Retargeting Technology to Convert More Prospects Into Customers
Could you imagine how excited a clothing retailer would be if they could place a tracking device on every person that walked into their store? Furthermore, what if that tracking device could also report to the shop owner every product the person stopped to look at, touch, and try on?
Not only does this technology exist on the internet, it’s considered normal. Any business that does not use this will fall hopelessly behind and probably be out of business in short order.
The technology, of course, is general Retargeting, which we’ve all seen work. You visit a product page on an ecommerce website and then almost instantly you see that product plastered all over your News Feed for the next few days.
This truth is well known: The bulk of your website’s visitors leave without ever engaging with you. They don’t fill out opt-in forms or buy anything.
A study by Marketo found that 98 percent of visitors to your website, on average, are anonymous; you don’t have any information about them at all. You won’t be able to reach them if they leave. That’s why Retargeting is important—so you can reach them, even if they leave.
In this chapter you are going to discover what Facebook Retargeting is and how you can leverage this technology in ways to enhance the profitability of every campaign you run on Facebook. In addition, you’ll learn how to set this up and use this technology in all of your campaigns.
THE POWER OF RETARGETING
Retargeting is one of the most important advancements in marketing in the last 150 years. It’s right up there with classified ads in newspapers and commercials on television.
This technology has removed the pressure from advertisers to “get that sale now.” In version 1.0 of web marketing, we used to agonize over the wasted opportunity of paying for a website visitor and having them leave without buying—or at least leaving us their email address.
It forced advertisers to painstakingly tune ads and web pages to “get responses now.” The smartest of marketers learned to split test ads, offers, and landing pages to get to the most optimal combination and maximize their response rate.
All of this activity was good, and it forced advertisers to be very efficient, but it did a disservice to the visitor (and quite frankly the advertiser) because it removed the element of time from the equation.
It also perpetuated a mindset that there was an elusive “perfect” ad, offer, or landing page. Practically, you know that one-size-fits-all doesn’t fit your customer base. You have people that buy from you for all kinds of reasons because they are wired differently.
It’s a fool’s game trying to squeeze every customer through a single portal. In reality, you need to have many doors for which to invite customers to walk through and begin a conversation with.
Retargeting technology gives you the gift of time and conversation. You now have time to relax and converse with your website visitors versus pushing them to an action.
Anyone that knows me (Bob) well (or has stepped into my office) knows I love sports. After being a high school basketball coach for over 30 years, my approaches to business and coaching bleed together, so much so that I will use business analogies with my players and sports analogies with my clients.
Retargeting is analogous with basketball. One of the mantras we have on my team is “next shot.” There has never been a player with any significant playing who has made every shot in a season. Most players have multiple opportunities in a game to make a shot, but even the best miss about 55 percent during a game.
Retargeting is the ultimate “next shot.” When you miss a shot, you get a chance to attempt another, perhaps even in the same possession, same half, same game, or the same season. Same goes with your visitors. You might miss a shot to make that sale on their first visit to your site, but you might make your shot on the next visit that day, or perhaps on a visit the next day, next week, or next month.
You know how this works because you’ve seen it in action. You’ll visit a web page and then ads for the product you just looked at will follow you around the web for days and weeks. For example, if you’re on the keto diet, would you rather see ads for steak or cookies? A steak ad would feel natural to you while a cookie ad would feel out of place.
A good way to tell if your Facebook Retargeting campaigns are creepy and annoying or if they’re acceptable is to ask yourself how they would work in real life. Let’s say you walked into a store in a mall. You pick up a cell phone case, look at the price, and set it down. If a salesperson came over and gave you a little more info about the case’s manufacturing in the U.S. and that it has a two-year guarantee, you would probably think that was helpful and wouldn’t mind. But if the salesperson then follows you around the store shouting, “You forgot to buy the case!” you’d be annoyed. The same is true of Facebook Retargeting ads. There’s a balance.
Have you ever thrown a rock into a lake? What happens when a rock penetrates the water? It makes a splash and you see ripples rolling outward from the point of entry. The ripples near the middle are the biggest, and as they extend outward, they get less and less noticeable until they eventually disappear.
Retargeting is like that. When a visitor hits your website, it’s like a rock hitting the surface of the water. The ripples extending outward represent time and interest toward your ad.
Therefore, time is important. Recency in relation to their visit is very important in Retargeting. When you build audiences to retarget, you define the amount of days from the visit you want Facebook to include.
As it goes, you understand that someone who visits today is more valuable than those who visit tomorrow, or next week, or next month. Just like the ripples in the lake, the further out from the last visit, the less likely that visitor will notice you.
While you can define Retargeting Audiences from 1 to 180 days in Facebook, we generally recommend you set your standard audience durations to 7, 14, and 30 days.
