For stores with lots of SKUs, the dynamic display of products has been a real winner for many on Facebook ads over the last 12 months. Facebook’s ability to dynamically pull products from a catalog and present them in an optimized manner has been a game-changer for many brands.
But is your brand utilizing dynamic catalog displays to their fullest potential?
Let’s find out.
Read More: Facebook’s Carousel Catalog Feed System is on Fire
For a while, most only used catalog displays for retargeting, which makes sense. People at this stage of the funnel already know about your brand and selling points, so may simply need reminding of the products, or presented with similar ones in order to drive conversion.
However, more recently, Facebook has come through with more top-of-funnel options for dynamic display.
Now I know what you’re thinking, I can’t just put my catalog in front of people and expect them to buy, and you would be correct. Whilst this may work for some brands, for many, we need content to sell them, and we need our products laid out in a way that’s easy to digest.
This is what collection ads offer.
The collection is an ad format that lets people move from discovery to purchase in a smooth and immersive way. Each collection ad features a primary video or image with three smaller accompanying images below in a grid-like layout. Customers who tap on your collection ad to browse or learn more will be seamlessly taken to a fast-loading visual post-click experience powered by Instant Experience – all without leaving Facebook or Instagram.
This allows you to bring forward the browsing experience from your website to Facebook whilst also offering value and a chance to inform with media and copy. This is very useful for a few reasons:
- We get all the benefits of a traditional video or image post allowing you to inform the viewer of what your product is about, its selling points, features and benefits. As we know this is crucial in the sales process and means.
- By bringing the browsing experience to Facebook, people can see your full range of products with prices, and you can even segment your “storefront” collection into sections of relevant products (shopify collections). This means people see more products, so could be more likely to be intrigued enough about one to click through to the website, compared to if they were presented with an image of a single product. For stores with multiple collections, this is a game changer.
- The fact they’ve already watched your video or seen your content, browsed your full range, seen the price, (all whilst still on facebook) and then still clicked through to the website means that the conversion rate from this traffic is likely to be higher and more qualified. Of course, this is not the case 100% of the time, however it’s what we have seen on multiple accounts, and makes sense as we can still use the video and copy to handle objections.
- Engagement retargeting – By clicking on your collection, someone is engaging with your post. This instantly puts them into an engaged audience in the middle of funnel campaigns. If people are more likely to click because they don’t have to leave Facebook, this means you’re building a larger, warmer audience faster, and the best bit? This has nothing to do with Facebook pixel retargeting, so you don’t have to worry about tracking issues, or a smaller retargeting audience. This is a really useful retargeting strategy going forward, particularly if your brand is one that was heavily reliant on pixel data, rather than engagement data for retargeting, and have seen a large reduction in audience size since ios14.
So as we can see, collection ads have a range of benefits over single image or video ads, and with three different layout options – Storefront, Customer Acquisition, and Lookbook, there’s no reason not to be testing these formats in your ad account.
