Why You Should Use Facebook Retargeting Ads

If you’re not running retargeting ads, you’re leaving money on the table. Facebook retargeting ads are one of the most effective ways to promote your business on social media. Retargeting ads drive highly qualified traffic to your website and tend to have a larger return on investment than traditional ads for our clients. There’s a multitude of reasons for using retargeting ads:

• Serving “like campaigns” to people who have viewed content on your website.
• Advertising sales and promotions to people who have browsed your site.
• Serving “app install” campaigns to people who visited your site without downloading your mobile app.
• Reminding people to complete their order after visiting the payment information page without purchasing.

These are only a few of the ways that you can utilize retargeting ads to grow your digital marketing sales. You can get very creative with these types of campaigns. The best part is that you can get started with them immediately if the Facebook conversion pixel is installed on your website. The conversion pixel will drop a cookie in the browser of anybody that views content on your website. After visiting your site, a user will immediately become eligible to be served your ads on Facebook. 

How to Create Facebook Retargeting Ads

One of my first tasks involving Facebook retargeting ads at Marketing Supply Company was helping an emerging furniture startup become profitable with Facebook ads. Their ads seemed to be targeting the right people and they were getting highly relevant website visitors. Despite this, they weren’t profitable before retargeting. 

This is because a lot of customers don’t purchase your goods or services on their first website visit. Sometimes it can take quite a few visits before an actual conversion takes place. If you don’t remind them about your business, they may forget about it or find a different business. This is why retargeting ads are so great. There isn’t a more relevant audience to target with your ads than the people who have already shown interest in your product.

As soon as the task of optimizing their ad strategy was presented to me, I immediately created retargeting audiences for them once the conversion pixel was installed. I created these audiences using their website traffic by going to the “Audiences” tab in the ad manager and then selecting the “Website Traffic” option.

I set it up so that anybody who visited a page on their website for a specific product was served an ad promoting that product. To do this I created a custom audience for each product page on their website. I also created a custom audience for all of their website visitors so that I’d easily be able to promote any sales or promotions they run in the future.

Beyond selecting which pages trigger a user to be entered into a retargeting audience, you can set the timeframe in which that user is eligible to be served retargeting ads as well. For instance, if somebody visited a specific page on my website and I set the window of time to 30 days, they’d be included in my retargeting audience for 30 days. After 30 days they would no longer be served my retargeting ads unless they visited the page again.

It’s a good idea to split test different audience timeframe windows. Every business has a different audience and there’s no way to be sure of which window is optimal for your customers until you test it. Some may become irrelevant quicker than others, I’ve heard of people having success with 7 day to 120 day retargeting windows depending on their strategy and product.

After we built up the retargeting audiences and then began serving ads to them, their Facebook ads went from not profitable to highly profitable within a couple months. We installed the pixel halfway through December. All of their most successful campaigns were retargeting campaigns and the ROI on them was great!

If done correctly, your retargeting ads can be very low cost and profitable as well. If you don’t have the time to learn Facebook ads, then you should consider reaching out to a digital marketing agency! I’d recommend Marketing Supply Company.