Did you know it can take 3-7 or more exposures to your product before someone buys?
What if you could follow people around Facebook showing them your products for less than a penny?
If you are marketing right now without retargeting people—you are missing out on potentially 20% or more customers.
You’ll learn how to launch your Facebook retargeting campaign in 5 simple steps.
Click Here to Download a PDF Guide >>
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How Allen Edmonds Retargeting Made Me Buy Two Pairs Of $385 Shoes
If you’ve used Facebook at all, you’ve seen the advertisements in your news feed and on the right like I show you below:
See those Allen Edmond shoes? Allen Edmonds showed me that ad because I visited their website, and I visited that specific shoe on the website.
The headline and description copy isn’t fantastic at all but they are exposing me to shoes I’ve already seen and given me an easy way to buy the shoes.
These ads followed me around Facebook for weeks. Each time I saw one of these ads, it cost Allen Edmonds less than a penny to show it to me.
The ending of the story, I bought two pairs of Allen Edmonds shoes! That’s what retargeting is!
You can turn retargeting on for your business, whether you sell physical products, have an iPhone or Android app, or a SaaS business. Local businesses included!
Retargeting helps you get more customers for far cheaper than traditional advertising.
What exactly is retargeting?
Lets quickly cover the ‘what’ of retargeting so you can start implementing it for your business and website.
When I visited Allen Edmonds, what they did was cookie my web browser with a bit of code saying which pages I visited.
That bit of code knows what pages I visited and informed Facebook which Allen Edmonds ads to show me about the Wingtip Oxfords.
Every time I visited Facebook it showed me the specific relevant ads based on which pages I visited on their website.
While writing this post, I went to visit the belts page on Allen Edmonds and refreshed Facebook to see the targeting ad. And what do you know, it shows some awesome belts:
I also clicked on that Appy Couple advertisement above the Allen Edmonds belts, and now they are following me everywhere.
You can easily set this up for your business in 5 steps which we’ll go through below.
If you have a developer you rely on to implement your code, you’ll want to give steps 1-3 to them, although they are fairly simple and we’ll show you step by step exactly how to implement the code.
Lets dive right in!
Set Up Retargeting On Facebook
Step 1: Set Up Your Facebook Retargeting Pixel
The purpose of your retargeting pixel is to know exactly which page a person visited. If they visited an article but didn’t visit your checkout process, you’ll want to send them to another article.
If they started the checkout process but didn’t buy, you could give them a coupon through your ad.
a. Create Your Facebook Ads Manager Account
If you don’t already have an Ads Manager account, you can go here to make your account. All you need to do is click ‘Create Ad’ and revisit the ads manager link to get the ability to create your ad. You don’t actually need to create an ad just yet to get your ads manager account created, just start the process of creating an ad and return to the Ads Manager.
b. Create Your Retargeting Pixel
Next, you’ll want to go to Audiences to create your retargeting pixel which will collect where visitors on your website go.
Click On Audiences.
Click on Create Custom Audience.
Click on Website Traffic for type of audience you want to create.
Click to agree to the terms and click ‘Create Web Remarketing Pixel.’
Website Traffic: select ‘Anyone who visits your website’ and click ‘Create Audience’ in the bottom right.
After you create an audience, it will give you some code, which you can send to your developer or keep for yourself.
If you are install the code yourself, copy and paste it into a text file, and keep that file handy:
Step 2: Set Up Your Facebook Conversion Tracking
The next step is to track which ads people click on that cause them to buy. This is very important to know your cost per acquisition (CPA) because if you know your CPA you know how much money you can spend to get more customers and more profit.
a. Create Your Conversion Tracking Pixel
In your ads manager, click on Conversion Tracking and click on Create Pixel when you get inside the conversion tracking tab.
Select Checkouts to track people who bought and rename your pixel to something you understand, I named mine ‘Place an order.’
After you create the Conversion Tracking pixel, save the code into a text document or email it to your developer.
