4 Ways Facebook Remarketing Will Improve Your ROI

What Is Remarketing?

Remarketing is a tactic that lets you advertise to people who have visited your website and shown interest in your product or service. The way it works is relatively straightforward: Visitors come to your website, you segment your website visitors and create custom ads and then show those ads to those website visitors via Facebook.

Learn how using Facebook remarketing will improve your ROI.

Generally, remarketing on Facebook helps boost conversions and lowers the overall cost per customer acquisition.

However, the biggest advantage of remarketing is that you’re only showing your ad to people who are genuinely interested in your product. You can remarket to people who have visited your website, but haven’t purchased yet; customers who have completed a sale; and people who may not know about your product, but are likely to be interested in it.

Brands use remarketing to target website visitors on Facebook.

For remarketing to work, you have to do your best to determine which users visited your website organically or via paid search traffic, and then find them on Facebook or Twitter. Don’t worry—it’s easier than you think!

Read on to find out more about the advantages of Facebook remarketing and how it can help your business.

#1: Lower Cost per Click

Remarketing on Facebook usually has a lower cost per click when compared to remarketing on search engines. The reason for the lower cost is that Facebook traffic is supposed to be less targeted than search engine traffic.

On search engines, users are looking for a given product or service, and therefore they are asking for your service (pull marketing). On social media, you are exposing users to an ad while they are doing something else, and therefore they might not be as likely to convert (push marketing).

The result is that Facebook ads have a lower price point than search engine ads, because technically, Facebook users aren’t looking for your product or service right now.

Create a custom audience with a combination of attributes.

But as you probably know, targeting via Facebook can be as granular as you like. Use that to your advantage. A hyper-targeted audience guarantees cheaper traffic from the audience you’re after—in this case, users who have visited your website, but have not converted yet.

The way to convert the audience you’re remarketing to is to have consistent, quality marketing. Customize your message in a way that includes relevant and additional information to what customers already know about your product from visiting your site.

Not only does targeted Facebook remarketing give you more bang for your buck, but you can also expect to see a higher click-through rate than other general Facebook campaigns, lower cost per acquisition than first-time visitor conversion cost and higher engagement.

#2: Drive Higher Conversions

Converting first-time visitors into buyers takes time. If your industry is competitive, people are more likely to browse multiple sites before completing a purchase.

In most cases, people visit your site, and then click away so they can compare your prices with someone else’s. When they’ve gone, some visitors may forget your name and you end up losing a sale because they can’t find their way back to your site. Or maybe they missed that one selling point that could have made the difference.

Create a custom audience to target website visitors who didn’t convert.

Remarketing to your website visitors who didn’t convert works to remedy those situations. When those visitors see your ad on another site (e.g., Facebook), you become more recognizable and that boosts your chances of completing the purchase cycle.

#3: Capitalize on Social ProofYou can exclude users who have completed a sale by simply creating a custom remarketing segment for people who have visited your thank-you page, and then preventing them from seeing your campaign.

You don’t have to limit your remarketing to potential customers. Showing ads to a wider audience—like those who have already bought from you—allows current customers to interact with potential ones. Happy customers often share positive comments and engage with your content.

When current customers comment on and share your ad, it’s more appealing to new customers.

When a potential customer sees those comments via remarketing, he’s likely to have a more positive impression of your brand and that can maximize your chances of conversion.

That connection also increases brand loyalty—and loyal customers are worth more than new customers, because they’ll continue to buy from you at no additional (or at least minimal) cost per acquisition.

Speaking of loyalty, when you extend your audience to include current customers, upselling is much easier, more social and more engaging. When customers see your familiar company on Facebook and Twitter, the chances you’llgenerate engagement and additional conversions are much higher.

#4: Expand Market Reach

I’ve talked about remarketing to potential and existing customers, but you can also broaden your remarketing audience to those who share characteristics with those groups.

You can do that by using an offsite pixel to create a custom audience in your Facebook Ads Manager that includes people who have visited a particular page on your website. As discussed, those lists can include potential and existing customers.

Create a lookalike audience to broaden your reach.

You can leverage those lists to create a lookalike audience. The advantage of using lookalike audiences is that you’ll reach relevant potential customers you were missing out on, and who are also likely to be interested in your product or service and ultimately convert.

Conclusion

Leveraging the Facebook data and tools available to you, you can remarket precisely to the audience you need to reach—potential customers, existing customers and even people who have never heard of you. And since there is no minimum investment, it fits easily within all budgets.

via

How to Use Targeted Facebook Ads to Promote an Event

How Facebook Ads Drive People Down a Marketing Funnel

Marketing funnels are useful because they show how people go from hearing about your event to registering for your event. Your funnel is essentially a framework that connects content marketing, social media engagement, email marketing and ads into a functional strategy.

