Imagine this: you’re casually scrolling through your social media feeds. Suddenly, you see this catalog ad of your favorite brand offering several perfectly placed products, and you’re intrigued. What are the details, and how soon can you get them?
But how do businesses create such appealing ads for their Facebook and Instagram feeds? Don’t worry; here’s everything you need to know about catalog ads and how you can create your own.
What Are Catalog Ads?
Catalog ads are a full-screen and visually interesting ad type that helps businesses show multiple products or multiple images of the same product within a single ad unit.
It’s available in carousel (swipeable) and collection formats. A carousel is attached to a product catalog and showcases many products in one ad. You’re actually making a menu of items people can browse.
Why Use Catalog Ads?
These ads are most beneficial for your e-commerce business, where you wish to display various products in the same ad. Where businesses have a wide range of products and services, this ad type provides so much value.
You can immediately showcase all the different products to your audience, and they can browse further. Your audience will definitely find the product (most probably) they love the most – which will bring you leads and conversions.
Getting Started with Catalog Ads
You can create segments by targeting all viewers and demonstrating an important ad for each specific audience segment. Here’s how to get started with your first catalog ad.
Step 1: Set Up Your Facebook Business Manager
- Go to Facebook Business Manager.
- Click on “Create Account.”
- Follow the prompts to set up your business account.
Step 2: Create a Product Catalog
Make sure you have a Facebook Business Manager account. It provides online space for your business that is suitable for managing everything you do with Facebook, including ad accounts, pages, and the people who work on them—all in one place. Follow the steps given below to create one:
- In your Business Manager, navigate to “Commerce Manager.”
- Select “Create Catalog.”
- Choose the category/type of the catalog (e.g., e-commerce, travel, real estate)
Follow the steps on your system’s screen. Either upload your product information data or share a URL that has the required information defined on the page.
You can also share information about the business partners. Click next to connect, return to the catalog tab of the product, and do some targeting selection.
Step 3: Optimizing Your Product Catalog
After preparing a catalog, it is important to structure and maintain it to yield the best ad output. Carefully curated real images of the catalog record show better success and such ads are more likable.
A detailed description of the record, prices, and availability of the products is crucial. The more you provide the right information to the user, the fewer carts they will abandon at the time of purchase.
Step 4: Designing Your Catalog Ads
Here, you can show your creativity and how you want to present your product to your audience. Certain websites allow you to do that. You can also consider Cropink for the same.
Cropink allows you to crop, resize, and edit your images for use in Facebook and Instagram ads. It’s a cool website because ads generally require certain ways to be created, and Cropink will allow you to do it easily.
Step 5: Setting Up Your Campaign
Once you have a catalog and your ad design ready, you can start setting up your campaign for your set of ads. To set up a campaign, you need to follow these steps:
- Go to Facebook Ads Manager.
- Click “Create” and select the “Catalog Sales” objective.
- Choose your catalog from the dropdown menu.
Set your campaign details, including your budget, audience targeting, and ad placements.
Step 6: Targeting Your Audience
Your ad target is the most pressing in any successful ad campaign. Luckily, there’s no shortage of Facebook ad-targeting options for you to choose from.
You can target basic demographics (age, gender, location), interests, behaviors, and even users who have interacted with your business before. For example, if you are running an ad for a sale on a women’s collection, then your target is limited to women under a certain age range and with certain interests.
You can also select a lookalike audience to create a new campaign. A lookalike audience is when you have an engaged audience that rewards you with their attention by interacting with your posts and ads. You can easily find new people who share the same characteristics—they’re a lot like your valuable audience members.
Step 7: Monitoring and Analyzing Your Ads
Once you’ve started your catalog ads, it’s time to track the performance and optimize the ads accordingly. Facebook Ads Manager has various metrics and reports through which you can measure impressions, CTR, conversion, and return on ad spend (ROAS). By measuring these metrics, you will know how effective your ads are for you.
Keep your eye on data all the time and try to figure out what’s working and what’s not. If you see that a particular product or ad format is working well, go with it and spend some more of your budget on it. On the flip side, if something is not working, change up, try out new things, and see how it goes.
Best Practices for Catalog Ads
To maximize the effectiveness of your catalog ads, follow these practices:
Keep Product Feed Updated: Keep your product feed up-to-date with the product, prices, and availability to avoid providing the wrong information and losing customers.
Try Different Ad Formats: Experiment with different ad formats and placements to see what your customer likes and what works for you. For example, you should try carousel and collection ads to see which works and gain more engagement and sales.
Use Dynamic Ads: Take advantage of dynamic ads on Facebook or Instagram. These ads show the most reliable product to a specific consumer based on their past behavior and interests. This effectively targets the user, increasing the efficiency of your advertisement.
Use High-Quality Images and Videos: You should spend some of your budget on high-quality images or videos. Images and videos are the main components that capture attention. You should show off your product as effectively as you can!
Remember that you should have to track and analyze the performance of your catalog ads regularly. It doesn’t stop there; focus on learning more and taking your business to the next level faster. You will see that you will take your business to a billion places very soon!
