Facebook Ads How eCommerce: How To Stop Losing Money With An “MBD” Framework (Plus 15 Winning Campaign Examples)
Joy Sharma
eCommerce Facebook ads are a must for every type of online store, no matter what type of products you sell. Unfortunately, thanks to the tediousness of running a Facebook ads account and lack of support from Meta customer service, most eCommerce businesses lose a large chunk of their investment long before they can create a Facebook ads strategy that sells.
Most of the time, this happens in one of two ways…
Scenario #1:
Navigating Facebook ads manager, with its array of ad types and advanced targeting options like custom audiences and complex Facebook pixel set-ups can be challenging for up-and-coming eCommerce brands. This complexity often prevents them from leveraging the growth potential of Facebook advertising.
Scenario #2:
For established eCommerce brands, ineffective Facebook ad campaigns not only result in subpar ROAS (return on ad spend) but also divert resources from other critical platforms like Google ads. Every penny of your ad spend is essential for growth; wasting it on non-performing Facebook ads undermines your growth goals.
The key understanding here is that Facebook’s advertising is powered by a machine learning algorithm. To succeed, you need a substantial ad spend to fuel the algorithm, enabling it to analyze ad performance and metrics, and help shape successful Facebook ad strategies. Ineffective campaigns hinder this process, wasting money and reducing your growth chances.
The solution lies in a unique MBD framework, providing an efficient way to harness the power of Facebook ads without draining resources. We’ll explain how to leverage this framework, along with 15 inspirational Facebook ad campaigns.
The MBD Framework: “Making Better Decisions”
- Why Your Facebook Bidding Strategies Matter
- How To Create Ads Faster & For Less Money
Types Of Facebook Ad Campaigns & Which One You Should Choose
- The Four Facebook Audience Categories
- Broad Audiences
- Lookalike Audiences
- Interested Audiences
- Custom Audiences
- The Best Ad Structure For Manual Campaigns
- The Three Elements Of An Ad Set
- Value Proposition
- Offer
- Ad Campaign Date
- How To Test Your Ad Creatives
- How These Factors All Work Together
Dynamic Ads: How To Use Them Effectively
- Dynamic Product Ads & Broad Dynamic Product Ads
- Advantage Shopping Catalogs
- 15 Facebook Ad Templates You Can Use For Inspiration
The MBD Framework: “Making Better Decisions”
Now, don’t shoot the messenger, but humans generally can not compute the vast amount of data that comes from platforms like Facebook. So, when we fail to acknowledge our own limited capacity, it inhibits our ability to make the best decisions possible for our business.
Facebook business, at its core, is a predictive machine learning tool. Unfortunately, that means that no matter how skilled of a data analyst you are, you simply can’t out-predict a machine that’s been built to do just that. So instead of allowing this truth to work against us, we’ve decided to use it to our advantage by creating a framework that integrates the principles into a streamlined decision-making process called the MBD framework.
Why Your Facebook Bidding Strategies Matter
When you create an ad account, you’ll see that Facebook offers both manual and automatic bidding options. For 99% of the ads you see on your Facebook page, these brands use automatic bidding since it is less tedious and leverages the platform’s predictive tool to yield the best results.
While automatic bidding may seem like a no-brainer for an eCommerce business, this tool can hurt your growth if you’re a brand that’s just started running ads. The reason? Your account simply lacks enough data for Facebook’s algorithm to determine the best outcome for your ad campaign. So, when you ask the automated bidding tool to yield the best results possible, it’s going to assume that a minimal amount of growth is the best outcome for your brand.
In the MBD framework, we take a more customized approach. Instead of trusting the algorithm to spend your money effectively, we limit how much Facebook can bid on your ads using manual or goal-based bidding tools. You can think of this as putting a limitation in place as to how much of your money Facebook can spend before yielding the result that you desire.
Here’s an example…
Let’s say you have the budget to give Facebook a million dollars for your ad campaign. However, you have a target ROAS of 2.2. So, using the manual bidding tools, you tell Facebook to only spend the amount of money it will take to yield your target return on ad spend. In this case, Facebook will likely only spend $100 – $200 of your ad spend before determining that additional spending would hurt your ROAS. Now, you’ve not only hit your target, but you’ve also prevented yourself from losing thousands of dollars by taking bidding into your own hands.
