How to Personalize Ads at Scale on Facebook

The smaller the audience, the easier it is to personalize your ad copy. Personalizing ads on Facebook isn’t all that difficult if you’ve set up the correct custom audience to retarget users based on their website behavior. 

However, when running ads at scale, you’ll often need to target audience sizes in the millions, and with many of these users never visiting your website or hearing about your brand, being able to personalize your ad copy becomes a lot harder.

Facebook has recently updated its dynamic product ads (DPAs) to allow businesses to personalize their ads at scale. In this article I’ll show you how.

Personalizing ads for lead generation

If you run a lead generation objective on Facebook, you now have the option to use a product catalog as your creative.

When using this option, the Facebook algorithm will shift through your entire catalog and serve the most relevant creatives based on users’ interests and behavior, while optimizing your ad to deliver the most leads at the cheapest price.

The biggest benefit of this feature is being able to show all your products and creatives without having to configure ads individually.

Facebook says DPAs for lead generation will be used for automotive dealerships that can serve users the correct model of car with a call to action to contact the business for a test run, and real estate agents who can list homes and ask users for their telephone numbers to schedule a viewing.

It’s actually a great addition for any business that sells high-ticket items and needs to meet the customer in person or talk over the phone.

Dynamic product ads served in Messenger

You can now run dynamic product ads in the Messenger placement.

This new inventory placement for DPAs should lower the overall CPM running campaigns, and Facebook states that users are more likely to engage in their inbox as they will already be connecting with other businesses. Facebook hasn’t said too much, but I suspect DPAs are served to users who are already talking to other businesses in their inbox or use their inbox frequently.

Canvas and ad collection ads

Canvas and collection ad formats have been an amazing resource for e-commerce businesses to serve multiple products and categories to users in a single ad format.

Facebook has now connected them both with your product catalog, allowing you to serve cold audiences a single ad collection. Based on their interests and shopping behaviors, Facebook will show cold audiences the most relevant products within your catalog.

Combine these ads with lookalikes

DPAs help you improve your ad copy and audience targeting. You can take this one step further by using lookalike audiences from past sales and customer lists to provide Facebook with even more data to help serve your ads to the right people.

The idea of these new options is to reach cold audiences at scale, test several audiences, and keep a close eye on metrics such as relevance score, CPM and, most importantly, the cost per acquisition or lead.

Are you using these DPA updates?

The quickest way to scale your ads on Facebook is to reach the right audience with the right message.

These DPA updates plan to do exactly that.

Have you used them yet? If yes, let us know in the comments how you’ve got on.