Most people in the ecommerce world say “If you’re selling physical products and you’re not selling on Amazon, you’re absolutely missing out!”
And.
Most people in the advertising world say “If you’re not advertising on Facebook, you’re absolutely missing out!”
So, if you’re looking to expand the amount of traffic to your Amazon listing (beyond what you can get inside of the Amazon ecosystem), the next logical step is to look to Facebook to help you achieve that goal.
Right?
I think you know by now, exactly what I’m going to say………”It depends”.
Why Using Facebook To Drive Traffic To Amazon Isn’t a Great Idea
While Facebook is one of the most powerful advertising platforms available, the vast majority of what makes Facebook great is its ability to help you continually improve the performance of your ads through use of the Facebook pixel.
Since Amazon does not allow you to use the Facebook pixel inside of its ecosystem, it can make using Facebook ads much more difficult when you're using time to drive traffic and potential sales with Amazon.
We're going to be diving into two different ways that you can drive traffic to Amazon with Facebook later on, one of these ways will allow us to Leverage The Power of the pixel.
Keep in mind that there's nothing inherently wrong with driving Facebook traffic to Amazon and that you can still make it profitable.
It's just not as easy or as simple as it is if you were driving Facebook ads to your own website.
Why Use Facebook To Drive Traffic To Amazon
Even if you can't take complete advantage of all of the great things about Facebook ads when you're driving traffic to Amazon, that doesn't mean you still shouldn't do it. Facebook is one of the highest converting advertising platforms around and Amazon has insanely High conversion rates and consumer Trust.
This combination, when used correctly, can lead to an excellent use of your ad dollars as well as increased sales ( and all of the other benefits that come along with that inside of the Amazon ecosystem, like higher organic search rankings).
Let's take a few minutes to dive into the different ways that you can use Facebook to drive sales on Amazon, as well as, the way to set up your ads for the best results.
Driving Facebook Traffic Directly To Amazon
Generally speaking there's only two ways to drive traffic directly to Amazon using Facebook and each have their own pros and cons.
You can either point your ad directly to your product listing or you can point it to one of the store pages, which can give you a little bit more control over the customer experience.
Product Listings:
The single easiest way to drive traffic with Facebook to your Amazon products, is to link directly to the product listing on amazon.com.
All you need to do in order to set up this type of ad is have your product listing live on Amazon.
The biggest downside to using this method is tracking and understanding what's actually leading to a sale can be extremely difficult with this type of an ad.
While Facebook gives us a good idea of how many people have seen your ad and how many people clicked the link to go to Amazon the page, Amazon currently tracks all sales and all visits, making it very difficult for you to understand how many of your sales are actually coming from this ad.
One way that you may be able to get around this, is if you're a member of the Amazon Associates program. You can create a special link inside of your Associates account and see how many sales are generated by people who have clicked on that link.
The downside to using this method, is that Facebook is notoriously strict with any ads that contain affiliate links and getting your ads approved can be a lot more difficult.
Store Pages:
If you're choosing to drive traffic directly to Amazon from Facebook, instead of using the product listing method, a better option is to use Amazon storefront.
Unlike traditional product listings, product listings an Amazon storefront Pages, allow you to track traffic from Individual sources and see the performance of each of those sources inside of a dashboard.
This means that if you decide to drive traffic from Facebook, Google, or any other AD platform outside of the Amazon ecosystem, you can actually track each and every one of these sources and understand whether or not they're actually leading to product sales.
Depending on when you're reading this article, you may or may not have access to the storefront feature, if you're not already a part of Amazon's brand registry.
Setting Up Tracking With Amazon Storefront Pages
In order to track Amazon StoreFront sales by source, you must have access to the storefront feature inside of your seller central account.
After you’ve confirmed that you have access to the storefront feature (and you’ve setup your store), you can access your storefront analytics dashboard by signing into your sellercentral account and then going here
Next, you’ll want to click the “Create Source Tag” button in the upper right hand corner of the screen.
