Towards the end of March, Facebook launched collection adverts. These had initially been tested out by a selected group of major brands, including Adidas, Tommy Hilfiger and Michael Kors before being available to other brands on Facebook Business Manager.
With engagement being driven by visuals and interactiveness, Facebook initially launched Canvas adverts that allowed you to create bloglike adverts. Now they have created a new type of advert that makes mobile shopping from an advert even easier.
What are Facebook’s collection adverts?
Facebook Collection adverts are product-focused, allowing Facebook users to shop the advert directly from their mobile. Martijn Bertisen, sales director at Google said: “Our study shows that this is increasingly translating into mobile transactions and that a mobile-first or even mobile-only strategy is now imperative to international success in retail.”. This means that the shopping experience needs to be even better on mobile than on desktop. Consumers want to go from seeing a product in an advert to purchasing as quickly as possible. They don’t want to spend the time trying to Google and manually search for it.
How can I create a collection advert?
You can create collection adverts within Facebook Business Manager. Ideally, you want this to be set-up as a conversions campaign, as the main focus is to encourage sales in this format. As this advert format requires product catalogues setting up, you may need to get a developer to set-up the coding for the products you wish to feature.
Once you have your general campaign and product catalogues set-up, you can get to the creative part.
The most popular and effective way of creating this advert is by featuring a campaign video as your key feature, to entice and excite your customer. According to Facebook, “30% of mobile shoppers say that video is the best way to discover new products.”. Then below you can feature any of the products that are featured within the campaign, or even have extra that are similar to those within it. It may be that you’ve got a whole collection of products, but you’ve only got a few featured within the video content.
Within a collection advert, you can feature up to 50 products. From these 50 products, you can select your key favourites that you may want to feature higher up in the list, or Facebook can use an algorithm to feature the most popular products towards the top. Ideally, you probably don’t want to have 50 products listed as it could appear overwhelming, but instead, you could create multiple adverts targeting different products to different consumers. Making sure these adverts are well-targeted will be key in driving more sales.
As people browse through these products on the adverts, if they decide to purchase an item, it would directly take them to the purchase page and therefore make the mobile shopping experience more convenient.
Why should I use collection adverts?
Collection adverts won’t work for every business. They’re very much focused to those that are selling products rather than services. You may have already seen this style of adverts on your mobile and will notice that many fashion and lifestyle brands are already making the most of this type of advert format.
There are so many ways you can style these adverts to fit within your campaigns or marketing strategies. If you like creating gift guides, then turn those into one of these adverts. If you run regular campaigns that feature a set of products, again this is the perfect advert for your brand.
With mobile being people’s main source of online shopping, it’s so important for your brand to be working on making your online experience as easy as possible. Collection adverts open up this opportunity to do this if you implement them into your marketing strategy.
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