I did most of my Christmas shopping online. That gave me many opportunities to be retargeted with Facebook ads. A Facebook ad retargeting campaign isn’t too terribly different from regular Facebook ads in that the audience and creative can really make a difference. If you get that right, you can increase your sales and lower your abandon cart rate. If you get it wrong, you can end up really irritating your buyer. First, let’s go back to basics.
1. What Counts as Retargeting Ad?
A retargeting ad is an ad that you show to a smaller group of people who have previously engaged with your content. Sometimes you show a retargeting ad to someone who visited a specific blog post to introduce them to a related article or offer. Other times, you use a retargeting ad to recapture the attention of someone who looked at your product but didn’t actually buy it. You can use the Facebook pixel to identify those smaller groups of people and collect them into specific audiences.
2. How do I get the right audience for my retargeting ad?
Having the right audience is always important for Facebook ads, but it’s particularly important for Facebook ad retargeting. You want to think of your retargeting audience as having two groups: people who should see the ad, and people who should not see the ad.
People Who Should See the Ad
When you’re running a retargeting ad, you’re trying to show an ad to a group of people who looked at your product, but didn’t actually buy it. You want to remind them about your product in the hope that they will go back and look at your product again, and this time, buy it. You create a retargeting audience by using the Facebook pixel to collect all of the people who visited the product page. So the first audience you need is this group of people who visited the product page.
People Who Should Not See the Ad
Once you’ve collected all of the people who visited the product page, you usually want to exclude anyone who purchased the product. If they already own the product, you don’t need to show them an ad inviting them to purchase the product again. There are, of course, exceptions. Sometimes there are products that people purchase more than once. Sometimes you show the ad to happy customers in the hope that they will comment on the ad about how great the product is. But generally speaking, You only want to show a retargeting ad to people who did not purchase the product you are promoting the first time.
This means you have to collect all of the people who did purchase the product. It’s easy to collect those people with a pixel placed on a thank you page. If you redirect everyone who purchases your product to thank you page, you can create an audience of people who purchased your product. Then you add this audience to your retargeting ad as an exclusion audience. You tell Facebook, “Show this ad to everyone who landed on the product page. EXCEPT, don’t show it to this group of people who landed on the thank you page, because I know they already purchased the product.”
3. Write copy that suits the scenario.
Retargeting ad copy should be different from a regular Facebook ad copy. Often, your initial Facebook ad is shown to a cold audience. This means it’s shown to people who are just being introduced to your product. When you run a retargeting ad, you’re showing the ad to people who have already looked at your product but didn’t actually purchase it. That’s why it’s helpful to write copy that is very specific. You can acknowledge the fact that the person seeing the ad may have visited your product page. However, you have to be careful about making assumptions about where this person is on their customer journey.
“Did you forget something?” works great if you’re serving your ad to people who have added your product to their shopping cart and then left it. It’s not the best copy for someone who just visited your landing page but wasn’t at the stage where they were close to purchasing. It feels presumptuous and is maybe even a little off-putting. Good retargeting copy addresses the fact that the customer is now familiar with your brand, but doesn’t feel too pushy.
I love this retargeting ad from Simple Pin Media. It acknowledged the fact that I’d been to the course landing
4. Don’t overserve your ad.
Retargeting audiences are by very nature much, much smaller than traditional audiences. Once you start working with retargeting audiences on Facebook, you have to pay much closer attention to how often people are seeing your ad. If you over-serve your ad, people will see it so often that they become irritated by it and you could risk losing potential customers.
Facebook has a metric call “frequency” that you can use to monitor this. The frequency number is the average number of times each person in your audience has seen your ad. People have different opinions about how high you should let your frequency number get. Some people think 2 is too high. Some people think 5 is too high. Once an ad his a frequency of 2, I start paying closer attention to overall ad performance. If general ad performance is seeming to drop off and the frequency is higher, I will turn off the audience.
Retargeting ads are some of my most favorite kinds of ads to run.
I love being able to create such precise audiences using the Facebook pixel. If you’d like to experiment with them for your next campaign, I can help. I can coach you through running your own retargeting campaign or I can do the campaign for you. Book a free 30-minute call and we can talk about how a retargeting ad could look for your business.
Are you still just trying to wrap your brain around Facebook audiences in general? My free audience creation mini-guide could help. Go here to grab a copy.