This will bring up a pop that will create your “tagged” links for you.
You will need to select a destination page (where in the storefront you want the link to go) and a tag name (like Facebook-ads).
Amazon will dynamically create the “tagged” link for you and any traffic that comes to your store will be tagged and attributed directly to that source (like the traffic coming from Pinterest in the example below)
Keep in mind that using this method will ONLY attribute sales that happen within your Amazon storefront, which means if someone leaves and then comes back to your “traditional” Amazon listing to purchase, they won’t be counted.
Driving Facebook Traffic to A Landing Page and THEN To Amazon
Arguably the best method for driving traffic to Amazon using Facebook ads, is to use a landing page or Bridge page before you actually take the traffic to amazon.com.
There are several reasons why you may want to consider using this approach, even if you have access to Amazon storefront.
I know, I know you're probably thinking “ Chris, I've heard you say in the past that you always want to give people the path of least resistance what gives?”
In this case the path of least resistance actually involves more steps not fewer.
Think about how you use Facebook vs. how you use Amazon. People who are already on Amazon are ready to buy something, you don't generally go to Amazon just to spend time when, you're on Amazon, you're looking for something specific.
When you're using Facebook, you're not in an active buying mode, meaning you're not ready to buy something. while retargeting visitors to your eCommerce store with a photo of your product can be an extremely effective way of bringing people back to your site, that requires that they've actually interacted and met you before.
In the case of Amazon products, we're trying to bring cold traffic, meaning people who are looking at cat photos over to Amazon to buy a product.
While we can do this successfully, chances are we're going to drive a lot more traffic than sales, which drags down our conversion rate, and can have a negative impact on our Amazon ranking.
Additionally, because we can't put the Facebook pixel on our Amazon product listings, if someone comes to our listing and does actually want to buy the product, but can't do it right then and there, we don't have a way of getting in contact with that person ever again.
The Simple Solution to all of these problems, is to take Facebook ads and drive them to a landing page. that way we can target everyone who has landed on that page (think “abandoned cart” style ads) and we can send only the most qualified traffic directly to Amazon potentially increasing our conversion rates.
There are a variety of styles of pages that work extremely well for this type of ADD, but the simplest and most common involves giving people some sort of a discount.
If this is the message we would choose to use, or process would look a little bit like this.
- Facebook User Clicks on your Ad
- Facebook Users Visit Your Landing Page
- Facebook User Gives you Their Email, In exchange for the discount
- If they don’t, we can give them another ad, reminding them to grab the discount.
- We email the user the discount and a link to Amazon
Looking at it this way, you can see not only are we getting the benefit of the additional sales were generating inside of the Amazon ecosystem, but we're also creating two lists that we can use in the future ( people who visited our website, which is targetable inside of Facebook, and we're creating an email list of people who are actively interested enough in the product to give us their email in exchange for a small discount).
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Yes, Send Me The Roadmap!How To Use Facebook To Drive Traffic To Amazon
Before we can start driving traffic to Amazon, we need to go through a simple four step process.
Choose Your Method:
Before you actually begin creating your ad, you need to choose the method from one of the two that we talked about above.
If you don't want to involve anything other than Amazon, then all you need to do is get your link to your product page or to your store Front Page and you can get started.
If you choose to go the landing page route, you obviously need to build the landing page before you start to worry about building and creating your Facebook ad. There's a lot of different landing page software out there and depending on what you offer on the landing page, the best one for you to use will vary based on your specific goal.
That being said, the easiest way to get started is by simply offering a discount, if that's your goal GiveawayBoost offers that functionality( in addition to the giveaways that you've seen us talk about in the past) and it makes it very easy to just set everything up.
Choose Your Targeting:
Once we've selected the way that we want to run the ads, we need to understand who is actually going to see the ads.
In this article we're going to cover three different ways that you can target your ads.
