I know. You’re probably thinking ‘Hell no! That’s where my best margins are!’ but hear me out.
I grant you that Facebook’s native reporting, which is pretty reliable, will show much better numbers for your middle and bottom funnel campaigns as long as you’re doing them right.
But what else are you doing to reach out to your audience?
How to Reduce Spend on Retargeting
Here, I’m gonna tell you some important ways to wring every last bit of efficiency out of your retargeting so you can free up more spend for prospecting.
If you send emails, make regular social posts, deploy influencers or advertise on other platforms then how can you be sure that the attribution you’re seeing on Facebook really reflects the value of the ad?
What if they got an email about their abandoned cart, clicked through and purchased. But earlier that same day they were shown one of your retargeting ads, which now scoops up the attribution for that purchase, despite the fact that it was your CRM that did all the work!
Maybe your retargeting ad collected a whole load of clicks and a good number of conversions but then a perfectly-crafted and timed social post pushed just a few more of the clickers to convert. Your retargeting ads are gathering more attributions that don’t rightfully belong to them!
Each and every interaction between your brand and your customers and prospective customers represents a marketing effort.
“But how can we possibly tally these? How can I know whether my retargeting ads are actually generating the revenue they say they are?” I hear you ask.
Read More: How to Build Effective Retargeting Campaigns for Ecommerce Stores
Attribution Model
The first thing to consider is your attribution model. If you are using Google Analytics, for example, and your attribution model is ‘last click’, then 100% of the conversion will be attributed to the final click before purchase. This ignores all of the preceding interactions with the customer.
What nurtured this lead into a purchase? What other channels influenced their journey?
Each brand is different, has a different purchase consideration time, utilises different channels and speaks to their audience in their own way; so there is no one-size-fits-all model.
There are some pricey tools out there for bespoke cross-channel attribution calculation, but you can get some very useful data with just the attribution models on Google Analytics:
Time Decay, for example, will give the touchpoints closest in time to the conversion most of the credit. So the first click will be given much less importance than the last.
Position-Based models will assign a percentage of the credit to the first and last interactions and split the remaining percentage between the interactions that occurred in between. If the customer clicked on a Facebook ad and later googled you and added to cart, then abandoned cart and later converted from an email reminder, Facebook and email would receive equal credit, with the remainder going to paid search.
These are just two of many ways that you can change how you compile data on your cross-channel marketing efforts. It’s important to find the one that best reflects the way in which you interact with your customers and the way in which they interact with you.
Read More: How to Build Effective Retargeting Campaigns for Ecommerce Stores
The Hold-Out Test
Another way to determine the true effectiveness of your Facebook and Instagram retargeting would be to run a ‘Hold-Out Test’. This is where you use Facebook’s own A/B testing tools to compare people who saw your Facebook ads to a ‘hold-out’ group of 10% who did not.
From here you can compare the lift in the rate of conversion between the two groups and decide whether the percentage your retargeting ads achieve is worth the investment. How much of the work is done by the retargeting ads? Do your customers prefer emails, SMS marketing, social posts? Do they like to google the companies they intend to purchase from and take it from there?
Finally, there are ways that you can arrange your campaigns to complement other channels. Let’s say your remarketing emails achieve an open rate of 25%, and an overall conversion rate of 10%. What about the other 75%? What about the people who opened and didn’t convert?
If you use Klaviyo, you can link this to your Facebook business manager and use these audiences of lapsed email recipients in their own special retargeting campaigns. If you don’t use Klaviyo, you can still upload customer lists and create the audiences that way. You’re able to address this audience specifically with ads just for them.
Used together, everything here will give you a much better idea of where every dollar of ad spend goes and will enable you to streamline your retargeting efforts and pump more money into the acquisition of new leads.
Accurate attribution is absolutely essential for maximising your ROAS and quickly scaling your ad spend. Using these tools and techniques you should test, test, test! There is no textbook for your brand and your growth, so you have to find out for yourself.
A bit overwhelming? Understandable. Attribution analysis is one of the tougher aspects of media buying. It takes an instinct developed through a lot of experience to read the data accurately and know what to do with it.
We have the most experienced media buyers out there, managing millions of dollars a month in ad spend and utilising know-how like this to scale eCommerce brands to the moon.
If you’re spending over $500 a day and want to scale your brand, book a call below!
