What is Facebook retargeting and why does it matter?

Facebook retargeting allows you to re-engage people who have shown an interest in your Viralstyle campaigns. This can range from clicking on your ad to actions with a buying intent like clicking Add to Cart.

You’ve already learned how to create a custom audience based on your traffic and If you’re running ads and are not running retargeting ads of any kind, you’re probably missing out on potential sales.

It’s the highest ROI advertising activity

Retargeting as a form of advertising can quickly pay off and produce a healthy ROI, since you’re only reaching people who have already shown interest in your brand and are therefore more likely to convert.

Considering the fact that only 2% of website visitors convert during the initial visit, retargeting can help you bring back a portion of the 98% who left without doing the thing that you wanted them to do—typically, buying something.

Retargeting gets higher clickthrough rates

• The average click-through rate (CTR) for retargeting ads is 0.7%, 10 times better than the CTR of regular display ads.
• A well-defined mobile retargeting strategy gets triple the results per dollar spent and increases CTR by up to 48%

Retargeting gets more conversions, too

• A study found that retargeting increased the conversion rate of ecommerce customer service businesses by 128% and financial services businesses by 147%.
• Retargeting increases the chances of converting visitors into buyers by 70%.

Implement your Facebook retargeting strategy

Dynamic Product Ads for Facebook retargeting on autopilot

The power of dynamic ads is the ability to automatically craft the perfect ad for the right person. It works using data recorded from the Facebook Pixel to analyze the behavior of visitors and what they interact with on your website. It then matches other users with similar profiles and curates personalized ads gathered from that info.

Here are the four simple requirements needed to get your dynamic ads up and running on the Facebook platform:

Event Tracking

The first step begins with assigning events that the Pixel will monitor and collect data from to create dynamic ads. This can include typical events (view content, add to cart, checkout, purchase, etc) or custom ones depending on your needs.

Product Feed

Next, download your dynamic product ad feed from Viralstyle and upload it to Facebook. This info will be used to supply your product catalog.

Product Catalog

To create your catalog, head over to the “Catalog Manager” in the business manager section and select “E-commerce.” You’ll be able to add products with the “Use Data Feeds” feature that updates your listings on a scheduled basis if your inventory regularly changes.

Launch Dynamic Ad

For the final step, select “Catalog Sales” as a campaign objective in the Ads Manager. Then create a product set at the ad set level which will be used to display products throughout your campaign.

Once in the audience selection, select ‘Define a broad audience and let Facebook optimize who sees your products’ in order to reach a new audience. On the other hand if your goal is to target previous visitors, choose ‘Use info from your Pixel or app to create a retargeting audience’.

Be sure to explore the ‘Show Advanced Options’ menu where you’ll be able to refine your audience targeting, optimize for event type, ad format, etc. Voila – now you’re ready to launch your dynamic ads campaign.

How to build a retargeting strategy that scales

The goal of creating a retargeting strategy is to set up your campaigns in a way that allows you to scale your positive returns and convert more prospects into customers.

The best retargeting strategy requires focusing equal parts on targeting the right audiences and using the right creative. Once you have both elements working in tandem you can be assured that every potential customer is being served the right advertisement at the right moment.

Creating retargeting audiences

After adding your Facebook pixel to your Shopify store, you will be able to create “custom audiences” in the Audience section of the Facebook Ads Manager, which are made up of people who have engaged with you on social media or taken certain actions on your website.

Here you can create audiences based on the following credentials:

• People who engaged with your brand on Facebook and/or Instagram
• People who visited your website
• People who spent a certain amount of time on your website
• People who visited specific pages of your website
• People who viewed a product (called “viewed content”)
• People who added a product to their cart
• People who initiated checkout

All of these audiences can also be defined by time frame, which allows you to create tighter audiences of more recent prospects and larger segments of those who visited your website as far back as 180 days ago.

Segmenting your Facebook audience

With all of the custom audiences available to you through the Ads Manager, choosing which segments to target has a lot to do with the type of product you sell and your customers’ typical buying behavior.

For businesses that sell impulse-purchase products that are lower cost, you may not need to retarget people further back than 30 days.

For higher-end brands or those selling big-ticket items, like mattresses or engagement rings, retargeting might take place over a 180- or even a 365-day window.

If you’re not sure exactly how long you need to retarget people, these are some of the most commonly used audience segments for retargeting:

• Social (Instagram and Facebook) engagers: Past 90 days
• Website visitors: Past 30 days
• Viewed content: Past 14 days
• Added to cart: Past 7 days
• Initiate checkout: Past 7 days

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