• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, October 21, 2020

In an effort to take some of the friction out of online shopping this holiday season, Facebook this morning is unveiling a series of commerce-driven ads and features on both Facebook, and Instagram. Not surprisingly, the new formats are designed to optimize mobile commerce explicitly, given that proprietary Facebook research indicates nearly four-in-five (78%) of online purchases already are happing on its mobile interfaces.

The new formats are designed ot achieve three goals: reaching more in-market shoppers, offer them discounts and enable them to “sharpen” their digital skills.

Beginning with the start of the holiday shopping season, Facebook will rollout “Ads With Product Tags On Instagram,” which will it easier for advertisers and small businesses to tag products so consumers can discover products and shop for them by driving traffic to product detail pages embedded on Instagram.

Facebook says the new features are based on beta testing by a group of advertisers who have been using it for about a year, and effective today it’s available to all advertisers via Instagram’s "Ad Manager."

Another new feature being rolled out today, “Shopping Engagement Custom Audiences,” enables advertisers to create custom audience profiles to target users who have already demonstrated an interest in their product or brand by taking specific actions such as “saving a product,” viewing a shop or initiating, but not completing a purchase.

Not surprisingly, Instagram also is enabling advertisers to extend the reach of those explicit purchase intent users by offering “Shopping Lookalike Audiences” that matches them with others with similar profiles in its user base.

Meanwhile, Facebook’s main platform will introduce a “Discount Feature for Facebook Shops,” which create explicit traffic among users looking for deals, discounts and other price-based sales promotions.

“To make sure customers know of the discount options available to them and peak their interest, you can get creative by adding a banner to your shop,” Facebook said in a statement announcing the new features.