Facebook remarketing is one of the most important forms of advertising. It allows you to show ads specifically for those audiences that had some sort of previous contact with your brand.
This also means that your ROI is significantly higher on the Facebook retargeting campaigns, which overall makes your business more profitable.
When we talk about Facebook retargeting strategy the most important step is to find the people that have engaged with your business and then identify the audiences and audience groups that can be retargeted. So first we need to check what kind of previous visits and actions can be tracked and retargeted.
Website Traffic – Pixel Retargeting
With Facebook advertising it is essential to place a pixel code to your website, which will track visitors and collect data on the actions visitors take on the website. It can track which page was visited, how many times, by how many visitors. Creating product catalogs will also give you data on which product was added to cart, purchased and so on.
Analysing this data allows you to create custom audiences which will be the core of your Facebook remarketing Strategy and retargeting Ads.
Social Media Accounts
Most social media platforms provide statistical reports for business accounts about user engagement. Facebook allows you to create audiences about business page likers, organic and paid post engagements, message senders and video viewers.
You can also look at the data with demographic breakdown and if the pixel is placed on your website, you can analyse the social engagement data together with the pixel data. For example showing what percentages of your customers liked your Instagram or Facebook Business Page and vice versa.
This will allow you to retarget all of these audiences and convert them to purchasers or upsell, cross-sell and resell to them.
Customer Lists
Facebook allows you to upload custom lists to your Business Account and retarget them. You can create these custom lists based on any customer data that you have collected within your business. It can be customers that visited your physical store, signed up to your newsletters, attended an event or purchased from your store.
While pixel data is dynamic data that normally gets updated automatically, custom lists are often static lists, meaning they only get updated when you reupload them. However, in certain cases you can integrate other platforms with Facebook Audiences and create custom lists based on actions that were taken on other platforms. For example you can integrate Facebook with Klavyio and create a list based on an audience segment that opened a newsletter, which can be retargeted with Facebook Ads.
After you identified and created the available audiences that can be retargeted by Facebook Ads, your Facebook remarketing strategy needs to specify those audiences that you want to retarget.
Planning your Facebook retargeting strategy will mainly depend on your business goals and resources. On Facebook we normally recommend to spend 20-40% of your advertising budget on retargeting, so you can create enough ads that are relevant to people based on where they are in their customer journey or buying circle.
Facebook Remarketing Strategy 1.
One of the most popular Facebook retargeting strategies when you create 2 separate campaigns.
One for retargeting website data which is the most valuable as the customers are further down the customer journey. We often call it bottom of funnel (BOF) or Hot traffic. It is hot because they are the easiest to convert them into purchasers. You will segment your audiences based on pixel events, frequency and recency. For example: Page viewers last 3 day, Page viewers last 4-7 days, Added to Cart in the past 7 days, and you add audiences as detailed as you can, as long as your adsets perform.
The second campaign is called middle of the funnel (MOF) or warm traffic and includes audiences that haven’t been on the website yet, so they are not yet close to purchase but had some kind of contact with the brand before. These are usually the Social Media Engagers, Video viewers or any Custom lists that are created for audiences prior to visiting the website. On this campaign you also separate the audience as much details you can. For example Everyone who liked your FB Page in the last 30 days, everyone who watched 90% of your videos in the last 7 days…
Both of these campaigns can be set up with Campaign Budget optimisation and with Adset Budget Optimisation. Advantages of CBO is that the algorithm will decide how to distribute the budget across adsets / audiences, potentially spending it in the most efficient way. It works very well when you have a campaign running for long term with a relatively fixed budget, without any significant promotions or seasonal periods. ABO is better to use when the ad account and pixel doesn’t have so much previous history as you manually select how much budget would be spent daily on a specific adset / audience. It also works very well when there are promotions, for example during Black Friday as you need to increase budget on a very specific audience, not on the whole campaign. This way you hae more control over the adsets.
You can read more about the best BOF and MOF audiences here.
Facebook Remarketing Strategy 2.
The other very effective Facebook retargeting strategy is when you consolidate your audiences into 1-3 adsets only. For example on BOF campaign you only set up an adset for Page Viewers in the last 30 days and Added to Carts in the last 30 days. And on MOF you set up an adset for IG and FB engagers in the past 365 days, and an adset for video viewers in the past 90 days.
This strategy can be only used in CBO as the algorithm will allocate budget between the audiences, and find the conversion within the consolidated adsets. Other advantage of this strategy is that you more likely meet the 50 conversion / adset / week criteria that Facebook recommends. However it is not recommended to use for businesses where the repurchasing cycle is shorter than 30 days, or when the pixel doesn’t have significant event history.
We wrote about an interesting case study about testing this Facebook remarketing strategy, that you can read here
Facebook Remarketing Strategy 3.
Another popular retargeting strategy is using Facebook dynamic ads with Catalog Sales objective. To be able use this strategy you will need to create a catalog and connect it with your pixel. You can read here about this.
This strategy allows you to retarget audiences with product ads based on their browsing history. Meaning if a website visitor looked at one of your products, but left without purchasing it, you can retarget this user with a dynamic product ad, so the person will see the same product as an ad that was visited previously on your website. You can also use this strategy to cross-sell or upsell products if you create product sets that are usually sold together.
I would also recommend including Retention campaigns in your Facebook remarketing Strategy as Facebook is not only a customer acquisition channel, but it can help increase retention, and the lifetime value of a customer. You can read here about the Importance of retention campaigns here.
Hope you enjoyed the read! If you’re spending over $500 a day and need help with your retargeting campaigns book a call below:
