Facebook Remarketing
“Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.”
– Mark Twain
“Remarketing” isn’t commonly used term outside of marketing circles. I normally avoid inside-baseball lingo, but this one is important.
Here’s a primer: every time someone visits your website, they leave a cookie behind (unless they are in Incognito mode, or deliberately clear their accumulated cookies). Think of a cookie as a fingerprint at a crime scene; it allows you, as detective, to see who has been there to follow up with them later.
How Does it Work?:
Remarketing is when we collect all our fingerprints/ cookies into an online audience, and then advertise back to that audience. The fact that they’ve already been on your website means 2 things: Remarketing is when we collect all our fingerprints/ cookies into an online audience, and then advertise back to that audience.
The fact that they’ve already been on your website means 2 things:
- They know about your business, and have enough trust in it to click through
- They’re interested enough in your business to take an action (ie. click or search) to get to you
Remarketing advertising has the best ROI of any advertising: period. Now, let’s talk about how you can do it for your GC.
Facebook Remarketing:
The savvy IGCs I talk to all have one thing in common: they spent the majority of their advertising dollars on Facebook.
Facebook is a hydra of extremes. With one head, you spend countless hours posting and watching the “thumbs up” appear. This free aspect of Facebook is (and I know that some dispute me on this) an ineffectual way of building revenue.
The other head is Facebook advertising. It has the best audiences, ease of use, and ROI of any online platform, especially for our industry.
Those who are familiar with remarketing probably think of it as an Adwords strategy (Google search advertising). But it’s easier to setup and use on Facebook and, if done properly, can X3 your Facebook ads ROI.
What Does it Look Like:
I’m going to qualify by saying that this is not a beginner technique. You’ll need either strong knowledge of Facebook advertising or will need to hire/contract someone who does. It’s not something you can do with on-page boosting; you’ll need to be set up in Facebook Ads Manager.I’m going to qualify by saying that this is not a beginner technique. You’ll need either strong knowledge of Facebook advertising or will need to hire/contract someone who does. It’s not something you can do with on-page boosting; you’ll need to be set up in Facebook Ads Manager.
Here’s an example:
- You post a “5 Hidden Benefits of Evergreen Trees” on your blog. You put it on Facebook with a teaser and a link to your site.
- Say 100 people click through organically. You put $50 on a boost and crank that to $1000. I think this is familiar territory for most.
- Of the 1000 people who go to your site, hopefully 3% (30) sign up for your email. You now have the opportunity to woo them with email content and convert them to paying customers.
- 97% of visitors visit the page without signing up. Many enjoy your blog but, for whatever reason, don’t sign up. You paid to get them there, but now they’re gone as anonymously as they arrived.
- Using the Facebook Pixel (accessed via Ads Manager), you collect the cookies of everyone who visits your site via Facebook. You can set rules (visited a page with “tree” in the URL, or visited more than 3 pages, etc) and bucket appropriate cookies into appropriate audiences.
- The Facebook users who click through to your “5 Benefits” blog go into an audience called “Trees & Evergreens.” Everyone who reads a blog about these things go into this bucket.
- Here’s the good part: When it comes time to advertise your big Trees & Evergreens sale, that’s the audience you send the Facebook ads to. You know they’re interested, now it’s time to monetize.
Other Lists:
You don’t need to use the Pixel. Other ways to build a remarketing list are to input your existing email or customer list. If you’re e-commerce, you can use lists build on previous purchasers, abandoned carts, or best customers.
Results:
Let’s face it: our normal method of building a Facebook audience is an exercise in guessing. We guess the age, interests, and hobbies. The only thing we know for sure is that most of them are women and our geography.
Remarketing audiences are proven. They are built on past activity, not our assumptions. For that reason, the ROI is considerably higher. It takes some time, and some technical savvy, to set up, but once it is you’ll never look at digital advertising the same way again.