Scaling Facebook Ads For Ecommerce [Ultimate Guide]
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In this guide you’ll learn how to run a successful Facebook ad campaign for ecommerce in 2024.
I’ll also share my best practices for setting up (and scaling) ecommerce Facebook ads to ensure you scale profitably.
Let’s dive in.
Right now, Facebook (Meta) is arguably the best advertising platform for ecommerce stores and there are 3 reasons for this:
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Setting up your Facebook ad account is an underrated step, you don’t want to rush this process.
Getting the technical foundation right is critical.
Take your time making sure your pixel is set up correctly, you’ve added the correct events and your website is connected properly with your Facebook business manager account.
Here’s a helpful checklist to get the technical details sorted:
☐ Set up your Facebook Business Manager
Detailed instructions: Creating a Facebook Business Manager account
☐ Install The Facebook Pixel and ensure it’s connected to your website.
Use the Facebook Pixel Helper Chrome extension to test that you have it set up correctly on your website.
☐ Upload your product data feed to Facebook and check for errors.
More info about setting up your product feed.
☐ Set up Conversion tracking
More info about pixel conversion tracking with Facebook.
Facebook advertising has changed a lot in 2024.
How-to guides from 2 years ago are no longer relevant.
A big trend in 2024 with Facebook ads is the push towards account consolidation.
In other words…
The simpler your ad account structure, the better!
Here is how your ad accounts should be structured in 2024…
A common myth with Facebook ads is that you need hundreds of ads and dozens of ad sets to test. The truth is you don’t need complex campaign structures to be successful.
In fact, 1 campaign, 1 ad set and 1 ad is often enough to see some good results and I recommend this structure when starting Facebook ads on a small budget.
Trust Facebook’s machine learning to find your buyers and invest more time in the ad creative strategy.
An ideal Facebook campaign structure would include 2-3 ad sets with 3-5 ads. Each campaign you build will also be built around a specific ‘theme’.
For example:
Campaign 1 – Could be focused on new customer acquisition and themed around a specific product SKU like ‘women’s black dresses’. That way when you create ads and messaging everything can be aligned to target customers shopping for black dresses.
Campaign 2 – A second customer acquisition campaign that focuses on dynamic ad creatives targeting broad audiences. You hand of the steering wheel to Facebook and let it use it’s machine learning to find customers for you.
Facebook gives you a lot of campaign objectives to choose from but…
99% of the time you want to choose conversions as the campaign objective.
If you’re growing an ecommerce business profit is your most import ecommerce metric to measure success against. No other objective on Facebook ads better serves this than optimising your campaigns for conversions.
I’ll also mention that our Facebook ad agency uses CBO campaigns 90% of the time and for the bid strategy we set cost caps to protect from overspending and increasing CPAs*.
CPA* = Stands for ‘Cost Per Acquisition’ which is a measure of how much money you’re spending on advertising to acquire a new customer.
The Ad set level of Facebook ads is where you control audience targeting and let Facebook know what goals you want to acheive.
Many ‘Facebook Gurus’ will tell you to split-test dozens of different ad sets & audiences but the truth is…
You only need a maximum of 3 ad sets per campaign and often 1 ad set is enough.
A few more important tips to pay attention to at the Ad set level:
Audience targeting on Facebook is where you tell Facebook who you want to show ads to.
Facebook gives you so many different possibilities here and my best advice when starting out is to keep your Audience targeting broad.
As more data comes in you can use Facebook’s analytics tool to refine this and reduce your initial audience sizes.
Interest Stacking (Detailed Targeting)
When targeting audiences, you can introduce interest-based targeting as a way of refining your target audience and optimizing your campaign. However this is often hard to scale and these audiences can degrade your ad performance over time.
What budget should you start with for ecommerce Facebook ads?
I recommend starting with $400 daily and setting cost caps based on your target CPA.
Important: You need to spend a good amount of budget on Facebook ads to reach 50 purchases required by Facebook to exit the learning phase. If you’re not spending enough to reach the required 50 weekly purchases then you will get stuck in ‘learning’ and ad performance will be inconsistent.
