The Best Facebook Ads Campaign Structure for Ecommerce in 2021

A well-planned campaign structure is vital for two reasons.

It allows you to successfully advertise to audiences at different stages of the eCommerce buyer’s journey.

It makes it much easier to learn from your performance data and make improvements.

One of the biggest advantages of Facebook Ads is the ability to test and learn what works quickly.

In this post, I’m going to show you how my agency structures eCommerce ad campaigns.

The Ecommerce Buyer’s Journey

This concept underpins the whole structure of the campaign. It’s how you make sure ads are targeted to the right people and how you get the most out of your ad spend.

We can break down the eCommerce buyer’s journey into four stages:

Cold

Users that have never heard of your brand or engaged with any of your content.

Warm

These are the people that have interacted with your business without making a purchase.

Hot

People that have shown buyer intent. They may have added a product to their cart without completing the checkout process.

Loyalty

Customers. These are the people that have already purchased from your store.

Even with this broad overview, you can see how the marketing funnel works and how the eCommerce buyer’s journey will guide campaign structure.

The Ecommerce Campaign Structure

Cold Audiences

The first stage is to make people aware of your brand and your products.

You’re reaching out to people that have never heard of your business before, so you want to focus on the following audience types:

Saved Audience

A Saved Audience allows you to target users on their demographics, behaviours, location, and interests.

I would recommend taking a deep dive into Audience Insights to find relevant targeting options.

For example, you can target the audiences of your competitors, influencers, magazines, and more. 

 

It’s important to keep your targeting quite broad at this stage. 

 

Facebook is really good at finding the right people for your ads, so don’t go too narrow with your Saved Audience. 

 

Lookalike Audience

 

Create a Lookalike Audience based on your conversion data.

If you have been running your campaign for a while, Facebook can use your conversion data to find users that are most like your existing customers. 

 

Set your goal as traffic and optimise your bidding strategy for landing page views. If you’re using video ads for brand awareness, set engagement as your goal.

Warm Audiences

At this stage, we want to target the people that have engaged with the cold audience ads. 

 

You can create custom audiences sets for:

 

Website Visitors

 

People that have visited the website and product pages. 

 

Engagement

 

People that have engaged with your ads, liked your page, or otherwise interacted with the brand on Facebook or Instagram.

Ensure that you exclude users who have shown buyer intent to avoid overlap with audiences further along the funnel. 

Hot Audiences

This is the stage where you will likely get the most sales and best ROAS.

 

The previous stages have led users to this point in the funnel. 

 

Users have already shown buyer intent. Many will only need a reminder to nudge them towards making a purchase. 

 

You want to create custom audiences based on Pixel data.

 

Remarketing

 

Target users with ads promoting the exact product that they have viewed and added to their cart on your website. 

 

Discounts Codes/Coupons

 

If you have a big enough margin, a discount or coupon can be an effective way to bring back users that abandoned their cart. 

Loyalty Audiences

Many Ecommerce businesses overlook the final stage.

 

But this can be a vital part of the campaign, especially if you sell products with a high purchase frequency like cosmetics. 

 

To target users that have already purchased, upload a customer list to create a custom audience.

 

 

You can also use Pixel Events to target users who have purchased within a set period. If your product lasts for around 90 days, target users that made a purchase 80+ days previously.  

 

Every business is different, and those nuances should be reflected in your Facebook Ads campaign structure. 

 

When you start to see users move through the funnel and start to generate sales, you’ll know that your campaign structure is working. You’ll also be able to getter a clearer picture of which areas are working well and what needs to be improved.

 

How do you structure your Ecommerce ad campaigns?

 

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

 

And if you need assistance setting up a new Facebook Ads campaign or getting better results from an existing campaign, click the button below and schedule a demo call with me. Let’s have a chat about what my agency can do for your business.