A Beginner’s Guide to Retargeting Ads

We all would like to believe that every single person who comes into contact with our business takes a very straight and orderly path to buying. Someone visits our website for the first time, fills out an e-book download form, and is then interested in talking to a sales representative in one session on your website.

Minutes later, the sales representative reaches this lead, and before you know it, the lead becomes a customer and hands over their credit card to buy something from your company.

In reality, however, the buyer’s journey is probably not as linear. People visit your website and then go. Two months later, they discover your latest blog post and then decide to download this e-book.

A few days later, they decide to read another blog post. Perhaps a week later, they decide to contact sales, and it takes a few more weeks for meetings and discussions to make a purchase decision. Same bottom line, but the process is a bit more complicated.

So marketers have to be willing to help their buyers through this complicated process. A good way to do this is to retarget ads.

If you’ve never used retargeting before, don’t worry. In the following post, we’ll explain the basics of how retargeting works, how you can use it to support your larger marketing goals, and even outline an example of a Facebook ad retargeting campaign.

How retargeting campaigns work

There are two main types of retargeting: pixel-based and list-based. The way it works is slightly different and has different advantages depending on the campaign goal.

Pixel-based retargeting

Pixel-based retargeting is a way to redisplay your material to any anonymous website visitor.

This is probably the most common type of retargeting. When someone comes to your website, an inconspicuous piece of JavaScript (often referred to as a pixel) is placed in their browser so that their browser “Cookie-d.“When you leave your website to surf the internet, this cookie notifies retargeting platforms to show certain ads based on the specific pages you have visited on your website.

The advantage of pixel-based retargeting is that it is timely (they can be realigned pretty soon after you leave your website), specific to a particular page on your website, and behavior-based. Disadvantages of this method are that there are fewer people in the campaign at all times, since everything depends on how often people come to your website, display and leave certain pages. It can also be difficult or time-consuming to implement JavaScript on many websites.

List-based retargeting

List-based retargeting works after you already have someone’s contact information in your database.

You can also use lists of your existing contacts for certain types of retargeting ads. To do this, upload a list of email addresses to a retargeting campaign (usually on a social network like Facebook or Twitter). The platform identifies users on this network who have these addresses and delivers retargeting ads just for them.

Although it is a little less common than pixel-based retargeting, list-based retargeting allows you to set highly customizable criteria for your ads because it is based on more than just behavior – you decide who is included in which list.

On the other hand, it is possible that someone in your list gave you an email address and the social network gave you another – and in this case, your ads will not be shown. Also note that list-based retargeting is less automatic and timely than pixel-based retargeting because you are responsible for uploading and managing the list.

If you’ve ever heard of the term “retargeting”, it is likely to be compared to remarketing. And although the two are often confused with each other, they do have differences. Let’s talk about when you would use both.

Remarketing and retargeting are often confused with each other. Although they are similar, retargeting your ads helps you reach new potential customers, while remarketing focuses on reawakening your business’s interest in current or inactive old customers.

A retarget ad helps those who have never heard of your company understand how your product or service fits their lifestyle or solves a potential problem. With retargeting you can personalize the message.

If you analyze sales, you can determine what is popular with the target groups you want to reach. For example, if you find that a particular line of products works well among millennials, drag pictures of them to a carousel ad and use them to engage customers again. Personalizing a separate ad for a collection that targets a segment of your target market is an example of how retargeting can be successful.

Take this ad that I saw today. Despite never bought from Evil gal, this ad appeared in my newsfeed:

This ad introduces Nasty Gal to new leads (like me) by giving an overview of various garments that are popular with target groups.

It is likely that I saw this ad because I fit Nasty Gal’s target audience on Facebook and my previous behavior on the social channel was to look for reviews from similar clothing retailers.

To win back a lost or inactive customer, you can use remarketing. This tactic aims to improve customer relationships by using marketing tactics

If you want to give your customers an incentive to buy from your company again, essentially turn to remarketing.

