7 Key Ways Marketers Should Leverage Product Advertising

Consumer behavior tends to be highly volatile, so the ability to quickly recognize shifts and adjust ad campaigns is highly valuable. Retailers with this advantage can act nimbly and better reach their advertising goals.

The following best practices can help retailers make the most of their product advertising efforts:

1. 1. Know your audience and their search intent. Retailers who use search history intelligence to deliver ads on another site or channel have seen engagement rates 2.5 to 3 times higher than untargeted ads. To help achieve these results, retailers should use an integrated solution to display product ads on Facebook based on products that consumers have been searching for already, as well as target shoppers based on the specific pages they visited on the retailer’s site, geographic location, time of day, and more.
2. 2. Stay on top of feed management. Feed management tools can help retailers to save time, eliminate feed format complexities and optimize product data for relevancy and performance across publishers and channels.
3. 3. Leverage the power of mobile. According to comScore, 60% of daily time spent on digital media is attributed to mobile usage, so it’s crucial that retailers are on top of their mobile advertising strategy. Additionally, retailers should launch and monitor new mobile ad offerings, like Facebook’s Multi-Product Ads, across multiple audiences in bulk.
4. 4. Be ready to scale. With an inventory management system, retailers can link product inventory to specific keywords, creative, or product groups, and use feed data to manage campaigns based on the availability of relevant products. As inventory levels deplete, the inventory management system automatically pauses campaign objects associated with the unavailable products and reactivates them when inventory levels are replenished.
5. 5. Diversify. While it’s tempting to be a one-publisher expert, studies have shown that retailers who understand how to strategically split up their advertising budgets across multiple publishers see higher returns. As the market continues to be divided among these publishers such as Google, Bing, and Amazon, retailers should re-evaluate where they spend their advertising budget. Replicating current campaigns on different publishers is a good place to start.
6. 6. Test and optimize creative. Marketers should set up A/B tests to calculate winning creative based on metrics like CTR, conversion rates and ROAS, and fine tune settings such as confidence level, duration, and minimum thresholds.
7. 7. Leverage native ad formats. Marketers can leverage native ad formats to reach and retarget users across Facebook, Twitter and the web. For the holiday season, retailers should use native ad formats to promote promotions and sales in order to reach audiences as they’re accessing their Twitter and Facebook to connect with friends and family.

Product ads are an indispensable tool for retailers. Understanding the differences between the product ad offerings available and how to make them work best for each retailer’s unique needs is the key to success.

If you’d like to read more about each of these 7 best practices you can view the full white paper here.