Are you running paid Facebook advertising campaigns? If you are, but you’re not running a remarketing campaign, then you’re leaving a lot of potential sales on the table. In this blog we’ll discuss what remarketing is and how businesses not using a PPC consultant can use it to increase the returns on their paid Facebook advertising campaigns.
What is Facebook remarketing?
So, what is what is remarketing and when should you use it? A remarketing campaign on Facebook can be beneficial for any ecommerce store or a business looking to generate more leads. Before we get into how you can get the most of out of your Remarketing campaigns, it’s worthwhile understanding what a remarketing campaign actually is.
In its simplest form, remarketing, or sometimes referred to as retargeting on Facebook is showing your ads to people who have already engaged with your business in one way or another. On Facebook, they may have either seen your ad, clicked the ad, viewed a good portion of your video ad, browsed your website, or even added a product to their cart. These people have interacted with your business but have not yet completed a conversion action. Sometimes people need more time to decide. Or they want to know more details about your products. So, it makes sense to keep reminding them about your product so that it is in the front of their mind.
Differentiating between a cold, warm and hot audience
When you advertise products on Facebook, you’re showing your ads to a ‘cold audience’. These are people who have never heard of you, or your business before. A cold audience needs to be educated on what your product is, why they need it and also that you’re the right brand to buy the product from. There’s a lot of work required in order to get the customer to complete a conversion action.
A good chunk of the cold audience on your Facebook advertising campaigns are likely to ignore your ads. But as long as you’re targeting the right audience with the right ad copy, some of your audience will find your ad interesting and engage with it. They may actively look at your ad with interest, click through to your site, browse your product pages, read your product reviews, check the price or delivery options. These people are a warmer audience. They have shown an interest in your product and business but have not made a purchase.
People who add a product to your shopping cart or even get as far as the checkout stage but then don’t complete a sale are your hot audience. The fact that these people added your product to their shopping cart shows that they are interested in it. Perhaps they were busy at the time and wanted to complete the purchase later on, but then they forgot. Or it might be that they need a little more convincing to get them over the line. These are people that are most likely to complete a purchase if you give them a little nudge, which is why they are your hot audience.
Your hot audience is likely to perform the best, your warm audience will perform the second best and you cold audience will be your worst performer. However, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t target a cold audience. you need a steady flow of cold audience coming in to develop a warmer and hot audience.
Facebook remarketing audience lists
So, we know that our Facebook remarketing campaign should be targeting warm and hot audience, but how do we do this on Facebook? There are a few tricks that you can use to identify your warm and hot audiences on Facebook.
A good starting point to identify warm and hot audiences on Facebook is to target the below four audiences:
- Watched 95% of your video – If someone watched all your video or the majority of it, then you know that they found something interesting in your video. This is a sign that they are interested in your product and are a warm audience. of course you can only use this audience list if you’re running video ads
- Clicked on the call to action button to visit the product page – Anyone who clicked on the call to action button of your Facebook ad was clearly interested in your product and wanted to find out more. This is a good sign, and shows that they are a warm audience.
- Site visitors who added a product to the shopping cart but abandoned it – If a customer visits your website, adds a product to their cart, this is a very good sign that they want your product. This is a hot audience as they have indicated that they want your product by pressing the add to cart button.
- Visited the shopping cart page but didn’t complete a purchase – Those people who put a product into the shopping cart and visited the checkout page but didn’t complete a purchase are a very hot audience. These people want your product but for some reason didn’t complete the last step. It is expected that this audience will be the most profitable audience in your Facebook remarketing campaign.
Even though your warm and hot audiences are likely to be your best performers, you need your cold audience to create your warm and hot audience. We generally recommend that your warm and hot audience are atleast five hundred users large before you start targeting them with a Facebook remarketing campaign.
Remove double serving
One problem that you may come across when creating an ad set for each of the above four warm and hot audiences is that they may double serve through different audience lists.
For example, if someone viewed over ninety five percent of your video and also click through to your site, added a product to cart and visited the cart page but didn’t complete the purchase, they will be included in all four of your audience lists. All four of your ad sets will show advertisement to this user. This causes three problems:
- Seeing an ad too many times could annoy your customer – Remarketing to people who have shown an interest in your business or product can help to increase your profits, but your customer will get annoyed if they see your adverts too often. This could have the opposite effect and lead to a reduction in sales.
