If you’re using Facebook advertising and you’re struggling to see any success, I’d take a guess that you either aren’t using Facebook Retargeting or, if you are, you aren’t using it properly.
First, for those who don’t know what I’m talking about when I say “Facebook Retargeting” – this is a feature that Facebook offers on their advertising platform that allows you to show ads to people who have engaged with your business or brand previously.
This is also one of the best ways to run profitable advertising campaigns, and it makes sense if you think about it.
Someone who has previously engaged with your business in the past is more likely to be interested in and purchase products or services from you than someone seeing your brand for the first time.
The money is made with Facebook Retargeting when advertising on Facebook.
Sure you can have profitable campaigns by dialing in your targeting and running great ads with great copy to “cold traffic” (people who haven’t seen your brand before), but it’s tough.
When you start to introduce the different retargeting strategies I’m going to talk about in this article, that’s when the real ROAS (return on ad spend) will show up.
How Can I Use Retargeting Within Facebook Advertising?
To set up retargeting you will need to create what Facebook calls “Custom Audiences” within the ad platform.
This is pretty easy to do, and I’ve uploaded a video titled “How To Create Facebook Custom Audiences” on our YouTube channel that you can watch.
Here are a few examples of categories of Custom Audiences you can create in Facebook Advertising:
- Customer File (upload your past customers or clients)
- Website Traffic (people who have visited your website)
- Engagement (people who have engaged with your Facebook or Instagram accounts)
- Store Visits (people who have visited your brick and mortar store)
Once you have created these custom audiences you can target them specifically when creating your advertising campaigns on Facebook.
For example, if you wanted to run a Facebook ad only to those people who have visited your physical store location you could do that by selecting the “store visits” custom audience you created when you are selecting your ad targeting.
Strategies For Increasing ROAS With Facebook Retargeting
Alright, let’s get into the good stuff…
I could probably talk about this for hours, but I will try and narrow it down to a few of my favorite Facebook Retargeting strategies.
#1 – Retargeting Website Visitors That Aren’t Customers
Everyone running Facebook ads should be retargeting people who have visited your website but haven’t purchased something from you yet.
They’ve stumbled upon your website one way or another, meaning they are most likely looking for the product or services you offer. I would look at this as a “hot lead” in most cases.
The type of ads I would run to these hot leads would depend on if your product/service is more of an impulse lower priced purchase or a higher ticketed item that requires some brand trust.
If you are offering a lower priced product or service you could run ads that promote your product/service and try close the sale right through the ads.
And if you are offering a higher priced item you could run ads that build trust and let the potential customer know more about your business or brand.
The sooner the better for retargeting these website visitors.
You can dial it right in and target “all website visitors in the past 1 day” and exclude your purchasers, but generally, for smaller businesses, I would stay with “all website visitors in the past 7 days” excluding customers.
#2 – Facebook and Instagram Video Engagement
When you post videos on your business Facebook and Instagram accounts Facebook will track the percentage of the video that people are watching (pretty cool, huh?).
You can then create custom audiences based on the percentages for certain videos and retarget those video viewers with Facebook and Instagram ads.
You can target people who’ve watched at least 25%, 50%, 75%, or 95% of a video, and this is an amazing tool for us to use.
Think about it – if you are posting a video about your business’ product or service and someone watches 95%+ of the video, do you think they’re interested?
Most likely.
And we can now retarget those viewers with ads to try and close the sale.
I’ve learned that people have very short attention spans these days on social media, and if you can get someone to even watch 50% of your video they are most likely within your target market and interested in your product/service, so that’s where I usually start.
(once your videos are getting thousands of views you should dial in your targeting and create a separate audience for the 95%+ viewers)
The power of this retargeting strategy is pretty amazing…
You can run video ads to a wide targeted group of people all over the world, and then create a custom audience of people who have watched most of that video, so you know they are most likely a potential customer, and then retarget those people with more ads.
#3 – Cross-Selling To Your Current Customers
Who’s most likely to buy your products or services?
Someone who has already purchased from you in the past.
This could seem obvious to you, but you’d be amazed at how many businesses forget to run ads to their current customers.
You may think “Well I have them on my customer email list and can market to them there”…
And that’s great and you should be marketing to them through email as well, but you also have to realize that people don’t read emails as much these days (or they get caught in spam), so a lot of people aren’t even seeing those marketing efforts.
One of the first things I do when we are launching a new product or running a sale on one of our current products is create a Facebook ad campaign targeting my past and current customers (or in our case members).
The ROAS (return on ad spend) on these type of Facebook ads can be amazing.
#4 – Target Specific Website Page Visits
This ties into my first tip, but this dials it in even further.
You can target visitors of individual pages on your website through Facebook remarketing.
Let’s say you are selling nutritional supplements and have a product line of 5 different supplements. Someone might have visited your homepage and clicked on your pre-workout powder to check it out, and then left the website.
Now instead of running just a general ad to that website visitor, you can run an ad based around the pre-workout product to them.
Here’s another example:
You offer sport-specific personal training for multiple sports and your website outlines what you offer for each different sport on a separate page. Now someone visits your website and clicks on the “baseball training services” page, reads some of it and leaves.
Now you know there’s a great chance that this is a potential baseball client, and instead of running general ads to him/her you can dial in your advertising and show them ads about how you can help make them a better baseball player.
Bingo. These type of Facebook ads crush it.
Start Making More Sales
That’s going to wrap up this article on tips for Facebook Retargeting. Make sure you try and implement the strategies talked about above in your Facebook and Instagram marketing plan and watch your ROAS (return on ad spend) increase.
There’s a lot more Facebook and Instagram advertising strategies we will be talking about in the Create Freedom courses, so make sure you check those out and leave any questions you have in the comment section below.
Now get to work, and I’d love to hear from you if these tips end up helping your business!
Dan Garner
Kevin McClelland
