If you’re active on Facebook and have recently browsed through the newsfeed, you’re definitely familiar with Facebook retargeting but might not even be aware of it!
Marketers are currently reaching users in a strategic fashion by using Facebook to retarget visitors who’ve been to their site. The result is a low cost per acquisition and a high ROI for businesses. Let’s walk through a scenario of this native form of advertising to give you a better idea about how it works.
An Introduction to Facebook Retargeting
One evening you decide to visit Nordstrom.com and are looking for a pair of “7 for all mankind” jeans but decide not to make an online purchase at the moment. Ironically, over next 14 days, while browsing through Facebook, you take note of ads in the newsfeed and the right-hand column with images of those exact jeans and a special pricing offer. (Raise your hand if this has happened to you.)
What Nordstrom was able to do was place a tracking pixel on the specific product page for “7 for all mankind” jeans. The pixel that their developer placed on the product page knows that the user has not yet made a purchase. They then had their graphic designer create imagery and their creative department came up with advertising copy that gets served to people on Facebook who drop off of this page. Lastly, they have analytics and conversion tracking installed to make sure that when someone makes the purchase, it can be attributed to the display retargeting campaign.
This may sound complex but this post outlines the beginner’s guide to setting up a retargeting campaign on Facebook to help anyone learn how to set up a Facebook retargeting campaign.
Whether you run an e-commerce website or B2B business, Facebook retargeting will help keep your brand top of mind for customers who’ve shown interest in your company.
My Background
In addition to implementing these types of campaigns for e-commerce clients, my agency, The Media Captain, has implemented Facebook retargeting for a variety of different business, such as a dental practice, a law firm and an apartment community in Charlotte. Overall, we’ve seen an amazing cost per acquisition which has helped convert both organic and paid traffic! Even if you’re a beginner, there’s no reason not to get started with a Facebook retargeting campaign, and the return on investment, in our experience, has been tremendous.
How to Set Up a Facebook Retargeting Campaign:
Step 1: Go to your Facebook ads manager and click audiences on the left side of the screen.
You’ll want to make sure you’re logged in to your Facebook account and have properly set-up an advertiser account.
Step 2: Click create audience on the top right side of the screen.
There will also be an option for “Lookalike Audience” but since we’re focusing on retargeting, we’re going to stay away from that.
Step 3: Select custom audience from your website.
In the image below you’ll want to click on the last option, although you’ll start to see that there are other neat options when it comes to custom audiences!
Step 4: Copy the code that appears and follow the on-screen instructions to paste it into your website code.
If you don’t have development skills, you can simply copy and paste this code and send it to your developer. It shouldn’t take your developer more than 15-20 minutes to implement onto your website.
After you properly implement this pixel onto the pages of your site that you want to remarket to, you’ll need to complete the following steps listed below.
- Make sure that the imagery and messaging of the advertisement you create for the remarketing campaign entices people to re-visit your website
- Properly set-up conversion tracking in Google Analytics so you can monitor all of the conversions, average time on site from this campaign, bounce rate, etc.
- Bid in a strategic manner so this form of advertising will yield a return on investment.
You’ll need to spend some more time to come up with creative and copy for your new retargeting campaign, but the steps above show you how to set up Facebook retargeting for your site. Once the code is in place, Facebook will begin to create custom audiences of people who’ve visited your site or have visited specific pages. You can then set up ads to target each of those custom audiences with the right ad for each group.
As we’ve already written about before, Facebook retargeting is a must-have strategy for 2015. It helps bring both organic and paid visitors back to your website after they drop off and ultimately converts more of your traffic. If implemented properly, Facebook retargeting will yield a low cost per acquisition and will help build brand awareness for your business. I highly recommend giving it a try and seeing how it can help your business grow in 2015.
Author
Jason Parks is the owner of The Media Captain, a Digital Marketing Agency based out of Columbus, Ohio, that offers online advertising, SEO, social media, web development, and video production services.