Below is an example of a horizontal funnel (using Facebook) that follows Jane as she goes from awareness of the event, to registering for the event, to telling her friends about the event.

Each stage of your Facebook marketing funnel serves a different promotional purpose.

Now let’s dig deeper into how Facebook ads support each stage of the funnel.

#1: Capture Awareness

The first phase of any campaign is awareness. Maybe someone finds out about your event because a friend was talking about it, or maybe that person subscribes to your email or reads your blog.

In the funnel example above, Jane signs a pledge to support, which is a mini-campaign designed to nurture interest for an upcoming event. Doing a mini-campaign like this isn’t always necessary, but it can be effective, particularly for paid events.

At this stage of the game, I suggest you use any of these Facebook ad options:boosted posts, event ads, post engagement ads or lookalike audiences.

Boosting a post offers a number of ways to target your Facebook ad.

I frequently recommend boosted posts, especially if you have limited staff, training or resources.

When you decide to boost a Facebook post, only boost your best stuff. That way you increase the likelihood that people who see the post will engage with it. To find the posts worth boosting, look at your Insights to find your top event-related posts based on engagement rate and how relevant it is to your current marketing goals.

There may be cases when your best-performing updates aren’t directly related to your promotion. If that’s the case, simply edit the status update, include a call to action (CTA) and link to your campaign landing page. Just make sure your edits feel natural, not forced.

I won’t go into the details about event ads, but I will say that promoting events with ads can be super-powerful, especially if you target the friends of people who have registered!

Page post engagement ads are another option. These are ads you create using a page update and the Advanced Facebook Advertising Tool. This tool gives you many more targeting options than boosted posts. (However, Facebook now lets you use the Advanced Ad Tool when boosting a post.)

Use Facebook’s Advanced Advertising Tool for excellent targeting options.

Or you can create and use a lookalike audience. A lookalike audience is a custom audience that shares the same likes and interests as your customers, email subscribers, volunteers or even people who attended last year’s event.

Creating a Facebook lookalike audience is as simple as uploading an email list. Who should be on this list? Why would they be interested in hearing about your event? The easy answer to both is anyone who registered for a previous event.

Once you create a lookalike audience with Power Editor, you can use it to target your boosted post by following these steps:

1. Find the post you want to promote and click Boost.

2. Click the Use Advanced Options link in the pop-up window. You’ll be redirected to Facebook’s Advanced Advertising Tool.

3. Scroll down under Audiences and type the name of your lookalike audience into the Custom Audience field.

4. Select the lookalike audience from the list of suggestions.

5. Select any other targeting options you want to include. You may not need to bother with this if your lookalike audience is based on a very specific email list (for example, previous event registrants).

#2: Nurture Interest

In our example with Jane, we’re using triggered email marketing campaigns. Triggered campaigns or autoresponders are email messages that are automatically sent in response to something the subscriber does.

When Jane signs the pledge, she is added to a specific email list. As soon as she’s added to that list (the trigger), a series of two to three email messages are sent to her, encouraging her to register for the event.

There are a few Facebook ad tactics you can use to support these email messages, but one stands out front and center: email custom audiences.

Create a custom audience to target people from your email list.

The constant challenge of email marketing is getting people to open your emails and click through your campaign links. We can send Jane triggered emails intended to nurture her interest in the event, but we can’t make her open or click. This is where Facebook email custom audiences come into play.

An email custom audience allows you to reach people on a specific email list with Facebook ads. In our example let’s say that Jane opens one of the triggered emails, but fails to click on links to learn more about the event—maybe she gets distracted or gets pulled away to a work meeting.

After her long and stressful meeting, Jane opens Facebook during a coffee break. She sees boosted posts (or event ads) reflecting the same CTAs she read in the triggered email. She may click through the post and register for the event, or take the post as a reminder to register later that night when she has more time for email.

This tactic essentially creates a one-two punch—combining email marketing and Facebook marketing. In our example we’re using an email custom audience with the list of people like Jane who’ve signed the pledge.

You can create a Facebook email custom audience by following these steps:

1. Export the email list or segment from your current donor database, EMS or CRM and save it to your hard drive. You only need a single column (CSV or TXT) of emails. No other data is required (you can even remove the header row).

