6 Audiences You Need for Ecommerce
When you’re starting out, marketing can be time consuming and expensive. If you’re in the ecommerce business, you understand how hard it can be to target the right audience. Even after you gain some experience, you may still be targeting the wrong people. Luckily, Facebook has many of the tools you need to be successful.
If you’re not already using them, Facebook ads are good for ecommerce, like really good. But there’s some groundwork needed before you start. Building proper audiences can mean the difference between paying for a bunch of wasted clicks and actually generating sales.
Installing Your Facebook Pixel
Before you can get started, make sure you have your Facebook pixel up and running. If you’re on a platform like Shopify, it’s a pretty easy setup. Just plug in your pixel ID number and you’re ready to go.
If coding isn’t your strong suit, fear not! Facebook currently integrates with additional platforms like; Magento, WooCommerce, Wix and even Squarespace. Unfortunately, if your site isn’t listed, you’ll have to manually install the pixel code yourself.
Now that your pixel tracking code is installed, we can dive right in.
Custom Audiences
When working with Facebook ads, Custom Audiences are your best friend. If you haven’t set up a Custom Audience before, head to your Facebook Business Manager, from there you’ll select the account you want to use, then under the “assets” section click “audiences.” This is where you’ll be able to set up your Custom Audiences.
You can base custom audiences on your customer lists, website visitors, or engagement. You can include or exclude anyone you want in this audience. The goal of custom audiences is to narrow in on your messaging, and to increase your conversion rate, return on investment and learn more about your audiences.
Behavior Audiences
Once you’ve installed the Facebook Pixel on your site, you can then build audiences based on your site traffic. These audiences are based on behaviors specific to your site. You can build an audience list from something as simple as visitors to your site, or as advanced as someone who hasn’t visited your site in more than X amount of days.
Window Shoppers
We’ve all been a window-shopper at one point or another. In terms of ecommerce, window shoppers are those who visited your site and did not add anything to their cart. You want to know who this audience is and why they visited your site without making a purchase. Did the product not resonate with them? Were they out of your target demographic?
To set up this audience, you’ll first need to decide your criteria. Are you interested in specific page views, or general content views? You’ll also have to decide your date range for this audience, as well.
By setting up this audience, you’ll have a better idea of who’s not making purchases when on your site. This information will also help you target who is more likely to make a purchase on your site.
Cart Abandonment
This audience includes those who visited the site, added some product(s) to their cart, and for some reason, didn’t end up purchasing. You can also segment this audience further to include when the action was completed. We typically recommend having 7, 14 and 30 day segments for this audience.
Why is that? We’re so glad you asked. This is a great audience to have for retargeting purposes—you already know they were close to converting, but they just need an extra little push to take them over the edge. You can select this audience and entice them with some offer (a free shipping coupon, percent of a purchase, a buy-one-get-one offer, etc) to encourage them to complete their purchase.
Purchasers
After you’ve created window shopper and cart abandonment audiences, you should set up a purchaser audience. Your purchaser audience is something you should leverage for exclusion lists. This means instead of wasting ad spend on someone who recently purchased your product, you can instead remove them from any current ads, or future ads, that may no longer apply to them.
Your purchaser audience can also be used to build lookalike audiences. While you may not want to flood your current customers with retargeting ads, you will want to be able to target people similar to them who are likely to also make a purchase.
Similar to the cart abandonment audience, you can also use the purchaser segment to re-engage visitors. Consider setting up a campaign that targets purchasers every so often after they completed a conversion—we might suggest 30, 90 or 180-day cycles depending on your product lifecycle. If you have a consumer product that has a shorter life cycle, 30 days may be the best option for setting up this audience. If it’s a bigger purchase item with a longer product life, 180 days might make more sense instead. Staying in front of your audience at these points gives you a better chance at re-engaging them, especially since they’re already warm.
Other Audiences
Purchasers
No, this isn’t a duplicate. This audience is for customers who purchase from a certain category.
If your store sells widely varied products, you don’t want to build your lookalikes and retargeting the same way.
For example, if you sell clothing and accessories, you want to be able to segment those who purchase from each specific category. This audience is a great opportunity to retarget to customers who bought from one category, but not the other.
Loyal Customers
In any business, it’s important to know who your loyal customers are. Custom Audiences allows you to create an audience based on repeat purchasers within a certain time frame. When setting up the conversion event, in this case, it would be “purchase,” set to a minimum occurrence of X and the addition of the parameter for the last X days.
This audience will vary based on your business. For you, a loyal customer may be 2 purchases over the last 6 months. Whereas for another business, that may look something like 3 purchases over the last 12 months. The key here is to really match your business and your customer lifecycle.
High LTV
There are loyal customers, and there are extremely loyal customers. Not only do you want to be able to identify who a good customer is, you also want to be able to identify customers with a high lifetime value.
To create this audience, set the main conversion event to Purchase and add an extra parameter-defining value, setting this to a minimum dollar value. This is a great audience for promoting premium products and a strong source for a lookalike audience if you want to drive higher average order values across the board.
Obviously, these are only 6 examples of audiences you can set up to use Facebook successfully for your ecommerce business. This isn't an exhaustive list, there’s multiple different audiences you can set up for whichever variables make sense for your business, potential customers and buyer journey. Taking the time to build these audiences at the start of your ad campaigns can greatly amplify your success down the road.
Content originally published on EmberTribe.com