Working with eCommerce brands we get to explore niche details every day. One of the latest ones - deep linking to product pages on Facebook Dynamic Product Ads. If you found this article, I assume you've had the same issue. If not, it's still a great piece of information about creating Facebook Dynamic Product Ads, Deep Links to website and an issue that you will most likely run into when creating ads for an eCommerce website. Table of Contents
What is Facebook Dynamic Ads?
Facebook Dynamic Ads and Remarketing (Retargeting) lets you dynamically personalize Facebook Ads for users who viewed certain products or content on your website.
Dynamic Ads come in two flavours - Ads for Broad Audiences (prospecting) and Retargeting - ads shown to consumers who viewed a specific pages or took a certain action on your website. Chances are you also saw these ads after researching products on an eCommerce website and were served an ad like this showing cards with products you've viewed and other products related to them.
Example of Facebook Product Ads:
Dynamic Retargeting is a powerful tactic that lets you re-engage past Visitors and tell a story about your products to get the sale. In fact, 98% of consumers won't make a purchase after the first website Visit, which highlights why Retargeting is so valuable. Logics behind the Dynamic Ads and Retargeting is similar to regular Ads and Retargeting, except you can largely automate these ads and map them after thousands of products is your eCommerce store.
What you Need to Create Facebook Dynamic Product Ads (DPA)
Before you get started with Facebook Dynamic Ads or Dynamic Retargeting, there is a couple of requirements to create the Ads with the Catalogue Sales Objective:
Have Facebook Pixel setup
Setup tracking for Visitor action on your website - Content Views, Add to Cart, Checkout etc.
Problem with Deep Linking to Product URLs
So you've created your Product Campaigns, Ad Sets and you want to use Deep Links to dynamically link your ads to different product pages?
One of the parameters in your data feed is Website Link (URL). Usually you would use the URL parameter for your Facebook ads, but that's not the case with Dynamic Ads. Dynamic Product Ads use Deep Links to website pages.
What is Deep Linking in Websites?
Deep Links in websites - are a type of links that links to a specific website page dynamically. Instead of using a regular URL, deep links specify a parameter or a schema of the link. For example, for product in Column B use corresponding URL in Column D, as shown below.
The problem is that Facebook won't allow you to use the Link parameter for Deep Linking. Weird, right? This partially defeats the purpose of uploading the data feed in the first place.
How to Use Deep Linking for Facebook Product Ads
Here is the workaround we came up with. Modify your data feed file to include custom label columns. You can have up to five Custom label columns in a data feed.
Next, separate URI parameters from the URLs, like I show below. Example of URI parameter in URLs:
Place the URIs into a Custom Label column of your choosing, there is really no difference between the <custom_label_0> and other custom labels. Now it's time to upload the data feed into the catalogue manager. Once you are done, go back to the Ads Manager and change the Deep Link field to URL + Custom Label, as shown below.
That solves it, your Facebook Dynamic Ads deep links are ready to go!
Bonus Tip: Other Factors for Success
Now another important component for Product Ads on any platform is Product Photography. Google, Facebook, Amazon and even your very own eCommerce store. When a user scrolls through Facebook feed, content (e.g. images and videos) is what makes them stop scrolling and read the headline. And then click. And then convert. Same is true for your website. When a user comes to your category page, their attention goes to images first. That's why it's incredibly important to have best product photography in place. Photo below helped us nearly double the ROAS for one of our eCommerce clients:
Now it's Your Turn
Let me know in the comments below if this solution worked for you or if your found any workaround for the eCommerce platforms you work with. What eCommerce platform did you use this solution for?
Author
Sasha Matviienko is an Analytics & SEO Consultant in Analytics & Digital Marketing consultant, founder of growth360. Sasha has 10 years of Digital Marketing experience from Paid Search, SEO and Display to advanced Data Analytics and Conversion Optimization experience working with clients of all shapes and sizes in Toronto, Canada and Worldwide.