- You’ll needlessly spend more – The second problem with double serving through multiple audiences is that you’re going to spend more advertising to the same people. This will bring your overall return on ad spend down.
- You can’t differentiate ads for each audience – It is a good idea to differentiate and tailor your ad copy for each audience. If your users are coming through multiple audiences, then you can’t tailor your ad copy to them.
Six tips for Remarketing on Facebook
Now that you have your Facebook audience lists identified and the basic structure of your remarketing campaign, here are six basic tips to ensure that your Facebook remarketing campaign is a success:
Tip one: Create multiple ads for each ad set
Create multiple ads for each ad set. When doing this, it’s a good idea to try multiple different ad formats, images/videos and also different ad messaging. Facebook will then test these ad formats and learn which ad performs the best for each placement. You should start to see an improvement in your engagement rate which will result in cheaper click prices.
Tip two: Keep an eye on your campaign performance
Facebook’s algorithms have become very good at learning which segments of our audience performs well and which ad copy performs the best for each placement. However, it does get things wrong sometimes. You still can’t have a ‘set it and forget’ approach when it comes to remarketing on Facebook. You still need to keep an eye on your campaigns and what Facebook’s algorithms are doing.
Sometimes Facebook starts spending too much of your budget on ads that are clearly not performing well in comparison to your other ads. If you spot this, then you can turn off those ads. Just make sure that the ad has enough data behind it before you make a decision.
Tip three: ad frequency
The other thing to look at is your ad frequency. This gives an average number of times that each person from your audience is being served an ad. You don’t want to be showing your ad to the same person too may times. This could annoy them and put them off purchasing any product from your business.
Deciding what your maximum frequency can be tricky. But in most cases, it is a good idea not to have the same user see your ad more than 5 times.
Tip four: Track conversions instead of views
The end goal of your Facebook remarketing campaign is to increase revenue. To do this, you need conversions and not necessarily views. Usually, the more times someone views your ad, the more likely they are to convert. However, this is not always the case. If a particular segment in your Facebook remarketing campaign gets a lot of views but isn’t getting any conversions, then you should think about blocking it out. This should result in a higher return on ad spend. It will also mean that more of your available budget can go to the better performing segments.
Here are some segments that you could look at when segmenting out the performance of your campaign. If you’re seeing a high spend or a high number of views from any of these segments but no conversions, then you can block the specific segment out.
- Age group
- Gender
- Placement
- Platform
- Location (Country or region)
To access this data on Facebook simply click on the ‘Breakdown’ button and select ‘By Delivery’. This should show you several ways that you can break down the performance of your Facebook remarketing campaign.
Tip five: Tailor ad copy to the audience
Your ad copy shouldn’t be a generic ad that you use across all your audiences. You should be tailoring your ads depending on the level of engagement with your business and how hot your audience is.
For example, if someone clicked through to your site, added a product to cart and visited the cart age, then they may just need some messaging to remind them about your product so that they convert later on. Someone who added to cart but didn’t visit the cart page may just need a discount code to get to complete the purchase. A customer who has viewed ninety five percent of your video but not clicked through to your site possibly needs more educating on the benefits of your product as well as why they should buy from you.
Tip six: Retarget to recent visitors
The longer it has been since the user visited your site or interacted with your ad, the less likely they are to make a purchase on your site. When creating your remarketing audiences, make sure you tell Facebook not to include anyone who completed the audience criteria more than a certain number of days ago. You can do this by selecting the maximum number of days in the ‘Retention’ section.
To decide on how long your audience retention setting shuld be, you will need to think about how long the average customer takes after interacting with your ad before they convert. If you’re selling more products that have a longer research journey, then you may want to go for a longer renetion setting. If you’re products are more likely to be purchased on impulse, then you may want to go for a shorter audience retenion length.
Wrapping up
If you’ve made it this far, then you should be able to create a basic remarketing campaign on Facebook targeting four different audiences. To ensure that your Facebook remarketing campaign is a success, make sure you continually monitor it and implement the five optimisation tips that have been mentioned in this blog. If you’re looking for a PPC consultant in Wakefield or a PPC consultant in Yorkshire to help build and optimise a Facebook Remarketing campaign for your business, then get in touch. I offer a free PPC audit to everyone who gets in touch.