Among all the ad types we run across Facebook, Google and other channels, our Ecommere clients consistently see some of the best Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) numbers with Facebook Dynamic Ads.
At a basic level, Dynamic Ads are used to retarget non-converting website traffic with highly targeted and dynamic advertisements based on specific behaviors those users exhibited on your site (e.g. viewed a product page, added a product to their cart etc.).
It is usually a no-brainer to run this ad type for eCommerce because it consistently returns a positive ROAS even with a relatively basic setup. But to achieve the very high ROAS levels that are possible with Dynamic Ads you’ll want to give these campaigns the same level of care and attention you would any other ad campaign.
We’ve tested thousands of dynamic ads since Facebook released the ad type in 2015. Across all that testing we have found six key pro tips you’ll want to use to take your Facebook Dynamic Ads campaigns to the next level:
- Recency is EVERYTHING and 48 hours is the sweet spot. Structure your campaigns with at least 2 time frames as ad sets – 0-48 hrs and 3-30 days post visit.
- Use Intent-Based Segmentation – users who abandon their cart are much more likely to complete their purchase vs users who only viewed category pages. Rather than grouping all of these people together, separate them into the following separate ad groups and adjust bids and budgets based on ROAS of each audience:
- Abandoned Checkout Process
- Cart Abandoners
- Viewed product(s)
- Viewed category(s) or search page(s)
- Viewed any other page
One caveat – you’ll want at least 15 sales per week per audience. If you have less than that, consider combining related audiences up the purchase funnel until you meet that threshold.
- Include Price in Ad Template – our tests have concluded with overwhelming evidence that including product price as a field in the dynamic ad template increases ROAS.
- Use a Custom Image Template – using an advanced ads management tool like Smartly.io enables more sophisticated customization of the images that will appear in your dynamic ads. Rather than simply displaying your product images exactly as they are on your site, you can add decorative borders, include special offers, calls to action, and more.
- Choose Manual Bid Type – Facebook may recommend using automatic bidding on dynamic ads campaigns, but our research has shown that using Manual bids and bidding 2x your true value delivers the best results. Here’s what that means – if you’re willing to pay $15 for a sale, choose manual bidding optimized toward sales with impressions as the Billing Event and $30 as the bid amount. Again, make sure you get at least 15 conversions per week for whatever conversion type you’re bidding toward. If you don’t get 15 sales, try bidding for Add To Cart conversions.
- Give Shoppers a Reason to Return – the people seeing your ads have already been on your site and did not purchase for whatever reason… so give them a compelling reason to change their mind and come back! We typically test several offer types when we launch a new account – Free Shipping, $ amount off, % off, Free Gift with Purchase, etc. Throughout our testing, we’ve found the two best performers are Free Shipping and either $5 or $10 off purchases above a certain threshold.
Looking for more? Schedule a free discovery call with our team and we’ll be able to quickly evaluate your setup and see what else we can do to help.
Kaleb Hill
Can you break down number 1 in lament’s terms for me? I’m not quite understanding. Thanks!
Chris Root
Hi Kaleb – sure thing! Users are most likely to complete a purchase they abandoned within the first 48 hours so we create two separate ad sets – one targeting users who visited your site within 2 days and one targeting users who visited your site 3-30 days ago. This way we can bid aggressively on the 2 day audience of people who are very likely to convert and we can reduce bids on the 3-30 day audience since that group is less likely to convert. Feel free to reach out via the contact page if you’d like to chat more about this, happy to help!