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The veteran social media platform, Facebook, has come a long way. From being a medium to spread news across the globe, playing games in groups to connecting businesses with the customers, there is hardly a thing this platform can’t do. 

With the social media app’s Ads campaigns taking marketing to another level, there are a myriad of things businesses can capitalize on using Facebook. Since majority of the customer base is on the popular social platform, there is heaps of data that can help businesses channel their future campaigns and target customers. 

One such technique widely used by marketers on Facebook is retargeting. As can be inferred by the term itself, retargeting focuses on the viewers that have visited the company’s website in the past. Whether they were one time viewers or had gone to the website quite frequently, Facebook retargeting lets you find all of these viewers’ profiles. 

Once you have their data, you can ‘retarget’ them for your ad campaigns. Facebook retargeting has enabled businesses from all walks of life to get the attention from the potential customers increasing the conversion rate. 

Retargeting helps you get to know your customers or viewers. By observing their actions on your website, you can analyze their behavior. Understanding consumer’s behavior is a prerequisite for a successful ad campaign. Once you have the information about your audience you can tailor your ads according to their liking. 

You can even design posts to target a specific product that is clicked on the most by your website visitors. Such posts can be used to increase brand awareness and user engagement per se. 

Leads generated through Facebook retargeting have better chances of making new customers or bring the old ones back for that matter. Now that we are clear with what Facebook retargeting really is about let’s help you understand it more. 

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How does it work?

With everyone being aware of how our data moves between websites and social media platforms, it is no surprise that retargeting is quite successful. 

Whenever a viewer visits your website, a cookie gets saved. Just as you would see a message popping up every time you visit certain websites (it is so common that you would hardly find a site that is not doing it, really) about saving cookies and you grant your permission by clicking on the ‘I accept’ option. This is how you give consent to the website to save your information. 

Whether the viewer spends a few seconds on a certain page or adds products in their cart and leaves without actually buying all the information gets saved. Every bit of information is vital for a successful retargeting campaign. 

Now, when you go to your Facebook account and set up a retargeting campaign, there are plenty of ways you can use the acquired viewer information. You decide what information to use for retargeting the viewers.

In your preferred audience for the ads campaign, you can choose to target people who did a specific action such as visited a certain page, made it to the shopping cart, browsed through the homepage or viewed the location page, etc. 

This adds necessary filters to the ads campaign that makes them very specific. While catching new eyeballs is also significant, how amazing would it be to target those who are already somehow familiar with your face value? The retargeting strategy is aimed at making the most of your ads campaign while staying in the budget. 

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Why Facebook retargeting?

A couple of benefits might be very obvious from the above information but there are bunch of more that are bound to compel you to try this stardust yourself. 

Here are a few of the most important ones:

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1. Reach your audience at their prime time

Social media platforms such as Facebook regardless of how business oriented they might have become are still used to blow off some heat after a long day at work or to take a break from the daily grind. Many people use the platform to see what is going around and indulge in some form of entertainment. 

It is during this time when they are just casually going about different posts and pages. Since the viewers are not going to visit your website by themselves during this time and given how marketing in this very time is bound to increase ROI, Facebook retargeting helps you engage with them. These viewers will be shown your ads. Whether they click on the ad or not you would at least capture their attention. 

The viewers will see you across different platforms and that would sort of validate your presence. With competition growing more than ever, this is extremely important. 

2. Saves you a good deal of bucks 

While different other types of ad campaigns give you a lot of liberty in choosing your target audience, filtering them on the basis of their interests, choices, etc. retargeting takes things on the next level by making sure you are reaching out to people who have shown interest in your brand in the past. 

The budget you use for your ad campaign will be aimed at bringing the old customers back. The new target audience you might be targeting has a 50-50 chance of being converted into actual leads. With retargeting the chances increase drastically. 

In your ad campaign you can choose or target people who scrolled down at a particular page or added a certain product in their cart. So, if there is a certain product that you want to promote, Facebook retargeting will find just the right audience for you. This ensures that the money you allot for your ads campaign is mostly being used to engage with the potential leads. 

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3. Increased ROI

Increasing ROI is every business’ dream. While many still struggle with the ad campaigns and find it hard to make the most of their money invested on the campaign, remarketing (another term for retargeting) can make things fairly easier. 

What happens is when the users are shown cookie-based ads, their interest in the product or a certain brand increases. Many of us has witnessed it first-hand that whenever we are shown or happen to come across a particular product more than once, it sort of gets imprinted in our minds. Our interest in that product increases. 

And most of the times, we end up buying what we had shown little inclination towards in the very beginning. This is a very common marketing strategy generally used in the mainstream industry. The remarketing strategy works wonders for the ROI increasing it significantly. 

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Setting up Facebook retargeting

Getting started with the Facebook retargeting is fairly easy. Do not get spooked by the words like cookie-based ads, remarketing, etc. 

Assuming that you already have a website for your business, here is the simplest way of doing it:

 To get started, you need to install Facebook Pixels on your website. Facebook Pixels work like a code on your website. It basically connects your website with Facebook. It is through this very code that you are able to set up retargeting for your website. You can use Pixels to generate custom audience for your ad campaigns. 

Once you have Pixels, the retargeting is just one tap away. You need to go to ‘Ad creation’ using your Facebook business account or account that is affiliated with your brand. This marks the beginning of the Ad generation process.

Next up is choosing your audience. You will see a ‘retargeting’ option. Click on it to proceed with customizing your retargeted audience. Here, you will see numerous options to choose from which include:

• Viewed or added to cart but not purchased 
• Added to cart but not purchased
• Upsell products
• Cross-sell products

These are the actions that past viewers or customers did. Each action on your website is recorded and categorized accordingly. The categorization helps you specifically target certain audience and try rehashing their interest. 

Next, you are to pick the number of days for the action chosen. These days reflect how many days old actions will be targeted. Whether you want to engage with people who visited your website long time ago or the most recent audience, you decide. 

Further, you can also set up custom audience if you want. Either way your retargeting campaign is good to go. For even better results, you can make your ads mobile-friendly. Majority of the customer base are using their smartphones to shop and for social media. Ads that adapt to the screen size and are tailored for smartphones perform better than the rest. 

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Final verdict

Retargeting is one of the most effective ways to leave an impression on your audience. The brands that make the most of ad campaigns by using all the available platforms are hard to forget. Moreover, businesses appear more trustworthy to the audience if the latter happen to come across the former more often. 

We’d say Facebook retargeting for your brand is definitely worth a shot so way the wait?

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