You probably already know that using social media—Facebook in particular—should be a vital part of your digital marketing strategy. You might also be aware that remarketing—finding people who have previously visited your website to bring them back—is also important. But how about combining the two? Facebook retargeting is a proven boon for small businesses.
Facebook retargeting scours the popular social platform to find people who have previously engaged with your website. It’s a great way to make your ad campaigns more cost-effective, gives you more ROI, and improves conversions. Studies show that retargeting ads generate clickthrough rates 10 times higher than a standard ad, and are 70 percent more likely to result in a conversion.
How Do I Set This Up?
You will need some level of coding competence to get this going, but nothing overly painful. Facebook has worked to make it easy for small businesses who usually don’t have a full-time developer on staff, to get remarketing codes implemented.
The tool is the Facebook pixel, a piece of code that the social platform will use to identify users that intersect between Facebook and your website. You’ll need to go to Facebook Business Manager and create an audience. Choose “Custom Audience” and when you are done setting it up, you’ll be given a pixel to implement on your website.
You can implement the code directly, but simply pasting it anywhere below the tag—the higher up on the page the better, although it will work from anywhere. If the notion of messing around with the code makes you leery, WordPress sites have access to plug-ins that can do it for you.
What Do I Track?
In between opening up a Custom Audience and getting your pixel, there will be some decisions you’ll have to make regarding exactly who you want to target with your remarketing campaign. Common marketing approaches focus on any or all of the following…
- The broad reach of anyone who has visited your website. They’re already familiar with your brand and if you’re unsure of how to get started, you may want to try just retargeting everyone and then narrow it down as your campaign starts to collect more data.
- People who have visited specific pages on your website. Here you would presumably focus on the “money pages” on your website. It could be anything from a free newsletter that will collect email addresses to premium content that brings in money. Any page that has something for sale or for sign-up available is a good candidate for retargeting.
- For e-commerce sites, a popular retargeting strategy is to focus on cart abandonment. Anyone that got to the point of putting a product into the cart, but failed to complete the sale should be retargeted.
Maybe they just had brief second thoughts about an impulse purchase, but upon being reminded will feel better about a decision to purchase. Maybe they didn’t have access to their credit card at the time the cart was abandoned. Or maybe they were simply interrupted during the purchase process and then forgot to return. In any case, people who dropped off on these pages are good candidates for remarketing.
You also have the option to upload your own email addresses to Facebook, which will then find any matches that exist with people on the social platform. This presents an ideal opportunity to upsell current customers on Facebook.
It’s hard work to get a prospect to your website and it’s rare for a person to convert on their first visit, no matter how good your website, how compelling your sales copy, or how valuable your product. But through the use of Facebook retargeting, you can make sure that the first visit is just the beginning of the customer journey.
Want to ramp up your Facebook Ads campaign? We can help. Call (443) 475-0787 today.