You may even need to spend up to 3 times your average order value (AOV) when first starting with Facebook ads. The idea here is to give Facebook enough budget so it can collect valuable data that you can use to optimise your campaign as it matures.
At a minimum you want to choose a budget based on the following:
Minimum Campaign Budget = Target CPA * 7.14 * # of Ad sets.
7.14 = the daily sales needed to exit Facebook’s learning phase within a week.
Target CPA = how much you’re willing to spend to acquire a new customer from Facebook ads.
For example:
Let’s say you have an average order value (AOV) of $50 and have a target ROAS of 2. Therefore you’re willing to spend $25 to acquire a new customer. You also plan on launching 1 new customer acquisition campaign with 2 ad sets for testing.
Minimum Campaign Budget = $25 * 7.14 * 2 ad sets
Minimum Campaign Budget = $357 daily to achieve your target ROAS of 2.
One of the biggest mistakes I see ecommerce businesses make when advertising on Facebook and Google Advertising is not allocating enough budget to achieve meaningful results. You must assign a proper budget to get through the learning phase and take advantage of Meta’s incredible machine learning and predictive conversion modelling.
Ad creatives are arguably the #1 most success factors for Facebook ads.
Facebook advertising is one of the best platforms for generating and scaling your ecommerce business but there are 3 key things you need to get right for Facebook advertising to work:
Successful Facebook ads share 2 things in common:
One of the key things to getting Facebook ads to work is using engaging creatives.
And more often than not, this is where a lot of Facebook campaigns fall down.
Here are some 7 simple ways to improve your Facebook Ad creatives:
As with the campaign and ad set level. Keep your ad creatives simple and easy for customers to understand.
As soon as your Facebook ads are live, you want to pay close attention to the performance of your campaign.
Otherwise, you can burn through your money quickly.
So…what should you be looking for exactly?
The #1 goal is to make sure that your Facebook Ads are generating more revenue than they cost to run.
Here are the key metrics on Facebook to watch closely:
Using the views listed above is a great way to quickly identify where your funnel is breaking. This is a great way to tell if it’s your Facebook campaign, product or website that’s the problem and you can work to fix it.
For example: If you’re getting a lot of ‘adds to cart’ but the ‘checkouts’ are low then this is most likely a conversion issue on your ecommerce store and you’ll need to investigate what is causing this.
One of the most important metrics on Facebook to pay attention to is your ROAS.
This KPI is critical to understanding if Facebook is producing a positive return on investment for you and lets you know when you’re ready to scale up your Ad spend.
When it comes to ecommerce, every store will have a different ROAS they want to achieve to be profitable. For your ecommerce store, you might calculate the following:
ROAS of 3 = Breakeven point
ROAS of 4 = Making Money
ROAS of 5 = Crushing it
Before running your Facebook campaigns make sure you work out your breakeven ROAS number so you can set some clear goals for your campaign.
A word of warning…
Scaling Facebook ads is an advanced level of Facebook marketing and you should already be getting a few sales from your initial Facebook campaign before trying to scale.
If you haven’t received any sales from Facebook yet, then you need to go back and work on fixing your campaign before trying to scale.
There is a lot of information and strategies to cover when it comes to scaling ecommerce ads and on Facebook and it deserves its own post.
I’ve put together this step-by-step guide to scaling Facebook ads that you can download here.
Get The Guide To Scaling Facebook Ads:
Congratulations on making it this far! You have everything you need to launch and scale a successful ecommerce Facebook ads campaign.
It’s over to you.
Which Ecommerce Facebook Ad tip did you find most helpful from this post?
Let me know in the comments below right now.
Jonathan Gorham is the co-founder of Engine Scout and a passionate digital marketer, focusing on topics surrounding ecommerce marketing, SEO, and social advertising. He's based in Melbourne, Australia, and when he's not working, you'll find him relaxing with family or hanging out with friends. Connect with him on Twitter or LinkedIn.
