Do you ever feel like a product or page is stalking you on Facebook?
You know the feeling. It’s that post that seems to always pop up in your newsfeed when you’re scrolling down. Well, you can rest assured that nobody is following you – you’re just the target of a Facebook retargeting campaign.
Retargeting is a powerful tool in marketing, as it lets you target audience members who’ve already interacted with your brand but didn’t go all the way to make a purchase or give you a link. And in Facebook advertising, there are actually a lot of ways to handle your remarketing campaign needs.
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Facebook Retargeting 101
The main way to deal with Facebook retargeting is with the pixel. This way, you can reach that user who visits your site and show them another ad based on what you want them to do.
These ads can look differently, depending on what you need. One common format is the “hey, you left something in your cart” type of ad that reminds the user to go back to your site and finish the order. It’s a great way to make sure your leads aren’t lost and increase your conversion rates.
To do this, you will get a pixel code that you then need to copy between the tags on your site. You can add it to only a few specific pages you need to track, as well as add specific actions such as tracking the shopping cart.
The Facebook pixel brings a lot of perks to the table, the most important one being that it can let you run Dynamic ads that will showcase your product catalogue. Dynamic ads can automatically create ads with certain products in your catalogue and show them to the right people, usually based on if a user viewed a specific product on your website.
This is a powerful tool because you’re not showing something new to an unknown person; you are showing your ads to the people who’ve been on your site before. But Dynamic ads are only available after you’ve installed the pixel.
However, installing the Facebook pixel isn’t the only way to run a retargeting campaign. Here are other 4 creative ways to do it!
- Customer Lists
If you have a generous database of your customers, then you can use it to create audiences for Facebook ads.
All you have to do is visit your ad account, and look for the Custom Audience tab and select the Customer list option to upload your list and create a new audience. Facebook will then give you another chance to edit your list to make sure there are no mistakes. But before that, you should add as much data as you can on your customer list.
Here are some things you need to add:
- Email addresses;
- Phone numbers;
- First and last name;
- City, state, and province;
- Country;
- Date of birth;
- Age;
- Gender, etc.
Facebook also has some specific requirements regarding how to format your customer list. To make sure you get it right easily, you can look at their online guide and follow it.
2. Video Views
Live videos are all the rage right now as Facebook is not so subtly pushing for them. But even if you post regular videos, there is a great way to leverage those views later on.
You can create a custom audience of people who have seen a particular video and present new, fresh post directly to them. You can choose which type of viewer you prefer, such as based on how long they’ve watched your previous post (the longer the watch length, the more engaged they were), or even how long ago they did it.
3. Page Engagement
Plenty of people may interact with your Facebook page, even if they did not hit the “like” and “follow” button. That means they think your posts or brand somehow arrived in their feed, and they’ve reacted to it by liking it or sending you a message directly to you.
But there’s a way to get to these people again without direct messaging them to like your page. Facebook allows you to create ads specifically to boost your page engagement, meaning to increase the size of your audience. And instead of choosing an audience based on demographics, you can target based on previous interactions.
Because you’re addressing to people who visited your profile before, the chance of them becoming part of your audience increases since they already interacted with you and recognize your page.
4. Lead Forms
Getting leads on Facebook has never been easier thanks to the lead ads. If you have a form you want people to fill in and want to use social media to promote it, it can be difficult to get some of the users to comply, especially if they’re using a mobile device to scroll through their newsfeed.
But with lead forms, once they click on the ad a form automatically pops up and allows them to put in their data, without being redirected to a different page or app.
And what can you do with that data? Well, you can create a custom retargeting audience and show those people other ads. Or, you can reach those who did not finish filling in the form and get them to reconsider.
5. Lookalike Audiences
Lookalike audiences can be created once you have a good, strong audience to work with, meaning one that’s engaging, liking your posts, commenting, and dropping messages.
You can take that very strong audience and create a lookalike version that will be people with similar profiles (in terms of age, other demographics, interests, behaviours, etc.) but who’ve never interacted with your page before. Lookalike audiences aren’t exactly 100% from the remarketing campaign field, but they are a strong feature in the Facebook advertising catalogue you should leverage in your ads.
Over to You: Pixel or No Pixel?
Ads campaigns on Facebook can take on different shapes and sizes, and the most important thing here is to choose the format that can get you the best results.
You may really need to track the activity that comes on your website from social media. Facebook, on its own, can only tell you about the interactions users have while they stay on the platform – when they leave, they’re left in the dark. Other tracking tools like Google Analytics can also pick up where Facebook leaves, but if you want to leverage the data and create remarketing campaigns based on-site activity, then yes, you need to install the pixel.
But of course, that depends on what your goals with these ads are. If, for instance, you’re just looking to build a bigger social media following, then you do not need the pixel for that. You can choose the engagement ads to either reach new people or retarget users who’ve interacted with you in the past.
In any case, remarketing campaigns are essential to any business, big or small. And if you want to make the most out of this powerful tool, you may need the advice of an expert. At Australian Internet Advertising, we know all about the ins and outs of Facebook marketing and remarketing and are here to help.
