Are you fed up with spending money on Facebook Ads that simply don’t work, spending hours putting together the perfect advert only for it to bring people to your website where they simply don’t convert into sales? It makes no sense to continue like this, so we’re explain how Facebook retargeting can 10X your returns when compared to ordinary Facebook Ads, saving you money and increasing your conversion rates.
Facebook Retargeting can look like a challenge on the outset; with so many options and functionalities to choose from, it’s a wonder how any business can make money using retargeting, right?
Well not to worry, in this article, we’re going to explain what Facebook retargeting is, when to use it, and demonstrate the kind of results you can expect when done correctly.
Before we get into the juicy bits, lets take a moment to differentiate retargeting from remarketing.
In simple terms; it’s in the methodology being used. Retargeting is the use of paid ads to reach to those who have already expressed a desired interest in your products or services. Remarketing is typically the sending of emails to an existing customer base.
The use of Paid Ads, especially on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram enable you to utilise to many more metrics and behaviour patterns than sending emails. Although email has it’s place and should never be overlooked, retargeting using social ads can lead to a 10X engagement rate from your primary target audience and a drastic increase in purchasing behaviour.
Retargeting is showing ads to potential customers who have interacted with your adverts or your website, showing buyers intent towards your products and services at some point in the past.
If you’re running adverts pointing towards your website without the retargeting functionality, there’s a very good chance that you’re leaving upwards of 50% of potential sales on the table.
Whether you’re looking to re-engage old customers, display a new product to existing customers, or remind someone that they’ve left a product in their cart before checking out, then Facebook retargeting is for you.
It is essentially showing adverts to a familiar audience where the leads are warm, not cold. It’s the second stage in advertising once brand awareness has been established.
It may surprise you, but not all Facebook advertisers use retargeting. In fact, only around 25% of advertisers on Facebook make use of this function. Why? Because it’s either over-complicated, or there are leaks in the buyers journey.
Whereas, when you look at the likes of Amazon, Apple and Playstation, their focus is so heavily based on retargeting, it’s near impossible to place something in your basket, leave the website, browse Facebook and not see adverts practically bombarding you about the product you looked at. It’s easy to see that when done properly, retargeting enables businesses to grow exponentially.
For businesses who do use retargeting, they experience roughly 10X the engagement with their audience, essentially reducing their cost per conversion and increasing profits.
Facebook retargeting uses the Facebook Pixel. Much like your usual Facebook ads, the pixel is used to ‘cookie’ an individual so you can track their movements across your website, see what pages they’ve visited and products they’ve browsed.
Although Facebook doesn’t provide such granular level of detail per individual user, it will still enable you to target groups of customers who have displayed particular behaviours on your website.
Lets say for example that you run an online fashion brand specialising in Women’s boots. You place your initial adverts to show your new range of outside walking boots and start drawing people to your website. From here, in this example, you get a 3% conversion rate from click to sale. Not bad. However, you may also find when looking at your website analytics, that a further 5% of people placed a product in their basket to check out, but didn’t. This means that although you achieved a fairly standard 3% conversion, you’ve got a further 5% who almost converted, and a further 92% who visited the website, but didn’t purchase anything.
In physical stores, you would have to make do with 3% conversion rate on your marketing budget unless you had a really compelling offer to bring them back. However with retargeting, you can run a new set of adverts for your new audiences. You would look to run an advert for the 92% of people who your website and didn’t buy anything, perhaps with an offer of sorts to entice them back and reconsider purchasing. You would also run a further advert to the 5% who left your website but with an item in their basket – perhaps with free shipping on the product that they were considering buying before, again in an attempt to bring them back and complete the purchase.
As you can see from the example above, you are now able to hyper focus your marketing on the very same audience who you had initially worked hard to bring to your website for the first time.
Further to the individuals who had visited your website from your initial advertising push, you can now create ‘lookalike’ audiences, where further adverts can be shown to individuals with very similar interests to those who first visited your website from clicking your ads.
Retargeting is all about marketing back to customers who didn’t complete a purchase first time around, compounding the number of ‘touch points’ of your product and the user and not losing them into the ether of online stores available to them.
Much like standard ads, retargeting campaigns can be placed at any of the following:
- Mobile News Feed
- Desktop News Feed
- Instant Articles
- Desktop Right Column
- Facebook Video Feeds
- Facebook Video Feeds (Mobile)
- Mobile Marketplace Feed
- Marketplace Category Feed & Details Page
- Facebook Stories
- Facebook Groups Feed
- Instagram Feed
- Instagram Stories
So as you can see, there is no shortage of places where you can recapture your audience’s attention.
In short; everyone who has been cookied via the Facebook Pixel. But this isn’t what we do in any of our campaigns. Before we get in to the reasons why, we’ll list below some of the options you can choose from when looking to retarget your audience:
- Video views by time (3 seconds, 10 seconds, 30 seconds, 1 minute)
- Frequency of website visits
- Recency of last visit
With the above being said, we would look to exclude your current customers from any campaign focused primarily on awareness and acquisition; there is no need to remarket to these individuals as you have already got their details.
Recognition and repetition: It’s a well-known fact that the average person takes between 7 and 12 touchpoints before they recognise a product and engage to purchase. Whether this be print advertising, TV, radio or digital, it’s super rare for someone to see a product just once and purchase it immediately. With Facebook retargeting, you are placing your product, brand and service in front of your most likely customers multiple times, with different touchpoints (if you’re running sever separate ads), and before long, product recognition kicks in. The customer becomes more familiar and eventually purchases.
Retargeting increases engagement and conversion rates by roughly 10X for industries across the board. No longer are you looking to gain more traffic to your website from an array of different people, you are focusing your efforts on those who have previously shown interest and bringing the products that they desire back towards the front of their minds.
Adverts are shown based on user behaviour, which makes their shopping experience so much better. Imagine walking into a shopping mall where all you see are the products that you actually want to buy. No more need for endless browsing – it’s straight to the point.
It doesn’t take a genius to realise what’s a more effective form of advertising: Pushing out an advert to a wider audience once in order to bring them to your website and purchase on first visit, or to generate a new set of adverts to potential customers who already have an affiliation with your brand.
Well, it depends largely on what you’re selling, who you’re targeting, and the quality of your adverts.
Looking at the actual advertising costs, there is little difference in an initial ads campaign vs remarketing campaign if all variables are the same (ad quality score, audience etc), especially on a reach basis. However, it’s when you’re looking at the effectiveness of the campaign per conversion where you really see the differences in financial implications.
Because you’re targeting the same audience with a different message, there is an increased chance of drawing them back to your website with renewed intention to buy from you. From the results that we’ve seen for our clients, we are averaging a 10X increase in sales from retargeting vs original marketing ads.
This may not be the same for all businesses, especially those just starting out on their ads journey, but it’s a likely end-point that you may get to with a series of A/B split testing, product promotion testing and incentivisation testing.
The cost per sale will reduce with effective retargeting, making it a must-use strategy in your overall advertising arsenal.
If you’re looking to embark on your latest retargeting journey, perhaps you’d like to follow our master guide on how to create the ultimate retargeting campaign, packed with real-working campaigns that we have done for our clients. Just follow the link below!
