This guide will cover everything you need to know to create a successful Facebook retargeting campaign.
People seldom convert on their first visit to your website. Research suggests up to 98% of first-time website visitors don’t. Well, that’s a lot of people. Unless someone makes an impulse purchase, they research their options, refine their preferences, decide, and then purchase.
The length of time this process takes varies based on your business, product, or service.
So you need to bring those initial 98% of non-purchasers back, maybe multiple times and convince them to convert. This is called retargeting.
What Are Retargeting Ads?
Retargeting ads are where the target audience of your ad campaign are people who have already interacted with you. They, therefore, know your brand and, in theory, have a higher level of intent than general prospecting audiences.
Most people think of retargeting as solely website-based — retargeting people who have visited your website to bring them back.
While this is the core tactic of retargeting, Facebook allows you to retarget people who have engaged with you in other ways. They may be on an email list, have watched one of your videos, or engaged with your mobile app. There are lots of possibilities.
These involve collecting user engagement data, creating target audiences based on these interactions, and building campaigns targeting these audiences.
You collect the necessary data for website retargeting by installing a pixel on your website.
If the person visiting your website is logged into Facebook, that website visitor will be connected to the user via your pixel. You can then populate various Custom Audiences with this data. We’ll get into more detail on how to do this in later sections.
What Are The Benefits Of Retargeting?
The opportunity to win back potential lost revenue is the only benefit you need to know to start retargeting. Your bottom line demands it.
But if you need a little more convincing, take a look at some of the statistics:
- Retargeted website visitors with display ads are 70% more likely to convert to your website.
- 69% of shopping carts are abandoned without ever completing a purchase.
- Retargeting can increase ad response up to 400%.
- Retargeting ads are 76% more likely to be clicked on than regular display ads.
How To Set Up A Facebook Retargeting Campaign
Once you’ve set up your custom audiences, running a Facebook retargeting campaign is easy. Go through your usual campaign creation process and select the relevant audience from the custom audience drop-down box at the Audience stage of creating an ad set.
Your ad set will now target everyone from the custom audience you created. You can still refine your target audience the same as always, by demographic, interest, behavioural, and connection data. Doing so will mean your target audience must exist in your custom audience AND match your other criteria selections.
You can both include and exclude custom audiences from your targeting. This will come in handy.
How to optimize your Facebook retargeting campaign
Right, so now you know how to set up a Facebook retargeting campaign, it’s time to cover some quick tips to get more out of your it.
Utilize Recency
If someone comes to your website and doesn’t purchase a product, they don’t want to be followed by your ad for the next year of their life. No one does. Make use of Facebook’s day limit on your custom audience to ensure you’re only targeting people who have visited your website within a recent period.
Segment Your Audience
Don’t just target everyone who visits any page on your website. The more website traffic you have, the more you should segment. Target people that visit specific pages that show conversion intent and retarget them with ads that nudge them towards your desired conversion.
Exclude Past Purchasers
Exclude custom audiences of people that have completed your conversion. No one likes being targeted with ads for a pair of sneakers they bought from your website over a week ago. It’s annoying. So make sure you don’t do it.
Cap Your Frequency
You can utilise frequency capping if run a Reach and Frequency campaign. This allows you to ensure that users only see a certain number of impressions of your ad within a set number of days. This helps you to stop being spammy.
Try Daily Unique Reach
If your website retargeting audience is small, optimizing towards link clicks or website conversions may not be of much use—as you’ll reach your entire audience very quickly anyway. In this case, utilize Daily Unique Reach optimization, which allows you to optimize your ads to be shown to people daily.
The above rule still applies—you don’t want to be spammy. So only do this with very recent audiences. For example, anyone who visited your website in the last seven days.
Use New Creatives
Don’t use the same old creative for all your other campaigns. These are hot prospects. Hit them with a specific, relevant message that resonates, tempting them back to complete the conversion they missed on their first visit.
Optimize Landing Pages
All your landing pages should be optimized for their specific purpose. But this rule is doubly important for retargeting campaigns. You know your audience was close to completing a conversion. They were missing the final nudge or piece of information they needed to get them over the line.
Remove the clutter. Present them with only the information they need to convert and, for goodness sake, optimize your pages for mobile. If your site takes longer than three seconds to load, you’ll lose half your traffic.
Sync Your CRM
Your website’s custom audiences will be dynamically updated by Facebook based on your pixel data. But so can your custom audiences based on list data.
Many leading CRMs and marketing automation systems sync list data directly to Facebook custom audiences. Use these integrations to link your audience lists from your CRM to Facebook to ensure your advertising and email campaigns are in perfect sync.
Beware The GDPR
The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation has already greatly impacted how marketers can use data to retarget customers with ads in the EU.
Familiarise yourself with the regulations. You’ll likely need to get customers’ permission to retarget them, so ensure you know what to do to comply. This article is a good starting point.
Final Thoughts on Facebook Retargeting Campaigns
Retargeting is one of the easiest ways to reach out to engaged audiences that already know your brand and have shown a degree of intent.
While no one likes to be followed around the Internet for the rest of their lives once they’ve visited a website, taking smart measures and building targeted campaigns will ensure you’re not one of the brands doing this.
On the contrary, you’ll be one of the brands that customers enjoy being retargeted by. Moreover, you’ll ensure you’re not leaving any potential revenue untapped. If you’re not retargeting, it’s time to start.
Relevant case studies of Todays.Agency
- A New Car in Town: Multi-channel Brand Awareness Campaign for the “Swedish Miracle”
- How we increased sales and decreased CPA from 21,52 £ per purchase to 4.12 £ in Facebook Ads
- We reached CPAs under 1 Eur in Google and Facebook campaigns
- Reviving the Romanian Market for Used Smart Gears through Lead Generation
