Facebook Retargeting Strategy for 2021: Maximize Ad Spend
By: George Denby
Tags: Facebook Ads, Facebook Marketing, PPC Marketing

You might have made a Google search for a product that you want, but you hesitated on clicking that purchase button. After a few hours or days, upon checking your Facebook feed, you will notice that a related ad shows up.

After viewing the ad, it convinced you to continue that purchase. What makes this phenomenon possible? The answer is Facebook retargeting.

Facebook retargeting is a marketing strategy that follows up leads. It works by loading a Facebook pixel on websites that follows customers and tracks their actions.

Facebook paid advertising strategies are incredibly popular for good reason, and re-targeting is possibly the best one.

Businesses use a retargeting strategy to show ads on the news feed of their potential customers. We can say that it is sneaky, but several digital marketers proved it to be effective.

On one hand, it’s an effective strategy to make a sale after rejection or objection. On the other hand, it’s also true that this approach can repel leads because of its seemingly dubious nature. To avoid the latter and take advantage of the former, we compiled a comprehensive guide.

Facebook Retargeting Considerations

There are three considerations you must be aware of upon doing a Facebook retargeting.

First, you must retarget the right audience. An excellent way to do it is segmenting your audience to know where they are in the marketing funnel. You can group your traffic into impressions, first-time clicks, recent visitors, repeat customers, and cart abandoners.

The second consideration for Facebook retargeting is doing it at the right time. You can show your ad immediately or sporadically. You can also run ad campaigns before items expire or during special occasions such as the days before Black Friday.

We are now aware of the factors that affect Facebook retargeting. Now we will head on to different strategies to choose from when doing Facebook retargeting.

Improve Your Ads Before Changing Your Strategy

You might be using a single generic ad for your business. You should try updating your generic at first before considering using dynamic ads. You’ll never know how much work you can save.

Try updating your headlines before anything else. A powerful headline changes everything. According to Carmine Mastropierro, around 80% of your audience only read headlines. Also, Blogspot has an article that mentioned personalized call-to-actions perform 202% better than basic ones.

Keep this in mind when doing the copy for your ad: use the word “you” or “your” to provide an organic feel. Also, you need to keep it short and sweet because your headlines do much of the work.

Your ad copy also contributes to the efficiency of your ads. To have good ad copies, get a copywriter and a content manager.. Seventy three percent of major organizations hire a content manager, so consider hiring one.

Keep Your Existing Ad Campaign Running

The adage says, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” If you already ran an ad campaign, you can use it again for retargeting purposes. Creating an evergreen campaign is useful for Facebook retargeting.

Dynamic ad campaigns are good examples. You can run it over and over again, as long as the metrics show profitable results. However, they require a lot of money and time as an investment. Make sure that you review them first to make efficient use of your resources.

You can create more auto-generated templates if your previous ad campaign runs perfectly. You can view your metrics from time to time to confirm it. Keep a close eye on your ongoing campaigns too. It will give you an idea if your automation needs tweaks and repairs.

Run A Slow And Steady Campaign

You must be aware that you wear out your welcome if you show aggression to your audience. If your ads look annoying and pushy, you need to fix your ad campaigns. Let us discuss the slow and steady Facebook retargeting strategy.

You are slowly building a relationship with your customers through your ad campaigns, so you need to invest in making a series of ads to make sure everything fits into your narrative. Your ads must tell a good story that can stimulate your audience.

The effective ad campaigns for this strategy are carousel photos and videos. The average CTR for Facebook ads is 0.9%. In comparison, carousel ads have 72% higher CTR than single image ads. Meanwhile, the average engagement rate for videos on Facebook is 6.13%, higher than the overall, with only a 3.6% engagement rate.

The first ad of your retargeting campaign should focus on brand awareness. It would help if you made a flashy introduction to this one. It must consist of all the details of your branding: name, tagline, product line, services, target audience, and core values. Remember, you are establishing your presence on your first ad.

After running your first ad campaign, create a custom audience on Facebook to check your statistics. Let us take a video ad campaign as an example. On the engagement part, select “people who viewed at least three seconds of your video.” by looking at your metrics, you’ll notice that some may click or convert immediately on the first ad. Even if others don’t, your retargeting strategy will continue.

You can hit these leads with your retargeting ad. All the following ads need to focus on lead generation and conversion. Find the optimum number of ads to help to ease the relationship with your potential customers. Remember, slow and steady wins the race.

Retarget Existing Customers Who Haven’t Engaged With You In A While

“We miss you like crazy!” Have you ever received this text before? If you had good terms with the sender, you’re more likely to engage with the conversation. You may even try to ask for updates if the sender is an old friend of yours. Now let’s try using this strategy on old customers.

You can make a retargeting campaign for customers who already engaged with you some time ago. You can connect with them again, even if they already saw your ads or purchase from you, but you need to open up your retargeting window as big as they can.

These leads who seemed to have drifted away might be customers who still enjoy your product. You may ask for feedback about their experience, but you don’t need to do it in your ad campaign. You may do it subtly if it can help your retargeting strategy.

Retarget Users Who Searched For What You Offer

An impressive retargeting trick you can do on Facebook is using Google and Bing Ads in your growth strategy. You can retarget your website visitors who found you from a search ad. This retargeting strategy is useful if you use keywords in your search campaigns.

