Facebook Collaborative Ads 101

Ranging image ads to instant experience ads, Facebook advertising offers a variety of ads for businesses to choose from. Collaborative Ads is also under the umbrella of Facebook ads and acts as a middleman between your business and retail partners. It allows your business to collaborate with your retail partners such as 7-11, Lazada, Shopee and many more to run direct sales campaigns! If you are a retail business, you might want to add Collaborative Ads as part of your social media marketing strategy to maximise brand-to-brand partnership and retarget people who interacted with them.

For business’s convenience, Facebook has also come up with a retailer directory for businesses to look for a retail partner. The directory allows businesses to filter by category, collaboration type and country as well.

Besides that, there are still other benefits to using Collaborative ads:

• Multi-uses; it can help to increase brand awareness, sales and also garner traffic to retailers website or apps
• Brands can work on their own campaigns without retailers having to do so 
• Availability and price change of products will automatically updated on the catalogues
• Ads will automatically advertise products that fits individual interests and needs due to its dynamic nature
• Insights such as sales, conversions etc. can be garnered from retailer’s website and make it for reporting purposes

So, how does collaborative ads work? Your retail partner will allocate a part of their catalogue segment for your brand to run your own ad campaigns using dynamic ads*. The campaign objective would usually be conversions or catalogue sales. Carousel, photo and video ad formats can be used for collaborative ads. Once the ads are published, by clicking on the ad URL, the customer will be directed to the retailer’s website or phone app.

*Dynamic Ads – helps to optimise the campaign performance by adapting the content based on individual user needs

Ad creatives are one of the most important factors in social media marketing as it helps to engage customers, so creatives will have to be high quality and not blurred or cut off. So, to get you prepared, here are the image and video size specifications:

If you are unsure on whether collaborative ads will be beneficial to your business, here are 3 case studies from different brands.

Case Study #1 – OPPO Malaysia and Shopee If you are a digital marketing company in Singapore, it is quite evident that popular retail partners would be Shopee or Lazada as these e-commerce platforms usually carry a wide range of products. In this case study, OPPO Malaysia collaborated with Shopee to test if they could use Collaborative Ads to increase brand awareness besides just driving sales.   Throughout the entire campaign, OPPO tested out various objectives such as awareness, frequency, reach and others with a mix of image, carousel and video creatives. Ultimately, the results has proven their theory right as there was an increase in ad recall: 7.9-point lift in ad recall 5.6-point lift in consideration 87% increase in add-to-cart actions $4,677 lift in sales

Case Study #2 – Benefit Cosmetics Singapore and Sephora In this case study, Benefits Cosmetics Singapore worked with Sephora to discover the effectiveness of Collaborative ads during sales events and test out two types of video ad creatives to find out which will engage their target audience the most. Besides that, they made use of retargeting, custom and lookalike audiences to reach out to more people to encourage them to make a purchase. 6.1x return on ad spend 23% lift in purchase conversions 24% increase in omnichannel sales value 19% increase in online sales value

Case Study #3 – Piattos Philippines and Lazada Piattos Philippines took it up a notch by using more engaging content to attract their audiences attention by using playable ads, while collaborating with Lazada. Together with one of Facebook Partners, VMG, they came up with a simple game for their ads whereby the chips are the main characters of the game. The ad was made only for mobile users and a hashtag was used. Based on the results garnered, the use of gamification in their ads have proven to be more effective compared to ads that do not use playable ads. 16% higher ad recall 6.2x increase in brand awareness

If you are trying to use Collaborative ads as your facebook advertising strategy for the first time, there are some best practices that you can take a look at:

1. Create a product set within your catalogue segment – this makes it easier for you to select the products you want to advertise
2. Use automatic placement – allow ads to be placed on Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network and Messenger. It increases ad visibility and reach out to more audiences
3. Retarget people who viewed your products on retailers’ site – these are the audiences who will reconsider purchasing
4. Try to use broad audiences and avoid using lookalike audiences – broad audience allows you to expand your reach while lookalike audiences may affect audience size and ad delivery

It can be helpful to test out different ad creatives, objectives, audience types etc. to measure the effectiveness of each on your business. In general, for social media marketing, campaign testing can help you get a clearer picture of how your ads are performing amongst your target audiences and plan future campaigns effectively.

If you are still unsure, you can approach trustable and reputable agencies that offer digital marketing services to help you with your digital marketing strategy. Here at iClick Media, we also offer digital marketing services to our clients. If you require help, do not hesitate to make an appointment with our Chief Consultant here.