When creating Retargeting campaigns, ask yourself, “What’s the next step I’d like a visitor to do?” It’s not always to purchase. In your first Retargeting campaign, one strategy is to provide more information.
RETARGETING TURNS LOSING CAMPAIGNS INTO WINNERS
Without Retargeting, the economics of advertising are working against you. We have a client where the Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) for initial traffic is negative.
RETURN ON AD SPEND
Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) is a marketing metric in advertising to help you evaluate its effectiveness.
Here’s the formula:
Revenue / Cost = ROAS
A ROAS greater than 1 indicates a profit; a ROAS less than 1 indicates a loss.
Check out Figure 3–1 to see some numbers. For prospecting, this client is losing money. The ROAS is 0.261.
Another way to look at this is to understand how much it takes to make $1.00. On a losing campaign, you divide the Amount Spent by Revenue. Here you get 3.83. So, he is paying $3.83 to make $1.00.
However, with a Retargeting campaign (Nurturing), his ROAS is 3.696. Quite a solid return. Since this is a positive ROAS, that means he’s making $3.70 for every $1 he spends.
For the entire campaign then, he’s profitable with an ROAS of 2.667 ($53k/$20k) or making $2.67 for every $1 he spends as shown in Figure 3–1.
FIGURE 3–1. Effect of Retargeting on ROAS
It’s also interesting to note that he is actually spending almost 2.5 times more on Nurturing (Retargeting) than he is on Prospecting because the return is so much greater.
The economics of this campaign are quite good. Although not shown, he is getting a first-time visitor to his site for around 45 cents, which is cheap. He knows that just a fraction of the 13K visitors will buy on their first visit because they don’t know him yet. He knows that within 14 days, he can get a significant portion of those visitors to buy and he’s willing to invest more of his ad dollars to get these customers to convert.
The bottom line is that Retargeting makes Facebook Advertising profitable for this client. Without it, he’d go broke!
CREATING A SUCCESSFUL FACEBOOK ADS RETARGETING CAMPAIGN
Clearly, Retargeting is necessary and good for advertisers. Yet, we’ve all seen examples of bad and lazy Retargeting. Almost everyone has a story of how they bought a vacuum cleaner and then saw ads for more vacuum cleaners for the next month. That vacuum should last years if not decades! That company is clearly not suppressing their buyers, so is wasting precious ad dollars on a customer who has already bought!
How about those “zombie ads” that just won’t die? You visit a site and you see the same ad multiple times on every website you visit or in your News Feed for months! This is a lazy and poor Retargeting strategy.
Good Retargeting isn’t really remembered: it’s simply clicked on.
We’re going to show you how to do good Facebook Retargeting!
Retargeting is accomplished by two main technologies: cookies and pixels.
Cookies are little bits of info that are stored in your browser to uniquely yet anonymously identify your browser. Cookies are how Facebook knows you were looking at a particular page and then can allow an advertiser to show ads related to your visit to that site.
Pixels are little bits of code on the websites you visit that set a cookie to uniquely tag you. Large companies like Facebook and Google (as well as many other specialized companies) use these pixels to “cookie” you. These major players can associate your cookie with your identity because you’re logged into their system. The big players don’t share your personal info with the end advertiser, so you remain anonymous to them.
Cookies are not something you have to worry about. The pixel is something you will need to install on your website. More on that shortly.
There are a few best practices to help you think about how to create your Facebook Retargeting strategy.
RETARGETING PRINCIPLES FOR OPTIMAL PERFORMANCE
Retargeting is very powerful for profitable advertising campaigns, but you want to be sure you follow a few principles to make it perform in an optimal way. As with any tool or technology, there’s a basic way to use it, but we want you to gain an edge over other advertisers, so we’re going to teach you what the experts know.
People visiting your site can almost always be segmented into buyers and non-buyers. The more you can segment them, the more targeted your ad will be to them.
If you have a blog, each topic or category could become a segment. As you’ll learn in Chapter 5, you can also segment by time spent on your site. If you can’t segment based on buyers or non-buyers, or topics or product lines, you can still segment by time on your site.
You’ll learn more about segmenting shortly.
Timing Is Everything
Do you remember what you had for dinner last night? Do you remember what you had for dinner two Tuesdays ago? The answer is you’d have to think about it to remember.
That’s how visitors to your website are. Within 24 to 48 hours, people have forgotten a lot about you. No offense; they’re human. They are distracted.
As it goes, the more recently someone visited your site, the more interested they are in your business. This is called recency.
Facebook uses this idea of recency in everything they do. You’ll see when you create a Website Visitor Audience, you’ll have to tell it how many days people are to stay in the Audience after visiting your website.
