Facebook Ads Manager is one of the powerful advertising platforms in the world, accounting for 18% of total digital advertising spend in 2023. With over 3 billion users across a portfolio of apps and services, Facebook offers marketers a unique opportunity to engage their target audience.
But as average Facebook ad costs have increased significantly since 2019, while marketing budgets are also becoming more scrutinized, it’s important for paid media marketers to manage their spend in the channel wisely.
Facebook retargeting ads enable marketers to re-engage users that have previously interacted with their brand, translating that intent into conversions. While Facebook retargeting ads can be more complex to set up than acquisition campaigns, their higher average returns make them well worth the extra effort. In this article, we’ll walk through 7 best practices you can use to make the most of your Facebook retargeting ads.
The foundation of any retargeting program is understanding who has engaged with your brand.
The Meta pixel and SDK allow Facebook to track users that visit your websites and apps, respectively, as well as the specific actions they take on those properties. Once this data is being collected, you can design campaigns in Facebook Ads Manager that retarget specific segments of your website and app visitors. You may, for example, build a campaign for users that have added a product to their basket but haven’t yet completed a purchase, or retarget existing customers with an upsell offer.
The Meta pixel is easy for any website developer to install, and can even be implemented using marketer-friendly tag management solutions such as Google Tag Manager. It’s important to note that if you are using the Meta pixel to track user activity, it must be included in your website cookie policy as per the GDPR.
While the Meta pixel and SDK offer a simple method for making user engagement data available in Facebook Ads Manager, it’s important to note that your brand does not own the data collected by the pixel, Facebook does. As such, you are limited to the retargeting capabilities that Facebook permits–you can only retarget users that have visited your properties within the last 180 days, and can only attribute a conversion to an ad if it occurs within 28 days of ad exposure. You are also subject to any changes that Facebook may make to their platform in the future.
To design more custom retargeting campaigns and future-proof your data-driven marketing programs, you can develop your own first-party data strategy and leverage first-party data to power your Facebook retargeting ads.
First-party data is user data that is collected from your business's owned properties, such as your websites, apps, OTT platforms, and POS kiosks. First-party data can include your customers’ names and email addresses, user activity on your website, payment information, and more. This data can be stored in systems owned and operated by your business, such as your data warehouse, your CRM, or your Customer Data Platform. A first-party data strategy is the process of defining what data you will collect from users as they engage with your brand, how you will collect and process it, where you will store it, who within your organization will be able to access it, and how those stakeholders will use it.
With your first-party data strategy in place, you can define retargeting audiences and upload them to Facebook Ads Manager as Custom Audiences. As your first-party data set likely includes data specific to the nuances of your customer base, such as customer type and historical data, powering Facebook retargeting Ads with first-party data enables you to design more granular campaigns than possible with Meta pixel tracking. For example, you might deliver different retargeting campaigns to freemium and paid subscribers, or re-engage customers in the holiday period based on their purchases last year.
McKinsey & Co. recently reported that 71% of customers expect personalization, and 76% of customers actually get frustrated when their experiences with brands aren’t personalized.
While personalizing acquisition campaigns can feel like throwing things at the wall to see what sticks, retargeting programs offer marketers the opportunity to use customer data to tailor experiences to users’ interests.
With the proper first-party data strategy in place, you can develop rich customer profiles as users engage with your digital properties. By using this information to define granular segments and uploading them to Facebook as Custom Audiences, you can power highly-personalized Facebook retargeting ads. A pet supply retailer might, for example, create separate audiences for users that are interested in cat supplies and dog supplies, and deliver different campaigns to each audience.
Facebook Ads Manager also enables marketers to leverage the user data collected by the Meta Pixel for personalization. Advantage+ catologue ads use machine learning to create personalized ads that show shoppers relevant items from your catalog based on their interests and behaviors. All you need to do is define 20 or more products in Ads Manager, launch your campaign, and Facebook handles the personalization based on the data they have available on their users.
To maximize your return on investment for any campaign, you need to deliver the right message, to the right people, at the right time.
This is particularly important for retargeting programs, as delivering high-value offers to the wrong users can result in a poor customer experience and wasted ad budget. As you’re defining your retargeting campaigns, increase campaign efficiency by excluding certain segments from your target audience.
Within Facebook Ads Manager, you can create audience exclusions based on interests, geographic, and demographics. A business selling products in the United States of America, for example, may have Canadian consumers browsing products on their website, even though they aren’t currently able to ship to Canada. While retargeting all website visitors in the last 30 days would waste ad spend on Canadian consumers, excluding Facebook users based in Canada would ensure all campaign budget is focused on US consumers.
Another great audience exclusion hack is to upload Custom Audiences and use them as custom exclusion on your campaigns. For example, you may upload a Custom Audience of customers that have made a purchase in the last 7 days, and exclude them from retargeting campaigns promoting a first-time-purchase discount.
Bonus: Use a real-time audience platform, such as WasteNot, to automatically update audience exclusion lists in real time. This makes it possible to remove customers from your advertising campaigns as soon as they’ve made a purchase, increasing return on ad spend and improving the customer experience.
When creating your retargeting campaigns, leverage the optimization capabilities Facebook offers to make the most of your investments. ROAS goals, one of several bid strategy options available in Facebook Ads manager, provide Facebook with guidance on how they should bid for your campaign at ad auction.
Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) measures the amount of revenue generated per dollar invested in an advertising campaign. ROAS enables marketers to understand how well their advertising programs are performing and make better decisions on how to invest.
In Facebook Ads Manager, ROAS goals tell Facebook how much revenue you expect to generate per dollar invested in the campaign. Once ROAS goal is set, Facebook will “try to deliver against that over the campaign's lifetime, dynamically bidding as high as needed to maximize results.” While Facebook does not guarantee that they will hit the ROAS goal specified, setting a ROAS goal in Facebook Ads Manager will give Facebook guidance on how to bid for your ad placements during a campaign, decreasing the chances of runaway campaign costs and wasted spend.
Capturing your target customers’ attention with Facebook Ad campaigns is a great start, but for most businesses, clicks do not equal revenue. To optimize Facebook Ads, you must also invest in improving the post-click user experience.
Driving engaged users to make their first-purchase is a great use case for Facebook retargeting ads, but it’s not the only one. Re-marketing to your existing customer base with up-sell and cross-sell offers can drive customers to make additional purchases, increasing customer lifetime value and retention.
An eCommerce cookware brand, for example, may retarget customers that have purchased a specific item with an offer to complete the set. A streaming media platform, on the other hand, may retarget subscribers that have watched a certain show when the next season is available.
To retarget existing customers, simply define your target audience in a first-party data platform, such as your CRM or Customer Data Platform (CDP), and upload it to Facebook as a Custom Audience.
John Joe Smith, founder and CEO of WasteNot, is hosted by Tom Triscari, founder of Quo Vadis, for a Q&A conversation on the future of audience suppression.
Many advertisers waste up to 40% of their ad budgets due to inefficient targeting, and they aren't even aware of it. In this article, we'll walk through how brands can use modern audience suppression strategies to improve advertising efficiency and performance.
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WasteNot is the only platform focused on allowing marketers to activate and optimize real time ad exclusions across all biddable media.