What is Facebook retargeting?
Facebook retargeting is when a user visits your website and doesn’t purchase (usually 98% of first time visitors) they are ‘cookied’ or tagged. To retarget these visitors, a code is placed on the page that the user visits, which then triggers your ads to follow that cookied user around the web, whether that be on a social media site or on various websites across the internet.
Facebook retargeting works similar to Google Ads retargeting, but rather than showing your ads across websites within the Display Network, your ads are shown on Facebook. Facebook also more commonly refers to retargeting as ‘custom audiences’.
Why utilize Facebook retargeting?
With Facebook’s active monthly user base larger than China’s population, and 22 billion ad clicks per year, the opportunities to gain more business through Facebook ads are endless, and there’s no better way to start than with familiar faces.
If someone has already visited your site, downloaded your e-book, or engaged with your app, the chances of them interacting with your ad and purchasing from your brand are much higher than if they saw your brand for the first time on Facebook. In fact, Facebook retargeting ads get 3X the engagement more than regular Facebook ads.
How to use Facebook retargeting
When someone visits your site or interacts with your brand, they’re tagged with a code you implement to track them, and then while they’re scrolling through their Facebook feed your ad pops up to remind them what they’re missing.
There are actually a few different options for Facebook retargeting, including customer lists, website traffic, app activity and offline activity.
1. Website traffic
This is the option of retargeting that you’re likely most familiar with, which will serve ads to people who have visited your site within a set time frame. We suggest re-targeting audiences for website visitors at 7, 14, 30, 60, 90, 180 days and similar for engagement on Facebook and Instagram pages
Once you’ve placed a Facebook pixel on all pages of your site, you can set up specific audiences with filters based on pages they’ve visited. For instance, if you sell running gear, but you want your Facebook ads to target people searching for sneakers, then you can set up an audience that shows ads to just people who have visited pages with the keyword “sneakers” in the URL.
2. Customer list
Perhaps one the most powerful tools Facebook has to offer is the ability to serve personalized ads to a list of contacts you’ve already acquired. With customer lists, Facebook ads becomes more like email marketing by targeting specific people with personalized messages. Whether it be email addresses, phone numbers, or even Facebook user IDs, you can pull a list of contacts from your CRM or wherever your customer data is stored, upload it directly to Facebook, and target people with ads that are relevant to where they are within your sales funnel.
3. App activity
You can target based on app activity. If you have an established app this is typically a good option and there are multiple ways to show relevant ads to the right people based on user behavior. For instance when someone abandons a shopping cart within your app you could target them with the same product and a special discount code. You can reach people who have recently opened your app, recently completed a purchase (to upsell), or achieved a certain level in a game.
4. Offline activity
This is another type of custom audience, which allows you to retarget the people who interacted with your business offline, that is ‘create a list of the people who interacted with your business in-store, by phone, or through other offline channels’.
