Must Read, SHOPLINE News

3 Major Updates You Cannot Miss of Facebook Business Extension with SHOPLINE

14 May 2021
·
4 minutes read

Lately, the concept “Social Commerce” has risen and been forcing retail brands to expand their sales channel to social media platforms. We see the transformation of the ways of doing business on social media: from the old “Inbox me” comments, to group buy, to Facebook Shops and Instagram Shopping now, the wave of Social Commerce is coming fast. On the other hand, numerous market researches have shown that consumer behavior has changed drastically and they are searching for product reviews online more often, in addition to the influence from online influencers and KOLs, social media doomed to be the one place brands cannot overlook in the coming year.

As Facebook’s Marketing Partner, SHOPLINE offers a variety of integrations for merchants to connect to different social media platforms effortlessly. With the newly updated Facebook Business Extension, you can now easily connect your SHOPLINE store with Facebook and many of its assets to build a more complete social commerce network for your brand. Let’s check out these updates!

What is Facebook Business Extension (FBE)?

Facebook Business Extension is the linkage between your SHOPLINE shop and Facebook’s assets such as Ad Account, Facebook Pixel, Product Catalog and more.

A. Facebook Pixel

In the era of Big Data, often we use data to monitor fragmented consumer behavior, their consuming habits and preferences. The management consultancy firm, Accenture, mentioned in their study in 2018 that an overwhelming 91% of consumers prefer to shop with brands who “remember” their preferences and provide personalized recommendations accordingly.

It is believed that in 2021, the figure will only increase without a doubt. Facebook Business Extension, hence, is built to help merchants to create not just a personalised shopping experience, but a better one.

To be able to provide a better personalized experience, brands should prioritise the data tracking of every step of the shopping journey to obtain available information. One of the methods is through Facebook Pixel. If you set up your own website, you may need the help of your web developer to help install the tracking code; But for all SHOPLINE merchants, you are in luck because you yourself can finish the setup via Facebook Business Extension, even for those who don’t have a clue about any programming knowledge!

B. Product Catalog Integration

As mentioned earlier, the brand new Facebook Shops and Instagram Shopping features will be the next big contributors in terms of online sales, if you are one of those brands considering to expand your business to social media, without integration, unfortunately, you will have to create your own shop and product catalog on Facebook, also, information such as product inventory cannot be synchronized in real time, resulting in a lot of time and labor costs.

Facebook Business Extension might just be the perfect solution here. Not only can you automatically synchronize the product information from your store to Facebook Shop, but also simplify the application process for Instagram Shopping after you successfully integrate FBE. With Instagram Shopping, you will be able to apply the long-awaited Instagram Product Tag feature on your brand Instagram account, allowing customers to swipe and shop simultaneously.

Introduction to the Optimised Facebook Business Extension

There are 3 major updates of Facebook Business Extension you must know:

1. Comprehensive Business Assets Management

Integration of Facebook Pages, Pixel, Messenger plug-in, Ad Account and Facebook Shops is already available from the last version of FBE. While in this update, integrations of Instagram account, Conversions API and Business Manager are also made available, making it easier and more secure for sellers to integrate all assets on Facebook on SHOPLINE.

Figure 1. Comprehensive Business Assets Management

2. Shopping Experience and Optimised Product Catalog

We also see improvements in Product Catalog, benefits of using it includes helping sellers to become more visible on Facebook Shop and Instagram Shopping, reaching higher ads quality as well as higher consumer purchase intentions.

Higher purchase intention: Optimised price and rule information to strengthen credibility and reinforce purchase intention.
Higher visibility on Facebook Shops & Instagram Shopping: This version of update allows more product fields available to fill in, which helps sellers to create customised Collection Ads faster than ever.
Contributed in ads performance and quality: Good news to those who have been buying Dynamic Product Ads (DPA)! Your ad targeting will be more accurate thanks to the updated Data Feed feature, completed your Product Catalog and gave Facebook a more precise reference for ad placement.

In addition to the above benefits, given the recent rising trend in “Search Commerce”, Collection Ad is believed to be a tool to reach potential customers who search for products on social media platforms. Not only can you attract more customers to buy from you, Collection Ads tailor made for different festive occasions or seasonal promotions also helps increase the reach of specific customers by different product categories.

Figure 2. You can edit Product Feed Data within Products at admin panel to optimise shopping experience

3. Upgraded Conversions API

Does this sound familiar to you? After you place an ad, there is a gap between the performance data on Facebook/Google and your store backend, this could be the results of ad-blocking / privacy protection plugins installed by your visitors, affecting the data collection of ad tracking. While the use of the Conversions API will not be affected by the above circumstances, allowing your ads to send data to Facebook directly through your website server, sending the status of order completion/cancellation to Facebook so it can better optimise your ads.

Read more about Conversions API in this article : How To Track Customer Behavior? Experience First Dibs On SHOPLINE’s Integration With Facebook Conversions API. Upgrading to Conversions API brings many benefits – Use both CAPI and Facebook Pixel at the same time to improve the accuracy of ad tracking; CAPI also measures customer behavior in more ways, so that your advertising and customer behavior tracking are comprehensively improved.