2. Select the Facebook page post you want specific email subscribers to see and click Boost.

3. In the pop-up, click Advanced Options. You will be redirected to Facebook’s Advanced Advertising Tool.

4. Scroll down to the Audience section and click Create Custom Audiences.

5. In the pop-up, click Data File Custom Audience.

6. Give your list a name and a short description, select I Agree to the Facebook Custom Audiences Terms and click Create Audience.

Fill in some basic information so you can use your new custom audience for later campaigns.

7. Complete your ad by selecting your email custom audience, your ad run dates and budget.

A quick note: When your list is uploaded, you can target Facebook users associated with that list. When you select the list in the Custom Audience field, you may notice that the audience number is smaller than the list you uploaded. That’s because Facebook only uses emails that are associated with a Facebook profile.

#3: Convert Prospects

If you’ve conducted any type of campaign that includes a landing page asking people to take a specific action, you know all too well that most people won’t do what you want them to do—they may lose interest, get confused, get distracted or even get back to work. Whatever the reason, they fail to convert.

But they did visit your landing page!

You can use that to your advantage by using Facebook website retargeting. The diagram below explains how retargeting works.

When you see Facebook ads for a site you’ve recently visited, you’re being remarketed to.

Facebook website retargeting allows you to target ads at people who have visited a specific page on your website. In our example it’s the event registration page.

To retarget registration page visitors, follow the instructions above for creating a custom audience, but this time when you click Create a Custom Audience, choose Custom Audience from Website. Jon Loomer’s article will help you complete the process from there.

Pay careful attention to the number of days you keep people in this custom audience. You don’t want to keep people too long because the recency effect wears off. For example, if Jane visited the event registration page 30 days ago, chances are she’s way past the point of losing interest.

Refresh your retargeted audience frequently so you’re not marketing to people who have lost interest.

Remember that the most important part of converting registrants is your landing page. If the landing page isn’t effective, retargeting visitors with Facebook ads won’t work that well.

#4: Increase Word of Mouth Shares

To encourage attendees to tell their friends about the event, you can reuse some of the tactics you’ve already implemented. For instance, you can create a new email custom audience based on the list you create from the event registration page, and then ask those people to share your event information.

I also encourage you to create another website custom audience—this time from people who have reached the thank-you page of your website after registering for your event. Next, create an unpublished (or dark) post encouraging registrants to invite their friends to the event and retarget the post to your new custom audience (your registrants).

Create a dark or unpublished post ad in Power Editor.

You definitely want to use event ads at this point, simply because of their strong social proof. Facebook users who are served event ads see which of their friends have RSVP’d to your event.

via

How to Retarget Content to Facebook Custom Audiences

Retarget content to a your audience with Facebook Custom Audiences.

Why Retargeted Content?

The goal of retargeted content (also known as remarketing) is to place your brand top of mind. Common strategies remarket to people who have already visited your website.

Updates like this can show up in your news feed if you’ve ever visited the Plated website.

People rarely buy from you the first time they visit your site or see an offer. They would rather take their time, compare your pricing with competitors’ and visit your site a few more times before completing that valuable sale.

Here are four custom audiences you can use to retarget Facebook users with your content.

#1: Website Visitors

The most common remarketing tactic is targeting relevant ads at people who have already visited your website (usually a specific landing page).

To create a targeted audience based on website visitors, you must have a Facebook website custom audience in place.

Overall, retargeting website visitors is a simple concept: When someone visits a page with your custom audience code (i.e., an offsite pixel), they’re added to your custom audience list in your Facebook Ads Manager.

You can include those visitors (and the custom audience they’re part of) as a target audience in a Facebook ad retargeting campaign.

Custom audiences are important to Facebook retargeting campaigns.

There may be a case where you want to retarget only a portion of the traffic that has visited a landing page on your website. No problem. You can do that by creating a personalized custom audience:

1. Go to your Facebook Ads Manager and choose Audience.

2. Click on Create a Custom Audience.

3. Under Website Traffic, select People Visiting Specific Pages.

3. Next to the Visited field, customize the URL elements to match the pages you want to retarget.

4. Click on Create.

You don’t have to retarget everyone who visits your website.

After you create your personalized custom audience, it’s ready to use. However, keep in mind that it may take a few hours for the new audience to have the final user count.

#2: Facebook Fans

Retargeting to existing Facebook fans is incredibly easy: When you set up your Facebook ad, choose to target people who are already fans of your page.

Narrow your retargeting audience to include only people who are fans of your page.