Existing Customers:
One of the best ways to start targeting your ads is to start by targeting your existing customers. While this is a super simple process if you’re selling via your own website, Amazon makes it a bit more difficult.
Typically the best way to add your customers to a targetable list inside of Facebook is by using their phone number or email address. While Amazon doesn’t offer us that information, we can still create a list inside of Facebook with the information they DO provide.
In order to be able to target your existing Amazon customers with Facebook ads, you need to download and combine a few different reports (there are some software programs out there that can automate this process for you, but their results may vary).
How To Find Your Existing Amazon Customers:
To grab a target-able list of your Amazon the first step is to login to your Amazon Seller Central Account (sellercentral.amazon.com).
Then go to your reports tab in the menu bar (at the top of the screen) and click on the “Fulfillment” reports section.
Next, along the left hand-side of the screen, you are going to look for the “sales” section and select the “Amazon Fulfilled Shipments” report.
Next You’ll want to select your date range (Amazon Currently only allows this report to be run at a maximum of a monthly basis) and click “request CSV”.
You’ll want to repeat this process for each month of the report you wish to gather (Amazon allows you to access data that is up to 12 months old).
Once the report is prepared, you’ll need to click the “download” button located in the report status column and save the report to your computer.
From here, you’ll want to open the report (or reports if you have more than one) in your spreadsheet program of choice (excel, numbers, google sheets, etc).
You’re also going to want to open a new “blank” sheet, so that you can copy and paste the data that you need.
To upload the information we need to Facebook, copy the following columns into your “blank” sheet:
Locate Customer Name
First, we need to copy “Recipient Name” (Not the Buyer Name, we want the actual person who got the product).
We will want to place this into Column A of the new sheet. Next we need to highlight the entire column (this can be done in most programs by selecting the letter at the top of the column).
Then, we need to split the name into multiple columns (Facebook requires that we upload first name and last name as different fields).
If you’re using Google Sheets, you can do this easily by clicking on the “data” menu and selecting the split text into columns option.
The program will ask how you wish to split the text, in this case we are going to select “Space” (this tells the program to split the text any place it finds a space).
Once this process has been completed, rename the first row to show “first name” and “last name” in column A and Column B respectively.
Give the spreadsheet a quick look to ensure it wasn’t split among more than two columns. This can happen if people list their middle name inside of their account. If it does, do your best to consolidate it back to two columns based on what appears to be their actual last name.
Locate Customer Postal Code
After you have successfully split your customer names, we are going to need their postal code.
You can find this in your report under the column labeled “Ship-Postal-Code”.
Copy this column and paste it into Column C of the “New” spreadsheet, next to where you have the customer names.
Locate Purchase Value
Lastly (this step is optional), locate the “item-price” column and copy that to column D of the “New” spreadsheet. This column gives Facebook an idea of what a new customer is worth to you and can help them optimize your ads down the line.
Once you’ve done this, you will need to save the worksheet as a .csv file and then we can upload it to Facebook!
How To Target Your Existing Amazon Customers:
Once we have our customer file saved as a .csv (based on the instructions above), we need to upload it to Facebook.
You’ll need to go to the audience section of your Facebook ads account (https://business.facebook.com/adsmanager/audiences).
Next, you’ll want to click on the “create audience” button (in the upper left-hand corner of the screen) and select “custom audience”.
Next, you’ll need to select “customer list” from the options.
Facebook will then ask if the upload contains customer value. If you included the product cost in your sheet (column D based on the instructions above), select yes. If not, select no.
You’ll then be asked to select the file from your desktop, click the “upload file” button and select the file from your computer.
Then, give your audience a name (something simple that you’ll remember later like “amazon customers”) and click “next”
Facebook will then ask you to map the fields from your sheet to the fields they use to identify your customers.
First, they will ask you to select the column that shows the customer value (column d in our example).
