Facebook Retargeting Tips

There’s more to be gained from retargeting than just reaching out to the audience you’ve already started to establish. This method can actually help you to build your authority, familiarity, brand awareness, and so much more.

How to Set Up Facebook Remarketing

Facebook retargeting is one of THE most powerful marketing tools when it comes to finding an audience for your products or services. The reason for this, is that it’s also the single most targeted form of advertising – meaning that it will seek out the very visitors who are most likely to buy from you.

And in this case, that means seeking out people who have spent time on your website, and who may have considered buying from you in the past. It means looking for people who are engaged with your brand already.

To market to these people, we need a way to track them and identify them – so we can follow their journey from our order form, to Facebook.

Here’s how you set up a campaign to do that.

The Process

The first thing you need to do, is to create a ‘pixel’. A pixel is a snippet of code that places a cookie on your user’s computer that can later be used to identify them from Facebook.

Making pixels is very easy. Simply log into your Facebook ad manager or business account and then choose Pixel from the hamburger menu. Creating a pixel simply means giving it a name and choosing any particular behaviors – such as identifying keywords in a URL.

From there, you will save it, and copy and paste the code to place among your HTML on your website. If you don’t know how to do this – ask your web developer. Some WordPress plugins can also help.

The next step is to create a ‘custom audience’ on Facebook. This is an audience that you have previously defined, who will be the recipients of your campaign. You can choose to target by location, age, interests etc… but by using ‘website traffic’, you can choose to target only people with those pixels stored.

Next, you go about creating an ad campaign as usual – choosing the type of ad you want to create, the kind of goal you want to target etc. Depending on the type of ad and its location, you will be given a certain number of words to play with, in addition to an image or video.

Then you simply select the audience and for this, you will use the custom audience you saved with your pixel. Make sure you name these well so you can add the right campaigns to the right audiences. And that’s it!

When you think of the term remarketing, you might think of showing adverts to people who have already been to your website. This way, you can prompt someone to buy a product that they had otherwise forgotten about or decided to pass on. By remarketing to these leads, you can hopefully catch them at the right time and remind them of their interest in whatever you’re selling.

But there’s another form of remarketing, and one that Facebook offers in particular. It’s called customer list marketing. Essentially, you are remarketing by using a list that you have previously collected by interacting with your audience, and which now is going to become the basis for your next campaign.

What is a Customer List?

A customer list can be anything. It might for instance mean a mailing list, or it could mean a list of contacts that you bought.

Either way, you should have a list of names and numbers, and of email addresses. When you upload this to Facebook, Facebook can then match those numbers and details with users on its database. And when it does that, it can then find the people who are members of your mailing list ñ people who have already shown they have a distinct interest in buying products from you, or checking out what you have to offer.

Perhaps the most common form of customer list is the mailing list. Countless internet marketers shout about the power and importance of mailing lists ñ and you can leverage them just the same yourself this way.

Mailing lists give you a direct line of contact with your audience, and with people who specifically have asked to hear from you.

The only problem is that many people don’t check their inboxes all that often ñ especially not the promotions tab.

Not only that, but email is generally not multi-media. That means you can’t wow your audience with an amazing animation, a jingle, or a narrated sales-pitch. Thus, you often lose engagement with that audience.

This is especially true if they only signed up in the first place to get access to a free PDF report or similar!

But now if you use social media to recontact that same group, then you can potentially surprise them on a whole different platform. That way, you can get the attention of those people who aren’t opening your emails. You get so much more bang for your email list buck, and a way to re-engage with your audience.

Remarketing, also sometimes called retargeting, is a form of marketing that involves addressing the same individual more than once – potentially many times in a row. More specifically, it involves targeting people who have already shown an interest in a specific product or service that is being offered.

This is achieved through the use of cookies. These are small files that are saved on a user’s computer through their browser when they visit a website. It’s thanks to cookies that you’re able to stay logged in on Facebook and other sites.

But cookies can also tell a website that you’ve been on a specific page or site. That in turn means that the site can make some assumptions about you. Thus, if you’ve spent a lot of time looking at holiday houses lately, then it might show you ads for holidays in that region.

But while remarketing has some clear and obvious advantages, it also has drawbacks. One is GDPR. GDPR is a new policy implemented by the European Union that affects the way we collect and use data collected about customers and visitors.

This means that if you’re a marketer, you now need to let your visitors know that you’ll be collecting their data to use in advertising. This simply means asking the user to consent to your use of their data through the form of a pop-up or similar. But it is a limitation as it of course impacts on your relationship with that customer.

Mistakes

While the idea of remarketing is to reach people who have been considering buying from you – simply to push them over that edge and help them make the ‘right decision’, it’s worth noting that it doesn’t always go down that way.

Sometimes, your marketing will fall on deaf ears by targeting people who have already bought your product and don’t need it twice.

Sometimes it will target people who were shopping for friends for Christmas – meaning that they actually have no interest in the product themselves.

Finally, you might be remarketing to people who have shown already that they aren’t interested in the product by leaving!

The good news is that most of these issues won’t cost you money – as you only pay for PPC ads if someone actually clicks on them. The other good news, is that you can mitigate these issues by using smarter and more specific cookies and events. Just be sure to keep these issues in mind when designing your campaign.