For customers who already know your brand and have shown a need for your product, create a personalized message to reawaken their interest. For example, if your company offers membership, contact those whose membership is expiring and needs to be renewed. This email I received is an example:

This marketing email not only served as a reminder to renew my subscription, it was Flourish market‘s Way to remember the benefits of membership. In the email I could see how much I had saved through the shopping service where my membership fee was spent and I was offered a special offer to renew.

Since I was already familiar with the brand, Thrive could use the email to add personal details and take a snapshot of what I can enjoy as a member (again).

As with retargeting, this tactic is successful when messages encourage action. The CTAs of the email, such as “Browse our options here!” told me that I could read my options in one click, so I did. Use remarketing efforts to remind customers of the benefits of shopping with your brand, such as: B. Easy access to shopping.

What goals should you have for retargeting?

Now that we have the background to how retargeting works and the different types of audiences that you can segment by, we can focus on goals. The main types of retargeting campaigns that you should consider are awareness and conversion campaigns.

awareness

Awareness campaigns are useful when you want to re-engage website visitors and let them know about relevant products, features, or announcements. These ads are typically served to pixel-based lists.

The obvious downside to awareness campaigns is that they provide less targeted content to people who haven’t been deeply concerned with your brand. They are not in your contact database, and lower clickthrough rates are often expected than with other types of campaigns.

However, since the goal is to make potential customers aware of your business, impressions and engagement are acceptable metrics. Awareness campaigns are often the forerunners of a much more effective campaign goal: conversions.

conversion

Conversion goals are just that: You want to get users to click on your ad and take a next step, such as: B. Completing a landing page form. Conversion campaigns are best used to target a specific list to a clear next step in the flywheel. They can be measured using typical conversion metrics such as website clicks, form submission and cost-per-lead (CPL).

The best thing about a conversion campaign is that you can use it for multiple parts of the flywheel. For example, pixel-based ads generate leads and direct people to landing pages where they can share their information.

List-based ads qualify these leads better. Ads are shown to contacts who have given you limited information and lead to longer forms with additional fields.

Retargeting can also be used to move these qualified leads further along their sales cycle. For example, you can use retargeting to send a list of contacts who have downloaded an ebook to sign up for a free trial of your product.

Regardless of your goal, it is important to align the positioning, the motive and the next step in the conversion process – regardless of whether it is an offer landing page, a website page or a request for further information – with your target group list. List-based retargeting can have low match rates (users are synced with accounts on any platform, usually by email address). Therefore, make sure that you conduct your retargeting activities with incoming content.

Select a retargeting platform and retargeting tool

Honestly, you have a few options to actually implement your retargeting. There are countless third-party platforms that perform web and social retargeting, e.g. Perfect audience, AdRoll, Retarder, and Bizo. You can also perform retargeting on certain platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

While email targeting can be effective, it’s important to consider many of the other platforms that might also be beneficial. Although each platform you use to implement ads is different, there are some advantages and disadvantages to choosing platforms that run social media ads or ads elsewhere on the web.

Social media retargeting often works well because users are more likely to share, answer, and discuss your content on one of these well-known platforms. You can also see that the ads run from a real account, as opposed to a small web banner ad with little text that anyone can run. However, web retargeting works well for impressions because the ads follow your target audience across the Internet, not just on some specific social media websites.

Would you like to see what a remarketing campaign looks like? We’ll go step by step through building a retargeting campaign and measuring its success.

Facebook retargeting

One of the oldest and best-known platforms on which you can market and realign your ads is Facebook. Facebook not only offers remarketing options, it also allows you to serve ads to a large pool of mirror audiences with a range of ad targets.

In this example, we pretend to set up a remarketing campaign for HubSpot. To lead qualified leads to a free trial, we set up a replicated Facebook retargeting campaign for leads in our database that we know are interested in marketing automation. This is how we would set up this campaign.

1. Make a list or existing contacts or collect groups of pixels on your website.

First, you need a list of the leads you want to target again. In the marketing software of your choice, create a list based on two criteria: life cycle phase, interests based on the topic of the last download. If this list is large enough, you can proceed to the next step. If this is not the case, you should check your segmentation properties and / or the type of retargeting to be implemented.