Step 3: Put The Retargeting Pixel On Your Website & Conversion Tracking On The Thank You Page
The next step is to put the retargeting pixel on your website on every page so every visitor who visits your website is cookied. This means you can target them with relevant ads like Allen Edmond did to me with shoes and belts.
The purpose of this guide is to show you how to target anyone who visited your website, if you want to target people on specific pages, you’ll need to create separate tracking pixels for different pages like your checkout page.
If you have WordPress, you can easily integrate this code into all pages on your website and specific pages.
If you know how to edit HTML and you don’t use WordPress or other content management systems, you will just need to put the tracking code in the header of every page for the tracking pixel and the header of your thank you/ confirmation page.
Here is step by step instructions to put it in WordPress and also paste it into an HTML file.
Log into your WordPress dashboard. You can get there by going to http://(nameofyourwebsite.com)/wp-login.php.
Click on Plugins.
Click on ‘Add New’ at the top.
In the search field on the top right type ‘OH Add’ and press enter.
When OH Add Script appears, click on ‘Install Now.’
Click on ‘Activate Plugin’ on the next page.
b. Implement your tracking pixel into your website
Next go to Settings -> Header Footer Settings
Copy the code you had for the retargeting pixel and paste it where it says ‘Google Remarketing.’ Save your changes.
c. Implementing your Conversion Tracking pixel onto your Thank You page
The purpose of putting the tracking pixel on your thank you page is to track if any specific ad caused someone to buy.
The more successful you know which ads create signups, the more you can test and increase conversions for that specific ad.
Go to your thank you page, and click to edit it in WordPress.
Scroll down the page and look for OH add script.
Paste your ‘Place an order’ tracking code into the first box you see and click update/publish to make your changes go live on your thank you page.
d. HTML: Inserting the conversion pixel into an HTML page
The tool I use to edit HTML files is called Sublime. It’s free and something many engineers use all day to do any coding.
After you open your HTML file, paste the code into the header, generally to be safe, place it between other script codes like you see in the screenshot below. Save the file.
Step 4: Create a Facebook ad
Next you’re going to create a Facebook ad to target people who have already visited your website.
The ad we’re going to create together will target people who have not started the checkout process. We’re going to retarget them with an article. We won’t be jumping into writing the article here, make sure people have the ability to buy, give their email or move to the next step of the buying process on your article near the bottom or the top of the article.
a. Example Facebook Ad
b. Create Your Facebook Image
You’ll want the image to be 1200 x 627 in size. You can find all the specs here for Facebook ad images.
I used Canva to create the Facebook image, which is a great tool you can use to create many of your design needs.
Go to your ads manager and click on ‘Create an Ad.’
Click on ‘Send people to your website’ and paste your article URL into the url box on the right.
Click ‘Continue.’
d. Select Your Ad Targeting
Custom Audiences: For your Custom Audiences, Select ‘Website Visitor’ that we created before.
Locations: For Locations, select the locations you want your ad to show up in. If you are a local business, select your city, if you have 128 locations, select all 128 locations. The goal here is to only show your ads to people who can buy, if you are a global business, target the world.
Age: Select relevant ages for your product or brand.
Gender: I selected Gender here to be female to ensure my ad only shows to females, now if your buyers are men too, you can show it to them.
Languages: I selected the language as English for my article because its in English. Select the language based on who your buyers are. If you only target English speakers, select English (All).
e. Setting Your Ad Budget
Budget: If you are just starting, set a budget per day of $5 or less. Whatever you can afford.
Schedule: If this is a seasonal retargeting ad, schedule it to start and end at specific dates.
Optimize For: Clicks to Website.
Pricing: Select ‘Set the amount a click to your website is worth to you.’ I recommend starting with pay per click so you can gauge how much it costs to show the ad. Each time a person clicks you will be charged at max $1.25, generally lower through a bidding process.
Ad Scheduling: Leave this as “Run ads all the time.”