Does it seem odd to advertise to existing Facebook fans? Consider that acquiring sales from existing customers is cheaper than acquiring new leads (and many of your fans are probably customers). You can also upsell those existing customers with new or better products and services.

Additionally, your fans may not be seeing all of your Facebook updates. If youretarget your most important content to them via a Facebook ad, they’re more likely to see it.

#3: Email Subscribers

You can actually strengthen the power of your newsletter by serving Facebook ads to existing email subscribers.

To set up this custom audience, you need an Excel file with a column that includes all of your subscriber email addresses. Once you have that, go to Audiences in your Facebook Ads Manager, click Create Audience and choose Custom Audience.

Click on Data File Custom Audience and follow the instructions for the setup. Make sure to indicate that you’re updating email addresses.

Create a custom audience based on your email subscriber list.

Retargeting to email subscribers can increase the chance of conversion exponentially. It’s worth the extra effort to set it all up.

#4: Similar Audiences

Many of your users—whether website visitors, Facebook fans or list subscribers—have overlapping demographics, interests and behaviors. Wouldn’t it be great to find more people like them? Well, you can.

You can create a custom audience targeting people who share similar characteristics to your existing connections—people who are very likely to be interested in your products, services and content.

The custom audiences you create to retarget to by similarity are called lookalike audiences and they expose your ads to a more vast and relevant audience.

To create a custom audience based on similarities to website visitors, go to the Audience section of your Ads Manager and choose the custom audience installed on your website (see #1). Click Create Lookalike Audience at the bottom of the page and choose the desired audience reach.

To create a custom audience based similarities to your current Facebook fans’ personal data (e.g., behavior, interests, etc.), go to the Audience section of your Ads Manager, click Create Audience and choose Lookalike Audience from the menu.

Create a lookalike target audience to find potential Facebook fans and customers.

Click Source and type your page name. Select the country you want to target and how similar your audience should to be to your current fans. Click Create Audience.

Choose the characteristics of your fan page lookalike target audience.

To create a custom audience based on similarity to your current email subscribers, go to your Audience menu, click on the name of the email list you loaded in #3 and click on Create Lookalike Audience at the bottom of the page.

Once you have your custom lookalike audiences in place, you can select each as needed depending on the goal of your Facebook ads.

via

How to Use Facebook Website Custom Audiences

What Is Website Custom Audiences?

In its most basic form, Website Custom Audiences is a powerful tool that lets youcreate Facebook ads that target users who have visited your website. Now you can reach well beyond your core fans and email subscribers.

Catch the attention of recent website visitors with a relevant ad about your product or service.

WCA may sound quite a bit like Facebook Exchange (FBX), another way to retarget users on Facebook who visited your website. But FBX is created only through an approved third-party and can only create a domain ad that drives people to your website.

The special thing about a WCA is that it’s created and used within ads run through Power Editor or the self-serve ad tool. That means you can create any ad you typically could on Facebook. Your ad can be related to your Facebook page, a page post, offer, event or application.

The image above is an example of WCA in action. I created this ad to sell my one-on-one service and retarget anyone who has visited my website during the past 1-3 days.

I also run a similar ad targeted at non-fans who visited my website to increase my number of relevant Facebook fans.

Target recent website visitors to increase your relevant fan base.

The response to these and other ads using WCA has been incredible because I’m able to create something extremely relevant for those people who see the ads.

What Are the Benefits of Using Website Custom Audiences?

I’ve never been so excited about a new Facebook advertising feature—the impact WCA has on reach is remarkable. Partner it with your simple sales funnel and watch things get really interesting.

As I’m sure you know, relevance is the key to crazy ROI on Facebook. The more relevant the connection, the more likely the user is to buy.

That’s why I recommend a simple Facebook sales funnel that focuses on building a highly relevant audience, providing regular valuable content to build trust, collecting email addresses and selling.

Let me use my page as an example of the impact WCA makes when paired with a simple Facebook sales funnel.

I have a little over 40,000 Facebook fans. I also have an email list of about 17,000 people. Accounting for overlap, we can assume that makes about 50,000 unique people I can target with Facebook ads who are familiar with me.

Until the launch of WCA, I’d burn through my fans and email list pretty quickly when promoting a post or looking for a conversion. So I’d then move on to Lookalike Audiences and interests targeting.

Creating a Lookalike Audience.

Now, with the addition of WCA, I can generate ads that target recent visitors to my site and entice them to like my Facebook page or sign up for my webinar while memories of my content are fresh.

What group of people would be most likely to want to click on a link to my recent blog post? Someone who has previously visited my website, of course!