We generally recommend you use Audiences of people that have visited your site in the last 1, 7, 14, and 30 days, but you can create as many as you like or need depending on your sales cycle.
If you have a long sales cycle, using an Audience that’s three times as long as your average sale will keep everyone engaged. So, if your average sale takes 30 days, you should use an Audience of 90 days to ensure you include every potential buyer.
Stop Repeating Yourself
Most advertisers’ first attempt at remarketing fails because they only have one ad that says, “Buy Now.” If someone didn’t buy on the first attempt, there are many, many possible reasons. You have to address those and give the visitor a good reason to come back. That reason could be more content or it could simply be a better deal if the price was the issue.
You’ll discover several strategies for keeping people engaged and moving along the Customer Awareness Timeline toward doing business with you later on.
Retargeting Is Not Just for Non-Buyers
There are many strategies where Retargeting can be used other than convincing non-buyers to buy.
For example, you can use Retargeting to reach recent buyers and offer them an additional product or service (cross sell or upsell). Buyers are usually the most likely to buy again. Often this is very counterintuitive, because you might assume they don’t “need” more. So, try and increase your profit margin by asking them what every good fast food restaurant asks, “Do you want fries with that?”
You can also retarget people to engage them in a series of videos or articles over a span of time. As you’ll learn, you can mimic an email marketing sequence in the Facebook News Feed without needing to capture their email address. We’ve referred to this in the past as an “invisible autoresponder.”
You can also use Retargeting to get people to take other actions such as liking your Facebook Page, visiting your YouTube page, opting into a special report series, or inviting them to an exclusive event.
Facebook has the ability to track users for up to 180 days, so you have the ability to stay connected with them for six months, which is an eternity in internet time.
THE FACEBOOK PIXEL IS THE NEW WAY TO BUILD A LIST
I sat down with a business owner last week and he was talking about how he installed “that pixel thing” on his site and now he was waiting for all the traffic to show up from Facebook. He was absolutely correct in his desire to get his pixel installed, but obviously uninformed about how it worked!
Installing your Facebook Pixel is the first thing you do after setting up an Ad Account. It’s the cornerstone of Facebook Advertising.
It used to be that advertisers were obsessed with building up Facebook followers with Page likes. If you had a lot of likes, you could reach those people fairly easily.
However, likes are no longer necessary. What advertisers should be obsessed with instead is pixeling visitors to track and react to a person’s behavior. There’s no need to create a robust Facebook Fan Page because it is much better to connect with people right in the News Feed than through content and ads.
The Facebook Pixel (we will also refer to this simply as “the pixel” in the book) is a little bit of code you put on your webpages to send data to Facebook about all of your visitors that Facebook matches to its users. This allows you to connect visitors on your website to your advertising on Facebook, allowing you to do two main things:
1. Build Retargeting Audiences
2. Measure the Results of Your Ads
BUILDING RETARGETING AUDIENCES
The Facebook Pixel allows you to build a Retargeting Audience based on people who visited a page or multiple pages on your website.
A very basic Retargeting Audience is simply one made up of everyone who visited your website. A more advanced approach is to segment your website visitors into multiple audiences based on specific pages they visit on your site. This could be individual product pages, blog posts, checkout pages, etc.
For example, someone who has added products to their shopping cart is much more likely to buy than someone who visited a landing page for five seconds and then left. So, the audience of people who added products to their cart or even started the checkout process are more valuable than someone who simply landed on the product detail page.
Facebook helps you create these segments based on pages or events. In the scenario above, the event is called Add To Cart. Segmenting your audience by pages and event gives you time to tell a story and lead people through your sales process at their own pace based on their actions on your website.
INSTALLING THE FACEBOOK PIXEL
Stop what you’re doing and install the Facebook Pixel right now. Seriously. It’s the first thing we check for a new client, and it’s the first thing you need to do after setting up an Ad Account. The first step is to install the pixel’s base code, which is in your Ads Manager, then go to Events Manager. Click Add New Data Source and then Facebook Pixel, as seen in Figure 3–2.
FIGURE 3–2. Initial Pixel Setup
Put in your website URL and Facebook will suggest a partner integration if you use one of the 30 or so most popular website platforms like WordPress or Shopify. This is the easiest way to install the pixel if it applies. If you’re not using one of the partner platforms, you’ll install the pixel code manually.
Follow Facebook’s instructions to get your pixel installed. One of the questions it will ask is if you want to enable Advanced Matching. YES, you should enable Advanced Matching. This is a technology Facebook uses in their algorithm to make cross-device conversions much easier to track. For example, many people discover a product first on their mobile device, then buy it later on their desktop. This feature helps Facebook know who these people are.
