Developing an e-commerce Facebook Sales Funnel

In this article, I will try to give valuable suggestions on how to develop a SIMPLE sales funnel. I strongly suggest reading my first guide on this topic to make sure you have everything set up and ready.

Developing a sales funnel

TOFU – Top of the Funnel

This is the main campaigns that will drive new visitors and potential buyers to your website. At this stage you shall introduce your brand, highlighting your products and show what makes you unique.

Take a look at this relatively new Facebook service to get ideas about what ads other similar brands are running.

It is important to understand that since its a new e-commerce website, we do not have any client database. You will need to build it with interest-based targeting. 

For a TOFU stage, we will have 2 main campaigns.

Traffic Campaign – Run for 2-3 weeks

• Targeting: Don’t be too specific about your audience but make sure you did your homework! Let’s say, you are selling fitness apparel. Think about WHO your ideal purchasers are and WHAT they may be interested in. Running? Crossfit? Heavyweights? Fitness?
• Placements: I am not a big fan of automatic placements since Facebook can burn your money quite fast with ineffective placements. I usually select Facebook and Instagram feed along with Facebook Marketplace.
• Budget: $20/day is enough to notice results.
• Optimization for ads delivery: Go with Landing page views. It will be a little bit more expensive but you will get a much lower bounce rate and better quality traffic.
• Ad creatives: to determine the best creative you may want to try different formats.
• The first ad should be a video. Again, take a look at what others are doing with Facebook Ads Library to get an idea. If you are too lazy to create a video – skip it, however, it is great to target engaged video viewers.
• Another ad set is Dynamic Ads Creatives. It allows uploading different images, headlines, descriptions and buttons for Facebook to combine and rotate it and see what performs better.
• To activate this feature you need to press on the campaign that you just created. There you will see ad sets. Press a green “Create” button and put the same info you did previously, but activate Dynamic Creatives.

• After this is done, go to the next page and you will notice that now you can upload up to 10 images and 5 variations of descriptions, headlines, etc. Test, test, test!

Conversion Campaign – Run for 2-3 weeks

• Make sure to optimize it for Purchase. All other settings are the same as for the Traffic campaign, including creatives.

The reason for creating 2 similar campaigns with a different objective is to understand what works better for your particular business and get more data. Facebook is much clever than you think. It knows which person has a higher probability to make a purchase after clicking an ad.

MOFU – Middle of the Funnel

At this stage, we are trying to convince a warm audience that somehow engaged with TOFU campaign to visit your website and spend time exploring your products since they are already partly aware of your brand.

Whoever got moved down the funnel from TOFU to MOFU is most likely your target audience who might be interested in your product. It is time to speak their language.

You can also highlight how your product can BENEFIT the target audience. Offering free shipping? Worth mentioning it.

Audience creation

Before we proceed with creating a campaign, first we need to create an audience.

Proceed to “burger menu” and find “Audiences”

Video audience

If you used videos in TOFU campaign you need to find those who watched at least 25% of your video.

Go to “Create audience” -> “Custom Audience” -> “Video”. Here are the settings. Make sure to select the correct video.

When created, it takes some time before it’s fully populated and ready to be used.

Engaged audience

Now we need to find people who interacted with your Facebook or Instagram pages and posts.

When creating a custom audience you will see “Facebook Page” button.

Purchasers

For this campaign, we do not want to target those who already ordered from us. For this we need to create a custom audience and exclude it from the campaign we are going to create.

Select “Purchase” under events:

Setting up the campaign

As soon as your audiences are fully populated, it is time to create a campaign.

Since you are already familiar with the process of campaign creation I will not go into detailed instructions.

Create a conversion campaign with a purchase conversion event. The audience shall include your created engaged audiences (video and/or page) and exclude purchasers.

• As for targeting demo and geo, use the same settings as for TOFU targeting. But do not put anything in the “Detailed targeting”.
• Budget: $20/day
• Placements: same as for TOFU
• Creatives: Use carousel ad with 5+ images. If possible use lifestyle shots with highlighting a product. For headlines, use product name (make it shorter if it’s too long). Link it to the product page on the website. In the description you can mention that you offer Free Shipping or something that can be beneficial for your target audience (ex. Free returns, Fast Delivery, Unique 2019 collection etc.)

BOFU – Bottom of the Funnel

For this step, we will be remarketing product viewers and those who added to cart with Facebook Product Catalogue. Remember we uploaded products and connected the Pixel earlier?

Catalogue Sales Campaign

• Budget: $10/day
• Run without an end date
• For this type of campaign, you can use Automatic Placements
• Here are the settings:

• For the ad copy, use a carousel to highlight several products and don’t forget to offer the best incentives. It can be Free shipping code 15% off codes. Better offer = higher conversion rate, but lower profits.

THE END.

Hopefully, this simple sales funnel will be a great starting point to get your e-commerce website rolling.

In future articles, I will go deeper into each funnel stage and explain how to A/B test your ads, optimize it and scale.