Facebook Retargeting Ads Drive More Profit
Yes, increasing sales and achieving a lower cost per acquisition is fundamental to the success of your business. Thankfully, Facebook retargeting ads empower you to drive a much lower cost per acquisition. When set-up correctly, they enable you to reach people who are more familiar with your brand, product, or service.
That means you are targeting ads at people who are more likely to remember your brand, watch your next video, click on to your website, and most importantly, purchase from you.
So… what exactly are these ads?
Continue reading to achieve Surge Pilot growth.
What are Facebook Retargeting Ads?
Facebook retargeting ads definition: As touched upon above, Facebook retargeting ads (also known as Facebook remarketing) are the Facebook ads you can use to target people who have already engaged with your business. For example, someone who has been on your website before.
In order to do so, you need to set up a custom audience (however, we’ll go through how to set these up later in the article).
What are custom audiences?
Customer audience definition: A Facebook Custom Audience is a segmented group of people that can be targeted based on the different categories that they fit into. They enable brands to import user email addresses, website visitors, and other groups of people so they can serve ads to that exact audience on the social media platform. Custom Audiences are the most effective way for brands to interact and engage with relevant users across multiple channels.
Who are the different types of retargeted audiences?
There are several types of people you can segment and retarget using custom audiences. Here’s a list of 6 different types of audiences you can retarget with Facebook ads and Instagram ads:
- Website visitors – Those who have been on your website
- Leads/Prospects – People who have considered purchasing from you before (e.g. filled in your form, been on your checkout page or added an item to their cart)
- Customers – Users who have purchased from your website in the past
- Newsletter subscribers – People who have subscribed to your email newsletter
- Social media followers – People who follow or like your Facebook and Instagram pages
- Video watchers – People who have watched your videos before
What else we will cover
In this article, you will find a lot of information that will help you increase your sales using different types of retargeting Facebook ads for any business. We will explain first, what is involved in this process of advertising to your future customers; from the bottom of the conversion funnel to types of traffic.
You’ll also learn about the benefits of Facebook retargeting ads, as well as the different types of retargeting ads and how to set them up. With the right knowledge of Facebook Advertising campaigns, it can become very simple to convert your target market into customers. It’s incredibly important that you are able to trace them back and maximise your spending with retargeted ads.
Retargeting Facebook ads will bring back the audience that stopped in the process of purchase on your website.
Let’s get started by discussing the sales conversion funnel!
What a Sales Funnel is, and Why you need it.
Sales funnel definition: A sales funnel (or conversion funnel) is an entire journey a customer takes before purchasing a product or service from a business online. For example, a gym goer may search for resistance bands to work out with at home, before seeing an advert for that product. They then may click a resistance band product ad and enter the website, before seeing another advert for it, going back to that same website, and finally purchasing.
The quicker it takes to convert your customer, the better. However, it’s important to find out how many touchpoints you need to convert your average customer. By using Google Analytics, you can identify this.
The conversion funnel is the tactical process every global e-commerce business uses to convert people into customers. The length of this process entirely depends on the cost of your product, the industry you are in. For example, a low-cost £15 t-shirt from a company like ASOS may not require a long conversion funnel. Such low costing products are more impulse purchases. On the other hand, a technology brand, like Beats Audio, hoping to sell a £349 pair of headphones, may see a much longer conversion window.
Importance of Sales Funnels
Creating a conversion funnel is one of the wisest things to consider before launching Facebook ads. It could make or break your business if you don’t take it into account. A conversion funnel will ensure that everything is organised before you start your advertising.
A good conversion funnel will enable you to spend less to convert. How? You will end up focusing your ad spend more directly on the people who are more likely to purchase. On average, people at the end of your conversion funnel will be a lot more likely to press ‘Order Now’, compared to those at the start.
Create a plan to engage and re-engage people in your sales funnel. And always use a tracking system for your sales funnels – make sure you set up Google Analytics to track every movement on your website.
The 3 Sales Conversion Funnel Stages Explained
A conversion sales funnel involves 3 main stages. Firstly, a user must become aware of your brand and offering, they must then consider purchasing, before eventually converting.
Stage 1 – Awareness
Unsurprisingly, you probably guessed that your target audience needs to first see you. The first time you saw or heard about Apple, you probably didn’t buy from them straight away. Your audiences recognition for your brand is the first step of their journey to becoming a customer. We call this a ‘cold audience’ in the conversion funnel.
Make sure you don’t offer discounts or offers to this audience. Think of the awareness stage, as the bait to catch the fish. You just want to just gain the attention of your audience. Whether it’s 15 seconds of their time, a quick look at your landing page, this time that’s been taken from their day is valuable.
Stage 2 – Consideration
At this stage, your potential customer now knows of your brand, website, or product, and now needs convincing into considering your product. The content in these ads should either: reveal more information on your products, provide social proof through customer testimonials, or build the authority of your brand.
It’s all about adding free value and building trust so you can convince them to consider purchasing from you. The conversion stage may take 2, 3, or more ads to convince your audience to actually consider buying.
We call this audience a ‘warm audience’ in the conversion funnel.
Stage 3 – Conversion
Now that your audience is close to purchasing from you, they are entering the conversion stage of the funnel. Ads here should be very direct and aim to get them to purchase. They now know about your company, the product and have the confidence to buy from you. At this stage, they are now a ‘hot audience’ and are ready to buy. Here you should serve them with ads that motivate them to complete their payment.
If you can, include culturally relevant discounts like ‘Use StaySafe20 for 20% off!’, use direct call-to-actions like ‘Shop now’ and create a sense of urgency.
The Benefits of Retargeting Facebook Ads
What many business owners tend to miss is the re-engagement opportunity. As mentioned above, Retargeted Facebook Ads give you the opportunity to reach a more engaged audience that knows your brand. Facebook gives you the chance to convert the traffic that was already generated. Consider retargeting campaigns as the executors of an incomplete job. Retargeting traffic is similar to a recycling system, where little gets lost and is much of it is reused.
7 Retargeting Ad Benefits
- Generates more sales from website visitors, prospective customers, and current customers
- Builds engaged communities who will be more inspired to participate in brand activations
- Gain more insights into how your audiences behave, and what they’re interested in
- Increase cost-effectiveness as your focusing your budget on warm audiences who already know your brand
- Remarketing campaigns are great for reminding people of your brand or product
- Improves engagement typically as retargeted audiences tend to share similar interests in your products
- Retargeting ads give you a chance to provide more in-depth information to your audience
How to Setup a Facebook Retargeted Campaign
Once your Facebook Business Manager, Facebook Pixel and Google Analytics is set up, you’ll be in a position to start your ads. Here’s a couple of simple steps for setting up your Facebook retargeted campaign.
Step 1 – Login to your Ads Manager account
Firstly go to your Facebook Ads Manager account here, and go to the ‘Audiences’ section in the ‘business tools’ section of your dashboard.
Step 2 – Set up your custom audiences
Next click ‘Create Audience’ and build your custom audience so you can segement the audience you want target with ads.
Next, pick which audiences you would like to target. You can create custom audiences for your website traffic, customer lists, video watchers, social media followers, app users, lead form submitters and more.
For the purpose of this demonstration, we setup a custom audience that is targeting website traffic – in particular, people who have been on your website in the past 30 days. The pixel you put in your website allows
Step 2 – Set up your Facebook campaign
Once you’ve created your custom audience, next head to your Facebook Ads Manager again and setup your Facebook campaign. When you get to the section ‘Audience’ like below, simply select the audience you’ve just created.
Assessing your Retargeted Facebook Ads
Now that you’ve created your retargeted Facebook ads, you’ll need to observe them and assess them. And to do that, you’ll need to start observing which ad sets and which ads are converting your warm audiences into customers. With the Facebook pixel, you’ll be able to:
- See which warm and hot ads are most effective in achieving your objectives
- Identify what demographic is most valuable to you
- Discover what part of your ad sales funnel is losing your audience
With Google Analytics you’ll be able to:
- See how long it takes to convert web users into buyers
- See how long your retargeted audiences are spending on different pages
- What products your retargeted traffic are most interested in
All these insights help you to build more effective campaigns, landing pages and more. For instance, some stop from the first moment they land on the page and bounce, others take their time to read or watch videos. Many just stop at check-out, leaving right before converting into a sale.
How much should you spend on Cold Ads vs Warm Retargeted Ads?
Managing your budget for retargeting ads depends a lot on the size of your available audience. A preliminary analysis is necessary to determine how much you need to invest in cold and warm audiences. We’ve worked with brands that have required a 50%-50% ad budget split on cold and warm audiences.
We’ve also worked with newer brands that have small current audiences and required 80% of the initial budgets being allocated towards cold audiences and 20% on warm retargeted audiences. If you’ve got no audience, you’ll find yourself spending close to 100% on cold audiences. It entirely depends on your current audience size and objectives. Are you trying to reach new customers or reconvert current customers? There is no right answer here. Just make an educated decision based on your objectives.
5 Types of Retargeting Facebook Ads You Should Try
The following 5 retargeting ads listed here, could address the problems you’ve encountered after creating your ‘warm’ audiences.
Carousel Testimonial Ads are one of the best ways to convince people to make a purchase. They provide social proof and encourage people to make a purchase. Presenting reviews and content surrounding the experiences of similar people is a proven social media tactic utilised by millions.
Social proof definition: Social proof is a well-known psychological phenomenon whereby people consider the actions of others before taking actions themselves. It gives people the encouragement they need to take action and makes it more likely for them to reflect a certain behavior. In advertising, social proof is used to encourage people to consider purchasing their products.