2. Upload the list to Facebook’s Audience Manager.

Once our list is processed, we can export the CSV file and import it into Facebook custom audience Manager to match email addresses with Facebook profiles. (There are third-party platforms that also sync these lists across social media, so choose which upload / sync option works best for your business.)

In addition to Facebook retargeting, Audience Manager allows you to perform standard targeting that allows you to set demographic, geographic, and other audience goals for an ad – even without a retargeting list.

When you click “Manage Ads” on the Facebook advertising homepage, click “Audiences” on the left toolbar. This way you can create a customer list by uploading a CSV or TXT file and options for sorting by user ID. Telephone numbers or emails.

Give your list an appropriate name so that you can easily find it later. Also, allow at least a few hours for it to fill. If you try to create an ad immediately, the audience may not be fully loaded.

3. Determine your destination URL.

To create a new campaign on Facebook, click the green “Create Ad” button in the top right corner of the ad platform’s home screen. This will prompt you to choose a target for your campaign. Whichever option you choose, add a UTM tracking code – a snippet of text at the end of your URL – that you can use to track success and match clicks and conversions from your campaigns. For example, we would create a campaign called “retargeting” and our free trial URL would look like this:

http: //offers.hubspotm/free-trial?utm_campaign = retargeting & utm_medium = social & utm_source = facebook

Once you’ve entered your URL for advertising, the next step is to rename your campaign just below the URL text box. Keep similar names for your campaigns to make tracking easier when multiple campaigns are running.

4. Segment your ads.

Select your custom audience and choose the geographic location you want to target. The location is an “AND” setting. If your list contains leads from all over the world and you select only “USA”, some people won’t see your ads.

Based on yours Buyer personasYou can also segment by interest, behavior, age, and other demographic settings to make ads more targeted. With conversion campaigns, you are again targeting a specific list of contacts who are already interested in your product. Therefore, it may not make sense to include other Facebook categories.

5. Set your budget.

Before you start the campaign, you should set a fixed budget for paid tactics, broken down by channel. For Facebook campaigns, set a lifelong budget for the length of the campaign, and monitor and adjust accordingly. Most beginners should leave the “Optimize for website click” bid.

You can also name your ad set at this time. This is useful if you want to differentiate lists (creatives, budgets, etc.) for different sets of ads in the same campaign (i.e. lead to the same page).

6. Create your ad.

Each ad can have up to six images associated with it, so you can test which ones perform best. Be clear and precise in your positioning as the heading under the image can only be 25 characters long and the text over the image is limited to 90 characters. You can also include prompt buttons such as “Shop Now”, “Learn More”, “Download”, etc. at the bottom right of the ad.

Some important details about Facebook ads:

• The image size is 1080 x 1080 pixels.
• Images can only contain 20% text.
• Under “Advanced Options” you can write a newsfeed link description with up to 200 characters to better explain your ad.

By default, ads appear on mobile newsfeeds, on the right column on desktops, and in mobile partner apps. Depending on where you want your customers to see these campaigns, you may want to turn off one or all of these options so that they appear only in the desktop news feed.

When you’ve got everything set up, click the green “Place Order” button at the bottom right of the screen.

7. Track your progress.

Congratulations, you’ve now created a conversion-based retargeting ad on Facebook! Now you can track website clicks, reach, clickthrough rate, CPC, and total spend to match your original goals.

On the start page of your Facebook advertising you can take a look at how your Facebook retargeting campaign works. If you want to dive further into the measurement data of the ad, you can go to the ad set, which shows information such as clicks and expenses per day. You can also easily make changes to your ad from this screen, such as: B. expand the budget, schedule and creative elements.

If you use a CRM like HubSpot, most tools offer Look at the performance Your destination URL to track views, clicks, and deliveries to specific retargeting campaigns.

Retargeting is a great way to motivate your potential customers and interact with people who have already shown interest in your company.

Although it sounds like a simple enough concept, many aspects of a retargeting campaign need to be worked out before you can copy the ad and make it creative. Make sure you have enough time to build your lists, set goals and campaign types, determine the platforms on which your ads appear, and link the entire conversion path.