What is Facebook Retargeting and how does it generate sales?

If you’ve ever advertised on Facebook, you’ll know that there are an awful lot of options when it comes to choosing your audience. “Retargeting” means choosing your audience based on their previous internet activity either:

1. by using special cookies called “pixels” to track them as they visit your website
2. by simply uploading a list of your contacts into a “custom audience”.

So let’s look at those two methods in more detail.

Pixel-based retargeting

Here’s how it works:

When a person goes to your website, the pixel on your site tells Facebook that they have visited it. When they later go onto Facebook, the site identifies them again and shows them your advert.
As you can imagine, this is a very powerful technique because it enables you to speak to people who are already considering buying from you.

Just think about that for a minute and consider how you would tailor your messaging if you knew that if was only going to be put in front of a “warm” audience. What are they likely to be interested in? What kind of headline and copy is going to be most appropriate for this audience?

Just be careful not to come across as a stalker by letting on that you know they’ve been to your website – that’s guaranteed to be very off-putting!

But with all social media advertising, it’s unlikely you’re going to create a perfect, profitable advert right off the bat. So I always say,

Pixel-based retargeting to people who did not buy

Another use of pixel-based retargeting is to target people who did go to your website but did not buy from you. You can do this by customising your audience to exclude anyone who landed on your confirmation page.

The people who will now see your advert are only those who visited your website but did not buy.

Again, be careful that your copy is not creepy – no one wants to feel like they’re being watched – but equally you know that they’ve heard of you so you’re not going to be using the same messaging you’d use if you were aiming at people at Awareness.

This technique is just as appropriate for B2B as it is for B2C and is a very versatile tool so have a think about how you could use it in your marketing.

A good example of its use in B2B is by Digital Marketer who used these two adverts to promote their free download template library.

The first advert (above left) was aimed at people who fit their target demographic but had not been to their website before.

​The second advert (above right) was then shown to people who had followed the link to their website but not bought. It’s a particularly good example because their messaging assumes that people didn’t say “no”, but just “not right now”. So they respond by asking “Did life get in the way? You forgot to take advantage of this deal!” 

And as before,

Contact list retargeting

This second method of retargeted advertising involves creating a custom audience by uploading a list of your contacts’ email addresses to Facebook.

When someone from your list logs into Facebook then Facebook identifies them from their email address and shows them your advert.

You can create a custom audience with as few as 20 people, which means that it can be a really powerful tool for targeting a list of known prospects, or for up-selling or cross-selling to existing customers.

However, as before, mind your messaging.

Although your messaging needs to respect that they will already know who you are, be careful not to come across as creepy – no one likes to feel “internet-stalked”!

And as with all social media advertising,

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This article is derived from the first edition of 'Watertight Marketing' by Bryony Thomas. It was written with permission and under licence during my time as a Certified Practitioner 2014-2019. The original intellectual property remains with Watertight Marketing Ltd. For more information visit watertightmarketing.com

Please note I am no longer part of the Watertight Marketing network and so I now use other methodologies instead of this one to achieve the same great results for my clients.