Introduction

Shopee is a popular Southeast Asian ecommerce platform which has a strong presence in countries such as Taiwan, Malaysia, Philippines and Indonesia.

We love looking for great deals through online shopping, so naturally we came across Shopee’s Facebook ads. We were certainly tempted to click on them and buy the products due to their great prices, but we think their ads could do with some minor adjustments to make them even more appealing.

Ad 1

What’s Nice

• Highlighting 80% OFF in big caps is a good way of getting a viewer’s attention.
• People who may be on the lookout for purchasing everyday grocery items for cheaper prices will definitely want to click it.
• Encouraging potential shoppers to spend RM20 or more in order to get subsidised shipping for their items is a great plus.
• The discounted price is written big and bold and on a bright orange background, which makes it really stand out.

What Could Be Bad

• Here’s a common ad creation mistake: The words are a little too tiny.
• We notice that the headline and the words in the grey bar are the same.
• We think the headline can be used to serve a better purpose instead of just repeating words that are already in the ad.
• Highlighting subsidised shipping for customers who spend over RM20 is a good way of getting the viewer’s attention, but this information should also be represented visually. This is because, people may not read the whole copy of the ad, as most of their focus may be on the discounts instead.
• We like how the discounted price is written big and bold and on a bright orange background, but the original price is kind of hard to see, so most viewers wouldn’t be able to immediately recognise the price difference.

How Can We Make it Better

• Let’s make the original price a little bigger so the viewers can have a better look and see the price difference.
• Emphasise the subsidised shipping perk visually in the ad image.

Our Take

Here’s our take! After reworking the ad slightly, viewers are immediately presented with the attractive perks of subsidised shipping along with being able to clearly see the great discounts on offer. The changes for this one are subtle, but can potentially make a huge difference on the click through rate of the ad.

Ad 2

What’s nice

• Mobile accessories can be quite expensive if purchased from the wrong ‘places’.
• Shopee has upped the ante here by claiming that if their prices are not the lowest, then they’re willing to pay 120% of the difference back to their customers – now that’s intriguing.
• Plus, the prices of the mobile accessories here are incredibly low. Only RM4.80 for a USB cable charger? Sign us up!

What Could be Bad

• It looks like the full name of each product is in the visual. And, we had to squint our eyes to read the words.
• Some people may feel that with the stamp being so small, it may feel like Shoppe’s not being serious with the ‘lowest price’ claim.

How to Improve

• We think that Shopee can enlarge the stamp in the image, to ‘strengthen’ its claim of having the lowest price.
• Instead of the current text, perhaps they could just have the listing as something like ‘Micro USB Cable” and enlarge it to make it easier to read.
• To further encourage people to buy these mobile accessories at a low price, we can include something in the copy like ‘Mobile accessories shouldn’t be expensive when they can break so easily! OR maybe something like ‘Can’t afford expensive fancy USB cables when they can break easily?’
• Again, like Ad 1, we can increase the size of the original price so that viewers can see the price difference.

Our Take

Similar to the previous ad, we’ve reworked this one slightly in order to maximise it’s effectiveness in getting viewers to buy the items.

We’ve enlarged the original prices along with the re-written item descriptions in order to make the prices and items more readily appealing to viewers without them having to squint to read the information.

We’ve also enlarged the guarantee stamp and moved it to the upper right corner in order to increase the prominence of the guarantee within the ad while still keeping the overall design clean and organized.

Target Audience

Let’s see what kind of audience Shoppe would target with these ads.

Audience 1 – People who like brands related to instant coffee, chocolate and milk, but might also be looking for discounts.

Firstly, we can target people who like Nescafe, Cadbury, and/or McCafe.

This is just a starting point, as it may not be able to effectively target people who are searching for low priced items, since people of higher income may also like these FB pages.

We can narrow things down by including pages that people must also like. We can do this by looking for Facebook pages of hypermarkets in Malaysia like Mydin, Giant and Tesco.

People who visit these hypermarkets are more likely to be people who are on the lookout for sales and discounts, as opposed to people who visit supermarkets like Cold Storage, Jaya Grocer or Ben’s Independent Grocer.

Audience 2 – People who are looking for reasonable or lower priced mobile accessories.

The method to targeting this audience is quite similar to the approach we used to obtain the first audience.

We can pick people who like ‘mobile phone accessories’, then we narrow that targeting with people who also must like e-commerce shops like Lazada or Taobao.

With this detailed targeting, the audience in it has a higher intention of buying cheap mobile accessories.

Audience 3

Many companies have an abundance of user data from their customers, but they may not know how to use it optimally.

Besides the normal targeting options like the above, Shopee may collect data users from their website as well as the Shopee app.

With this data, we have multiple ways we can create a target audience. For example, for people who have purchased face cream or hand cream from Shopee, they can then retarget these purchasers with a reminder ad to stock up on the cream they had purchased before.

People who bought a product and finished it may appreciate the reminder ad that’s sent to them. Not to mention that they’ll also be more likely to have the intent to repurchase the product.

• Ad example:

Audience 4

Another great example for creating a target audience with the user data is people who bought gardening products. We can re-target them with other gardening products which are relevant.

Here’s an example:By re-targeting this ad to people who purchased gardening products, the ad will be more likely to be successful in getting viewers to purchase these products compared to showing it to a new audience on Facebook.

Conclusion

Overall, Shopee seems to be doing great with their Facebook Ads, so their sales could really skyrocket if they just made a couple of important adjustments.

If you’d like to see the return on your own digital ads skyrocket, why not contact us and see how we can help you!