Facebook’s Brand Spanking New Product Listing Ads

Lauren Owens - May 6, 2015

In February, Facebook announced Product Listing Ads, an entirely new way to advertise within Facebook. In Facebook, product listing ads enable advertisers to promote multiple products, or their entire catalogue, within a single ad. If you’re a regular Facebook user, you’ve likely seen the Facebook PLAs in action within the last two months or so.

If not, here’s a recent Facebook PLA from the clothing retailer ModCloth:

You’ll notice that this ad contains a product feed, but, instead of listing your products alongside your competitor’s products, the way that Google’s PLAs do, the Facebook PLAs show products from a single advertiser. This provides the opportunity for advertisers to gain visibility and brand recognition, while enabling users to browse through your products within Facebook.

Prior to launching its PLAs, Facebook conducted tests with Target, Criteo and Shutterfly. In these case studies, Target touted a 20% increase in conversions compared with its other Facebook ads and Shutterfly touted a 20% increase in click-throughs.

At launch, Facebook PLAs were only available to select advertisers, but will be available for all advertisers soon.

These PLAs will be a boon for advertisers already running remarketing campaigns within Facebook, as these PLAs can be narrowly “curated” to include products the user has already viewed. Of course, the Facebook PLAs can be widely targeted, as well. In fact, Facebook says that PLAs can be “customized for use throughout the customer journey from discovery through purchase.” This means that there will be many ways to use the PLAs.

Advertisers with many products, and product categories, will want to experiment with the targeting, and curating capabilities available for the Facebook PLAs, as this will be the only way to get the most out of them. As always, when launching a new type of campaign, we recommend starting small and running tests with a clear strategy in mind – that way, you can get the most for your ad spend.