Facebook Collaborative Ads: bringing brands & retailers together to drive sales

Online channels are a key step in today’s customer journey, with social networks playing an important role. When searching for inspiration or product information, 42% of consumers turn to social media. So getting your social ads right is an essential component to driving sales for your brand.

Facebook Collaborative Ads are a format that lets brands partner with retailers to drive traffic to their products, even if they don’t have a dedicated e-commerce site. This is a powerful tool for these brands to drive online sales, leveraging targeting capacities previously unavailable to them. And partner retailers benefit from increased sales driven by those ads.

Meeting customers in the way they shop

We know that the way people shop today has become omni-channel, with some 88% of consumers researching products online before making a purchase. While nearly 90% of US retail sales still take place in brick-and-mortar stores, 32% of electronics sales and 25% of apparel sales are expected to be online by 2021, making it increasingly important for brands to reach their customers online.

Collaborative Ads fill a gap that previously existed for brands without e-commerce sites (and therefore without a Facebook Pixel). Now they can effectively retarget customers, and drive sales directly. They’re also an exciting new way for retailers to reach consumers and see their sales increase.

How do Collaborative Ads work?

To use Collaborative Ads, participating retailers must be whitelisted by Facebook, and then organize their catalogs into segments within Ad Manager. Catalogs hold information on a business’s inventory, which can then be used to create ads, add products to a Facebook Page shop, and more.

Using the relevant catalog segment, the brand can then create performance marketing campaigns using dynamic ads driving consumers directly to their products on the retailer’s website or app. Dynamic ads promote inventory to people who have expressed interest on your website, in your app or elsewhere online, retargeting those people with ads created automatically from items in your catalog.

When a user clicks on a Collaborative Ad created by a brand, they are taken directly to the website or app of the partner retailer, where they can make a purchase. This new ad format enables brands to measure the impact of their campaigns on conversions. And the benefits are mutual: retailers expand the reach of their collaborative campaigns to help them generate more sales online.