The social media giant announced they would be expanding dynamic ads so advertisers can now target not only users who have already engaged with their website or app, but also target potential customers based on their interests and intent rather than just specific products they’ve browsed.
Director of Product Marketing at Facebook, Maz Sharafi, said the new targeting option allows advertisers to retarget users who have been searching, for example, red dresses across multiple retailers’ sites and who like posts and pages related to dresses. Sharafi said of the new format:
“It automates the process of who it can show products to—it takes out a lot of the trial and error and complexity of being able to do this in a manual way. For example, to sell 1,000 products, you have to create almost 1,000 different ads to reach those products to different people. With dynamic ads, you’re effectively creating one.”
So, What Exactly Are Dynamic Ads?
Dynamic ads (formerly Dynamic Product Ads) allow marketers to automatically show ads from their product catalogues to potential customers based on their interaction with their websites or apps.
What Are the Potential Opportunities?
Many advertisers will worry that this update presents competitors’ with an easy way to poach their customers, however it’s not as cut and dry as that. Marketing Land states:
“An advertiser can’t directly target people who had browsed a competitor’s site or opened its app. Instead that behaviour will be used by Facebook’s ad-serving algorithm as another signal when deciding who should see an ad. Someone who visited a product page on a brand’s own site will be just as likely, if not more likely, to see the ad as someone who viewed a similar product on a competitor’s site and someone checking out a product on someone else’s site may not be a strong enough signal for Facebook to put a brand’s ad in front of that person.”
The update may provide fresh opportunity for not only large e-commerce brands but also smaller e-commerce sites to show relevant ads to potential customers. This will also help improve the overall user experience on Facebook as ads will be much more relevant and the users targeted may have a higher purchase intent, therefore an increase in sales is likely.
Aside from remarketing on Facebook, it has always proven tricky for marketers to target the exact people interested in buying their products. Now with the updated dynamic ads, advertisers will be able to hone in much more precisely on potential customers.
When Will These Roll Out & Will They Be Accessible to Everyone?
Currently only a select few advertisers in the US have been trialling the product, with some already seeing early success. Adweek reported that “online furniture retailer Wayfair has been testing the format and claims that the ads are 20% more effective than other types of acquisition advertising”.
It’s perhaps too soon to tell whether this update will hinder or benefit retailers but if all goes to plan in the trial phase, Facebook says it intends to expand the update to other regions “in the coming months”.