Facebook Retargeting: An Easy Guide to Boost Online Growth
Updated on November 1, 2022 in Marketing by Alifiya Mustafa
Facebook is a fantastic place to connect with people, talk to your friends, find opportunities, and grow your business. Started with an aim to just create a digital social place where people can meet more people, Facebook has easily become a wonderful place for brands to gain engagement from their buyers.
Online stores can now market their products, target their audience, and promote the brands that ultimately help them improve eCommerce sales with the help of Facebook retargeting.
If you believe that your visitors are going to turn into buyers as soon as you bring them to your website, then, I can bet that you must be an amateur. As per Episerver, More than 90% of first-time visitors are not going to buy anything from your eCommerce store.
If you are an experienced eCommerce business owner, then you must be familiar with this fact. To make sure that the customers buy from you, you must make sure that you are engaged with them on a regular basis.
The shoppers need to be familiar with you and should easily recognize you so that they buy from you. But, how do you do that? That’s where Facebook retargeting comes into play.
There are currently more than 2.6 billion monthly active users on Facebook which makes it a perfect confluence where the brands meet shoppers in the best possible way.
In this article, I’ll be explaining some simple ways of how you can leverage Facebook retargeting for your eCommerce business. This will not only help you gain more customers and increase sales, but it will also make sure that you retain those customers too. Now, let’s begin.
What is Facebook Retargeting?
Consider remarketing as revisiting your customers. You meet them on your website and now you decide to revisit them so that they don’t forget about you once they leave your site. So what you do is that you choose Facebook retargeting for the purpose.
Simply, you revisit your customers over Facebook in the form of Facebook ads. Facebook also calls remarketing a ‘Custom Audience’. When a shopper visits your site or interacts with your brand, they’re tagged with a code that you can use to track them.
Now, when those customers are using Facebook on their device, your ads simply pops-up to remind them again of you.
This way, your customers stay in constant touch with you. Thus, when they’re thinking about buying a product relevant to your brand – you’re always on their list to shop from. So that’s Facebook retargeting.
For example, a customer landed on your site while looking for baking equipment and left. With the help of cookies, your site recorded their actions. Soon after, if you’ve invested in Facebook ads, these ads (of the relevant products) will be shown to them while they’re scrolling through their Facebook feeds.
Facebook retargeting in a nutshell:
- A shopper comes to your site
- Thanks to cookies, they’re placed in a specific audience segment based on the action they or (or didn’t take)
- They’re tagged with a tracking code
- Soon, your ads will start to be displayed to this shopper on Facebook and the platforms that you’ve partnered with.
Is Facebook Retargeting Really Effective?
When the remarketing first started, it kind of freaked the people out. It was like Facebook was reading their minds! That is indeed creepy.
However, the regular retargeting campaigns by the brands made Facebook retargeting a pretty obvious and even, well-accepted strategy.
Let’s face it, you can’t stay ahead of the eCommerce competition without Facebook marketing strategies. Nowadays, people have started expecting brands to display commercials specifically designed and tailored to their needs and interests.
They pretty much want the brands to retarget them. As per Adlucent:
- More than 70% of the shoppers prefer personalized ads
- More than 85% believe that personalized ads mean unique and fresh content based on their past purchases and current needs.
- In fact, 44% of the shoppers are willing to provide brands with their personal information like name, email, address, product preferences, etc. so that they can receive more personalized ads.
If we look at the statistics collected by Wishpond:
The CTR of retargeted ads is 10 times better than the displayed ads
Retargeting helps to convert 26% of the abandoned cart customers
Now, if we look at the data specifically presented for Facebook retargeting, we can see that:
- 44% of the shoppers purchasing decisions are influenced by the ads seen on social media
- 26% of the FB users who click on the ads end up making a purchase
- More than 60% of marketers believe that Facebook is the best platform for marketing
Now, I am sure that you must be convinced why Facebook marketing is effective. Now, that’s one thing to know. But at the same time, it’s important to know why Facebook retargeting is so effective.
Facebook collects tons of data about your customers. From online behaviors to demographics to interests, you gain fruitful information that you can utilize to retarget your audience for specific products based on their needs.
Furthermore, Facebook ads are slightly cheaper than Google Ads. Also, where Google will display the ads on the product searched, Facebook is more focused on displaying the ads the customers are gonna like and what they want to see.
Effectiveness of Facebook retargeting in a nutshell:
Facebook retargeting enables you to display highly relevant ads to the specific target audience in a cost-efficient manner.
Easy Guide for Facebook Retargeting For eCommerce
Now that you’re through with what Facebook retargeting is and why is it so effective, let’s learn about how you can start your first Facebook retargeting campaign.
