Quick Guide to Retargeting on Facebook

Full Funnel MarketingDigital Marketing, Social Media AdvertisingLeave a Comment

retargeting facebook

Have you ever visited your Facebook News Feed and seen an ad from a company whose site you were just looking at or an ad promoting a product that you were eyeing on Amazon? Perhaps you thought to yourself, “Facebook knows!” or, “It is destiny telling me to buy these shoes.” Well, it turns out Facebook is not doing this by itself and it is not your destiny to buy those shoes. You’ve just experienced your favorite brands utilizing a digital marketing strategy called retargeting to attract you back to their website. You can use this strategy in various different platforms but for this post we are going to focus on retargeting on Facebook.

What is Retargeting & How to do Retargeting on Facebook

Facebook Retargeting is a specific kind of paid advertising, deployed on the Facebook platform, that targets users who have already been to your website and encourages them to take some kind of action.

Retargeting helps businesses re-engage your website visitors who may have been interested in your products or services but may have gotten distracted during the process. They may have filled out a contact form and later forgot to respond to the email you sent them, or life could just have gotten in the way and prevented them from finishing what they set out to do on your website.

Retargeting is generally done through ad networks like Google’s Display Network. But you can also use Facebook, the most highly frequented social network by the broadest audience, for retargeting. And today we will show you how to set it up.

How Does Facebook Retargeting Work
Retargeting works by using cookies to track the browser of a visitor whenever they visit your website through (if they have their cookies enabled, of course). By doing this, we can track what pages each user visited during their stay on our website, whether they completed a specific action (e.g. signing up for our newsletter), and what page they were on when they left our website.

For example, let’s say a visitor enters our website and views one of our services, like SEO, and then leaves the site. With Facebook Retargeting, we are then able to advertise to that specific visitor with an ad set up specifically for the service (SEO) that he or she was interested in before they left the site. This allows us to create customized ad sets for retargeting. This is done by setting up custom audiences in your Facebook Ads Manager and making up an audience of pixeled visitors who visited a specific url or a URL containing “SEO”. You can do this by going to Tools > Audiences > Create Audience in your Facebook Ads Manager.

retargeting on facebook

“By the time all was said and done, we determined that 18 months into our retargeting efforts, we had increased repeat visitors 50%, boosted conversion 51%, and saw 300% greater time on site!” – Larry Kim (WordStream, CTO)

Installing the Facebook Pixel
To start off you will want to install the Facebook Pixel, which is a snippet of javascript code, into your website on each of your website’s pages. After you install the pixel you will want to check if the Pixel is active by going into your Facebook Ad Manager > Tools > Pixels. Here you will be able to see the amount of pixel traffic that you get on a daily basis and if your Facebook Pixel is active.

Once you set your Facebook Pixel up correctly, you can start advertising with a really small audience and let your audience grow while the ad is running. Or you can wait a couple of days or weeks to have the audience size that you desire. if you have an email list of your leads or newsletter subscribers, you can also add your email list to a custom audience and advertise to them on Facebook.

facebook retargeting

After you install the Facebook Pixel you will want to set up Conversion Tracking. Conversion Tracking lets the Facebook ad analytics report on how many people who clicked on your ad converted into customers, which lets you get the most information out of your ad reports.

There are two ways to set up Conversion Tracking: Standard Events or Custom Conversions. Using Standard Events requires you to go back into the javascript snippet and add one more line of code depending on the “event” you are tracking, while Custom Conversions lets you create a conversion depending on the page they visit by typing in the URL or a keyword that is part of the URLs that you want to track conversions from like a thank you page where visitors are sent after opting-in or an order confirmation page that visitors can only reach after making a purchase.

Both options are highly effective. However, we personally prefer using Custom Conversions as it is much faster than having to go into your website code and changing lines of code on every set of pages you want to track conversions on.

remarketing on facebook

Setting Up Retargeting Ads
Now that you have your Pixel installed and your conversions set up, it is time to start creating your retargeting ads! We recommend using carousel ads to highlight the specific product or service (and its benefits!). By using carousel ads, you can show the product or service that each ad set’s audience was interested in as well as some similar products or services that they may be interested in but do not know about yet.

The audience for retargeting is an audience that already knows your brand and has shown interest in your product so they are generally further down in the buyer’s journey. Therefore, you should try to send them to a landing page where they can easily purchase the product or schedule the service that they are interested in.

Carousel Ad Details:
  • 3 – 5 images
  • Recommended image size: 600 x 600 pixels
  • Image ratio: 1:1
  • Text: 90 characters
  • Headline: 40 characters
  • Link description: 20 characters
  • Your image may not include more than 20% text.

The Benefits of Retargeting on Facebook

Retargeting is a very powerful tool that allows you to get in front of the majority of your website’s visitors again for a lower price than what a cold ad would cost you. It also helps maximize the ROI of your previous marketing efforts while keeping your brand at the top of your audience’s mind.

As if you needed any more convincing that retargeting really works: Website visitors that are brought through retargeting also tend to have a higher engagement rate and are 50% more likely to convert into customers! That’s what we call an ad dollar well-spent.

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