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26 Responses
Thank you very much for sharing this useful article with us. It was really helpful. I don’t have any experience in this area. So, is it worth to hire a professional or I can do it by myself? Thanks
If you’re just starting out in business then I recommend learning Facebook ads yourself and taking a D.I.Y approach. Hiring a professional agency can be very risky and expensive so you have to be careful. If you do hire someone then make sure you are holding them accountable to direct sales. Impressions, clicks and likes are vanity metrics. Getting sales and making money is what matters when it comes to Facebook ads 🙂
You can do it yourself if you have the experience but i won’t recommend you do it if you don’t have the experience else, you’ll just squander your investment budget.
thank you so much bro its really help for my business.
Glad you found it helpful 🙂
Thanks for this writeup, I am just about to set up my Ad for my Ecommerce. But when I search for key words in the Engine scout FaceBook search I just don’t get any response. It remains blank.
Hey Tony, the tool works best when you search for broad topics. For example, if you’re selling supplements then you might want to target broad topics like ‘health’ or ‘fitness’ to find relevant audiences who could be interested in supplements.
Thanks so much for this! It is so helpful.
Hey Ellie, glad you found the guide useful 🙂
the best article about facebook ads i have ever read!, thanks brother…
thanks for information, i always use facebook ads .. Thanks
Thanks for sharing this content. The content helps run Facebook ads for e-commerce. It will help to boost Facebook marketing.
Hi! Thanks for the article, it is very useful!
Link missing: Scaling Facebook Ads For Ecommerce Pdf: [empty]
Could you share it?
Hi Max, It’s now available.
Hi Jonathan,
First of all, very helpful article, thanks!
Secondly, would you mind sending the PDF on scaling via email? I am not able to download it from the article it seems, looks like it is missing.
Thanks and best,
Lex
Hey Lex, it’s available for download now.
Hey, thanks for your tips.
I’m trying this out. I just have a few questions and hope u can help 🙂
1) Cost Cap
I’m selling digital products between 3$ – 20$
Which amount should I enter?
2) Placements
Which placements should I choose?
Advantage+ or which ones?
Thank u very much
Hey Max,
1) I’d create separate campaigns for each product based on their price so you can set different cost caps to handle each price point. Start with 20% above your retail price for each campaign and gradually reduce the cost cap to your desired target only after you start getting impressions & sales.
2) Avoid Advatage+ until you have a successful campaign then you can move this into Advantage+ once you know it works.
Hey Max,
1) To start with I’d set a cost cap 20-25% above what you’d like to make a sale for. For example if you wanted to spend maximum $10 to get a sale on the $20 product I’d start with a $12-$13 CPA to get reach.
2) I like automatic placements – make sure your creatives follow Facebook’s recommend ad size guide (https://www.facebook.com/business/ads-guide/update/image/facebook-feed/link-clicks).
Hi there, can not see the scaling pdf, there is no clickable link… I’d love to have a look at it!
Hey Joss, I’ve just added the updated guide for scaling Facebook ads.
Thank you for this information. You are very kind giving out this stuff for free. I am just starting and it’s not easy targeting especially with high competition in a particular product.
Hi Jonathan, I’m not sure I understand the retargeting. Kindly, can you explain: different campaign, same campaign with prospecting, cost cap or not??
Hi Ovi, It’s common practice to set up different campaigns…
Campaign 1: for prospecting or targeting ‘cold audiences’ which is basically people who haven’t heard of your brand or visited your website before.
Campaign 2: for retargeting ‘warm audiences’ which are people who’ve visited your website in the past or who’ve bought from you before.
I’m suggesting a different approach where you combine both of these campaigns together and focus on prospecting cold audiences only. Facebook will automatically include ‘warm audiences’ when you set performance targets e.g. cost caps so you don’t need to worry about setting up a ‘retargeting campaign’. Focus on demand creation through cold audience prospecting as this is the only way to scale with Facebook Ads and you’ll retarget warm audiences with this strategy too.
hi, Jonathan Gorham recommends the broad target audience for the e-commerce industry.
Do you use combination of campaigns with different objectives to achieve the sales? I run campaigns for a newsletter service, but the CPM of campaign with sales objective is very high (USD $60). I am trying to use engagement objective to acquire users with lower CPM for Meta to learn the conversions goal of initiate checkout. And use awareness/ sales campaigns to retarget those users. Does it work or not so?