One great analogy for this is playing poker. When you have a winning hand in poker, you bid higher. But if you don’t feel like you can win, you sit that round out. Similarly, if you tell Facebook ads to only spend your money if it can yield a specific ROAS, it’s going to “sit out” the ads that it knows you won’t win, instantly saving you money.
Just by making this one change to your Facebook marketing strategy, you’re already ahead of 99% of eCommerce brands on the platform.
How To Create Ads Faster & For Less Money
Of course, if you followed the methods in the MBD framework for bidding tools, you’ll probably notice that you have a sizable amount of your ad spend left over. Rather than letting these funds go to waste, we use them to our advantage by creating more ad campaigns and using our manual bidding strategies to continuously yield these results.
Besides hitting your target ROAS, Facebook ads are really about finding your target audience, creating more brand awareness, and converting new customers. The eCommerce brands that are most successful at this don’t just rely on a single ad; they create dozens, if not hundreds, of ad campaigns to reach their goals.
As we’ve mentioned, Facebook ads manager is a predictive tool that uses large sets of data to calculate the best outcome for your ad. That means the more data the platform has to work with, the more targeted your results will be. To generate that kind of data, businesses need to consistently create a large volume of high-quality ad creatives that can then be used to extract better metrics.
And while many 3rd party eCommerce marketing companies rely solely on historical data to determine ad performance, Facebook ads use tons of unique inputs to calculate these numbers. So, the brand that can produce the highest volume of Facebook ads to almost guaranteed to win over its competitors.
The good news is that you don’t need a massive marketing budget to create ads at scale. We’ve created an easy-to-follow guide that teaches you exactly how to create a high volume of ads for less money, which you can find here:
Types of Facebook Ad Campaigns & Which One You Should Use
In the realm of Facebook advertising, there exist three fundamental types of ad campaigns, each offering unique features to meet diverse marketing needs.
- The first type is the manual campaign, providing a hands-on approach to ad customization.
- The second type, known as Dynamic Product Ads (DPAs) or Broad Dynamic Product Ads (BDPAs), automatically tailors your ads based on your product catalog and user interaction.
- Lastly, the Advantage Shopping Campaigns (ASCs) represent Facebook’s latest AI-driven ad format, pushing the boundaries of ad customization and audience targeting.
These campaign types can reach four distinct audience categories on Facebook:-
- Broad audiences who share common interests or characteristics
- Lookalike audiences that mirror the characteristics of your current customers
- Interested audiences who have shown interest in your brand or products
- Custom audiences built from your customer data.
Four Facebook Audience Categories
Broad Audiences
While the name makes it seem like this option targets vast numbers of Facebook users from around the world, a broad audience is just a more sophisticated lookalike to your target audience based on the people who engage with your ad campaigns. For instance, if your broad audience is set to to attract potential customers in the United States between a specific age range demographics, Facebook will use this information, plus metrics from your previous ad that were successful and people who have engaged better with this particular campaign’s ad creative to broadly people in your “broad audience”, it is NOT a shotgun approach to world where you show the ad to everyone.
Lookalike Audiences
Another great option for brands looking to expand their reach without losing sight of their target audience is to find lookalike audiences or Facebook users similar to those that have previously interacted with your ads. For instance, you can use the information from your existing customer list, website visitors, or Facebook page followers to determine the type of audience you’re trying to attract. Then, ask Facebook to find new audiences who look like these demographics to ensure that your ad’s placement reaches the right customers.
Interested Audiences
Another unique way to draw new customers to your eCommerce store is through interested audiences, which refers to Facebook users who have shown interest in specific products that are similar to customers who have purchased from other jewelry businesses through Facebook ads.
Custom Audiences
Finally, the most specific option is custom audiences, which allows you to create an ad campaign that reaches a specific customer list. This option is the best for retargeting campaigns or campaigns that are shown to people who have purchased from your online store before. You can use your email list or website visitors to create these custom audiences in Facebook ads manager.
