4.02 – How To Create Successful Retargeting Campaigns
Clearly, Retargeting is necessary and good for advertisers. Yet, we’ve all seen examples
of bad and lazy Retargeting. Almost everyone has a story of how they bought a vacuum
cleaner and then saw ads for more vacuum cleaners for the next month. That vacuum
should last years if not decades! That company is clearly not suppressing their buyers, so
is wasting precious ad dollars on a customer who has already bought!
How about those “zombie ads” that just won’t die? You visit a site and you see the
same ad multiple times on every website you visit or in your News Feed for months! This
is a lazy and poor Retargeting strategy.
Good Retargeting isn’t really remembered: it’s simply clicked on.
We’re going to show you how to do good Facebook Retargeting!
Retargeting is accomplished by two main technologies: cookies and pixels.
Cookies are little bits of info that are stored in your browser to uniquely yet
anonymously identify your browser. Cookies are how Facebook knows you were looking
at a particular page and then can allow an advertiser to show ads related to your visit to
that site.
Pixels are little bits of code on the websites you visit that set a cookie to uniquely
tag you. Large companies like Facebook and Google (as well as many other specialised
companies) use these pixels to “cookie” you. These major players can associate your
cookie with your identity because you’re logged into their system. The big players don’t
share your personal info with the end advertiser, so you remain anonymous to them.
Cookies are not something you have to worry about. The pixel is something you will
need to install on your website. More on that shortly.
There are a few best practices to help you think about how to create your Facebook
Retargeting strategy.
Retargeting is very powerful for profitable advertising campaigns, but you want to be
sure you follow a few principles to make it perform in an optimal way. As with any tool
or technology, there’s a basic way to use it, but we want you to gain an edge over other
advertisers, so we’re going to teach you what the experts know.
Segment Your Visitors
People visiting your site can almost always be segmented into buyers and non-buyers.
The more you can segment them, the more targeted your ad will be to them.
If you have a blog, each topic or category could become a segment. As you’ll learn in
Chapter 5, you can also segment by time spent on your site. If you can’t segment based
on buyers or non-buyers, or topics or product lines, you can still segment by time on
your site.
You’ll learn more about segmenting shortly.
Timing Is Everything
Do you remember what you had for dinner last night? Do you remember what you had
for dinner two Tuesdays ago? The answer is you’d have to think about it to remember.
That’s how visitors to your website are. Within 24 to 48 hours, people have forgotten
a lot about you. No offence; they’re human. They are distracted.
As it goes, the more recently someone visited your site, the more interested they are
in your business. This is called recency.
Facebook uses this idea of recency in everything they do. You’ll see when you create
a Website Visitor Audience, you’ll have to tell it how many days people are to stay in the
Audience after visiting your website.
We generally recommend you use Audiences of people that have visited your site in
the last 1, 7, 14, and 30 days, but you can create as many as you like or need depending
on your sales cycle.
If you have a long sales cycle, using an Audience that’s three times as long as your
average sale will keep everyone engaged. So, if your average sale takes 30 days, you should use an Audience of 90 days to ensure you include every potential buyer.
Everything about Audiences is covered in Chapter 5.
Stop Repeating Yourself
Most advertisers’ first attempt at remarketing fails because they only have one ad that
says, “Buy Now.” If someone didn’t buy on the first attempt, there are many, many
possible reasons. You have to address those and give the visitor a good reason to come
back. That reason could be more content or it could simply be a better deal if the price
was the issue.
You’ll discover several strategies for keeping people engaged and moving along the
Customer Awareness Timeline toward doing business with you later on.
Retargeting Is Not Just for Non-Buyers
There are many strategies where Retargeting can be used other than convincing non-
buyers to buy.
For example, you can use Retargeting to reach recent buyers and offer them an
additional product or service (cross sell or upsell). Buyers are usually the most likely
to buy again. Often this is very counterintuitive, because you might assume they don’t
“need” more. So, try and increase your profit margin by asking them what every good
fast food restaurant asks, “Do you want fries with that?”
You can also retarget people to engage them in a series of videos or articles over
a span of time. As you’ll learn, you can mimic an email marketing sequence in the
Facebook News Feed without needing to capture their email address. We’ve referred to
this in the past as an “invisible autoresponder.”
You can also use Retargeting to get people to take other actions such as liking
your Facebook Page, visiting your YouTube page, opting into a special report series, or
inviting them to an exclusive event.
Facebook has the ability to track users for up to 180 days, so you have the ability to
stay connected with them for six months, which is an eternity in internet time.
THE FACEBOOK PIXEL IS THE NEW WAY TO BUILD A LIST
I sat down with a business owner last week and he was talking about how he installed
“that pixel thing” on his site and now he was waiting for all the traffic to show up from
Facebook. He was absolutely correct in his desire to get his pixel installed, but obviously
uninformed about how it worked!
Installing your Facebook Pixel is the first thing you do after setting up an Ad
Account. It’s the cornerstone of Facebook Advertising.
It used to be that advertisers were obsessed with building up Facebook followers
with Page likes. If you had a lot of likes, you could reach those people fairly easily.
However, likes are no longer necessary. What advertisers should be obsessed with
instead is pixeling visitors to track and react to a person’s behaviour. There’s no need to
create a robust Facebook Fan Page because it is much better to connect with people right
in the News Feed than through content and ads.
The Facebook Pixel (we will also refer to this simply as “the pixel” in the book) is a
little bit of code you put on your webpages to send data to Facebook about all of your
visitors that Facebook matches to its users. This allows you to connect visitors on your
website to your advertising on Facebook, allowing you to do two main things:
- Build Retargeting Audiences
- Measure the Results of Your Ads
BUILDING RETARGETING AUDIENCES
The Facebook Pixel allows you to build a Retargeting Audience based on people who
visited a page or multiple pages on your website.
A very basic Retargeting Audience is simply one made up of everyone who visited
your website. A more advanced approach is to segment your website visitors into
multiple audiences based on specific pages they visit on your site. This could be
individual product pages, blog posts, checkout pages, etc.
For example, someone who has added products to their shopping cart is much more
likely to buy than someone who visited a landing page for five seconds and then left. So,
the audience of people who added products to their cart or even started the checkout
process are more valuable than someone who simply landed on the product detail page.
Facebook helps you create these segments based on pages or events. In the scenario
above, the event is called Add To Cart. Segmenting your audience by pages and event
gives you time to tell a story and lead people through your sales process at their own pace
based on their actions on your website.
