsideration.
Live Shopping on Facebook
You can sell products via live video on Facebook and Instagram (US only). Full instructions are in the link to set this up. The great part is having a link to your product during the video to make it a seamless experience for shoppers.
Future Shopping Advancements
Creator Live Shopping
Partnering with Social Influencers is not a new approach. Being able to do it via Live Shopping on Facebook is! We don’t know all the details for it yet, but we do know it’s on the way. Learn more about partnering with a Creator to determine if this might be a great next step for your business.
Dynamic Augmented Reality Ads
Augmented Reality Ads aren’t new to Facebook. Dynamic ones are! They will help identify shoppers at the discovery process. The first vertical will be Beauty, but Home Decor will follow.
All of these are exciting features and updates that can help shoppers in the journey and create a better shopping experience. I found all these great updates on the recent Leveraging Discovery Commerce Webinar. Check out other upcoming webinars from Facebook for Business.
Conclusion
There are some exciting things on the horizon for eCommerce advertisers!
Did we miss something awesome that’s new or on the way? We’d love to hear about it in the comments below!
