The Strategy We Used To Make A 200% ROI With Facebook Retargeting For One Of Our Clients
If you’re new to Facebook Ads, you’re probably NOT running retargeting.
And if you ARE running retargeting on Facebook, you’re probably NOT doing it right.
In the article below, I’ll show you a step-by-step case study of how we got a 2-to-1 return with Facebook retargeting for one of our agency’s clients. This and other Facebook advertising strategies are covered inside the Social Media Ad Genius Course. (If you run a business and you’re looking to accelerate your marketing, I highly recommend joining our Social Media Ad Genius community.)
Here are the exact steps we took get a 2-to-1 ROI with retargeting:
1) Install Facebook Custom Audience Pixel & Create Facebook Retargeting Segment
The first step to running any retargeting campaign on Facebook is creating your custom audience pixel inside of Facebook.
To create your pixel, click on “Audiences” inside your ads manager. Then click on the green “Create Audience” button on the top right. From there you’ll go to Custom Audience >> custom audience from your website. If this is the first time you’ve created a custom audience you will be prompted to agree to Facebook’s TOS & it will show you the pixel code. Once the pixel code is created you’ll want to place that in the header of every page in your funnel.
Once that pixel is placed you’ll want to create your custom audience segment. This is going to be your targeting audience for retargeting. Facebook’s interface allows you to segment your website visitors in many different ways. The following segment is the one we’ve found to be the most effective for retargeting.
Go to Audiences. Then Create Audience >> custom audience >> custom audience from your website. Enter a name for your audience. I like to call them “X Abandons” where X is the name of your offer. They are Abandons because that segment is going to be filled with people who visit your site and don’t purchase.
Next, in the dropdown menu next to “Website Traffic” pick “Custom Combination”. After the “Add New Condition” button you should see a link that says “Add exclusions”. Click that.
Your screen should look like this:
In the first box that says “Add URL keywords” you should paste the URL of your landing page.
In the second “Add URL Keywords” box under “Exclude” paste the URL of your Buy Thank You Page (the page your visitor sees immediately after they make a purchase).
Once you add these two URLs, click “Create Audience” and you’re done! This Custom Audience will now populate with people who visit your landing page and don’t make a purchase.
The next step to setting up your retargeting campaign is:
2) Run Cold Traffic
Depending on who you ask, there are varying answers of how big your retargeting segment should be to run a successful campaign. In my experience, you shouldn’t run retargeting without at least 20,000 people in your segment, with 30k being the point where you start to see great results.
This is where the time frame of your retargeting segment also comes into play. The ideal timeframe for retargeting is 30 days because the more time that elapses between the user visiting your site and purchasing, the less likely that person is to purchase. If you don’t have twenty thousand people visit your site in one month, you can expand the time frame of your custom audience segment by clicking on the edit button next to your custom audience.
Once you’re running your cold traffic and populating that custom audience, your next step is to:
3) Find Your Best Ad Images & Write “Time-Sensitive Copy”
My next step in this process was to run reports on all the ad creatives in the campaigns running to cold traffic. From there I identified the three best performing images.
I wrote some new copy that focused on urgency and special discount offers. For example, “Buy 2, get the 2nd item half off”, “All orders come with free shipping”, “Free shipping while supplies last”, or “We’re running out of X, get yours today” etc etc…
This copy was then paired with the best performing images from the last test. We used the least restrictive age targeting possible, because we didn’t want to exclude anyone from our already, extremely warm audience.
And the final step in our process was to…
4) Launch Campaign & Optimize Budgets
We setup the campaign with a very limited ‘per adset’ budget to start out. Each piece of copy had its own adset, with the three different images as Ad variations in the adset. We scaled the budgets on the best performing ads, making sure the frequency never went above 3.
The beauty of running retargeting is that if it’s setup properly, you can continue to scale your budgets. And if you’re running cold traffic, your frequency never goes up because the custom audience segment re-populates with new visitors AND excludes buyers.
In the end we found an adset that was getting checkouts $10.15 for a product that cost $20.97. We shut off all other adsets and ran that one ad creative for over $1,000 in ad spend.
$1,026.95 in ad spend for over $2,200 in revenue…
And that’s how you get 2:1 on Facebook with Re-targeting.
For more on re-targeting and other Facebook marketing strategies tested over $4million in ad spend,
==> Check out Social Media Ad Genius
Curt Maly
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