INTRODUCTION
In this day and age, digital marketing is essential for reaching potential home buyers or renters in your market; however, a single digital ad campaign is not likely to get you the quality leads you need.
Retargeting, or remarketing, is a way to reconnect with people who previously interacted with your website by strategically positioning ads in front of them as they browse other sites.
This helps you keep your message in front of people who already expressed interest in your development, which often leads to better campaign performance results. In fact, the average click-through-rate of a retargeting ad is 10 times higher than traditional display ads.
So, where should you start? According to eMarketer, Google and Facebook capture close to 57 percent of the U.S. digital ad market, making them good platforms to use.
Following are some tips on how to market your development using retargeting ads on Facebook and Google.
HOW TO CREATE RETARGETING ADS ON FACEBOOK
To start a retargeting campaign on Facebook, you will first need to install the Facebook pixel on your website. This involves inserting a snippet of code from Facebook, so you may want to reach out to your webmaster or website developer for assistance.
Once the pixel is up and running, it will start collecting data, such as website visits generated from Facebook, which will help you create the custom audience you’d like to retarget.
To create the audience, you will need to go into Facebook Ad Manager > All tools > Audiences. From there you can select your source. In this case, you would select “website traffic” to retarget people who already visited your site.
You can then refine your audience (e.g. choose all website visitors vs. people who visited a certain page, add a time frame) and give it a name–make it something descriptive and easy to identify later, such as “referral traffic from builder partners” or “April 2019 landing page.”
After your audience is set up, you can start a retargeting ad campaign on Facebook. Like other Facebook campaigns, you will determine your campaign objective (e.g. traffic), select your audience (use the custom audience your created), set your budget and schedule, choose your ad placements and create your ad.
Remember, you are retargeting people who have already visited your website and expressed interest in your development, so make sure your ad language and visual content appeals to those individuals. It is a good idea to create multiple ads to test which one performs the best.
HOW TO START A GOOGLE REMARKETING CAMPAIGN
To remarket on Google, you will need to link your Google Ads and Google Analytics accounts. While you are running the campaign in Google Ads, you are generating the audience in Analytics.
To set up your audience, log into your Google Analytics account and select Admin > Audience Definition (under Property) > Audiences. Google Analytics will create an “All Users” audience for you the first time you use this feature.
You can create more customized audiences by selecting “+New Audience” and choosing specific parameters, such as individual page URLs to include or exclude and how long of a window you’d like to hold someone in the audience (e.g. visited within last 30 days).
Make sure to connect the audience to your Google Ads account before you save and name it. Once again, you should name your audience something recognizable for future use.
To actually launch the campaign, you will need to switch over to your Google Ads account. Create your Google Ads campaign as usual by selecting the type of ad you want to run (e.g. search) and your objective (e.g. website traffic), setting your budget and date window, and creating ad groups and ads.
Then visit the Audience Manager under “Tools” in the main navigation section to locate the custom audience you created. Click the checkbox next to your audience to add it to your campaign before launching.