If you’re anything like me, you probably first learned media buying for stores with one product. Then, you graduated into handling accounts for e-commerce stores with multiple products… only to realize that the strategy might be a little different. That’s the case for most marketers.
Let’s take a look at five different ways you can organize a Facebook account that’s pushing multiple products, and how to effectively do it yourself.
Before we jump in, let’s look at the campaigns you need for accounts advertising only one product at a time:
- Prospecting campaign: CBO, a broad targeting ad set, an interests ad set, and a lookalike ad set (with your offline and website custom audiences).
- Creative testing campaign: each ad set is split into different creative tests. ABO.
That’s it. That’s all you really need to run an effective Facebook advertising account for one product in 2023.
Here are some things to be sure to have:
- 10% of your budget going to the Creative Testing campaign
- Both campaigns should be optimizing towards conversions.
- If it’s a new account, you don’t need to worry about the attribution window just yet. Keep it at 7 Day Click, 1 Day View.I can write a separate blog post about the different attribution windows on Facebook Ads, and my thoughts and method behind using them, if that’s something you’d want to see.
Keep in mind, for large businesses (higher spend), the above example is mostly true. For smaller advertisers, you can creative test directly within your prospecting campaign.
Now, let’s hop into the four strategies for organizing an ad account selling multiple products:
Method 1: Advertise only your flagship product.
Before I confuse you, I just want to get this out of the way. If you know that a product gets your customers to click on your ads and to reach your landing page, and you know that most of your customers are coming to your website for a specific product, then you should spend your money on pushing that product.
What is the method:
Instead of spending time and money on pushing all of your products, you’re focusing on what you already know works to get the attention of your target audience. You’re not going to run ads behind your other, less popular products.
Why does it work:
With this method, you’re using your Facebook ads as a way to acquire a buyer into your customer base. You’re getting them on your homepage, you’re enticing them to make a purchase. Then, you’re using other methods to sell them on your other products.
Other methods include up-sells and cross-sells on your website’s landing page or post-purchase page. You can also use email marketing and SMS marketing to push your other products.
Essentially, you’re spending your money on what you know works (getting better results and ad performance), and then you’re using other (more affordable) methods to push your other products.
The point here is to use your paid advertising as a customer acquisition channel, and focus on other ways to get your customer familiar with your other products. This includes email, SMS, up-sells, and cross-sells.
How to use it:
Let’s pretend you have two products, product A and product B. You’re well-known for product A, but you also want to push purchases for product B.
You know that product A has a great (low) cost-per-acquisition (CPA) on Facebook compared to product B, so you double down on the product and use it as a more affordable way to acquire a customer.
Then, when your customer lands on product A’s landing page (or product page), you’re going to have to think about pushing product B. This could either be as an up-sell, or as a cross-sell.
This method works best when the products are quite similar to each other, and it makes sense that your customers would buy both at the same time. For example, if product A was foundation, and product B was concealer.
In the case that it doesn’t make that much sense to buy the products at the same time (product A is foundation, product B is nail polish), that’s when you want to turn to email and SMS to push the products.
The good news is that you’ve likely already captured their email and numbers when they made the initial purchase, so any retention advertising you’re doing to get the same customer to buy product B will essentially be for free. You’re not paying a platform to acquire your customer anymore…you already own that data.
Keep in mind:
How do you know which product will do the best on Facebook? You’ve either extensively tested this already when you decided on your flagship product, or you can throw two ad sets into a CBO campaign (one for Product A, the other for Product B), and see which one Facebook’s algorithm will push. There’s a chance that Facebook puts all its spend into one of the ad sets. This is likely the one you want to double down on.
Method 2: Push each product individually
What is the method:
Pushing each product individually on Facebook ads is exactly as it sounds… you’re essentially creating a new prospecting campaign for each single product that you want to advertise. This way, you’re giving each product an equal chance.
Why:
Instead of prioritizing one product over another, you’re giving them all a fighting chance at performing well. Especially with a broad audience in each prospecting campaign, Facebook could find that one certain audience works better for Product A, while another works for Product B. All while keeping your ROI in check.
How to use it:
Each product gets its own prospecting campaign. So, continuing with the product A and product B example, your ads manager set-up will look something like this:
Since your creative testing campaign is an ABO set-up, you don’t have to divide these out by product. Just be sure to clearly label your ad sets with the product you’re testing and the creative testing type. For example: ProductA_HookTest1.
Keep in mind:
Some products will work better than other products, hitting your KPIs (cost per acquisition, for the most part) better than others. Some products won’t work at all. It’s practically impossible to push all your products equally on Facebook. With that, if a product doesn’t seem to be working, instead of pushing it and forcing it to work, save your money for the ones that do work.
