Nosto's mission is to deliver personalized shopping experiences to customers at every touch point. As such, we believe that in order for an ecommerce business to remain relevant and effective, it must deliver the same relevant and personalized onsite experience through its advertisements on both Facebook and Instagram.
The idea of being able to target exactly the right audience in Facebook & Instagram, with exactly the right ad creative and the right product set in dynamic product ads, inspired us. The outcome is a powerful capability within Nosto's Segmentation and Insights product. With it, you have the ability to use the user segments created in Nosto and then create website custom audiences for social ads with just one click.
We quickly found that this supplements and improves already excellent targeting options and capabilities provided by Facebook, which are crafted for ecommerce and digital retail. It gives control to the advertiser to decide exactly who they wish to target and with what content, also including the possibility to use refined seed audiences for lookalike-audiences.
What Can You Achieve with Segments for Ads?
Here are some examples of what you can achieve with Segmentation and Insights for Nosto Facebook and Instagram ads.
Arguably the most interesting segment to harness is Prospects, which consists of First-Time Visitors or Returning Visitors who, flagged by our AI, have the highest probability of conversion, based on your store's unique onsite behavioural analysis. Re-targeting Prospects is especially valuable when the aim is to maximize return on ad spend, or as another example, when there's a need to extend cart abandonment re-targeting campaigns to include also visitors who have not necessarily added something to the cart, but who are according to our AI and your site's unique behavioural patterns, close to convert. Targeting First-Time Visitors or Returning Visitors or both will increase the re-targeting audience's size and likely also sales volume, but typically with the cost of overall performance in terms of return on ad spend.
Regardless of the chosen approach, apply the same tactics that you would use with onsite content personalization and use different ad creatives for each segment, as the ad creative for First-Time Visitors might need to differ from the one you use for Prospects, while Loyal and High-Value Customers should be treated differently.
If you have identified an exclusive or otherwise outstanding product range in your inventory using the product data insights (perhaps a trending brand) that especially attracts your First-Time Customers (those who have bought just once), use the insights to deliver the most relevant ad creative for new clients or those still in considering their purchase.
Further, as there are often differences what's popular in different areas like states or countries or major cities, product sets and ad creatives used for each audience should reflect these geographical trends.
Alongside with the segment based audience, a basic lookalike is automatically created. In addition, you can create own customized lookalikes in Facebook's native interface by using the original segment as a seed.
How Does It Technically Work?
All audiences are website custom audiences based on the Facebook pixel and custom events, which means that Nosto doesn't use personal data like emails or mobile phone numbers to create audiences nor send any hidden meta-data to Facebook about the segment's parameters, but only an anonymous segmentID.
When you create an audience in the Nosto admin, we'll connect these to Facebook where they will appear in your business manager based on pixel parameter matching with your segment's name. If you're new to business manager and how to identify segments, please refer to guidelines in our overall Facebook Pixel tutorial.
Please keep in mind that it takes a moment before Facebook has created the audience based on the segments and for us to sync these back to Nosto, so please allow at least 24 hours for this process to complete.
Also note that very small segments might not perform as well as audiences in Facebook ads or might not be available at all. Try to keep them within the minimum range of 5,000 to 10,000 users, unless your intention is to launch a hyper-targeted short-term campaign. An example of this would be a notification about a new product range which is made exclusive for your long-term loyal customers.
After creating the audience out of a segment, it will be automatically updated until you remove the segment from the Nosto admin. Below are the required steps:
Click on the segment you wish to create as an audience on Facebook and then on Edit segment. (in the example, Parra Fans). Toggle the switch for Facebook (on top) and finally confirm by selecting Create.