Next Generation of Sidecar for Facebook Helps E-commerce Retailers and Brands Tackle the Growing Complexity of Facebook Advertising

Sidecar Additionally Launches Support for Google Display and Video Ads as Part of the Company’s Increased Focus on Audience Management Across Channels

Sidecar continues to solve the pain points facing digital marketing teams in retail, and today’s latest step is the introduction of the next generation of Sidecar for Facebook & Instagram. Critical among the new features is the granularity with which Sidecar automatically creates and manages audiences for Facebook and Instagram ads. In addition, the company’s heightened focus on audience strategy now extends to Google Display and Videos ads. Sidecar today introduces support for this ad format, complementing the company’s existing support of paid search and shopping ads, and providing retailers with complete management of their Google Ads accounts.

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Facebook’s fast-growing user base of 1.5 billion has become a critical advertising channel for e-commerce retailers and brands. While the channel now enables marketers with options like audience segmentation, Facebook is not without challenges, particularly as CPC costs increase each year. Facebook is a dynamic channel that requires smart approaches to drive efficient revenue and ROI.  Marketers must cut through the channel’s complexity to deliver the most relevant and timely ads for the right products.

“One of the biggest themes of Sidecar’s 2020 product roadmap is driving scale,” said Mike Perekupka, Senior Product Manager for Sidecar. “As we covered in our Q1 product webcast, we’re developing our core technology to empower retailers to scale their ability to engage with audiences, leverage changing ad formats, and adapt to shopper behavior across channels. Our new Facebook features and display support align perfectly with this mission. As always, we’ve developed these new rollouts with the same hyper focus on retail that’s marked our offerings from day one.”

New features and capabilities of Sidecar for Facebook include:

• Intelligent Campaign Creation: Sidecar creates ads, ad sets, and campaigns at scale using an automated setup. While the first-generation version of Sidecar for Facebook allowed retailers to create only dynamic product ads, the enhanced solution now supports every Facebook ad type, including video ads and single image ads.
• Customized Audience Builder: Sidecar’s AI technology now ingests demographic variables (i.e., age, location) and contextual variables (i.e., which product pages a user visited), in addition to its already existing inclusion of intent-based variables. Taken together, these inputs let Sidecar make decisions based on more data than humans ever could, driving granular and custom targeting to both prospecting and retargeting audiences.
• Automated Budget Allocation: Sidecar leverages AI techniques to understand a retailer’s entire Facebook ad budget, and dynamically allocates more spend to the audiences and ad sets with higher potential to convert, while reducing wasted spend on low converting audiences and ad sets.
• Ad Management and Testing: Sidecar automates ad delivery, and now runs A/B tests for copy, images, targeting, and bidding. Once a test concludes, Sidecar automatically incorporates the winning content and strategy into go-forward ad management.

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Customers have already benefited from some of the new Sidecar for Facebook capabilities. The Warming Store, one of the largest online retailers of heated clothing, winter apparel, electronic heating, and personal cooling products, is one such customer. It was looking to reach a very distinct audience of buyers on Facebook to complement its presence on Google, Bing, and Amazon.

“Sidecar worked closely with our team to develop and execute prospecting and retargeting campaigns to nurture a unique audience for us on Facebook,” explained Justin Silverman, co-founder of The Warming Store. “With Sidecar for Facebook, we’ve seen a significant decrease in CPC. Even better, our revenue increased 68% in the last four months compared to the same period last year, with a simultaneous cost savings of 2.5%. Working with Sidecar helped us realize a truly multichannel strategy by prospecting on Facebook and bringing that audience into our Google funnel.”

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