What is Facebook Dynamic Retargeting?

WHAT?

Facebook dynamic retargeting ads can be utilized to promote relevant products to shoppers who have already expressed some level of interest in the product. It would target one of three types of people:

1. People who’ve visited the product
2. People who’ve added an item to cart but abandoned it
3. People who’ve purchased something

Then the person would later be advertised that same product with creative + copy specific to them. “Try {product.name} at home – now’s your chance!”

WHY?

The benefit is that the advertisement is more personalized with keywords, images, and data from the product catalogue to someone who has already expressed some interest. Each advertisement is unique to each person which is the key part of dynamic retargeting. Dynamic retargeting enhances capability to target audiences directly on their behavior, increasing advertisement relevancy score and improving cpm for the advertisement.

HOW?

The first step to implementing dynamic retargeting on your advertisements is develop a product catalog that holds the most recent ID, Product Name, Link, Description, etc. for each product within your company. This product catalog can be updated as often or as little as you feel necessary and you can choose what items in your feed you would like to track.

Next decide which audience you want to track. Now this is different from the type of audiences you normally create in Facebook advertisements. Instead of targeting people based on demographic or interest, dynamic retargeting focuses in on people who have interacted with your company’s website (or mobile app). Audiences can be crafted around these pixels: search, view category, view certain content, added to cart, or purchased. (Pro-tip: “The Facebook pixel is a piece of JavaScript code for your website that enables you to measure, optimize and build audiences for your ad campaigns.” – Facebook) Once you decide what you’d like to track, place the modified Facebook pixel on your website.

In order to really hack into the benefits of dynamic retargeting, you need to associate the different actions tracked by the Facebook pixel with different templates of copy + creatives. Facebook assigns keywords like {{product.name}} to be dynamic to the exact product that the person interacted with. So an example unique copy would be “ {{product.name}} is made for you!” The templates can be unique images based on behavior, unique copy based on which person you’re targeting, can highlight the exact product the person previously looked at or even a similar product.

The final step is to test to see what works and what doesn’t. Play around with copy, creatives, tracking, etc. to find your company’s secret juice.

TL;DR

Steps For Implementing on your Facebook Ads:

1. Create dynamic product catalog
   1. The product catalog is a XML/CSV that holds the most recent ID, Product Name, Link, Description, etc. for each product within the whole site
      1. It’s created through the business manager
      2. https://developers.facebook.com/docs/marketing-api/dynamic-product-ads/product-catalog
         1. Use code within the website to create catalog
         2. Set up feed, labeling what you want to track
         3. Define how often the feed is updated, so it’s always the most recent products featured
2. Set audience you want to track
   1. Place the Facebook pixel on your website (or app events if you have an app) and modify it to report when product IDs from your catalog are being viewed, added to cart, and purchased.
   2. Audience crafted around these pixels
      1. Search
      2. View Category
      3. View Content
      4. Add To Cart
      5. Purchase
3. Associate actions above with different templates of copy – examples:
   1. Unique images based on results
   2. Unique copy based on which person you’re targeting
   3. Highlight the exact product the person previously looked at OR a similar product
4. Test to see what works and what doesn’t