The Best Ad Structure For Manual Campaigns
When it comes to ROAS optimization, working with manual campaigns is the best way to guarantee that you get the best results without using up all of your ad spend in the process. To do this, we work on creating a campaign that features one CBO (campaign budget optimization) and two ad sets.
The first ad set is our broad audience or, as we call it, our scalable audience. These facebook users are not necessarily broad in the sense that they fall outside of your target audience. Still, they use only basic information demographics to decide whether or not your ads will be shown to them.
For the second ad set, we like to take a more targeted approach. This is where we would opt to use either an interested stack, Facebook users who have interested in a product page similar to yours, or lookalike audiences. This helps consistently bring in potential customers by targeting new audiences that already share similarities with your existing customers.
Simply put, we create scalability by reaching broad audiences and drive stronger conversion rates by retargeting to current customers or buyers who behave similarly to them.
The Three Elements Of An Ad Set
Now, each of our ad sets also includes four unique key points that we’ll be using to measure growth and determine ad performance while running ads. These elements include:
Value Proposition
Value proposition or “angles” is where the ad creative comes into play. In essence, this is where you use your ad copy to target the specific pain points of your customer and example to them why your product is the solution they’ve been looking for.
For instance, if you’re a shoe brand, start by determining what motivates your customers to buy new shoes. Do they want to look taller? Run faster? Feel more comfortable? All these concepts are used to narrow down your value proposition, which dictates the direction of your ad creative.
Offer
Next, the offer represents the CTA (call to action) you hope to achieve through your ad copy. You can always opt for an evergreen offer, simply encouraging them to buy the product from your eCommerce store.
However, you can also use tactics like BOGO (buy one, get one), free shipping, and other limited-time offers to create more excitement and drive traffic to your online store, increasing things like your AOV (average order volume) and other key metrics.
Ad Campaign Date
Finally, we use the date we launched each specific ad set to help us keep track of our results in an organized way.
How To Test Your Ad Creatives
Once your ad sets are up and running, you can start using the data gathered from these campaigns to effectively test your ad creatives. We know Our campaign leverages a unique blend of creative testing structure and the dynamic use of Facebook’s bidding auction, specifically the target bidding auction. By synergizing these elements, We know our ads will either not spend or if they spend that means it a winner
So, if you have one ad set that features an evergreen offer CTA versus an ad set that is using a BOGO offer, you can test which approach is most effective for your target audience.
The same thing goes for your value propositions. If you’re using a unique angle for each ad set, you can determine which ad creative resonates more with potential customers, which you can use to craft even stronger ad copy for your next campaign. This is also a good way to test the effectiveness of social proof like testimonials, influencer collaborations, and other creative elements in your ads.
How These Factors All Work Together
Now, this is where the real benefit of using manual campaigns comes into play. Once you’ve set a manual bidding option, picked your audience, and begun testing ad creatives, you can completely remove your hands from the wheel and allows Facebook’s predictive machine to do the work for you.
This framework is effective because it limits the amount of ad spend that Facebook can use to run your campaigns but still allows you to test ad creatives in the process, saving you the time and budget it takes to test a large number of ads simultaneously. Most importantly, it gives Facebook ads more data to work with to more accurately create the results you want over time, leading to better long-term growth for your brand.
To sum it up, this system gives you better ROAS, stronger ad creatives, and more money in your pocket.
Dynamic Ads: How To Use Them Effectively
Even though manual ads allow you to promote specific products, Facebook advertising gives you options to promote multiple items from your eCommerce business at a time. These are called dynamic ads and can be a great supplement to your manual ads. Facebook offers two main types of ads in this category, which are:
Dynamic Product Ads & Broad Dynamic Product Ads
Simply put, DPA (dynamic product ads) and BDPA (broad dynamic product ads) give you the freedom to promote your entire eCommerce product catalog to an audience over Facebook, Instagram, and other connected social media platforms. Although we often use DPA and BPDA interchangeably, there are a few differences between them.
For DPA, you would be remarketing to previous website visitors. To customize this even further, you can narrow this window down to a specific timeframe, like the last 45 days. From there, the Facebook ads manager will connect to your eCommerce product catalog via your Shopify account, allowing you to target customers who visited during that time.
