Serving FB Remarketing Ads

The world of Facebook Advertising is hyper-specific. You’ve seen this at work in the article for Facebook Audiences. For instance, the social network makes it easy to target users down to specific addresses. It allows you to reach out to people who purchased a product on a mobile phone versus those who did it via desktop.

These examples are possible because of the size of information Facebook has access to. Imagine if you have data on the activities, behaviours, interests, and locations of around two billion active users. You just have to look for the right set of triggers to show your ads to people who matter the most to your business.

In this lesson, you are going to read about a particular subset of your audience: past visitors to your website.

For the purposes of this module, the focus will be on those who have shown interest in your products or services. They have either checked out an item/s or abandoned their cart. Maybe they changed their minds. Or they need more convincing. Or they moved on to a different task. In any case, Facebook can assist you in remarketing to these users.

What Is Remarketing?

Remember that Facebook is able to track your website traffic through the Pixel. Remarketing then is a technique that takes advantage of the information obtained by Pixel. It will follow your leads throughout their feed, showing them the same or related offers.

Why Do You Need Remarketing?

At the end of the day, marketing is about getting conversions. Otherwise, your job is not done in this department. Remarketing targets people who bounced or are still on the fence with regard to your offers. An example would be creating targeted ads based on audience behaviour on your site such as abandoning their carts mid-purchase.

What Are the Benefits of Remarketing?

Access to Billions of Users

There are 2.23 billion active users on Facebook every month as of the second quarter of 2018. Chances are your target market can be found on the platform. Even better, you can find the audience who will convert by serving them the right ads.

Better Than (And Different From) Display Ads

Reports in 2015 found social media advertising to be the most effective form of online paid advertising. In particular, Facebook Advertising was cited by experts as a cost-effective solution for business-to-consumer organisations.

In part, display advertising has suffered from banner blindness. They tend to ignore or overlook banner ads that disrupt their digital experience. Google AdWords is probably the most popular example of this to date. On the other hand, Facebook has worked around this problem by integrating remarketing ads into people’s feeds. And because these ads target those who have already shown interest in your business, the assumption is that they are less disruptive, if at all, to the natural flow of individual Facebook feeds.

Custom Audiences

Your Custom Audiences are meant for remarketing. Depending on your goal, you can target one of your specially-set groups, such as mobile app users or London-based millennial employees. As this chapter focuses on users who have visited your website, you can create a group based on that criterion.

Three Main Forms of Facebook Remarketing

Reconnecting with audiences who have already shown interest in your business is made possible by these three powerful sources of data on Facebook:

• Contact list

• Website visitors

• App users

You can build a Custom Audience from one of these three.

Customer List

If you have customer contact numbers or email addresses, you can just upload them on Facebook. Make sure to prepare them by following the best practices for providing data from a customer file. Here’s a link to the guide that includes multiple types, formatting, etc. Do take your time to understand the guidelines as these will help Facebook find the best possible matches for your ads.

Another important thing: review the platform’s terms regarding the General Data Protection Regulation. According to Facebook, you as the advertiser “act as the data controller of any customer lists uploaded as part of data file Custom Audiences.” This means you must have permission from your customers as to the use of their data. Do check out the Facebook GDPR microsite before you begin uploading a Customer List.

Website Visitors

This is the highlight of this chapter. The beauty of remarketing using this Custom Audience is that you can create ads based on what users have shown interest in on your website. That’s pretty doable through the traffic data obtained by Facebook Pixel.

However, the setup may seem a bit complicated particularly for first-timers. One way to approach this is to get a good grasp of the rules. For instance, in building a Custom Audience based on website visitors, you will have to indicate “All website visitors,” which includes or excludes everyone who’s visited your website up to a certain number of days. Facebook can go back up to 180 days.

Facebook does a good job at explaining the standard rules for this and how you can combine them to refine your audience.

App Users

Finally, if you have an app, you can also reach those who are using it. Crafting this Custom Audience encourages them to return to and potentially buy an item on the app.

For starters, you need to know about mobile advertising IDs, which are useful if you’re going to do any of the following:

• You want to reach people already using your app with Facebook ads on desktop or mobile
• You want to reach people who have taken a specific action in your app (like a purchase) with a specific message
• Your app doesn\’t use a Facebook Login, but you want to reach people who are already engaged with your app

The Custom Audience built for your app ad has technical requirements. Study them here. You will also need to register your app, as well as set up SDK and log events on the Facebook for developers site to get started. More information can be found here.

Going hands-on will help you better understand the dynamics involved in Facebook remarketing. Try this inexpensive yet effective option to recover lost sales and target customers who’ve already heard of your business.

You already have this guide to cover the basics. Keep it as your companion for learning. To create a remarketing ad, return to the articles on custom audiences and campaign setup.