Trust and credibility are everything in business. You can use for your carousel testimonial ads images or videos, each testimonial has to address different benefits. The best thing to do is to visually showcase a 5-star system. Carousel Testimonial ads can be used for giving credibility to your product/service. Present the 3 biggest benefits of your product, and address any concerns your audiences may have in the testimonial carousel cards.
Testimonials are very important and they should also be very visible on your landing sales webpage. In addition to this, create an attention-grabbing headline for each of these benefits in your carousel Facebook ad.
Surge Pilot Insight: We recommend adding at least 3 testimonials for your carousel ad, and to reference highly searched key phrases in them
2. Engaging Video Ads that Reduce Conversion Blockers
Conversion blockers are anything that gets in the way of your sales. It could be price, a lack of understanding of the product, or even a lack of relevance in the life of your consumer. To overcome this, create engaging videos that demonstrate how your product can improve their life, in the form of a comparison.
Burst the bubble of concern with an undeniable list of their most common objections for making the purchase.
Try to go deeper than that and tackle motivation. Above all address things that are usually missing, like someone not being convinced that the product will work for them. Then there are the ones not convinced that the product is for them. With the right conviction in the power of your product/service, you will convert them.
Start by creating a list of their top 3 objections that you can turn around with a good explanation and convincing content. Then, create a video in which you address these objections and offer an exact solution in a relatable scenario. Build confidence for people to actually buy your product or service. Address each objection in a different video and have them run at the same time, targeting the same people, your ‘warm’ traffic.
Surge Pilot Insight: Above all, don’t forget about the different placements available for Facebook ads. Consider the format of your ads and the length of your ads.
3. Offer Coupons or Free Offers.
Certainly, everybody loves coupons and free offers and it is the easiest way to convince people to purchase. CrazyClearance.co.uk and Groupon built their companies based on the customer incentive in discounts.
Although, they are effective, don’t offer discount coupons to cold audiences. We recommend only including discounted coupons and offers in Facebook retargeted ads for hot audiences, who are close to purchasing. That includes users who abandon the checkout, or even in DPA (Dynamic product ads).
Make an offer that your customers can’t refuse, for something they need. But only offer what you feel comfortable giving – Don’t mess up your bottom line. Use urgency and scarcity, giving the offer only for a very limited time, end of the week, 24-hours, or a few days. Always use whatever works for you and whatever you can actually deliver.
4. DPA Retargeting Ads to Speed Up Sales
Ever been on a website product page, and started noticing that the product is stalking you across the internet? That, my friend, is a because of dynamic product ads.
What are Facebook dynamic product ads?
Facebook DPA (dynamic product ads) is a form of retargeting ad every successful brand uses to convert product page viewers and past customers. Users who have engaged with a brand’s website previously are shown them relevant products, based on their previous actions on their site. These ads speed things up the sales cycle and are the highest converting ads on Facebook.
Setting these DPA facebook ads requires a bit more time and expertise. You first need to set up your Facebook catalog and connect it to your website. Next, you need to build your products, before building your Facebook campaign. The only difference is, you need to select ‘Catalogue Sales’ when selecting the type of campaign.
Upsell ads and cross-sells ads are two different types of dynamic product ads.
What is Facebook UpSell Ad?
Facebook upsell ads are ads that enable you to promote products to people who viewed a particular set of products in a particular amount of time. As a result, you’re able to advertise products which have a similar interest to a product they’ve already decided to view.
Example: A man views a landing page for a pair of Nike trainers by doesn’t purchase. Next, he gets shown a similar pair of trainers which gives Nike a higher margin
What is Facebook Cross-Sell Ad?
Facebook Cross-Sell ads are ads where a buyer is served with ads that compliment something they’ve already bought.
Example: A woman buys a laptop from Dell. Next, she gets targeted with ads featuring laptop accessories. 
Mastering the Facebook Retargeting Ads Sales Funnel
In conclusion, retargeting ads can be used by any type of business in the e-commerce space, selling products online. With retargeting ads, you address a major issue that stops your Facebook ads from converting. You begin converting people who have interacted with your content or website in the past.
Once you do set up your Facebook remarketing ads, identify what is causing your audience not to purchase and create the perfect retargeting Facebook ad to turn them back. Push your customers and prospective customers back down the sales funnel by addressing their concerns.
Utilise the insights from your Facebook reports and your Google Analytics to make strongly informed, data-driven decisions on your future ad targeting and landing pages. Facebook offers a lot of information and after 3-4 days the ads should have collected enough data.
The data will help you to understand your retargeting ads are performing well enough or need improving. As with any paid advertising, your retargeting should be continually refreshed to drive that higher return on investment.
We hope that this article and all the information shared here will help you reach your sales goals for the long term.
