Retargeting on Facebook is a super-powerful way to turn your site visitors into converted users who sign up, subscribe, download an ebook, make a purchase, or whatever it is you are trying to achieve with your website and marketing efforts.
Retargeting in general is so useful because returning visitors show a greater interest in your product or offer, and they have much higher odds of both clicking and converting after the first visit. Those odds even increase the more often your target customer sees the ad.
But there’s much more to retargeting than just showing the same generic ads to all your past site visitors from one single retargeting ad set. I’ve found a number of strategies that are way more advanced and effective than that.
Keep reading this post to learn the seven retargeting tactics that will take your efforts on Facebook to the next level.
1. Retarget visitors of specific pages, and show them a matching ad
Your website and blog consists of different web pages with different topics, and each of them attracts different visitors. So why show them all the same generic ad?
An important thing to remember is that you can segment your retargeting audiences by the different topics of your pages and their visitors. Basically, this means that you can show your visitors the specific ads that will more likely be compelling to them.
For example, at CrazyLister we segment our blog readers by the topics of the articles they read. So anyone who read one of the articles about how to increase their eBay sales will get a matching retargeting ad about how they can increase their sales with CrazyLister. The visitors who read about eBay templates will get an ad about, you guessed it – eBay templates. And this can go on and on, depending on the number of topics your blog has. It seems like a hassle, but it’s actually quite simple, and in the long term, definitely worth the effort.
Of course, the same tactic can be used on your site’s product pages and landing pages.
How to get it done
If you’re familiar with the Facebook audience tool, it will be very easy for you. All you need to do is create a custom audience of “People who visited specific web pages” and use the rules “URL” and “contains” to type in a unique part of the landing page (or pages) URL. In the example below, I created an audience of people who read our blog posts about eBay templates.
Now I’ll have an audience of people who I know what they were interested in, and exactly what ad to deliver to them.
2. Retarget visitors who wanted to learn more
Your site visitors who wanted to know more about your offering are closer to converting than visitors who just browsed through your homepage for a few seconds, and then left.
Accordingly, visitors who wanted to learn more are worth a higher bid and budget allocation.
In order to do that, you need to segment them in a separated custom audience.
How to get it done
As in our first example, it’s very simple. Create a custom audience, and segment the visitors who browsed through your site’s “How it works” or “Features” or “About” pages, as I did in the example below.
These are the users who wanted to inquire and get more information, and therefore deserve more of your attention.
3. Retarget the visitors who inquired about your pricing plans
One of the most powerful tactics in Facebook retargeting is to create a custom audience of visitors who visited your site’s pricing page.
The logic behind this is that visitors who reached your pricing page are in market and are much more likely to become paying customers.
You need to make sure these users won’t slip away by segmenting them and bid the highest price you can to make sure you reach them all.
How to create such an audience
As in previous examples, create a custom audience based on your pricing page URL.
4. Retarget the visitors who almost signed up, but didn’t
With this tactic, we actually continue what we did in the previous ones, but this time we segment the visitors who were even closer to converting, by targeting the visitors who visited your sign-up page but didn’t actually sign up.
It’s not always obvious why anyone who clicked a “signup” button on your site wouldn’t actually sign up, but in fact, it happens a lot, for various reasons. All that’s left for you is to give them that one last push, and remove any remaining concerns or insecurity to make them finally sign up.
How to create such an audience
Well, I guess that by now you get the point. Simply create a custom audience with the URL of your sign-up page, and exclude the users who already signed up.
5. Retarget users who searched for what you’re offering
If you’re using Google and Bing ads in your growth strategy (If you’re reading this blog I’ll go ahead and assume you do), there’s a nice retargeting trick you can do on Facebook. You can use Facebook to retarget the visitors who got to your website from a search ad, with exactly what they were searching for.
While it may sound a bit tricky, it’s actually simple. I’ll explain it by using an actual retargeting ad we’re using here at CrazyLister. We use keywords such as “ebay templates”, “ebay html templates”, “crate ebay templates” etc. in our search campaigns. But unfortunately, we don’t have a 100% conversion rate from those keywords. And this is where retargeting kicks in.
We segment our site visitors by what they were searching for, and “answer” their search immediately on Facebook.
For example, if they were searching for “eBay listings”, they will see an ad about eBay listings the next time they go on Facebook. If they were searching for “sell more on eBay”, they will see an ad that will tell them how to sell more on eBay with Crazylister. And this will go on and on for all the different search types and search landing pages we have.
6. Retarget by time segment
Time segmenting is one of the most basic retargeting tactics that is not being used often enough. Unlike the other segmentations we showed above that were based on where your website visitors been, with this tactic we segment them by when they visited your site.
The goal here is to spend more of your retargeting budget on the “hot” visitors who have visited your site recently and spend less on the ones who “got cold” because it’s been a while since they last visited your site.
With this tactic, you kind of create a “drip campaign” of ads your past visitors are going through, and you keep your retargeting campaigns evergreen.
7. Exclude irrelevant users
As mentioned above, there’s much more you can do with retargeting than just show the same generic ads to all your visitors. But now I’d like to share a different tactic, which makes almost everyone I share it with say, “How did I never think of that before?”
Here’s the tactic: Instead of just segmenting your visitors, also try to exclude the irrelevant audiences with a much lower chance to convert.
Not everyone who reaches your website is really interested in what you are offering, and therefore there’s no need to spend good marketing budget on those visitors. The best example is to exclude visitors to your career page (honestly, have you thought about excluding them?). Obviously, these are people who have no interest in your product, and should not be a part of your retargeting audience (unless you’re retargeting them with job ads!).
You can also exclude visitors who spend less time on your website. It works exactly the other way around from my points about the visitors of your pricing or features pages from above. Visitors who just spent a few seconds on your site and bounced away have a much lower chance to convert, and you might want to consider excluding them from your remarketing lists.
Here’s an example of how you can do it in your Facebook account.
Once you have that audience ready, you can simply exclude it from your retargeting ad sets, and make sure you’re only reaching relevant people. You can even segment out those visitors directly in the other audiences, by excluding this URL.
Final words
Effective retargeting can be a game-changer for your Facebook marketing, and segmenting your visitors into different custom audiences is the right way to do it. You’ll be amazed by how much better your marketing results can be with a killer retargeting strategy.