Once the base pixel code is installed, you can set up events. An event is simply an action a visitor takes on your website. It might be filling out a form with their email address, adding to your shopping cart, or completing a purchase. Facebook has the ability to optimize for any event you set up. The easiest way to set up an event is to use a partner integration. They include the most common events that advertisers need to track or optimize for.
To set up events yourself, go into your pixel and choose Set Up New Events from the Setup menu in the top right corner and choose Use Facebook’s Event Setup Tool. The tool will allow you to set up events without modifying any code. See Figure 3–3.
Next, add a URL to a page you’d like to track events. It could be a landing or product page. Then you’ll see your page with a Facebook Event Setup Tool on top of the page, as seen in Figure 3–4 on page 28.
Choose any buttons or links you’d like to track and they’ll be added to your event list. Any events you add here will be available to build a Retargeting Audience and optimize your ads.
FIGURE 3–4. Facebook Event Setup Tool
If you have a catalog website like Shopify or WooCommerce, you can connect it here. That will allow you to automatically show ads for products your visitor looked at but might not have purchased or even cross sells or upsells for buyers.
Facebook has standard conversion events that they automatically measure for you in their standard reporting (PageView, Lead, Purchase). Often, it’s necessary to further define a conversion when you have multiple events happening within your account. Perhaps you have multiple lead forms being promoted at one time, or individual order forms for various products and services. A Custom Conversion allows you to report and optimize on those specific conversion events. An example would be if you are running prospecting ads and you have two ways to generate a lead: by registering for a webinar or by registering for a phone consult. The pixel automatically tracks leads for you, but how can you know how many webinar registrations and phone consults the ad produced? By using a Custom Conversion.
To create a Custom Conversion, choose Custom Conversions from the Events Manager section of your Business Manager. Then click Create Custom Conversion at the top. Find the URL of the thank-you or confirmation page of the event you’d like to track. In the Website Event box, you can choose All URL Traffic if you’re not sure, but if you’re already tracking it as a standard event (like a Contact, Lead, Purchase, etc.), choose that standard event name.
Paste in the URL of the thank-you or confirmation page in the URL box and potentially shorten it to the unique part. Name your Custom Conversion and assign it a value. If your Custom Conversion is not a purchase, you can assign it the value of a penny so the value is actually a count of the number of results.
In the example for the webinar, you’d paste in the URL of the thank-you page of the webinar registration and name that Webinar Registrant. Then you’d create a second Custom Conversion using the URL from the thank-you page of the phone consult form and call that Phone Appointments. See Figure 3–5 for a Custom Conversion setup.
FIGURE 3–5. Custom Conversion Setup
Now you can both optimize for each of these events and see the results of the ad by adding these columns to your View and Reports. You’ll learn how to do that in Chapter 27. For now, just get any Custom Conversions setup that you might want to track.
About 20 minutes after your pixel is installed, you should start seeing activity on it. You should see the PageView event and possibly other events. If you don’t see any activity, the easiest way to troubleshoot your pixel is using the Facebook Pixel Helper Chrome Extension from Facebook (as seen in Figure 3–6). It will allow you to see if your pixel is set up correctly. You can find it in the Chrome Store. It will not only verify your pixel, but it will show you what data is sent to Facebook. It will even allow you to set up custom events and link to analytics about your visitors. It’s something you should install to help you understand the power of your pixel.
FIGURE 3–6. Pixel Helper Chrome Extension
MEASURING THE RESULTS OF YOUR FACEBOOK ADS
By connecting your website to Facebook and Retargeting, you close the loop between spending money on Facebook Ads and making money on your website. This is the only way to truly know which ads are working. Let’s walk through a few ways you can measure your ad results.
A conversion can be any activity on your website. It might be someone giving you an email address or purchasing a product. It might be as simple as watching a video or clicking a button. The conversion information is passed back to Facebook so you can see which ads are working.
For Facebook to really optimize for a conversion, it should have over 50 conversions per week. If you don’t have that many conversions, choose an event that’s higher up the funnel. For example, if you don’t get 50 sales a week, rather than optimize for a sale, optimize for an Add To Cart. Or if you only get 50 leads a week, optimize for a Page View until you get up to 50 leads per week.
Optimize Targeting
Once Facebook knows which people convert after clicking your ad, it can start showing your ad to similar people to the converters rather than just the ad clickers if you’re optimizing for an event.
Gain Insights About Your Website Visitors
You can learn things about your visitors like their demographics: age, location, language, gender, lifestyle, education, relationship status, job role and household size. You’ll get the top few pages people like. You’ll learn about how often they log into Facebook and about their past purchase behavior.
Through the course of this book, you’ll understand and appreciate all that Facebook will do for you. You’ll tap into its power over time.
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