Facebook Remarketing is essential for any online business. It allows you to get back in touch with your hot audience that has not yet converted by intercepting them before they forget about your products or switch to those of your competitors. By reading this guide you will learn how these campaigns are created and I will give you numerous ideas to create truly effective audiences to increase the ROI of your advertising initiatives.
The definition of remarketing
First, we must try to understand exactly what we are talking about:
This remarketing definition is very general. Going into more detail about online marketing, we can say that remarketing activities try to stimulate the purchase in all those people who in the past have already shown concrete interest in our product/service by visiting or interacting with the contents dedicated to it presently. on one of our communication assets (website, social profiles, newsletters, etc …).
The goal of remarketing
Following the definition just given, the goal of remarketing is to generate conversions. In fact, you must take into account that a large part of the audience that you will be able to engage with your content, even if they are potentially interested in buying, will not convert at the first contact.
You can use different emotional or rational levers to try to stem this behavior, but you will always find yourself having to face the problem of putting users back in touch with what you propose. If you didn’t, you would be wasting a lot of opportunities and the reason is pretty simple.
If a user added one of your products to their cart and then abandoned the purchase, they are most likely very close to converting. It would be enough for you to give him one last motivation, the last push. And that’s exactly what remarketing campaigns are for. In essence, it is about pampering the undecided, bringing them back to the site, and guiding them back to the purchase.
Remarketing, therefore, helps you to:
- reduce the cost per purchase
- increase the conversion rate
- improve return on investment (ROI)
- target users precisely
- indirectly identify your most profitable target
Remarketing on Facebook: what you need
Before explaining in detail how to create a new remarketing campaign on Facebook I want to leave you a shopping list. The things you necessarily need to understand this guide well and, at the same time, be able to remarket on Facebook are:
- Facebook pixel perfectly configured on your website. If you have an e-commerce, make sure that all standard events are connected to the events and functioning correctly
- always if you have an e-commerce, you should have a product catalog correctly configured so that you can use dynamic advertisements
- if you haven’t done it yet, study my guide on custom audiences, I’ll assume you know what they are, how they are created, and how they are used.
Remarketing campaigns on Facebook
Remarketing on Facebook orbits around the concept of custom audience, i.e. audiences made up of users who have voluntarily come into contact with your brand and interacted more or less intensely with the contents (whether they are products, landing, articles, videos, or any other what you thought of proposing).
They are generally small audiences or in any case much smaller than those you would normally use to do lead generation. Wanting to borrow from commercial jargon, we are talking about audiences made up of hot traffic which, however, could cool down quickly if you let it go and do not foresee ad hoc interventions.
Some examples of remarketing audiences could be:
- users who have added at least one product to the cart without then purchasing it
- users who have viewed at least one product without then purchasing it
- users who have visited a landing without carrying out the requested action
- users who have opened a contact generation form without filling it out
In all these cases, as you have surely already noticed, the people involved acted rather close to the conversion only to abandon the purchase path. In this guide, we are not interested in understanding the reasons for abandonment (which you may need to probe in case you notice abnormal behavior in the checkout flow). For the moment it is enough to note that all the actions considered are quite close to conversion.
In fact, and it is quite obvious, the higher the expressed purchase intention, the more important (and profitable) it will be to foresee a remarketing action. My advice is always to use the imagination (without exaggerating in useless Pindaric flights) and do tests, obviously measurable.
Remarketing campaigns on Facebook in practice
To create remarketing campaigns on Facebook we have two possibilities: campaigns with the Conversions objective and those to sell the products in the catalog. Thanks to the latest updates to the Ads Manager and Power Editor interface, the difference between the two possibilities has become very blurred.
If you are completely unfamiliar with creating Facebook Ads campaigns, I refer you to my complete guide.
Objective Sale of the products in the catalog
As I told you, with the succession of interface updates, the differences between the two campaigns have become quite rarefied. The few remaining, however, clearly characterize these two objectives. And if it is true that in some cases they may prove to be equivalent, for many scenarios the choice is substantially obligatory.
In particular, a campaign to sell catalog products will be the obligatory route if you want to deliver ads for the sale of up-selling or cross-selling products. Also, with this type of campaign, you will only be able to create dynamic ads.
You can therefore target anyone who has:
- viewed or added to the cart but not purchased: allows you to promote the products of a catalog to the people who have viewed or added them to the cart at least once in a specific period of time;
- added to cart but not purchased: This allows you to promote products in a catalog to people who have added them to the cart at least once in a specific time frame.
As for the exclusive features:
- up-selling products: allows you to promote a set of products to all users who have viewed one or more products in another catalog within a specific time frame;
- cross-selling products: This allows you to promote a set of products to all users who have purchased one or more products in another catalog within a specific time frame.
In addition to these possible choices, you can use custom combinations, which allow you to create more refined rules for selecting users.
As you will have understood, this type of campaign is mainly designed for e-commerce. To start the setup you will need to select a correctly configured Product Catalog.
Conversions goal
Using the Conversions goal for your Facebook remarketing campaigns you will need to create remarketing audiences using the appropriate audience creation tool. The creation will perhaps be less immediate, but you will gain in specificity and precision. By manually creating your custom audiences you can test some advanced combinations. A few examples:
- users who have viewed or added to their cart more than one product on your website;
- users who have purchased in the past but have not repeated the purchase in the last N days;
- users who have added products to their wishlist (or wishlist).
But even if you leave the e-commerce universe, you will have countless possibilities at your disposal. Some ideas:
- users who have viewed a landing page by scrolling to a specific point;
- users who interacted with your social content;
- users subscribed to the mailing list who have never purchased but visit the site regularly.
Really, the targeting possibilities are almost endless. Obviously, you will have to take care to evaluate the amount of traffic on your site and the frequency with which the actions you are trying to intercept occur. The risk is to find yourself with deserted or too small audiences to lead to good results.
Read more: Facebook Custom Audience: Advanced Targeting
Dynamic ads
Dynamic ads were once reserved only for campaigns with the Sales objective of the catalog products, today they can also be used with campaigns with the Conversions objective. In any case, to create this type of advertisement you must have configured a product catalog.
In fact, dynamic adverts, unlike classic ones, use the images and metadata of the products you host on your website, drawing on the details you passed on to the product catalog. In this way, Facebook can show users exactly the products they interacted with previously, maximizing the engagement rate and the chances of reaching a conversion.
How to create dynamic ads in Conversions campaigns
As I said, for some time now dynamic ads can also be created for Conversion campaigns. First, you need to select the Carousel format. You will then be able to select the option Add a template dynamically from a set of products. By selecting the card of the carousel with the label consisting of three points, you can proceed with the definition of the template that Facebook will use to create the advertisement on the newsfeed of the target users.
The dynamic fields of the product catalog that you can select by title and description are:
- First name
- Brand Reseller
- ID Description
- Short description
- Price
- Current price
- Five custom labels
Conclusions
As we have seen, remarketing on Facebook is a rather complex activity, but most likely more difficult to explain than to do. In fact, it is one of the activities with the highest potential return (some of the remarketing campaigns I am managing have ROAS above 30!) And, once everything is configured, you will not regret a single minute between those invested in studying and setting up the campaigns. They are certainly suitable for all types of online businesses, but I would say that if you have an e-commerce and you have not implemented them, it is time to take action. And quickly!
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