The warm-up
If you’re completely new to Facebook marketing and have no clue about how to use it for your eCommerce business growth, then there are 3 major things you’ll need to do.
1. Create your FB business page
2. Create an ad account with your business manager account
3. Create a product catalog that you wish to promote through FB
It’s pretty easy to do it once you go to Facebook Business as it walks you through it. If not, then I’d highly recommend you read ‘How to sell on Facebook’ for step-by-step instructions.
1. Install Facebook Pixel
The ‘pixel’ is basically the code that you’ll need to put on your website that connects your site to your Facebook Business Page. This automatically interchanges the data of your customers collected on both platforms.
This is the step that will allow you to begin your Facebook retargeting campaign in the first place.
How to set up Pixel for FB remarketing?
- To set up pixel for your Facebook retargeting, follow these steps:
- Go to your Ads Manager page within your FB business account
- Go to Business Settings → Click Data Sources → Click +Add button
- Enter the name of your pixel
- Enter your website URL (optional)
- Hit Continue/Set Up Now
Once you’re done with the steps, you’ll have the option of assigning the Pixel to a particular Ad account if you have more than one.
Now, you’ll require to install the Pixel on your website. If you’re integrated with a third party, click ‘Use and Integration or Tag Manager’ and follow the instructions as it guides.
2. Create a Custom Audience
As mentioned, the main reason for utilizing Facebook retargeting is to target a specific audience within the overall individuals base and present them with the marketing content that is specially tailored just for them.
On this page, click on ‘Create Audience’ within your Business account.
Current Customers
The best would be to start with your current customer base as you start Facebook retargeting. After clicking ‘Create a Custom Audience’, click ‘Customer File’.
Now, you’ll simply need to copy and paste your customers’ email addresses that you wish to target. Facebook will automatically cross-check if those emails are linked with any of the Facebook accounts. Thus, make sure that you’re using the email addresses that are also associated with your customers’ FB accounts.
Beginning with your current customers is an amazing way to lay the foundation for your Facebook retargeting strategy for your eCommerce store.
Website Custom Audience
From here on, things get a little deeper.
The aim of creating a Website Custom Audience is to segregate your audience based on actions they’ve taken on your site.
Here’s a list of potential actions to choose from:
- Visited site
- Time spent over a certain period of time
- Specific page visits
- The specific search term used
- Product added to cart
- Specific product purchased
- Abandoned cart
While you may begin by defining just one single parameter for your Facebook retargeting to your audiences, you’ll have the option of combining up to 5. This will enable you to design ultra-specific audiences in the future.
Engagement Custom Audience
Just as the above option, you get to create a custom audience based on customers’ actions in context to your FB content.
Here’s a list from which you can choose your target audience:
Once you choose the above options, you can even do the deeper segmentation. As:
Once again, you can choose multiple categories to narrow down your custom audience for Facebook retargeting strategy.
For example, you can create the audience who have visited your post as well as saved it, and so on.
Lookalike Audience
Till now, you’ve targeted the audience who have engaged with your brand in one way or the other through the Facebook retargeting campaign. Now, if you’re needing to spread brand awareness, you’ll want to consider creating Lookalike Audiences.
As you can get from its name, Lookalike Audiences are those who share the same interests in some way as the audiences that you’ve already defined.
The things that you’d like to match would be:
- Age
- Gender
- Profession
- Location
For the record, Facebook provides the following guidelines for creating Lookalike Audiences:
- The Lookalike Audience will just include people from the countries/country you select during creation.
- Your source audience must have at least 100 people from one single country in order for us (FB) to use it as the basis for a Lookalike Audience.
- You can create up to five hundred Lookalike Audiences from a single source audience.
- Users in your source audience will be excluded from your Lookalike Audience unless you use a Pixel as your source audience.
- You can use more than one Lookalike Audiences at the same time for a single ad set. The ad set will target your ads to users who are included in any of the selected Lookalike Audiences
3. Create your first FB Retargeting campaign
Once you have at least one Custom Audience create, you’ll be all set to create your first Facebook retargeting campaign.
Go back to your FB Business Page’s homepage. Now, click ‘Create an Ad’ located at the top-right corner of your screen.
You’ll be staring at the screen that’ll look like this:
From here, FB will guide you through the creation of your Facebook retargeting campaign, allowing you to design things like:
- Target audience
- The placement of your ad
- Ad budget
- Ad scheduling
Additionally, FB will walk you through the best practices for implicating them. It will also provide you an estimation regarding the reach of a given ad as well as the number of conversions you might expect from the ads.
Now, you’ll be allowed to choose the ad format in which you want it to be displayed. These ads will be shown within your target audiences’ FB feeds.
