4 Tips for Revolutionary Retargeting

If you’re an e-commerce business, here’s a statistic that should scare you: 97% of visitors, on average, will leave your website without making a purchase the first time. So what can you do? Are you simply wasting a whole lot of money, time, and effort attracting them to your site? Or are there some actions you can take to re-engage these audiences?

Step in retargeting!

What is retargeting?

Starting off with the basics: retargeting is digital advertising which specifically targets shoppers who have already visited your website. It’s a crucial element in your advertising strategy – these are people who have already engaged with your business and shown a level of intent to purchase in the past. They’ve effectively qualified themselves as a potential customer, and have left a digital trail in their wake. Using this trail, and the clues they have already provided you about their preferences and interests, you’re now able to continue the sales conversation with them rather than starting from scratch.

There’s plenty of articles online that will provide you with a step-by-step process to the HOW of retargeting. But we want to go a little deeper.

The Facebook Pixel

Before we do though, a preliminary note that any retargeting activity requires you to have the Facebook Pixel set up on your website. Here, we have an in-depth guide that explains more and gives you a step-by-step process for installing the Facebook pixel.

Here are our 4 expert tips for making your retargeting revolutionary

1. Create a funnel

In any discussion about marketing, the classic funnel is never too far away. And that’s because it’s still a great way of visualizing the concept of turning visitors into customers.

Retargeting can take place anywhere within the middle and lower funnel, when prospects are either considering a variety of options or you are working on the final step of converting them into customers.

One thing to remember is that, with any retargeting campaign, you should be running a traffic generating campaign in parallel. This approach with ensure you’re feeding the whole funnel at once, bringing new visitors to your site into the top-of-funnel awareness stage, whilst retargeting to others who have previously engaged with you. It’s a sustainable and long-term way of looking at your Facebook advertising, rather than short bursts of activity and then the stress of trying to restart the whole process every few weeks.

2. Segment audiences

In order to retarget effectively, you’ll need to ensure you messages are specific to the user’s context. Simply going back to every user who has visited your site with the same message is not enough. You’re chances of turning these prospects into customers will increase dramatically the more specific you can get about their previous actions on your website, and the future action you want them to take.

To ensure your retargeting ads are context-specific, segment your audiences into different categories. These could include:

• Landing page visitors
• Blog readers
• Newsletter subscribers
• Free trial users
• Those that added to cart but didn’t complete a purchase
• People who abandoned at checkout
• Past purchasers

You’ll notice that these groups of people are at very different stages in their buying journey. A blog reader, for example, might just be looking to keep up to date with the latest trends in your industry, and lay not necessarily be looking to buy right now. On the other hand, someone who added a product to their cart or abandoned a purchase at checkout had a high intent to purchase and almost did so. Targeting an ad with the same products that prospect had in their cart is a great strategy whereas, for the blog reader, a content-based ad with a eBook download would be a logical next step.

All in all, ensure you keep your retargeting ads as context-specific as possible to drive better conversion.

3. Bid more for retargeting

Continuing on from the point above, depending on the buying potential of a retargeting audience, you can bid more aggressively to reach the audiences most likely to make a purchase. It’s all about figuring out how much a specific prospect is worth for you. Surely someone who was a click away from purchasing is worth more that someone who simply visited your site. Your bid to reach that person with your retargeting ad should reflect that.

4. Try out Facebook Dynamic Ads

When it comes to retargeting, there’s no better ad format that Dynamic Ads (DA). The point of difference with DA, which is particularly useful for e-commerce businesses, is the ability to synchronize your product catalog to automatically set up a range of creatives. This allows advertisers to promote millions of products with a single creative template, without having to configure each individual product ad!

Benefits include

Tailored to individuals

The Dynamic part of the name means Dynamic Ads change based on continual analysis of the prospect’s data profile, showing the specific items they have viewed or ones relating to their interests.

UPDATE AUTOMATICALLY

Dynamic Ads automatically evolve as your knowledge of the customer does.

FOLLOW NON-LINEAR BUYING PATTERNS

Today, people can often start searching on one device, and complete a purchase on another. Facebook Dynamic Ads gather information from all touch points.

We’ve put together a guide to help you get the best out of Dynamic ads across Facebook and Instagram. Download it today to learn how Dynamic Ads can help you level-up to your social media advertising!