- August 19, 2022
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We’ve all been there: you look up a product or service online, only to find your Facebook feed flooded with ads for the same or similar items the next day. At best, this phenomenon seems like mystical sorcery.
In reality, however, it’s just a simple marketing tactic known as a retargeting strategy.
Website visitors who viewed retargeted ads are 70% more likely to convert. As of 2021, Facebook was the largest social media platform globally with 2.85 billion monthly active users and is touted to deliver the best ROI compared to other social channels.
Harnessing the power of retargeting in the world’s largest social platform, Facebook, can help you re-capture lost leads and visitors who fail to convert upon their first website visit. As visitors abandon their purchase journey, you can bring them back to your site using Facebook’s massive advertising prowess and reach.
According to SharpSpring’s 2021 Outlook on Retargeting report, 94% of marketers stated that retargeting was somewhat or very successful in achieving their goals. The same report revealed that Facebook was primarily used for ad retargeting campaigns, reinforcing their efficacy.
Source- SharpSpring
What is Facebook Retargeting and how does it Work?
Facebook Retargeting is the process of showing Facebook ads to users who have previously expressed an interest in your business. Whether they have visited your site, browsed through your blogs, added items to their cart or submitted forms, you can re-engage these users with paid social ads and encourage them to continue their journey.
Using facebook’s retargeting platform you can try to re-capture the attention of lost leads or on-the-fence prospects, and gently nudge them towards conversion. The advantage of using Facebook is its advanced retargeting capabilities that allow you to target audiences with incredible precision.
To get started with Facebook retargeting, you need to embed a snippet of code in your portal known as Pixel. Pixel is a form of a cookie that tracks and monitors the user’s online activity to assess how they interact with your site. You can then use these behavioural insights to re-target audiences based on their granular site engagement patterns – including the recency or frequency of interactions, pages they visited, dwell time and more.
Facebook also allows you to curate custom audience lists for re-targeting and thereby exercise greater control over who views your ads.
All in all, you can combine different approaches including pixel and list-based retargeting in Facebook to drive the results you want.
Facebook Retargeting Best Practices
There’s more to retargeting than showing the same generic ads to all past site visitors from one single retargeting ad set. Here are some best practices to create a customized carousel of Facebook retargeting ads for audiences based on their behaviour and interests:
The custom audiences functionality in Facebook helps to overlay different segmentation criteria or parameters to arrive at micro-segments and maximize targeting efficiency. You can create custom audiences to group users based on their shared behaviour and tailor your remarketing approaches to each segment.
Here are some ways to sharpen your custom audience lists and refine your retargeting strategy to match them with relevant offers and messages:
Here’s a free download of 42 affinity audience segments you can use to maximize targeting efficiency
In addition to reaching a specific target segment with your retargeting ads, you also need to exclude unrelated, unprofitable and already converted audiences. When defining custom audience lists for Facebook retargeting campaigns, you can also exclude specific audience segments.
For instance, visitors who just spent a few seconds on your site and bounced away have a much lower chance to convert. And, you might want to consider excluding them from your remarketing lists by setting the percentile value of dwell time to the top 5% or more.
The purpose of ad retargeting is to serve audiences with relevant messages or offers that will push them to take some action. If you display high-intent ads to leads who are still getting warmed up to your brand and exhibit low intent to purchase, you are sure to drive them away. Instead match your ad campaigns to the ‘temperature’ of your traffic based on how cold, warm or hot your leads are in your sales funnel:
Facebook’s dynamic retargeting ads let you create an ad template that automatically uses images and details from your pre-defined product catalog feed. Facebook tracks visitor behavior on your online store using the Facebook pixel, and then builds an audience of visitors who were active on your store in the last 30 days. This means you don’t have to do all the heavy lifting of optimizing ads; Facebook will automatically display personalized retargeting ads for each visitor based on their specific on-site engagement patterns and interests.
Instead of seeing the same repetitive ads that may lead to fatigue, provide a sequence of ad experiences to your audiences after they drop off your site. An effective method of using retargeting is moving users through a multi-step journey that nurtures them towards conversion. This technique involves creating drip campaign workflows by scheduling ads to be shown to a set of audiences based on the number of days since the visitor has left your site.
A sequential messaging strategy begins with generalized value propositions before moving to more specific offers, after users have a certain level of familiarity with your brand.
Final words
While Facebook retargeting is an important part of the digital marketing strategy, it’s not enough on its own. In addition to employing this tactic, you also need to ensure that your ads are compelling, engaging and offer the right incentives to your target audience.
Embrace the power of Facebook retargeting with the help of social media marketing services experts. The right team of cross-functional experts can aid you in crafting effective Facebook retargeting campaigns that deliver outstanding results.