As I mentioned above, my highly relevant audience (fans and email subscribers) was previously about 50,000 people. I’ve since created a WCA with a duration of 30 days that consists of more than 115,000 users.

While we can assume some overlap with fans and email subscribers, it’s safe to say that I’m reaching at least 65,000 more highly relevant people who are intimately familiar with my content.

But the power of WCAs goes further: You can also target by specific pages or sections of your website people visited.

So, for example, I could create an ad for my Power Editor training course targeted at those who read a tutorial about Power Editor on my website. Or target those who visited the landing page for that course.

You can use WCA to exclude people as well. I could promote a post and exclude people who’ve already read it. Or I could promote my webinar or training course, but exclude anyone who’s already signed up.

That’s increasing efficiency and limiting waste!

How Do You Create Website Custom Audiences?

Whether you create a WCA from Power Editor or the Ads Manager, the process is the same with the exception of the first step. So let’s start there.

From the Ads Manager, click on Audiences in the left column, then click the green Create Audience button.

Create a WCA from the Ads Manager.

If you’re using Power Editor, click Audiences on the left side (old design) or click the Ad Tools drop-down at the top right and select Audiences (new design).

View audiences within Power Editor.

Next, click the Create Audience drop-down at the top left and select Custom Audience.

Create a custom audience within Power Editor.

From this point forward, everything is the same whether you create the WCA in Ads Manager or Power Editor.

First, you’ll be asked to agree to Facebook’s Terms for Custom Audience from your Mobile App and Website. You should accept that.

Accept Facebook’s terms for using custom audiences from your website.

If you haven’t previously created a custom audience, you may also get an error message indicating it isn’t yet active.

After accepting the terms, you’ll see the following screen. This is where the magic happens.

Create a WCA.

The top section is easy. Name your WCA something that will make sense later. For example, Website Custom Audience—All Pages—30 Day Duration.

You don’t have to fill in the description unless you need more space to describe this particular WCA. The name is most important because that’s what you’ll see when you’re targeting in an ad.

The Visited area is where you create your rules for determining which website visitors will be part of your WCA.

Create rules for your WCA.

You’ll be able to select Domain, URL or Path. You can use Domain by itself, or include it with one or both of the other options.

• Domain lets you target anyone who visited a particular domain within your control.
• URL lets you target anyone who visited a URL that contains a particular character or string of characters.
• Path lets you target anyone who visited a page that contains a particular character or string of characters within the path (after the domain).

You can include multiple character strings in each section if you want to create a basic OR statement. In the Path box, I used this option to target anyone who both visited jonloomer.com AND visited a page that included either website ORcustom OR turkeys in the URL.

Click the + button to create an additional AND statement rule. For example, you could create a new rule for Visited URL and assign particular page URLs from your site like this:

Visited URL: website-custom-audience facebook-ads

That statement, along with your established Domain, targets anyone who both visited jonloomer.com AND visited a page that included either website-custom-audience ORfacebook-ads in the URL.

You can also change the Contains Any option to Doesn’t Contain if you want to exclude particular page visits.

By default, the WCA’s duration is 30 days (but you can change that to be as short as 1 day or as long as 180 days).

The duration includes anyone in your audience who visited qualifying pages during the most recent 30 days (or the duration you set). This is dynamic and the clock starts ticking as soon as you click Create.

This WCA will generate a list of users who visited qualifying pages of your website during the past 30 days.

Finally, you’ll want to click the View Remarketing Pixel link at the top of the page.

You’ll need to paste your remarketing pixel between the <HEAD> tags of your website.

This brings up the code you need to copy and paste between the <HEAD> tags of your website’s template in order to put the pixel on every page of your website.

How Do You Use Website Custom Audiences?

When you create a Facebook ad, you’ll type the name of your WCA in the Custom Audience box.

When you have more than one WCA, you may want to include one in your ad, but exclude another. If you’re using the self-serve ad tool, you can only include, not exclude, a WCA.

Enter the name of your WCA to target those users in the self-serve ad tool.

However, if you’re using Power Editor, you have the ability to both target and exclude WCAs.

Target or exclude WCAs within Power Editor.

Need some ideas on how you could use WCAs? I have a few.

You can use “page likes” to target anyone who visited your website during the past 30 days who doesn’t already like your page (i.e., exclude current fans).

You can use “promote blog post” to target anyone who visited your websiteduring the past 30 days, but exclude anyone who already read that post.

Finally, you can use “sell product” to target anyone who visited the landing page for your product, but exclude anyone who visited the thank-you page and therefore has already purchased that product.

via