We’re going to answer these questions for you right now. Ready? Let’s do this.
A conversational Facebook ad, whether it’s a Click-to-Messenger ad, or a Sponsored Message, is an ad that you interact with via an automated chat conversation. The automated conversations can range anywhere from collecting an email address in exchange for an offer, to asking a series of questions and recommending a product.
Click-to-Messenger Ads: Click-to-Messenger ads link to an automated conversation instead of a landing page. The secret power of Click-to-Messenger ads are that you can retarget people who click them with a follow up message, rather than pixeling them and showing them a display ad when they don’t complete the objective.
Sponsored Messages: Sponsored Messages are sent as a message, and they can only go to people who are already subscribed to you on Messenger. The secret power of Sponsored Messages are that they can be triggered based on custom Facebook Audiences and event data. Conversational Facebook ads are incredibly powerful, especially when used in combination and with other Facebook Messenger automations that tie into your customer journey data.
Ready to get started with conversational Facebook ads? See how we can help!
You are probably wondering “Why should I care about conversational Facebook ads? I already run ads on Facebook, and they work just fine… What’s the big deal?“
Great question. I’ll tell you why ecommerce businesses care about conversational Facebook ads.
“With increasing ad fatigue and increasing online advertising cost, it is important to continuously innovate. Click to messenger ads are a cost effective way to engage with a customer, capture a lead and pre-qualify for the bottom of your advertising funnel. An innovative ad format to interact with the customer in a conversational and interactive way. And above all – we are seeing great results for our clients.” — Johannes Weirather, CEO of Blackotter
Conversational Facebook ads are different than any other type of ad on Facebook. Instead of driving someone to a landing page or a form, you are starting an automated and interactive conversation with everyone who clicks on your ad. This is amazing. Why? Because you would never normally be able to have personal 1–1 conversations with all of your perspective customers, but with an AI chatbot and Click-to-Messenger ads you can.
Think about it: If you could clone yourself infinitely and have private conversations with anyone interested in your products, what conversations would you want to have? What questions would you want to ask? What information would you want to collect? What conversations would your customers want to have?
This is what conversational Facebook ads allow you to do, and not only that, but they allow you to re-connect with a private message, instead of just showing someone yet another ad in their feed. They are basically science fiction, except they are real.
“Octane AI is the first solution we’ve come across that is easy to implement for stores and the functionality that allows for contacting customers directly through a new, real-time medium is an absolute game-changer.” — Chathri Ali, COO of ReCharge (Clients include: LootCrate, Bokksu, SiO Beauty, and The Walking Dead)
Instead of sending 10,000 people to a landing page, driving sales, and then pixeling the rest of them, now you can drive 10,000 people to a conversation, drive sales, and be able to send a follow-up message (via a push notification) to all 10,000 people.
We’ve some brands see major success using conversational Facebook ads. See how DOYOUEVEN saw 638% ROAS and made over $30,000 using Click-to-Messenger ads and Sponsored Messages.
So, first things first, there are a lot of different ways you can use conversational Facebook ads. We need to figure out which ones make the most sense for you right now.
At a high level, think about your conversational Facebook ads like this.
“Combining the targeted power of Klaviyo and Octane AI during the holidays is a 1-2 punch that allows merchants to cut through the noise during the busiest time of the year.” — Alicia Thomas, Senior Marketing Manager at Klaviyo (Clients include: Chubbies, Taylor Stitch, Brooklinen, and Beardbrand)
Examples of ways you can leverage Click-to-Messenger ads with automated conversations:
Examples of ways you can leverage Sponsored Messages:
So how do you set up a Click-to-Messenger ad and Sponsored Messages?
Don’t worry, I’ve got you covered! I will walk you through it right now, step by step.
Let’s create a Click-to-Messenger ad together.
I’m going to walk you through, from start to finish, how to setup a Click-to-Messenger ad for your Shopify store (or for your clients). You can follow along with me in real-time in the video, or if you prefer to read through the steps, I have written them out below. The Click-to-Messenger ad we are going to create together:
Here’s what you need to get started:
Here are the steps we are going to take to set up our first Click-to-Messenger ad:
Ready? Let’s do this.
Step 1 If you haven’t added Octane AI to your Shopify store and Facebook page, you are going to want to go here and take a few minutes to set that up. This will only take a few minutes, once you are done come back here and continue setting up your automated conversation.
Step 2 Next we need to create a question that asks people for their email address. Once we have created this question we can include it in any future conversations we create.
