Top 10 Tips for Facebook Retargeting Ads

The harsh truth of selling online is that approximately 96% of visitors that come to your site are not ready to buy. Rather than being happy with a mere 4% of web traffic, many brands have focused on retargeting those lost visitors. As a top digital marketing firm, we wanted to share our Top 10 Tips for Facebook Retargeting Ads which can greatly aid any brands efforts.

Retargeting should be an important aspect of a well-rounded marketing plan and Facebook is a platform that is ripe for use. Aside from the 2 billion active users, the platform is user-friendly, and retargeting is fairly easy to set up. While many brands do utilize retargeting in their marketing strategy, very few maximize the potential of this powerful tool because they aren’t always aware of the possible ways it can be effectively employed.

What is Retargeting?

Retargeting is where you attempt to place relevant ads in front of website visitors who did not convert on their initial visit to your site. This is done by using the “cookies” that are placed on a browser when they visit. That cookie then allows a business to virtually follow a visitor when they go to other sites and target them with ads on those sites, such as when they visit Facebook.

10 Tips for Facebook Retargeting Ads

1. Understand your audience – It is very important to understand the audience when using retargeting. Are they price sensitive? Do people really need what you are selling or is it filling a want? Is the audience going to react well to something hip or funny? Take the time to dive deep into a target audience and create multiple buyer personas which will then make it easier to craft ads that will be effective for subsets within the target audience.
2. Focus on the headline – You have about 2 seconds to capture the attention of the average Facebook user with something in their feed. It is a bit sad that our attention spans have grown so short, but that is the reality of the social media world we live in. With such a short window that means the headline for ads must be clear, engaging, and convincing which is no small task. By understanding your audience, this task becomes a bit easier.
3. Retarget in a short window – Retargeting should take place in the 10-15 days after a visit and by that we mean multiple touches during that period. Strike when the iron is hot! If a customer has shown interest in your products or services but not converted, then you need to take your best shot before they convert with someone else. An important statistic to remember is that while about half of all web traffic is from mobile users, only about 20% of transactions take place on mobile devices. Often people will shop on a mobile device but then convert later on a desktop. Retargeting serves as a reminder to complete a purchase of something they were interested in.
4. Use an evolving message strategy – The beauty of retargeting is that you have the ability to use constantly changing messages. Rather than using a hammer to smash a window and grab their attention, you can start with a few light taps on the glass to get their attention and then ramp up the messaging. For example, the first ad might be a soft reminder of a product they viewed citing the primary benefits of the product. The next ad might be a reminder for shopping and reflect the great reviews that the product received. After that, the ad might contain a discount coupon or code for free shipping on a limited time.
5. Provide additional customer service – Facebook Messenger Destination Ads offer an interesting way to provide customer service for visitors that might have questions or need assistance. This type of ad encourages connecting to the business and connects them with Facebook Messenger which can then create a conversation with a customer to answer questions, get personal, and sell products or services. These ad types work best within the first week of retargeting but a few days after the initial visit.
6. Find the hesitaters – It can be tricky to find and effectively retarget people who have visited multiple times but have yet to convert. One way to do this is by focusing on specific metrics such as total time on site, or specific pages such as those for pricing, shipping information, return policies, or other FAQs pages and creating an audience group just for them.
7. Look for those who want to learn more – Similar to the hesitaters, those people who have shown interest specifically with learning more should be retargeted. You can create a custom audience based around people who looked at pages focused on features, the About Page, “how to use” or “how it works” and similarly structured pages. If those people need more information to make a decision, then they are close to a conversion.
8. Use Facebook lead ads to get subscribers – Visitors who have not shown interest in retargeting after a week typically are not ready or truly interested in making a purchase, but that does not mean you should forget about them and let them forget about you. By using Facebook lead ads, you can target that segment of visitors with the specific goal of getting them to subscribe to your email list which allows you to connect with them at a later date. This ad type works well because they can subscribe in their Facebook feed without any page redirects.
9. Retarget based on Google or Bing searches – For those who use either Google or Bing ads (or both), you can use Facebook to retarget any visitors who reached your site from a search ad. Even better is that you can retarget with exactly what they were searching for. If a person was searching for ‘Best Baby Diapers’, then the next ad they will see is ‘Purchase the Best Baby Diapers’.
10. Exclude irrelevant visitors – Not all visitors are destined to become customers, no matter how many ads you throw at them. Therefore, it is logical to exclude the irrelevant visitors from your retargeting efforts which saves money in your advertising budget. For example, people that spent an extremely small amount of time on your site, such as 2 seconds on a landing page before bouncing and never returning, are a very low percentage chance to convert so why waste ads on them? By creating audiences based on low time spent or visiting pages such as Career Opportunities and then excluding that audience from your retargeting ads, you will focus on the more relevant visitors.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line is that retargeting is extremely effective when done properly, and sometimes annoying and ineffective when not. Our Top 10 Tips for Facebook Retargeting Ads can help you up your retargeting strategy to increase engagement and clicks which leads to not only a better ROI but also more revenue.

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