Marketing’s common issue: budgets rise, ads run, but no conversions. For real results, focus on quality, not just quantity. Let’s stop right there – to achieve dreamed conversions, one needs to work not only quantitatively but also qualitatively. But let’s start from the beginning…
Fact: stream quality pays off
E-commerce results are evaluated through sales (conversions), but to achieve them, one must first create a good and efficient marketing funnel. Quality cold traffic, or the widest advertising audience, is perhaps the most crucial part of the funnel: if it is properly selected, buyers can emerge from it alone, and leading quality traffic to conversion is significantly cheaper, easier, and faster than with poor quality traffic. With poor cold traffic, the costs of achieving conversion significantly increase. Perhaps the most effective Facebook advertising tool for driving conversion is dynamic retargeting advertising, i.e. advertising where the user sees the products they have viewed on the site or added to their basket.
Where to get that cold flow?!
One of the most popular and effective tools for quality cold traffic is Facebook Prospecting advertising. To be able to run it, you first need to properly prepare the Facebook catalog. The catalog can be created in 3 ways:
- By downloading a template and manually filling it in;
- Using a standard content management system (CMS) and installing the necessary module, for example, Facebook for WooCommerce is used with WordPress;
- By adding specific Facebook tags to the microdata and using Facebook Pixel as the data source in the e-commerce store.
Practice shows that the most common choice is the CMS-installed module. The process itself (installation and linking) is simple, and a *.xml file link is prepared for the catalog, which needs to be submitted to Facebook Commerce Manager. Then the Facebook catalog automatically updates according to the chosen time and synchronises based on the changes you make in the CMS. Seems simple, right?
…but that’s not all!
If the CMS is non-standard, and you want to have a catalog, but there are too many products to update manually, then you will inevitably have to turn to developers responsible for the CMS and ask them to add microdata tags to the products. The difference from the standard CMS module is that microdata directly transfers information to Facebook Pixel, so you need to select Facebook Pixel as the data source in Facebook Commerce Manager. Although the latter method is more complex, i.e., you will inevitably need to find programmers who can understand the microdata implementation documentation provided by Facebook (which is certainly not that simple), if you want to achieve better results, you will still have to do it.
No matter how simple the integration of modules and *.xml files is, there are clear problems with the *.xml method – the Events with Matched Content IDs indicator is usually below 70%, which means that retargeting ads are shown to a smaller number of visitors. It is interesting that Events with Matched Content IDs in the case of *.xml files often fluctuate significantly over a wide range: from 70%, they can drop to 30%, and then rise again to 70%. A different trend is observed when installing microdata and selecting Facebook Pixel as the data source. In our customers’ cases, Matched Content IDs almost always exceed 90%, and the fluctuation range is much smaller (just a few per cent), and the results of dynamic retargeting are significantly better.
The moral of the story
So, if the goal is to get quality cold traffic, Facebook Prospecting type advertising can choose any of the three methods mentioned above to create a catalog. However, for conversions and using dynamic retargeting ads, we recommend adding microdata tags to the page’s source code in the e-commerce store and using the catalog via Facebook Pixel.