When normal people think about retargeting ads, they think about annoying brands taking advantage of their data online. They feel listened to because they search for Nike shoes and then see Nike shoes everywhere. Facebook retargeting can make a difference, however.
For marketers, we see as an opportunity to convert our customers into buyers. Retargeting is an essential part of getting customers, because people who know you have a better chance of becoming actual customers.
According to ReTargeter, only 2% of visitors convert, which means that 98% of customers leave without buying. This leaves a big opportunity for brands to get more customers that should be leveraged.
Another reality is that Facebook can cost a lot and using Facebook retargeting audiences can drastically improve your return on investment.
It’s why we made a small 5-step guide to help businesses create at least a basic Facebook retargeting campaign.
What is retargeting?
Retargeting is arguably one of the most important parts of Facebook advertising. How do you create Facebook retargeting campaigns? Well, you must create Facebook custom audiences.
Retargeting is part of the customer’s journey. On one side, you have people who don’t know your brand exists and on the other, people who bought from you.
The objective is to push people from “not knowing” to be your customers. Here’s what it looks like:
For example, you could retarget people who visited your website in the past 30 days. Those people have a much higher chance of converting than people who have never heard about your brand.
What does a retargeting ad look like? Well, it looks just like a normal ad but it’s just more personalized to the audience you are targeting.
For example, if you are retargeting people who’ve seen a pair of jeans on your website for twins, then you would show them the same product on a Facebook ad with a discount. Here’s an example I found from Fashion Nova:
Although the visual for this ad is bit ratchet, Fashion Nova does know what their audience resonates with: discounts and bad bitches.
5 Quick steps
#1 – Set up your Facebook pixel on your website if it’s not already done.
What is Facebook pixel? A Facebook pixel is a piece of code that you insert in all your pages for Facebook to be able to know when you get a visitor & track it. This allows you to create custom audiences for your Facebook retargeting campaign.
It also allows you to create audiences of people who visited specific pages like your blog, your product or service page, and so on.
Let me show you how to get the pixel code in the first place.
Go into “events manager”
After that, just add a name to your pixel account that represents the website you’ll use it for.
Now, all you have to do is either see if you can use a partner integration such as Shopify or manually insert your code into every head section of your website.
#2 – Go on business.facebook.com and click on “Audience”. You should find it by clicking at the top left of your screen under “Advertise”.
#3 – Hit “Create audience” and select “custom audience”. There are two other options, lookalike audiences and saved audiences, but you don’t require them to start a retargeting campaign. In this example, we’ll set up a campaign for people that visited your website.
#4 – Choose “Website Traffic” in the audience source selection.
#5 – Select the audience you want to retarget on the menu. In this example, we’ll recommend you select people who visited your product or service pages in the last 30 days.
To select only those who visited your product page, we’ll choose “People who visited specific web pages” and enter the generic URL that appears on all your product or services page.
Launching the actual Facebook retargeting campaign
After you’ve created your custom audience, it’s time to launch your first ad.
You just have to head to the “ads manager” and hit “create campaign”. Now, where you’ll need to select your audience is when you’ll choose it at the ad set level.
You’ll see at the top an option to select your custom audience (that’s where we’ll see if you remember the name you gave it).
Best practices for your Facebook retargeting campaign
I’ve decided to add a few tips to help you run a smooth and profitable Facebook retargeting campaign. If you have any other tips make sure to add them in the comments below, we’d love to improve this article for everybody here.
- Standing out: it’s really important to have a unique design when it comes to Facebook video ads or even Facebook image ads. You can definitely model ads you like from your competitors but try to add it to your own touch. The best creative I’ve seen is unique, original and branded. For instance, if your brand uses a tint of blue, try to find a way to use it inside each of your ads.
- Adapting to the placement: make sure your creative is adapted to the placement. A lot of companies run their Facebook ads for all placements and that is fine, but now you can adapt each placement to crop the image correctly. It’s a small effort that can bring amazing results.
- Performant copywriting: it’s key to make sure every word in your ad is efficient to share the message you are trying to share with your brand. You generally have 3 places: headline, primary text and description. We recommend making all these places relevant to each other and the image or video you chose for your ad.
Here’s an awesome example of a Facebook retargeting ad from Dollar Shave Club:
I’ve also decided to add a few ideas based on where people are in your funnel, from your cold audiences to your warm.
A cold audience is someone who has never heard about your brand and a warm audience would be your customers. In the middle, we would have people who know about your brand but didn’t buy yet.
In these examples, I’ll focus on people who have seen your website but not your products and those who have seen your products but didn’t buy.
- Seen website but not products: helpful content, webinar, PDF, another article, a carousel of products.
- Seen products but didn’t buy: discounts, similar products, exclusive offer, bundle offer, benefits/features of the product, customer reviews/testimonials.
What’s next?
It’s your turn to make your retargeting campaign the best possible. This is definitely a beginner article, but there’s an entire world waiting to be discovered.
Facebook retargeting is definitely one of the most underrated tools there is to marketers. To truly leverage it to the maximum, you need to constantly evolve.