Why Use Facebook Dynamic Ads to Personalize Your Campaigns

Facebook Dynamic Ads automatically and intelligently show relevant products to people who have expressed interest in a product or service on a website, in an app, or elsewhere on the internet. The improved results of serving ads that are relevant to the needs or desires that a shopper has revealed by their previous behavior are significant. Showing people ads for products they are interested in will increase their likelihood to purchase. While Facebook Dynamic Ads may appear similar to standard ads on Facebook they are, indeed, much more useful for advertisers. 

Using Facebook Dynamic Ads, advertisers can build an ad template that automatically populates and serves images and other details of products from a catalog. This eliminates the arduous process of creating ads individually for each separate product. Facebook Dynamic Ads use Facebook Pixels or their SDK to determine what ads are to be shown to people who have already exhibited an interest in the seller’s products by taking some action on their website.

Dynamic ads are especially useful for advertisers that have multiple products or services to offer their customers. Facebook’s legacy multi-product ad serving mechanism, called Carousel Ads, will display up to 10 product images with details. Dynamic ads are, therefore, most applicable for sellers that wish to offer more than 10 products. Unlike Carousel Ads, however, Facebook Dynamic Ads provide the ability to either feature multiple products at once (like Carousel Ads) or feature products relevant to customers in specific stages of the sales funnel using the single image ad format. Thus, unlike Facebook Dynamic Ads, multi-product ads cannot change depending on the audience. Carousel ads display the same ad to all audiences whereas Facebook Dynamic Ads change according to the current sales-funnel stage of the customer.

Dynamic ads allow for the promotion of a wide range of products employing unique creatives without the need to configure each ad individually. This enables a campaign to continually reach people with the right product at the right time. Consumers understand that ads are inevitable. Advertising is useful to their lives, helping them find the best price or fastest delivery for the things they want and need, and enabling platforms for free content. If ads are inevitable, how much better is it to be served ads that are relevant to their needs?

Dynamic ads help sellers reach people with relevant advertisements on all the devices and platforms they use. These ads will display items from the seller’s catalog across Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network and Messenger. Because Facebook Dynamic Ads work at a larger scale than most ads, a Business Manager account is needed.

The Facebook catalog is at the heart of Facebook Dynamic Ads. This catalog is a container that holds information about an inventory of products or services, like images, prices, stock levels, and descriptions. Advertisers can create catalogs for products, services, accommodations, home listings, and more. After creating a catalog and adding inventory, advertisers can create ads and connect to shopping channels on Facebook and Instagram to show people items from the catalog.

The Facebook Pixel is the mechanism that allows Facebook Dynamic Ads to work. Facebook uses this piece of code called a Facebook Pixel to track which pages of a website customers have visited (i.e. landing page, product page, or checkout) and, based on its findings, will serve a relevant product to that customer. For example, if a customer browses through a number of health supplements on a seller’s website, Facebook Dynamic Ads will then serve up ads for those and related products. If the customer added a specific health supplement to their cart but did not make a purchase, the ad will remind the customer to finalize their purchase featuring that exact product. This useful tool can be used to retarget online or mobile app shoppers to remind them of items they viewed but didn’t buy.

More About Facebook Catalogs

The first step in deploying Facebook Dynamic Ads is to upload a catalog (also known as a product feed) of the products or services to be offered. Each product in the catalog has specific attributes that are used to generate ads. These are, namely, a product ID, name, description, landing page URL, image, and availability among many others. Sellers can create one catalog for all items or multiple catalogs to use in different ways. They can also set up a catalog for different languages and countries. 

By connecting a product catalog to an Instagram business account, the products in that catalog can be tagged in posts and stories. Shopping on Instagram allows customers to tap on tagged products to see prices and descriptions. They can also shop directly from their feed.

A catalog is a structured data file that holds information about the items in the seller’s inventory. Each row in the catalog represents an individual product (unique size/color variant). Each column in the catalog represents product attributes, such as title, description, and image. Dynamic ads product catalogs are managed within Facebook Business Manager. Many marketing departments have already set up a business on Facebook to manage ad campaigns. If so, the catalog may already exist in a nearly complete form. Alternatively, catalogs can be created using Facebook’s catalog manager. 

Sellers that offer a large number of products or product variations will find Facebook’s flexible methods for keeping their catalog updated very helpful. Once the catalog is created a product feed is built to update or replace products in the catalog. Product feeds can be maintained manually or automatically using a set schedule. It is important to keep the product catalog exactly accurate. 

In addition to manual or scheduled uploads, Facebook supports live updates of specific product fields using the Catalog Batch API for near real-time updates. This approach is programmatic and mostly used to update stock-related information for fast-selling product items.

More About Pixels or SDK

The Facebook Pixel helps ensure the Facebook Dynamic Ads campaign serves up the right ads to the right audience at the right time. It is a snippet of code that sits on the seller’s website and tracks the actions visitors take on the website. It is important to set up the Pixel and ensure it’s tracking correctly. If not, Facebook Dynamic Ads will not be served up properly.

Dynamic ads work best if there is a strong feedback loop between the online product catalog and the ads. By installing Facebook Pixel on the site this feedback loop is created. The volume of app installs can be increased by showing relevant ads that drive directly to download. This will require the use of Facebook SDK, not just Pixel.

More About Ad Templates

The final step to setting up Facebook Dynamic Ads is to create a dynamic ad template. This template will be populated with products from the catalog. Choices for the template design include showing all products, only the previously viewed products, or the products that have been placed into the customer’s shopping cart. Keywords are used to pull images and product details from the catalog. 

Even though Facebook Dynamic Ads pull relevant creatives and details from your catalog, there are additional options for customizing what the ads look like across Facebook, Instagram, and the Audience Network.

As with all ad creation, regardless of the type of delivery, quality imagery is critical to success. Facebook provides all the requisite details for image aspect ratios and resolution. Use these guidelines during the ad template creation process. 

Conclusion

Modern sophisticated social media platforms provide exciting technologies to assist advertisers in their attempts to reach their target audience with the right ad at the right time. Consumers also appreciate receiving relevant advertisements over ads that constitute only visual clutter. Facebook’s Dynamic Ads represents the best that technology has to offer relative to social media ad placement, conversion, and customer acquisition. 

Designed for sellers with many products to offer, Facebook Dynamic Ads using Facebook Pixel code and an eye-catching template will provide a significant upgrade to any marketing campaign not yet taking advantage of these tools.

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