Remarketing explained
Data collected by your digital marketing system creates the basis of remarketing campaigns. This data, is used to target people with highly specific and relevant advertisements. Remarketing can be achieved in two ways, either using data natively within an advertising platform, or collecting data from a website. In this article we will dig into remarketing on the most powerful advertising platform Facebook, which includes Instagram.
For more information on remarketing visit what is remarketing.
Types of Facebook remarketing
There are four main sources for remarketing on Facebook, which includes customer lists, web traffic, Facebook sources and app activity. As most businesses do not own and operate applications, we will focus on the first three. At its core, Facebook ads focus on the creation of an audience. The following are sources to create warm audiences to remarket to:
- Customer list: Exported from your CRM or similar, Facebook accepts excel and .csv files with your customers details. The platform will then attempt to match key details such as email, phone and name with accounts on their system. You can even segment your list into key groups e.g. product interest for highly targeted campaigns. For more information on how to format a customer list for Facebook click here.
- Website traffic: A short snippet of code installed on your website sends data to Facebook. While you won’t be able to see any personal details, you can view the users pages visited and actions taken (if set up correctly). Campaigns can be then be targeted to users who visited certain pages or took (or didn’t take) certain actions. For support setting up remarketing please contact us.
- Facebook sources: If you only run marketing on Facebook and don’t own other marketing channels, you can uses data natively. Data from your paid campaigns, page and Instagram can be used to create an audience to retarget.
Creating audiences
In Facebook Business Manager, head over to Audiences located under Business Tools. You will be able to see a collection of all your saved audiences. For remarketing purposes, you will need to select a new audience and choose custom.
Website
If you have linked your website to Facebook, you will be presented with default targeting options:
- All website visitors
- People who visited specific pages
- Visitors by time spent
Depending on how your remarketing was set up, you will also be able to add users to an audience based on a custom event(e.g. Lead form, Phone call). Facebook allows data to be retained from this source, for a maximum period of 180 day, anything older will be lost.
Below is an example of an audience of all users who visited our SEO service page in the last 180 days. Please note, there must be a minimum traffic of 500-1’000 users in the data before an audience can be used for ads.
Customer list
At the most basic level, your customer list should include a persons name, location (country or city) and either an email or phone number (mobile preffered). Without a phone or email, Facebook will NOT be able to match the details. Alternatively, Facebook offers a direct integration from MailChimp to save you time and hassle. To find out more about formating a customer list please click here.
Facebook sources
The final custom audience includes data from Facebook sources you own, with targeting options including people who:
- Watched a video
- Interacted with an Instagram or Facebook page
- Completed a lead form
- And many more
Leverage data with lookalike audiences
As the second biggest advertising platform only to Google, Facebook’s data and algorithm is unparalleled. Once your custom audience has been identified, you can utilise it to create a lookalike audience. Facebook will create a new audience of users that share highly similar demographics and characteristics with the submitted custom audience. You can use any of the above sources to create a lookalike audience. If you know the majority of people who like your Facebook page are your perfect target market (they should be), then why would you not let Facebook work to find more people like them to market to?
Exclude your audience
Naturally, Facebook audiences are the key to success with Facebook ads. But it means much more than just setting up the right audience to target. Different ads have different objectives, when these ads start to deliver results, audiences should be created to exclude users. If someone has submitted a lead form, they should be removed from the targeting. Who you’re not targeting is almost as important, keeping costs per click low and targeting relevant users.
Contact us to maximise your Facebook ads today.
