INTRODUCTION
According to a social media marketing industry report, Facebook is the No. 1 advertising channel for both B2B and B2C companies. This makes sense considering close to 70 percent of U.S. adults use the social media platform.
Facebook retargeting ads can amplify your message by positioning your brand in front of people who already have some familiarity with your company or product. Plus, their average click-through-rate is about 10 times higher than a cold campaign.
If you’re unfamiliar, Facebook can show ads to individuals who’ve interacted with your website, keeping your message top-of-mind.
Following are some tips on how to set up Facebook retargeting ads for your business.
INSTALL THE FACEBOOK PIXEL TO CREATE CUSTOM AUDIENCES
To get started, you’ll need to set up and install the Facebook pixel on your company’s website. This involves inserting a snippet of code, so you may want to consult your webmaster or web developer if you’re not comfortable installing it on your own.
To create your pixel, go to Ads Manager > Business Tools Menus > Event Manager. Click “+ Add New Data Source” and select the Facebook Pixel to start setup. Facebook will provide instructions for integrations and tag managers, as well as manual installation.
Once the pixel is active, it will start collecting data, like website visits generated from Facebook and its network. From here you should set up standard events that make sense for your business, such as:
- “View content” to see how many people viewed a specific page of your website
- “Lead” to track submission of information by a potential customer (e.g. form submission, signups)
- “Purchase” to track completed transactions for products or services
You will create your custom audiences from this information. For example, you could create an audience that includes individuals who viewed a specific page on your website but did not sign up for an offer.
Go to Business Manager > Audiences > Create Audience > Custom Audience > Website Traffic to select the events you want to include (e.g. view content) and exclude (e.g. lead) in your audience. Name and save your audience so you can easily locate it when it’s time to run ads.
LAUNCH FACEBOOK RETARGETING CAMPAIGN
Once your audience(s) are set up, you can create your campaign in Facebook Ads Manager. First, you will choose your desired objective. For instance, “traffic” encourages people to visit your website or online store, and “conversions” is ideal for getting customers to complete a desired action, such as a purchase.
From there, name your campaign and build your ad set to include the custom audience you created. Type the name of your custom audience in the “Custom Audiences” field to apply it to your ad set. You can then choose to exclude audiences to avoid targeting people who may fall into multiple audiences or add additional parameters, like location, age, gender, interests, behaviors or demographics.
Then you’ll select your ad placements, budget and schedule and create your ad. Make sure to use language and photos or videos aimed at your specific audience. Remember, they’ve already visited your site, so your objective is to encourage them to come back and complete a goal.
For example, you could create a time-sensitive ad (e.g. “offer expires soon”) to incentivize people to return to your site and complete an action within a certain time frame. Similarly, you could offer a price reduction or additional perks to those who initiated a purchase but failed to complete it.