🔹 Go to your Octane AI dashboard and click “Campaigns” on the left hand side.
🔹 Click on “Questions” on the left hand side.
🔹 Under “Ask Questions” enter a title for your question. For now you can put “Email Collection”.
🔹 Delete the “Intro Message”, we don’t need this.
🔹 Delete the “Success Message”, we don’t need this.
🔹 From the + button dropdown select “Email field”.
🔹 For “Repeat submissions” choose “Allow users to fill these questions multiple times”.
🔹 Click “Create” to save the question.
Step 3 🔹 Click “Facebook Ads” on the left hand side.
🔹 Click the “Connect Facebook ad account” button.
🔹 Choose your the ad account for your brand and click “Connect”.
Step 4 🔹 Click “New Click-to-Messenger Ad” at the top of the page.
🔹 Name the ad something that you will remember. This is what the ad will be called inside of Octane AI and when it appears in your Facebook Ads Manager.
🔹 Write out the first part of your Click-to-Messenger ad message. This is the first message people will receive from your Facebook page when they click on your Click-to-Messenger ad.
🔹 Click the “Add Reply” button to add the button people can push to respond to and continue the conversation.
🔹 Write the answer into the reply box, for example “Yes!” or “Definitely!”. You can even add multiple options to give people more ways to express themselves. Keep this button set to “Next Section”.
🔹 Click the + button in the next section.
🔹 Select the “Questions” icon and then select the email question we created earlier.
🔹 Under the newly added email question, type out “Great! Thank you! Here is your discount code for 20% off:”
🔹 If you don’t already have a 20% discount code, we will need to create that now on Shopify. Open up your Shopify dashboard and click “Discounts” on the left hand side. Follow the steps here to create a discount code for 20% off, and then copy the discount code once you’ve saved it.
🔹 Paste the discount code on it’s own line in the convo (this will make it easy for people to copy the code from their Messenger conversation).
🔹 Click the + button and add a product by clicking the present icon. Choose the product you want to promote in this Click-to-Messenger ad.
🔹 Add the image that you want to appear in your Facebook ad when it is shown in the news feed.
🔹 Write the text you want to appear in the Facebook ad.
🔹 Update your link headline.
🔹 Select the call-to-action that you want to appear on your Facebook ad.
🔹 Choose an existing campaign and ad set, or create new ones, define your daily budget, and choose your target audience. You can change all of this later.
🔹 Push “Create” to publish to your Facebook ads account.
🔹 Click the “Facebook’s Ads Manager” link to view the ad in your Facebook ads account.
🔹 Review your ad and then click publish from the Facebook ads account.
🔹 You can monitor your stats from your Facebook ads dashboard and from Octane AI. You can update your ad conversation at any time by going to the Facebook Ads page on Octane AI, updating the Click-to-Messenger ad, and re-saving it.
Woooo! You created a Click-to-Messenger ad! Now… want to make a Sponsored Message? Let’s do it.
I’m going to walk you through, from start to finish, how to setup a Sponsored Message ad for your Shopify store (or for your clients). You can follow along with me in real-time in the video, or if you prefer to read through the steps, I have written them out below.
(Note: I recommend following along with these instructions for your first Sponsored Message, and then you can get creative once you understand the basics.)
The Sponsored Message we are going to create together:
Here’s what you need to get started:
Here are the steps we are going to take to set up our first Click-to-Messenger ad:
Ready? Let’s do this.
Step 1 If you haven’t added Octane AI to your Shopify store and Facebook page, you are going to want to go here and take a few minutes to set that up. This will only take a few minutes, once you are done come back here and continue setting up your automated conversation.
Step 2 🔹 Click “Facebook Ads” on the left hand side.
🔹 Click the “Connect Facebook ad account” button.
🔹 Choose your the ad account for your brand and click “Connect”.
Step 3 If you don’t already have a custom audience on Facebook for browse abandonment, let’s make that now.
🔹 Go to your Facebook Ads Manager, click the menu item in the top left, and mouse over “All Tools” on the bottom, and then click “Audiences” under “Assets”.
🔹 Click “Create Audience” and then “Custom Audience”.
🔹 Click “Website traffic”.
🔹 Set your audience as “All website visitors” in the past “30” days. 🔹 Click “Exclude People”.
🔹 Set to “AddToCart” in the past “30” days so that we can filter out the people who did add an item to their cart.
🔹 Name your audience and click “Create Audience”.