This method is only doable if you have only a few products to push. It isn’t realistic if you have a lot of products. I currently use this method for a brand that has four products.
Method 3: Advantage+ Catalog Sales Ads (formerly Dynamic Product Ads)
What is the method:
Running Dynamic Product Ads means you’re hyper personalizing the ads to the user based on their past behaviour. It’s a retargeting campaign type, which we haven’t really covered yet in this article. With dynamic product ads you can target three unique (but powerful) customer behaviors:
- Add To Carts: Those who added a certain product to their cart. Facebook will then retarget them with that same product that they abandoned originally, enticing them to continue to checkout.
- View Product: Your customers like browsing your website. Facebook takes note of this behavior and shows them the products that they viewed initially. It’s similar to Add To Carts, but just higher on the funnel.
- Purchases: Your customer purchased Product A. Facebook knows that people often buy Product A and Product B together. It retargets that same purchaser with dynamic ads for Product B.
You can also target past website visitors and social media engagers in the retargeting ad (use the longest time frame available).
For a prospecting DPA campaign, you can set that up by not adding any targeting on it. Run it on a broad audience, and let Meta decide which product it shows each user.
Why:
It shows your audience exactly the type of product that they want to see by using data that Facebook has already gathered from your audience. You’re letting Facebook decide which product to show your customers and website visitors, rather than doing all the guesswork yourself.
In addition to all of this, dynamic product ads are quite efficient. You don’t have to create separate ads for each product. Instead, you create a template, in which Facebook plugs and plays the product it deems suitable for each viewer.
How to use it:
This method is great when you pair it with Method 1. You essentially efficiently get customers on to your website, Facebook takes note of the products that they browse and view, and then your DPA campaign retargets them efficiently with either the same product you pushed in method 1, or with another product (if there was something else that caught their eye).
Method 4: Carousel Ads (Multi-Product Ads)
What is the method:
Carousel ads are on-Facebook ads that allow you to showcase multiple products (or your entire collection) in one swipeable ad.
Why:
This ad type is quite popular because each card has its own call to action button, so you can upload different products for each card, and still get people clicking “Shop Now” for the product that they want. Each card can have its own final URL too, so you can send them directly to the product they’re most interested in.
How to use it:
At the ad level, you want to select “Carousel” as ad type. Then you want to upload at least two “cards” (which are carousel slides) that are either images or videos.
You can even dictate the order of the cards, so it’s a good idea to put your best creative, or best product, first. You can even have each product be its own image.
Method 5: Collection Ads
What is the method:
Collection ads are a mobile-only ad type where you can showcase all your products in a carousel-like ad (up to three images). When a user clicks on the ad, it opens a Facebook instant experience (essentially a Facebook page for your store) where people can buy directly from you. This method is great for converting higher-funnel audiences as the collection is great for brand awareness, and the instant experience is great for pushing a conversion.
Why:
It’s engaging. You’re hooking your audience with your creatives, and you’re allowing them to browse your entire collection on their mobiles. And they can convert right on the app. It’s also a great way to showcase more than one of your products. The only downside is that it’s only on mobile… but everyone is on mobile anyway.
How to use it:
What’s going to show up is a hero image or video, followed by a few product shots. You not only need to create an instant experience page on Facebook for your collection, but you should also create a new collection ad for each product.
At the ad-level, you want to select “Collection” under Ad setup.
Then, you want to select (or create) your instant experience.
You can either start from one of the templates that Facebook provides, such as a lookbook or a storefront, or you can create your own custom instant experience Facebook page.
What is the difference between carousel ads and collection ads?
You might have read method 4 and method 5 and instantly thought, “wait, aren’t they the same thing?”
Although they are super similar, they’re definitely not the same. Here are the main differences:
- Collection ads are mobile-only. Carousel ads work for both mobile and desktop.
- Collection ads take you to an Instant Experience where potential customers are prompted to convert right there on the social media app itself. Carousel ads send you to a dedicated landing page (or your website or product page), where users can browse your website outside of the Facebook app.
- You can have up to 10 cards for each carousel ad. For collection ads, users are shown four on Facebook, and three on Instagram.
- Carousel ads can be sent to different landing pages.
- Carousel ads can have different CTAs. Want one card to showcase a product, and another to showcase directions for your retail store? That’s totally possible to do within the same ad.
- Carousels cards can advertising different products, with a single image being for a product. Collection ads are best used to advertise a collection as a whole, or a single product.