Then, if they aren’t able to auto-detect how to map the fields they will ask you to map the remaining fields as follows:
- First name=first name
- Last Name = Last Name
- Ship-Postal-Code=Zip/Postal Code
Once you have done this, click the “upload and create” button and Facebook will begin the upload and matching process.
Keep in mind, because we don’t get customer emails or phone numbers from Amazon, the match rate is not going to be anywhere near 100%. Typically, I’ve seen about 40-50% of the data being uploaded resulting in finding a positive match.
Lookalikes:
Once you've created the initial custom audience from your Amazon customers, you can use Facebook lookalike audience feature to create an excellent audience of people who like, interact, and by the same things as your customers.
In order to do this, simply select the audience that you previously created and then click the create a lookalike button.
This is probably the best way to use data from Amazon to create and target people inside of the Facebook ecosystem, because it finds millions of people who look and act like your customers, unless you reach out to them directly.
Interest-Based Targeting:
Facebook's most basic targeting option, and something that you can use, even if you don't have any customer data is often referred to as interest-based targeting.
Here, we would be selecting People based on pages they like or interactions that they've had inside of the Facebook ecosystem.
While this allows you to easily Target people who may be interested in your Niche, these types of audiences are generally less productive in terms of creating actual sales inside of Amazon, because they may not be interested specifically in your product.
Choose Your Goal
After we choose the targeting, we need to actually choose the goal for the ad.
Choosing The Best Goal For Your Direct To Amazon Ad
Facebook gives us a variety of options and the most useful option to choose is going to change based on how we chose to drive the traffic in the first place.
If we're driving traffic directly to Amazon, the best goal for your ad is likely going to be either traffic or link clicks.
These two options tell Facebook optimize the ad for people who are most likely to click on the link or to visit the website or in this case, our Amazon listing.
Choosing The Best Goal For Your Landing Page Ad
If you're choosing to run your ad using the landing page method that we discussed above, you can take advantage of what I consider to be Facebook's most powerful optimization method.
Since we're using a landing page or Bridge page with this type of ad, we are generally going to be asking our potential customers for their email addresses.
This allows us to take advantage of Facebook's optimization for conversions goal, meaning Facebook he's going to try to shoot the ad only to the people who not only are interested in coming to our website to learn more about the ad but look like the people who are actually taking action and interacting with us by giving us their email address.
This optimization, generally will lead to the lowest cost of acquisition of any of Facebook's optimization types.
Long story short, if we can take advantage of Facebook's conversion rate optimization we are likely to get the most qualified people at the lowest price.
Build Your Ad
After we choose which method we're going to use in their targeting type, we need to actually put together the ad.
While it may appear more complex,Facebook ads are really made up of three basic components.
Copy:
The first thing we need in order to create our ad, is the ad copy. These are going to be the words that actually show up on the Facebook post and should create some curiosity not exactly what it is that we are going to be getting to them if they interact with the ad.
Image or Video
The second part of a Facebook ad is going to be the visual.
This is going to be either a photo or short video designed to get people to stop and pay attention. One of the biggest mistakes I often see people make here is they try to sell their product with the photo or video.
While that can work, it's often less successful than using this area of your add to Simply grab your potential customers attention and to get them to read the copy that you have written
Link:
The last portion of the ad that you need to have ready before you can create ads inside of the Facebook platform is going to be the link to the page you would like to drive your potential customer to after they have clicked on the ad.
If you're using the landing page method, this would be the link to your landing page and if you're using the direct to Amazon approach, this would either be the link to your listing or to your store Front Page.
Now that you have an idea of the best way to use Facebook and Amazon together for your business, it's time to take action.
Follow the step-by-step guide and get those ads ready to roll.
Chris Shaffer
Chris lives at the intersection of business strategy and growth tactics. Having consulted with dozens of different businesses (as well as building several of his own), he brings a unique perspective on what's working across the eCommerce world in businesses of all shapes and sizes.The Simple 5-Step Process We Used To Generate $64,000 In 12 Months Working Part Time On Etsy.
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