As an advertiser, you would never want your audience to remain mere “window shoppers”. Converting an impression/reach to a customer is way too tricky because most people don’t convert just after a single visit to your website. There is a need to remind your audience about you again. When people see your brand often, their trust in your brand increases as a result of constant engagement through messages or interactions. And that is why we use retargeting ads.

The possibility of the conversion is immense in retargeting ads. It is a psychological fact that someone who already knows you would stop by to listen to you the next time you show up. 

You may be putting out all your effort and yet see your conversion rate dipping. This might be because you’re taking the wrong measures. So how do you do it the right way?

If you are looking to improve the ROI of your existing Facebook campaigns or need to set up a new one for your business, our team of Facebook Advertising experts can help you out!

In this article, we’ll be discussing 7 easy ways to improve your retargeting ad campaigns.

Improve audience targeting 

Targeting each person who visited your website is a misleading approach to retarget ads. The motive of each person who visits your website is very diverse. There might be people who check all the pages on your website. But this doesn’t mean they are planning to buy products from all those pages. Retarget them only if you feel they are aligned with what you offered them directly. Segment the website visitors according to the action they have taken on your website.

For example, suppose your website sells online courses for finance and marketing subjects, and someone visited your website to buy a finance-based course. In this case, ensure that you segment those people into a custom audience labelled “Finance course shoppers” rather than combining both finance and marketing course shoppers.

This practice helps to deliver highly specific content to your audience. 

Ad frequency shouldn’t annoy the audience

Ad frequency is an important aspect to consider during retargeting ads. Ads can turn annoying and intrusive when it’s shown more than a certain number of times. Showing the ad a few times can be helpful to the audience but showing beyond this can seriously make them feel bored or even angry. This can even lead them to mark your ad as spam.

Depending on the audience’s characteristics, figure out the optimum number of times an ad can be shown so that it urges them to take positive action. We also suggest you change the ad creative during this process so that it attracts the audience again.

Optimize likes and shares 

The likes and shares for your Facebook ads and posts are social proof that your brand is validated by the public. The high number of likes and shares indicates that your product or service is genuine and people like it for that. And that is why using your posts that have received a high appreciation from many people helps.  

At the time of setting up your Facebook ad, you’ll be given two choices, one is to create a new ad, and the other is to use an existing post. If you have posts from the recent past which performed well, use them in your ad campaign. Most people don’t realize the benefit of using a post with high-performance metrics on people. 

Using the same post to set up multiple ad campaigns and publish the promotional post on your company’s Facebook Page is an effective approach. You can use this post every time you run a new ad campaign if it is based on the content of that post. Learn how to create ads that people love.

Use Dynamic Creative Ads 

Facebook has a great marketing feature/tool, the Dynamic Creative ads. This feature compares various ad elements such as images, videos, titles, descriptions, and CTAs combination. The outcome is that you get to create personalized creative variations for each person viewing your ad. A creative that resonates with the audience boosts the ad performance. 

Show up with some complementary products

Do not stop the remarketing/retargeting process once people convert. Explore other possibilities to make them buy from you. You can always target them with a new set of ads. The new set of ads can be related to something that complements their previous purchase from you.

For example, you’re running a mobile phone and related accessories store. If someone bought a premium phone from your store, they won’t be paying attention to you after this because they won’t be buying a phone anytime soon.  This is when you can introduce them to products like a hard phone case, or a wireless charger. You can start by making them aware of it, then introduce its benefits when clubbed with your phone. Further promotion can be done maybe by offering a discount coupon.

Identify underperforming audiences

After grouping your audience into different ad groups and running them for a while, you can decide on a benchmark CPA (cost per acquisition) for each ad group.

When you identify that the average CPA for certain ad groups goes beyond the benchmark, break them down to reconstruct it by using new creative, different placements, or retarget until you feel the CPA is optimized. 

Optimize for Click-Through conversions

You need to optimize your ads for click-through conversions and not view-through conversions. Click-through conversions are the result of people clicking your ad and buying your product. While view-through conversions happen when a person simply views your ad and directly visits your website without clicking on the ad.

You might think that both earn you conversions ultimately, so optimizing for both click-through and view-through conversions are fine. But including view-through can mislead you. Your results would not be precise and it won’t help in effectively retargeting in the future. 

So, it is better to set a conversion limit for the view-through audience such that any ad “viewer” converts within one day after viewing the ad, and an ad  “clicker” can convert anytime within 28 days. 

This limit can be set on your Facebook ads. Facebook has something called as an Attribution window for ad results in Ads Manager. The Attribution window will allow you to set the number of days between when a person viewed or clicked your ad and then subsequently took an action. 

To access it, select Customize Columns from the Columns drop-down menu.

Facebook has set a 1-day view and 28-day click by default, however, it can be altered depending on your business.  

Suppose you set 1-day for view and 28-day for clicks, it means that you see attributed actions that happened 1 day after someone viewed your ad and 28 days after someone clicked your ad. 

You can choose from 1 day, 7 days, and 28 days for “View” as well as “click”.

Conclusion

Expanding your audience to discover new people is a way of improving your brand awareness, but retargeting is the only way to ensure that at least some among your cold audience convert to a customer. 

Retargeting ads can be used to remind your past customers/buyers how much they love your brand.

The right way to start with a retargeting campaign is to understand where your buyers stand in the buyer cycle. You can’t simply show an ad to buy a product directly without even making them aware of your product or brand.

You can instil a sense of urgency in people’s minds using phrases like “Last Minute Deal” or “Offer Ending Soon” in the ad copy or creative. You even add countdown timers to the ad posts. 

Giving discount coupon codes for people earlier in their buyer cycle is of no use. Here also there is a need to introduce your brand and product beforehand rather than directly jumping into this step.

Bring in the emotional element of advertising to give a human touch to your ad and finally, experiment until it becomes a highly compelling one!

If you still think it’s complicated, and need professional assistance with running Facebook ads for your business, do give us a try.