- To generate traffic — Page Post Link or Video Ad
- To increase traffic and enhance engagement — Page Like Ads, Page Post Photo Ads, Page Post video ads
- To generate sales — Carousel Ads, Collection Ads, Canvas Ads, Dynamic Product Ads
4. Set up Ad Spend and Bids
Similar to Google Ads, you’ll be required to bid for better visibility when using the Facebook retargeting strategy to grow your eCommerce sales.
Make sure that you keep the expected ROI in mind and do not end up spending too much. Keep your investment balanced with your ROI.
Once your FB ad goes lice, there are 3 major factors that’ll determine whether FB will present it to your targeted audience:
1. Bid size
With no doubt, you’ll have to beat your competitors in bidding. You can also run automatic bidding by setting up a maximum limit of bids for a given campaign.
2. Predicted action rates
FB’s algorithm analyzes a given to estimate how it will perform in front of a given audience. An ad that seems to be highly relevant and engaging will be given a better boost over its competition.
3. Level of engagement
The more your Facebook retargeting ads are shown, the more data Facebook will have in context to how many people have engaged with it. The more individuals engage with your ads, the more valuable they’ll appear in the eyes of Facebook’s algorithms.
In a way, you might need to spend a little more initially to gain engagement. Once your ads gain enough engagement to be well-considered by FB, you may lower your investment later.
Now that you’ve gained all the knowledge on how you can run your Facebook retargeting campaign, you may begin with your launch. Depending on your specific campaign goal, you’ll be allowed to choose between being charged per click, conversion, or impression.
- For generating brand awareness — You’ll just have the option to be charged per thousand impressions
- For generating traffic — You’ll have the option to pick between paying for impressions or clicks
- For generating conversions — You may pick for paying between impressions, clicks, or actual conversions
Dos and Don’ts of FB Retrageting
Before I close this article, I just want you to know a few tips and tricks, and warnings for how you can leverage Facebook retargeting for your eCommerce development.
1. Keep it small and simple
As explained, you may create your custom audiences based on up to 5 on-site/channel actions or inactions. But, it’d be a better idea to start small here and keep it simple.
Hence, focus on individual campaigns targeting those who perform a single action on your website or FB page. Along with this, run a separate Facebook retargeting campaign based on another factor.
For example, you may run one campaign targeting abandoned cart customers and another focusing on those who are just scrolling through a specific page.
While doing this, you’ll be better able to understand how Facebook retargeting works. Once you have a much deeper knowledge, you may start being ‘creative’ and come up with custom campaigns with multiple factors.
2. Beware of customer overlapping
When you create custom audiences for your Facebook retargeting campaign, it is bound to happen that your similar customers will be falling under the number of categories created. It isn’t necessary that all your campaigns will contain all the different customers.
When customer overlapping happens, you run the risk of displaying multiple ads, each relevant to a different action that applies to them. This can cause Ad fatigue to your customers.
Not just you run the risk of frustrating them with too many ads, but every applicable Facebook retargeting ad will end up competing for visibility from this consumer against one another.
To lower down the chances of this happening, you’ll need to analyze your Audience Overlap from time to time.
If you see that 2 or more individuals are VERY similar, you might want to merge them into one. There’s no sense in creating 2 different ads for two different sections where one ad will do just fine.
Another way to avoid this is to notice if there’s an overlap that is not usual and has no too close similarity. You may want to specify these segments in a deeper way.
With this, you may closely observe these metrics:
- The number of times the ad is displayed
- The number of actions your customers take after seeing the ad
- The number of times your customers clicked your Ad’s CTA against the number of impressions the ad generated.
Usually, you’re likely to see a downfall in your CTR as your members get ‘tired’ of seeing your ads too many times. As a result, you may want to decrease the number of times an ad is shown to an individual.
3. Don’t just run after the sale
Remember, Facebook retargeting isn’t just about gaining sales and more sales. If you constantly irritate your customers by forcing them to see your ad and purchase things, you’ll easily lose their interest, get blocked, and lose credibility.
There is more you can do with your Facebook retargeting strategy. As explained, you may choose to spread awareness, gain engagement, and more.
Hence, Don’t go all crazy with Dynamic Product Ad and rather create something that focuses on something else too.
Facebook images source: GrowCode
Finishing up
The Facebook retargeting strategy is a great way to improve your sales, gain engagement, and improve your brand visibility. There are ways to achieve your goal and reach your target audience.
Facebook retargeting enables you to achieve targeted audiences in much refined and simpler ways. You may just follow this easy and informative guide to leverage Facebook marketing for your eCommerce growth.
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