Step 4 🔹 Click “New Sponsored Message” at the top of the page.
🔹 Name the ad something that you will remember. This is what the ad will be called inside of Octane AI and when it appears in your Facebook Ads Manager.
🔹 Write out the first part of the Sponsored Message. This is the first message people will get when they are sent the Sponsored Message.
🔹 Click the “Add Reply” button on the right to add a button people can push to continue the conversation.
🔹 Type out the text for the button, for example “Yes!” or “Of course!”. This enables people to push a button to answer the question you put in the first message. You can have one response, or multiple. (You can even have the responses lead towards different parts of the conversation using “Tangents”, but we won’t go into that right now.)
🔹 Write out a new message to the bottom left. This is the message people will get when they hit the “Yes!” button.
🔹 Now let’s add some products! Click the grey + button and then select the “Add a product” icon.
🔹 This will automatically pull in all the items from your store and let you choose which ones you want to include in the Sponsored Message. Choose the ones that make sense for your browse abandonment Sponsored Message.
🔹 Add another message below that prompts people to go view all of your products on your store.
🔹 Click the grey + button, choose the “Add Button” option, and then select “Link to a Web site”.
🔹 Add the button text “Shop now” and the URL for your website (or a collections page).
🔹 Create a new campaign and ad set or choose existing ones.
🔹 Set a maximum bid (optional) and a daily budget.
🔹 Choose your browse abandonment audience from the dropdown.
🔹 Click “Preview” to see what the messages will look like, and then click “Create” when you are ready to add this to your Facebook Ads Manager.
🔹 Click the “Facebook’s Ads Manager” link to view the ad in your Facebook ads account.
🔹 Click “Review and Publish” to turn the ad on.
Boom! Now you’ve set up your very own Sponsored Message. And this is only the beginning! There are so many different types of messages and audiences you can combine throughout the customer journey.
But what if you need help setting these up? Don’t worry, we’ve go to you covered. Keep scrolling.
Or, come chat with our team directly to see how we can help you lift revenue by over 10%!
Absolutely. There are two ways you can get help with your conversational Facebook Messenger ads.
The Octane AI Support Team Octane AI’s Verified Agency Partners Reach out to me directly
If you want to reach out me, you can find me on Twitter, LinkedIn, or you can always send me an email at matt@octaneai.com.
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Good luck making your conversational Facebook ads!
What are conversational Facebook ads? Why are they such a big opportunity? What are Click-to-Messenger ads? What are Sponsored Messages? How do I set them up for my ecommerce business and monetize them? How do I meet other people experimenting with them?
What Are Conversational Facebook Ads?
There are two different types of conversational Facebook ads:
For example, you can send a message to someone when they look at a page but don’t continue to the next step, or if they have messaged with you but they don’t follow your Instagram account yet. You could even automatically send a custom message to people who watch a specific video from your Facebook page. The possibilities are endless!
Why Conversational Facebook Ads Are Such A Big Opportunity
Key Benefits of Conversational Ads:
How To Think About Conversational Facebook Ads and Facebook Messenger Automation
How To Create a Click-to-Messenger Ad
(Note: I recommend following along with these instructions for your first ad, and then you can get creative once you understand the basics.)
Sign Up for Octane AI and Connect Your Facebook Page
Create a Question Placeholder That Asks People For Their Email Address
Connect Your Facebook Advertising Account to Octane AI
Create and Launch a Click-to-Messenger Ad
How To Create a Sponsored Message
Sign Up for Octane AI and Connect Your Facebook Page
Connect Your Facebook Advertising Account to Octane AI
Create a Custom Browse Abandonment Facebook Audience
Create and Launch a Sponsored Message
Want to set up sponsored messages just like DOYOUEVEN? Read their full strategy!
Can Someone Help Me Run Conversational Facebook Messenger Ads?
We are always happy to answer any questions you have when you are setting up Click-to-Messenger ads and Sponsored Messages with Octane AI, just send us a message at team@octaneai.com and we’ll get back to you as fast as we can.
Want a professional to run Octane AI and your entire conversational Facebook ad strategy? We have verified a list of our agency partners that can jump right in and help.
The 250+ Page Playbook on Facebook Messenger & SMS Marketing for Ecommerce
Fast-growing DTC brands implementing this playbook have connected with 18x more customers, doubled their 7-day ROAS, recovered 5x more abandoned cart revenue & increased AOV 25%.
This article originally appeared in the OctaneAI blog and has been published here with permission.
