What is Facebook Retargeting?

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What is Facebook Retargeting?

Does this sound familiar?: You’ve spent your online advertising budget and have driven considerable traffic to your website. You have some new customers, but not as many people converted as you thought.

What do you do? Retarget.

Retargeting is a form of online advertising that brings back website visitors who haven’t converted on their first visit to a website. When a person visits your website, a ”cookie” is placed on their browser. The cookie lets you recognize and follow your website’s visitors when they visit other sites and then displays an ad. This can also be called being “pixeled”.

For example, a user has clicked on your ad and ends up on your landing page to learn more about your product or service; however, they do not take the action you are wanting them to take (a conversion such as buying a product or filling out a form) and they leave the landing page. Retargeting allows you to reach those customers again using Facebook with targeted ads to re-engage them and complete the sale.

We’ve outlined the steps in this simple graphic:

facebook retageting - digital giants

You can also think about it as the temperature of a customer:

COLD LEAD: A customer has never heard of you or visited your website, but may have seen your ad

WARM LEAD: A customer clicks on an ad and comes to your website and gets pixeled

HOT LEAD: A customer returns to your website after seeing a retargeting ad

Getting Started with Facebook Retargeting

There are some key steps you must take before being able to retarget to your potential customers:

  1. Ensure the Facebook retargeting code is on all of your website’s pages and landing pages.

Visit the Events Manager section in your Facebook Business account. If no pixel has been created, you can get started creating your pixel.

Facebook pixel Setup

Name your pixel, and decide how you want to integrate it: via a partner integration like Squarespace, WordPress or Shopify, manually add the code to your site, or email the code to a developer.

sing a Facebook Pixelconnect facebook pixel

If you decide to manually add the code to your website make sure you follow the instructions carefully on placement. Ideally, it will be above the <head> tag in your site.

Here is an example of what the code looks like:

<!– Facebook Pixel Code –>
<script>
!function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s)
{if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function(){n.callMethod?
n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)};
if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version=’2.0′;
n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0;
t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0];
s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)}(window, document,’script’,
‘https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js’);
fbq(‘init’, ‘1234567891029999’);
fbq(‘track’, ‘PageView’);
</script>
<noscript><img height=”1″ width=”1″ style=”display:none”
src=”https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=1234567891029999&ev=PageView&noscript=1″
/></noscript>
<!– End Facebook Pixel Code –>

2. Create custom conversions

You want to make sure you are properly tracking when someone does complete a conversion on your website so you can “opt” them out, i.e. not see your ad again. This is a key step that will help you waste less money advertising to people who may have already completed a conversion.

To set up a custom conversion, navigate to the Events Manager and select Custom Conversions. For example, if your conversion was the completion of a lead form, the thank you page can be set up as your custom conversion. Set your “Rule” to equal the thank you page’s URL. That way every time someone completes the lead form it will track as a conversion on Facebook.

3. Creating remarketing audiences

Navigate to the Audiences section in Facebook Business Manager. There you can begin to set up some basic audiences.

For example. If your goal is to retarget users who already visited your website but did not fill out a form, you can create a custom audience made up of those who visited your website in the past 30 days and exclude those that visited the thank you page.

Facebook expanded its custom audience sources, so you can not only create an audience from those who visited your website but also from:

  • An imported customer list
  • App activity
  • Offline activity
  • Interactions on your Facebook page
  • Interactions with video on your Facebook page
  • Interactions with your Instagram profile
  • Lead forms
  • Events
  • Instant Experiences

Last but not least…

Create Compelling Ads

It won’t be enough to just reuse the same creative you’ve been using for your initial advertising campaigns. Some things to consider when creating retargeting ad creative:

  • Create ads that reflect wherein the sales journey the user may have dropped off and address those pain points.
  • Your ad’s copy should have stronger calls to action and more urgency.
  • A/B test different creative or landing pages to see what resonates with the audience.
  • Test different ad formats.

Get a free 30-minute consultation with us to help you choose the proper advertising channel for your marketing goals

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