Facebook has announced that the site will now offer product ads in an effort to help brands showcase more of their products and advertise relevant products to the right people.
On the company’s blog, these ads are described as “a solution designed to help businesses promote multiple products or their entire product catalog, across all the devices their customers use. With product ads, businesses can showcase more products and people on Facebook can discover more relevant products.”
With these new ads, marketers can upload their product catalog and create campaigns targeting certain products to a specific audiences. Advertisers will be able to automatically reach people who visited their website or app (via Custom Audiences) or reach people based on interests and locations.
Kristi Argyilan, senior vice president of Target, told Facebook: “With dynamic product ads, Target has been able to more easily engage consumers with highly relevant creative,” adding that there has been a 20 per cent increase in conversion compared to other Facebook ads.
“Performance has also been especially strong with people shopping on mobile devices — an important and fast-growing area for Target — where we’re seeing two times the conversion rate,” she said.
Facebook’s system will turn off ads for specific products when they are out of stock, helping advertisers who use automatic delivery of product ads.
Yory Wurmser, retail and ecommerce analyst at eMarketer, said: “Facebook has clearly learned from Google’s product listing ads by including automatic product feeds so that retailers can keep ads aligned with real-time inventory.”
This announcement comes a week after Facebook announced relevance scoring for adverts, which includes visual metrics between one and 10 that are calculated through positive and negative feedback from the target audience.
According to eMarketer, Facebook’s share of US digital advertising reached 9.8 per cent last year, up from 7.6 per cent in 2013. On mobile devices, Facebook increased its share of ad spending to 17.6 per cent in 2014, up from 14.4 per cent in 2013.
In 2015, eMarketer estimates that the US retail industry will spend $12.9b on digital advertising, up 15.4 per cent from last year.
