Informative

Why Dynamic Ads Have Become Indispensable To Advertisers

In February 2015, Facebook introduced an automated game-changing feature for advertisers, that opened the door to many opportunities. The introduction of Dynamic Ads on Facebook has helped deliver unprecedentedly strong performances for advertisers, allowing them to improve their targeting strategies significantly, by limiting the target audience size to people who have viewed, engaged or showed interest in their product or service.

What is a Dynamic Ad?

Dynamic ads on Facebook is a feature that automatically promotes products or services to people who have already expressed interest in your website, page or app on the Internet, or have viewed products and services that are similar to yours. This enables you to deliver the right message, to the right person, at the right time. Let’s use an example: someone visits your website, where you sell sportswear. A customer starts browsing through your website and is checking out your newest collection of running shoes, however, he or she never follows through with an order, and exits the page without making a purchase.

Now this is where it gets interesting. Thanks to the Facebook Pixel, a feature that will be explained later on in this blog, the customer will soon be retargeted on Facebook with the shoes he or she was looking at, as well as other relevant and similar shoes available in the product catalogue. This represents the most relevant form of targeting, and will encourage the viewer to have another look at the product by visiting the website, and perhaps this time complete the purchase. Of course, this feature is not exclusive to the sale of tangible products.

Initially launched in May 2016, but optimally updated and improved since then, Facebook’s Dynamic Ads for Travel has proven to be a game changing addition in the online hospitality industry. Available on both Facebook and Instagram, including mobile versions, it has become a crucial advertising format used to reach travellers with dynamically generated ads.

Let’s clarify with another example. You’re checking flight prices for a holiday to the Bahamas, but don’t end up purchasing the ticket or booking. With the help of the Facebook Pixel, you will be retargeted with flight offers and tickets to the Bahamas with dates similar to the ones you originally searched for. The same retargeting strategy can be implemented for customers who visit hotel websites looking for a place to stay.

Retargeting The Right Audience

Dynamic ads can even allow you to select which of the people who visited and completed a conversion on your website, you would like to retarget with relevant ads. The list can also include people who have never visited your website before (see next section: Broad Audiences). It all depends on the targeting options that you choose to proceed with.

However, I would like to focus on retargeting past visitors here. Doing this can help customers remember products they viewed on either the website or mobile app without buying them. Maybe they even went as far as placing an item in their cart, but didn’t complete the check out.

Here are some tips that could help in the retargeting process:

Exclude recent buyers/purchasers

Exclude the people who have recently completed a purchase from your company, so you can fully focus on acquiring new customers and expanding your customer base. Should, after a while, some of the previous purchasers still not return to your website, you may then consider engaging them with a different dynamic ads campaign.

In the event that you do choose to retarget people who have recently made a purchase on your website, you can target them with either a cross-sell or upsell.

Time of last visit

Customers who visit your app or website in the last couple of days may be more valuable to you than those that visited over a month ago. Use the dynamic ad settings to segment the target audience according to the timing of their last visit. Further available segmentation options include: action types, device types, product categories etc.

Dynamic Ads with Broad Audiences

Another very interesting feature that is available, is providing highly relevant ads to customers, even if they haven’t personally visited your website or app. The ads can be automatically matched to people’s interests and behaviour around the web.

This is the added Broad Audience feature to the Dynamic Ads concept. Browsing, for example, through some raincoats on one clothing e-commerce store, can result in ads from other clothing brands targeting you with their new rain jacket collection. In this case, it would reach people who have merely shown intent and interest in purchasing a raincoat without specifically visiting your website.

This targeting may not be limited to rain coats only, as this smart feature’s dynamic ad settings may then use the information it has gathered to target you for other related items such as other types of jackets or autumn/winter clothing.

Finally, Facebook can use all the targeting data they have stored to help you create a lookalike audience of people who haven’t necessarily visited your website, but have got similar likes, interests and other characteristics that match your ad campaign’s targets. This could potentially help you expand your customer base, without these customers having a previous history with your or your website.

Best Practices for Broad Audiences

• Identify your target audience
• Include website visitors in targeting
• Use product sets that are large enough
• Provide tailor made ad content for your new audience

Facebook Pixel

Alright, so now that we have a thorough understanding of what exactly the goals and purposes of Dynamic Ads are, we can begin to discuss how on earth this is all made possible, because it certainly isn’t magic. In order for you to get the most out of your social budget, and for your business to excel with the clever Dynamic Ads and Broad Audiences features, there’s one absolutely crucial tool you will need: the Facebook Pixel.

A Facebook Pixel is an analytics tool that gives you the chance to measure how effective your advertising is, by studying, monitoring, recording and understanding people’s behaviours and actions on your website. It’s basically a line of code that is installed on your website’s online store. Once you attach the pixel data to your website, the Pixel will trigger and report any action that is conducted on your website to Facebook and Instagram. This is made possible as the Pixel drops a cookie on your website, allowing it to track visitors on your website, so you can retarget them later on.

Using track conversions, the Facebook Pixel can even give you the opportunity to discover what device a person is using to visit your page, and scrutinise their behaviour in terms of whether they usually start viewing an ad and website on their mobile, but later switch to a desktop to complete a purchase. This valuable information is then used in order to improve the way customers are targeted.

Implementing Dynamic Ads Efficiently

In short, there are four key ingredients needed in order to successfully implement a Dynamic Ads campaign:

• Facebook Page
• Facebook ad account
• Facebook Pixel installed on your website
• Facebook Catalogue

Setting up your Catalogue is of vital importance, as it will contain information on the products or services that you would like to advertise with your Facebook ads. Alternatively, if your catalogue is from another website, such as e.g. Shopify or WooCommerce, then you can simply stick with that, although Facebook Catalogues are the most trusted format.

The Dynamic Ad Format Options:

• Carousel Ad
• Single Image Ad
• Collection Ad

You’ll also have several creative options at your disposal, should you wish to, for example, add an overlay, or a CTA/offer etc.

Conclusion

In a nutshell, Dynamic Ads are the way to go! With advertising costs on the rise and the omnipresent competition becoming fiercer than ever, it is of utmost importance that you don’t waste any more of your social budget, and target exactly the audience that you need to reach out to. We would absolutely love to know where you stand on this. Or perhaps you’ve already been using Dynamic Ads for a while now, if so, let us know and share your experience with us!