Most people don’t make a purchase the first time they visit a website or see an FB ad.  Retargeting Facebook ads is an advertising strategy that can make a difference to your conversions, and to your bottom line.

Retargeting Facebook Ads

First things first. Let’s define retargeting. According to popular marketing site Moz, retargeting is “a form of marketing in which you target users who have previously viewed your website with banner ads on display networks across the web”. If you’ve been to a site, but didn’t purchase anything, and kept browsing, you’ve been exposed to retargeting. Those ads were a part of that site’s retargeting efforts. Here is some information about retargeting Facebook ads!

In general, there are three types of retargeting strategies:

• Generic: Generic Retargeting treats all your past site visitors as a custom audience, and targets them with ads after they leave your online store without making a purchase. This is considered beginner-level retargeting because everyone sees the same ad. There are no subsegments, and there isn’t a variety of ad content. This strategy is OK if you’re just getting started and still have limited site traffic.
• Behavioral: This type of retargeting segments past site visitors into unique audiences based on their behavior on your site. Different audiences might include visitors who viewed a product, added to cart, and visitors who signed up for special offers. It’s a step up from Generic Retargeting because you can create ad campaigns that are more relevant to the buyer journey of your individual customers. The key thing to remember is to be respectful of a customer’s space. In other words, setting a months’ long retargeting window and hammering them with ads will not increase your clicks. In fact, it’s much more likely they’ll click “Hide this ad”, and nobody wants that.
• Sequential Retargeting: This is the most sophisticated form of retargeting. Instead of seeing the same ad as everyone else (Generic), or an ad relevant to where they left off in their buyer journey for an extended period of time (Behavioral), you’re building a sequence of ads for them to see over time.

The Facebook Custom Audiences tool is what is used to build retargeting sequences with your Facebook ads. You can retargeting sequences from a Custom Audience based on their interactions with your brand, and create retargeting sequences accordingly. Example, let’s say you’d want to create a sequence for three days after a customer interacts with your site.

Custom Audiences

• Day 1 Audience: Create an audience who added to their cart within one day.
• Day 2 Audience: Create an audience who added to their cart within two days (exclude people who added within day one).
• Day 3 Audience: Create an audience who added to their cart on the third day (but exclude people who added to their cart within the first two days).

You can build custom campaigns for these three unique audiences, designed to show them unique ads every day. Boom! You’ve got 3 Sequential Retargeting campaigns ready to go.

While there are a variety of ads you can use in a retargeting campaign, there are a couple unique ones that we wanted to make sure to mention [If you need help building a Facebook Ad, we have information that can help!]:

• Blog Post Ad: How to _______. This blog should communicate that your product or service helps them do or solves something discussed on the blog.
• Best Sellers Ad: Showcase your best-selling products (maybe with some reviews)

To sum it up, retargeting Facebook ads is a clever means of getting your ads back in front of your target market without annoying them (hopefully). Generic retargeting is a great way you can build your FB ads strategy on a strong foundation. Have you tried retargeting tactics in your digital marketing? Let us know how it’s going!