The first thing you can do is ask your existing customers how they found you. You can do it through a survey while they are in the middle of the customer journey. This strategy works because a survey can help them feel that your business is hearing them.

You can also check your local on-site search function. Visitors will check some products using the search bar. You can optimize the site by configuring Google Analytics for site search. It will help you understand what your visitors precisely need.

You can see the keywords that people search on Google to find your website. Google Search Console can do it for you.

Show Specific Ads To Website Visitors Who Wanted To Know You Better

As mentioned above, some people visited your website through an ad they already saw somewhere, and they might be intrigued by the people behind the business. You can retarget these visitors for your next Facebook ad campaign.

These visitors are hot leads who are willing to pay, so this retargeting strategy needs you to segment your visitors who browse your informational content. You can edit a custom audience to segment your visitors who scanned the pages that explain informative content.

On Facebook custom audiences, select “people who visited specific web pages” and put a filter that contains “about,” “features,” and “how.” because your business got their attention, it’s time for you to do the same for them. Both of you will benefit from running a retargeting ad campaign.

Retarget Leads Who Viewed Specific Product Pages

Let’s admit it: not all your products can please an individual visitor. That brings us to the other side, where a visitor’s interest is only for some of your products. Let us leverage this fact for your next campaign.

Instead of showing your audiences the same generic ad, you can use dynamic ads to improve their customer journey. You can segment your retargeting audiences by grouping them into specific pages that they viewed. It may take a considerable amount of work, but we can assure you that it changes how things go.

This strategy takes advantage of the potential of dynamic creative ads. On Facebook, you can see aggregate results for each segmented audience. This strategy features the related products to your leads. It is more likely that you can provide your potential customers with what they need if they see a series of related products.

This strategy also works on landing pages. Potential customers arriving on the landing page means that they are interested in your ads. Retargeting these hot leads will increase your conversion rate.

Using Facebook audiences, you can filter “people who visited specific web pages” containing a particular product. You may need to do several of these, as mentioned earlier. You already know that investing effort to improve the customer journey will always pay off.

Retarget Visitors Who Are About To Sign Up

In this retargeting strategy, we will use what we have learned in the previous ones. We will only discuss that we will retarget the potential customers who almost signed up, and emphasize what push you need to do to help them convert.

Say that you have some people who have arrived on the sign-up page on your website. You are about to get personal information, but they backed out for some reason. These people are in the middle of your sales funnel but stopped. Know that It’s not over yet. You can get them back on that page and continue with the process with a retargeting campaign.

Retargeting these people will take you to Facebook audiences again. They visited a specific webpage, which contains the word sign up. You only need to show them more benefits of subscribing to your services. That way, they might change their mind and proceed to sign up.

Make Milestones For Your Potential Customers

People feel good when they receive a message that greets them with congratulations. This instant gratification tells them that they are far ahead of people who haven’t started yet. You can benefit from this by showing what level they are in the customer journey.

Your current potential customers who saw your ad for the first time have a different perspective from your previous ones. This retargeting strategy will need you to aggregate your customers by the level of marketing funnels. It’s similar to the slow and steady, but the ads tell them that they know you better than before.

Let’s discuss how to treat the levels of the customer journey as milestones. This way, we can identify what awards are appropriate for the leads on a particular stage.

You can congratulate the people who recently saw your ad on Facebook on the next ad that they will see. You can mention something like, “You already saw our previous product. You might be considering this one.”

You can potentially show them ads after they went to similar sites as yours. Making an ad campaign that retargets keyword searches can help. This strategy involves the one mentioned earlier that consists of seeing your site from search results.

Retarget Potential Customers Who Ask About Your Pricing Plans

Never let a hot lead slip by. Don’t ignore them. Visitors who ask the price are already interested in buying. They might still be canvassing and comparing you to your competitors. Showing another ad might do the trick to help them choose you.

You can segment these people by making a Facebook custom audience. Filter the people who viewed your pricing plans section. It will give you insights about how much people are in the consideration stage. After that, you can make a retargeting campaign for this audience.

Remind People That They Abandoned Their Cart

In March 2020, 88.05% of online shoppers abandoned their carts. You can only imagine how much they want that product badly. There are several reasons they didn’t continue the purchase. Depending on your business, considering their reasons will give you ideas about improving the next retargeting campaign.

But we can all agree that these shoppers are high intent potential customers. That is why you need to have a view cart option on your site. That way, it can improve your customer shopping experience on your website.

Also, having a view cart page will help you set up Facebook custom audiences. You only need to filter people who arrived on the view cart page. Now you are aware of how much leads require a little push to convert.

Typically, these customers are hesitant because of the price. That’s why you may need to mention it on your next Facebook retargeting campaign. There are three best options for you. You can tell them how the quality of your product maximizes its value. If this doesn’t work, you may need to offer discounts on the advertisement explicitly.

Your last resort is offering free shipping, a risky yet effective way to push their carts. Statistics show that 90% of customers say that free shipping encourages them to buy more products. They also mentioned that 61% of customers consider canceling their purchase when they don’t offer free shipping.

Making Your Facebook Retargeting Strategy

Facebook retargeting helps you maximize your online visibility. Most leads don’t convert the first time after seeing an ad. But you can maximize your traffic using Facebook retargeting.

You are helping your customers have what they desire and provide a stream of profit to your business. Consider using Facebook retargeting if you already improved your ad content but don’t show tangible results.