How to Retarget On Facebook (& Grow Your Business)

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Wondering what the heck retargeting is? Or how to retarget on Facebook? Want to Learn how to target on Facebook, and bring visitors back to turn them into customers? Learn more 👇

Retargeting is a powerful tool that allows you to reach potential customers who have visited your website but haven’t made a purchase. It’s a cost-effective way to increase conversions on your website, while also generating more revenue for your business.

In this blog post, we will discuss the following:

Benefits of Retargeting

How Facebook Retargeting Works

Steps for Retargeting Campaigns on Facebook

Let’s go:

Benefits of Retargeting

More than 80% of your customers visit your website and leave without taking any action. They just read.

They come. They leave. Most never come back.

Given that you work so hard to try to get traffic to your website, this is almost being careless with your business.

Retargeting helps you:

  • It’s even more effective than classic advertising or PPC campaigns when it comes to conversion rates.
  • You can show someone a product on your website and then follow them around the web with ads until they buy it from you or another retailer. Retargeting is like old-fashioned in-person salesmanship but, instead of being limited by geographic location, the seller has a global audience at their fingertips.
  • Make your website (and hence business) more accountable
  • Build a database of valuable leads and prospects that you can follow up with in the future
  • Find new customers through social media campaigns. By retargeting, you have access to people who might not know about your product or service but are interested in what they see. Once these potential customers visit your website, you can then retarget to them.
  • Retargeting success stories show that retargeting outperforms traditional marketing strategies and is a must for all businesses who want to succeed in this digital age.

Learn How To Retarget On Facebook

Retargeting works thanks to the Facebook Pixel. Once you place the Facebook pixel (the base code) and event codes (highly recommended), Facebook tracks, maintains, and builds audiences on the Facebook platform.

When you do retargeting ads, you are specifically targeting to these audiences (and not everyone on Facebook).

While you create the audiences, Facebook builds them according to the parameters you set.

Facebook Retargeting is an effective way to reach your target audience because it’s personalized and has a strong return on investment.

The Facebook Ads Manager platform allows you to create ads that are optimized for one of four audiences: people who like our page; people who have interacted with your website in the past, such as by visiting another website or watching a video; people who live in a certain location, such as a zip code or country; and everybody else (called “custom audiences”).

There are four ways to retarget on Facebook.

  • Simple or Complex audiences: You can create an ad that only shows up for users who have visited your website but never bought anything from you. You can target everyone who visits your website or those that follow certain URL paths (such as those who read your blog posts, check out your pricing page, and then exit).
  • Lookalike audiences: Create “sets” of completely new people similar to the “audiences” you create (such as website visitors, email subscribers, customers, and more). This is called a “lookalike audience” and will include people who are similar to your website visitors (Facebook finds these audiences for you, based on the mind-blowing data they have available).
  • Other audiences: You can also build specific audience sets such as email subscribers, past customers, people who watch your videos, your Facebook fan page followers, Instagram followers, and more.

Basic Steps For Retargeting On Facebook

The first step is to build your audiences on Facebook. While Facebook builds these audiences for you, planning ahead and thinking about these audiences is extremely important to get your campaigns right. Learn how to build audiences, creating retargeting campaigns, build creative ad content that just works, and learn how to measure the effectiveness of your retargeting campaigns on Facebook.

Total Time: 1 day

Build your audience

The first step for retargeting is to build your audience. After you add the Facebook pixel to your website, Facebook automatically starts building an audience for you.

Once your audience size is big enough (doesn’t have to be too big), you can start using these audiences for retargeting campaigns

Create your campaign

Your retargeting campaigns shouldn’t be the “same” as your regular paid ad campaigns (although retargeting campaigns are also paid ads).

As for campaign creation, you’ll follow the exact steps that you’d take to create normal PPC campaigns (except that the audiences you choose are specific and the ads (design, copy, and landing pages) are more targeted as well.

Build creative ad content

For your ad content, address your potential visitors, customers, or audiences directly (depending on what they do on your site and the types of audiences you build).

Assume that you have a lead magnet that you normally give away (and this marks the start of your funnel). People visit, read your blog, but don’t sign up.

Create specific ads to have your visitors come back and sign up for the free lead magnet (could be an online course, a discount coupon, an eBook, a white paper, a PDF checklist, or whatever it is that you give away).

Let’s say that your ads are created to bring back visitors to your product pages who “viewed” didn’t add to cart or purchase.

You’d then create ads to specific have people come back to complete the purchase. Now, you’ll have to “entice” those people who just left. For eCommerce (includes services, digital products, paid videos, online courses, and memberships), use a discount coupon (use it strategically) to have people take interest in your offer.

Test your campaigns

Since you never know which of the combinations above actually work (just being creative or confident isn’t enough), split testing (or A/B testing) is a good way to measure the efficacy of your campaigns.

Facebook has a built-in tool (right where you create ad campaigns) for A/B testing your ad variations.
Build out ad sets (with ads in pairs within each ad set) to start testing your campaigns as they run.
Collect data, analyze your campaigns, and tweak (or make changes) as needed.

Note: For taking any decisions based on A/B testing, you’ll need considerable data. You can’t make decisions based on 100 visits or 3 sales. Please keep your tests going for long enough for the data to gain enough statistical significance.

Interested in learning more?

Sign up for the complete course on [Pre-launch] Retargeting course (covering retargeting tactics, campaign creation, and the exact steps to take on major platforms such as Facebook and Google).

Bonus: Also learn how to use Adroll for Retargeting campaigns.

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