Want to know the key factors of retargeting? - Well, retargeting or Remarketing is an element of advertising that every company, no matter the size, should be using. The ability to keep your brand at the forefront of your customers and potential customers' brains is endless and does result in higher sales.

Now, not everyone is a fan of retargeting because they feel like they are being stalked by one of their favourite brands. Some people will view clever retargeting as an infringement on their privacy. You want to steer away from this thought process as much as possible.

The key to clever retargeting is to not be cringy and too clever. Don’t use headlines like “ hey you, forgotten about us? We have xyz available from £££. Use thought out strategies to regain the attention of your audiences.

Use your current customers to endorse your products/services and to notify your potential customers that you have something they need, make your prospective customers jealous of something they don’t have.

Now I mentioned that people can start crying when they are being retargeted because they don’t like being tracked.

Well tough shit, it’s happening.

You can blame cookies for that one. Cookies play a vital role in the game of retargeting.

A cookie is a small piece of data that is sent from a website and stored in a user’s web browser whilst a user is browsing that website. Cookies are there to remember your activity, to show you ads that you care about and remind you of products and services that you didn’t purchase.

The reason that some people will feel that clever retargeting is an invasion on their privacy is down to the data that is being stored in their cookies. Marketers can use this information along with pixel pools to retarget people at different stages of the purchase process.

Retargeting uses the data that cookies collect when you navigate through a site. Now if you head onto an e-commerce site, find a product you like, add it to your cart but then jump off at the last minute then you are just asking to be retargeted with that product or product set in the coming days/weeks.

Rookie Mistakes In Retargeting:

• Do not retarget too many people. Keep the quality of your pixel pool high and show your ads to the people that are most likely to purchase. The wider your retargeting approach is, the less effective it will be. Taking car finance retargeting as an example you would want to start by creating a pixel pool of people who have reached the application page but not reached the thank you page ( not completed the form). These are the people that are most likely to convert.

• Another high quality pixel pool in the field of car finance would be people who have been approved for car finance but were unable to contact. Car Dealers and Car Brokers find it very difficult to better their contact rates when they are depending on phone calls, texts and emails. Retarget the last 30 days of approvals with no contact and you will be giving your clients another contact approach.

• I mentioned before, do not make your retargeting ads creepy and cringy. You might think you are the best marketer in town but you will be the only one thinking that. Being cringy will just give prospective customers a reason to moan, especially when you are using headlines like “ Hey! We saw you visited our application page but didn’t submit, come back!”. Be simple with the ads and don’t point out the obvious i.e. you visited our site last week. Use the space in your ad to highlight the benefits of your product/service

• Don’t be too desperate with retargeting. If someone starts seeing your ad 5 times per day they are going to get fed up and probably report your ad, ain’t nobody got time for that. Keep your ads sweet and simple with a run time of 30 days and a frequency cap of 3 per day.

Budgeting Strategies for retargeting:

There are two types of budget strategies that are available with retargeting. One for small budgets and one for large budgets, when retargeting you are only advertising to those who have visited your site in the last 30 days.

If your 1st audience is only 150 rows of approved data in the last 30 days then you won’t be spending a great deal on that audience. It will be a very detailed and specific pixel pool but the opportunity to generate purchases/leads will be low.

It is best to split your retargeting campaigns into two sets. One would be the most likely to convert or the finely tuned pixel pool. The second would be the wider audience, the website page views, the Facebook engagement or the people who watched over 75% of the video. I would split my budget 60/40 across the two types of audiences.

Ad Strategies for retargeting:

2) The Brander

Keep your brand at the front, use this strategy when others have been used first. The goal of this ad is to keep your brand in the eye line of your prospective customers and hope they come back. Keep you ad simple with the image being your logo/storefront and your slogan. Use the headline of the ad to highlight the key benefits of your product/service. Use the description to give the ad some credibility, this strategy is used to stop your audience from getting cold. They will be ready to purchase soon and when they do, you’ll be the one they remember.

2) The Product Reminder

This is where you can reuse past ads that have been in the eye of your customers and prospective customers. You will increase the number of times someone sees your ad each day which will keep your brand/product/service at the front of their brain. Use the creative of the product/service you are offering. Focus on the headline to highlight the main benefit of the product. As well as the description to summarise the problems that the product solves.

3) Instant Celebrity

Use your past and present customers to interest your prospective customers. An example of a good image would be someone outside your dealership collecting a car, with the brand logo in the top left and a trust pilot logo in the top right. The headline of the ad would use recent reviews left by customers. Try using reviews that are the right size to fit in the three lines of Facebook. Use the description to rave about one aspect of your product/service.

4) The Fence Jumper

The goal here is to create an offer that will rejuvenate your dead pixel pool. This approach does work very well in e-commerce. If you target people who didn’t reach the thank you page and advertise from only £50pw. Use the image of the campaign to really highlight the price/price reduction. Then use the headline to create urgency. Also, use the description to highlight the reason for the sale I.e. summer, spring or Christmas.

Yes, it's not easy to understand, I mean just getting your head around Ads Manager is hard. So, click here to read my last blog all about using FB Ads Manager!

If you want a🔥🔥🔥 Facebook Ads, then you know who to contact!

Written By Callum Naylor