Facebook Ads For E-commerce in 2021

Every online business wishes for high organic numbers, free traffic, and basically – free money. However, that’s usually not the reality for most small businesses, and so we shouldn’t neglect the power of ads, especially when it comes to e-commerce.

In 2020, a study was made on some of the most known and visited e-commerce websites, and it revealed that 46 per cent of them spent up to one thousand U.S. dollars on advertising. 

This leads us to realize that it really doesn’t matter the level you are at with your business, good ads will never hurt. But what kind of ads should you go for?

In this article we’ll focus on Facebook Ads, we’ll talk about how they work and if they are suitable for your e-commerce business!

Contents:

1. What Are Facebook Ads?
2. What You Can Expect to Pay With Facebook Ads
3. Do Facebook Ads Work?
4. Beware of the Facebook Ads Policy
5. Facebook Ads vs Google Ads
6. Facebook Ads For E-commerce
7. Facebook Ads For Drop-Shipping

What Are Facebook Ads?

To sum it up, Facebook Ads give you the opportunity to use an image, a video, or an image carousel to spin on the platform in different ways (wall, story, via messenger and so on).

You can choose to customize your audience to who you think would likely buy, and choose from other customization options to better set up your ads for success.

When building an audience for your ad you can target users based on their location, behaviors, interests, and so much more! You can also choose to exclude audiences based on who you don’t want to target.

After that, you will need to choose a daily budget (minimum and maximum) for your ad, and Facebook will show your ad to as many people that they can reach from your desired audience.

What You Can Expect to Pay With Facebook Ads

The minimum amount for a daily ad set budget will be $1. When it comes to increasing the budget, that’s entirely up to you. Most advertisers like to start with a small budget, and once they see success and profit, scale up their daily budget.

If you want to make sure you don’t go over your budget, Facebook allows you to set the following:

• Campaign spending limit. Set a maximum amount you’re willing to spend on a given advertising campaign.
• Account spending limit. Set a maximum amount you’re willing to spend across all the campaigns you’re running.

If you are testing, then it is always recommended to start with a low amount of money and see which of your ad sets worked the best. Once you figure that out, you can decide on which ones you would like to increase the value of your bid.

Do Facebook Ads Work?

Like anything in the tech world, Facebook Ads do require a bit of attention. And of course, you must advertise good content, with a good product behind it. After all, success is dependent on if people actually want to buy what you’re selling!

If you ensure your content is high quality, and you understand who you should target with your Facebook Ads, then there is no reason why you shouldn’t be able to send people to your website. If you have a solid funnel and a good offer behind that ad, then conversions will come!

If you’re hesitant to give paid advertising a try because you’re holding out for that organic traffic, then we have some bad news for you… Businesses have seen a decrease in organic reach in 2020, so you might want to give Facebook ads a try instead of holding out for something that’s becoming less prevalent.

Scared to jump into the deep end and waste all of your money? Don’t be! The misconception that Facebook ads require a huge investment is holding back online businesses from giving ads a try. It takes as simple as a $5 a day budget to start testing and finding what really works for your brand!

Beware of the Facebook Ads Policy

One downside about running ads on Facebook is that you have to abide by their particularly-strict Ad Policies. These policies provide both explicit things to avoid, and guidelines around sensitive topics.

When running an e-commerce business, especially in a specific industry that is either controversial or relating to a sensitive topic (fitness, health, finances, etc) you might want to double-check the Facebook Ads Policy to ensure your ad does not in any way interfere with that.

Let’s see some of the things Facebook considers when reviewing your ad:

• You can not advertise anything related to illegal products or services.
• You are not allowed to advertise tobacco and related products.
• Drugs or related products are as well not permitted.
• If you running your business within the health & gym sphere, then you must not advertise anything that contains “before & after” pictures, as well as unsafe supplements, or imply that someone needs to or will lose weight from your product.

What else?

If you are selling anything related to Alcohol you need to ensure that your ad complies with the local rules.

For example, alcohol advertising it’s entirely prohibited by Facebook in countries like: Afghanistan, Brunei, Bangladesh, Egypt, Gambia, Kuwait, Libya, Lithuania, Norway, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Yemen, and much more.

There are also targeting requirements you must follow when choosing your audience’s age.

There are and other restricted content policies which you must check before creating your ads, if you operate in the following industries: Dating, Pharmacies and Pharmacy products, Cosmetics.

We recommend always briefing the policies before launching any ads, as Facebook can be pretty harsh with their punishments. If you go against policy you can expect anything from your ads shut off temporarily, or your entire ad account shut down without any notice!

Facebook Ads vs Google Ads

One thing is for sure: both Facebook and Google have the capabilities to generate a huge amount of daily traffic (think billions of daily users).

When it comes to costs, they work on the same bidding concept. However, studies show that the average cost per click for Google would be somewhere between $1 and $2. When it comes to Facebook, the numbers seem to be slightly lower, with an average CPC in 2020 of $0.97.

So, when evaluating each solution’s strengths and potential applications, it’s also apparent that the two platforms should be viewed in a complementary, rather than adversarial, way.

Facebook Ads For E-commerce

If you are running an e-commerce business, then Facebook Ads are definitely something to go for, as they will help you target those specific people that are interested in products similar to yours.

Facebook Ads will help you build a brand presence, and get increase your brand awareness by getting to the specific ideal customers.

We also know how frustrating it is to see so many abandoned carts. And even though email marketing can help in that sense, Facebook Ads can also do that and recover some of your abandoned carts customers.

Facebook Ads For Drop-Shipping

If you are in the drop-shipping business and want to scale up, Facebook Ads should work well in that direction.

They will allow you to drive different traffic to your product page, and since you have clear shipping agreements with your suppliers, nothing should stand in the way.

As mentioned before, testing is the key to success with Facebook Ads and please take this seriously, as they say, Facebook is 80% Testing and 20% Optimizing.

Interested about drop shipping?

See the top trending products to sell in 2021!