Even better, DPA will show these customers specific products that they may have looked at but didn’t ultimately purchase during checkout from your online store. This turns the DPA function into its own type of sales funnel, moving customers back to your eCommerce business.
On the other hand, BDPA is a bit more general. Instead of showing these ads to the previous customer who looked at these products, BDPA shows these ads to new audiences who have similar interests to your existing customers, making it a broader version of standard DPA.
To utilize either type of dynamic product ads, all you have to do is follow these steps in your Facebook ads manager:
- Product Catalogue: If you haven’t already, you’ll first need to set up a product catalog on Facebook Business Manager. This is a file that contains a list of all the products you want to advertise, along with certain attributes such as name, ID, description, landing page URL, image URL etc..
- Create Dynamic Ad Campaign: In Facebook Ads Manager, click on the ‘Create’ button. Select ‘Catalog Sales’ as your campaign objective.
- Choose Product Catalog: In the ad set level, select the product catalog you have prepared. This is the catalog Facebook will use to pull information about your products into your dynamic ad.
- Define Your Audience: You can choose to target a broad audience {BDPA} or use an option that will specifically retarget people {DPA} who have interacted with your products.
- Budget and Schedule: Set your budget (daily or lifetime) and define your ad schedule.
- Create Ad Template: Here you can create the template that Facebook will use for your dynamic ads. You can choose a single image or carousel format. Remember, Facebook will automatically insert images and details from your product catalog based on the user’s interaction with your website.
Advantage Shopping Campaign
ASC (advantage shopping campaign) is Meta’s most recent Facebook business innovation, which uses AI technology to automate the advertising process. To leverage this tool, all you need to do is add your campaign information into the system and allow the AI to make the best decisions for your ads.
Although this advancement is a great tool, you should keep in mind that AI has limitations. Currently, ASC can only be used on up to 8 ad campaigns at a time, which doesn’t reflect the high-volume number of ad creatives you’d want to produce to really grow your business. More to the point, ASC automatically creates its own targets for your business rather than using the parameters you create manually. Unfortunately, this makes it more difficult to hit your ROAS goals.
That’s why we recommend only using a small portion of your budget on ASC, at least until Facebook is able to address some of these concerns. If you want to use ASC, you can easily set it up in ads manager using the following steps:
- Product Catalog: Firstly, make sure you have a product catalogue set up on Facebook Business Manager. This includes all the items you want to advertise.
- Create Campaign: Start by navigating to Facebook Ads Manager. Click on the “Create” button to start a new campaign.
- Choose Campaign Objective: Facebook offers several campaign objectives. For an eCommerce business, “Conversions” is typically the best choice, as you’re looking to convert viewers into buyers.
- Set up your Ad Set: In the ad set level, choose the product catalog you’ve set up as the one you want to promote. Here you’ll also choose your target audience from the 4 types we discussed above.
- Budget & Schedule: Define your budget (daily or lifetime) and schedule when your ads will run.
- Conversion Events: Choose a conversion event. This would be “Purchase”.
- Create your Ad: Now, create the individual ad. For a shopping campaign, you’ll likely want to use Carousel or Collection formats that allow you to showcase multiple products. Make sure to write compelling ad copy and a clear call-to-action (CTA).
- Dynamic Ads: To take your shopping campaign to the next level, consider using Dynamic Ads. These use your product catalog to automatically show products to people who have expressed interest on your website, in your app or elsewhere on the internet.
- Review and Publish: Lastly, review your campaign settings to make sure everything is correct. When you’re ready, hit “Publish” to launch your campaign.
15 Facebook Ad Templates You Can Use For Inspiration
From influencer partnerships to user-generated content, carousel ads, and Facebook video ads, the possibilities for ad creatives are endless. So, we’ve curated our 15 favorite ad templates that you can draw inspiration from the next time you’re ready to start running ads fast.
Final Thoughts
As an eCommerce digital marketing agency, our goal is to help our partners tell their brand’s story in a way that yields massive results and puts them ahead of their competition. For more insight into how our MBD framework can transform your Facebook ad strategy, connect with a member of our team today.