Ad Set Name: Name your ad set based upon which specific article you are targeting in this ad group.
f. Creating Your Ad
How do you want your ad to look?: For now select ‘A single image in your ads.’
Choose different images to create multiple ads: Click on upload and select the image you created for this ad. Start with 1 for now unless you have multiple images for this same article.
Connect Facebook Page: Select the page you want to associate with this Ad, this will be your Facebook Brand page.
Headline: Write a compelling headline that goes right below the image. This is generally what people read 2nd or 1st when they see your ad.
Text: This is the body copy of your Ad, this is generally seen 2nd or 1st depending on how eye movement works. Write an enticing question or fact, or idea from your article to get people to click.
Call-to-Action-Button: These are optional though it doesn’t cost you anything to have them, so select one closest to what your ad is about, if it’s an article ‘Learn More’ works great.
Click on ‘Show Advanced Options’
News Feed Link Description: This is the text that goes below your headline, put something in here that makes it more compelling for them to learn more.
Conversion Tracking Pixel: Select your conversion tracking pixel you created, in this example ‘Place an order’ is the pixel that is available here.
Click to turn off your Mobile News Feed & Audience Network, these are on the bottom right in the image below. Unless your mobile website is converting very well, you’ll just be wasting your budget on mobile ads. Audience Network is a lot of other ad networks and applications on phones that have very high click through and little conversion.
Click on ‘Place Order.’
Your Ad now goes into review by Facebook. It can take 24 hours or longer to get approved.
Step 5: Evaluating Your Campaign
Creating your ad is only the first step!
Next you’ll have to drill down into if your campaign to see if it is profitable.
a. Setting Up Your Reports
In your ad manager, click on Reports.
Click on Customize Columns.
Set up your columns to look like the columns I have below:
You’ll have to find Checkouts (Conversion Pixel) by scrolling down and clicking the check mark next to it
After you finish, click ‘Apply.’
After your ads go live, you will start seeing data and seeing how many conversions actually happened with your retargeting campaign.
From there you will now want to test different images if you haven’t already.
b. Testing Different Images
The reason for testing different images is because clickthroughs and conversions can be vastly different for images.
If you can get more people clicking through to your article that ultimately leads to sales, Facebook will effectively allow you to pay less per click because your content is likely more relevant to people over someone else.
Your goal with retargeting is to get more conversions at a lower cost so you can increase your spending to get more conversions.
To add more images to your existing ads, all you need to do is upload more images and ‘Place Order’ for more ads.
We test different images because it’s the highest point of leverage to get more conversions and clickthroughs.
In your Ads Manager, click on Campaigns -> Click on The Campaign you created -> Click on the ad set -> Click on the ad itself, it will dropdown the ad and more options.
Under ‘Creative’ click on ‘Create Similar Ad.’
From there, just scroll down to ‘Choose different images to create multiple ads’ and upload multiple images-up to 6 images-to test more images.
After that, just scroll to the bottom and click ‘Place Order’ to get more ads created.
That’s it!
Now you have more images to test clickthroughs and conversions with.
After you test images, you’ll want to test different headlines.
Keep tweaking your retargeting campaign so you get more clicks and conversions at lower cost.
Takeaways
Thanks for going through this whole guide to add retargeting to your business. It’s very valuable to be able to retarget people who already visited your website because you can convert these visitors generally easier and cheaper than buying ads for fresh traffic.
Many people who don’t buy or sign up in the beginning do so because:
- They didn’t have enough time to buy the product (they are busy)
- They would have come to buy back but they forgot about your product
- They weren’t ready yet and your retargeting ad (like Allen Edmonds) was a constant reminder about your product
Follow this guide and implement retargeting ads for your website. It’s all about taking action, and taking this small step will open many doors for you and your business.
I hope you implement Facebook retargeting for yourself so you can start getting more of your visitors to sign up and grow your business.
What do you notice from this Facebook retargeting guide? What parts are difficult to understand? What would you love to learn more about? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
