Let’s start with the what and why of retargeting to establish a strong foundation. After that I’ll share real examples demonstrating conventional ways to implement retargeting (and why I think that’s the wrong approach).
Then, I’ll discuss a powerful framework for understanding and getting the most from retargeting.
After all of that, we’ll move on to execution using Facebook and Google paid advertising. Even if you consider yourself a retargeting pro, do not skip directly to the platform-specific sections. Absorb this module in its entirety — especially the retargeting framework.
Many thanks to Loren for writing the Facebook content for this module. I have added each author’s name to individual sections for clarity.
What is Retargeting — Shawn
In its simplest form, retargeting (referred to as remarketing by Google) is a method for re-engaging visitors to your website(s) or web app(s) with text, image, and/or video advertising.
For example, prospects visit your website and then see your ads on Facebook (including Instagram) and Google (including the Google Display Network and YouTube) because they visited your website.
A critical insight here is that users’ behavior influences the advertising they see. That behavior can include specific content viewed, actions taken (e.g., opt in / purchase), the quality of the visitor’s engagement (e.g., time on page, number of pages viewed), and much, much more.
Why Retarget — Shawn
Extensive reach, enhanced credibility, and the power of advertising decisions informed by user behavior are important factors to understand.
Reach tells us how much of our audience we’re likely to re-engage with when we retarget with Google (which includes YouTube and the Google Display Network) and Facebook (which includes ad placements on Instagram).
Consider the following:
- Google, YouTube, and Facebook are the three most visited websites on the Internet.
- Google search and the Google Display Network reach an estimated 90% of Internet users worldwide.
- In 2020, Facebook reported 2.6 billion monthly active users, and 1.73 billion daily active users.
The Traffic Engine focuses on Google and Facebook retargeting because those two platforms, combined, reach the overwhelming majority of Internet users around the world (in excess of 90%).
Credibility is more subtle, and it’s primarily a side effect of advertising on the Google Display Network. Let me explain with an example.
Many years ago my agency was one of three finalists for a large website design/build and digital marketing project. I was invited to meet with the client for the formal announcement that we had been selected for the project.
At that meeting, the client’s director of marketing explained that the three finalists had submitted similar, compelling bids, and we were chosen because it was obvious that our clients were making a lot of money because of where they were advertising.
He then went on to explain to the executive team gathered for the announcement that he noticed my clients were advertising on the New York Times , ESPN, CNN, and many other high-profile websites. Several other executives in the room mentioned that they had noticed the same thing.
I realized in that moment what had happened. The director of marketing had looked at my list of clients, clicked through to many of their websites, and then was retargeted across the Google Display Network.
He also sent an email to other executives with several examples of my agency’s work, which meant that they, too, were retargeted across the Google Display Network after visiting my clients’ websites.
Each assumed that my clients were advertising on the well-known websites they visited, not realizing that it was their behavior that caused those ads to appear across a global network of advertisers with ad placements managed by Google.
I know that some of you are thinking “yes, but everyone knows what retargeting is now”. In my experience, that’s simply not true. Unless you’re advertising in a niche specific to marketing (especially digital marketing), it’s (highly) unlikely your prospects understand the role that their behavior plays in the advertisements they see.
Instead, they see your retargeting ads within the context of brands and web properties they’re already familiar with. That association can convey credibility in the right circumstances.
For example, if your audience is in the U.S., aged 55+, and politically conservative, think about the impact on your brand when your retargeting ads appear on FoxNews.com. Or ESPN for sports fans, HGTV for home improvement, etc.
I am not aware of any way to measure the impact of this type of brand affinity objectively or accurately, but it is important to be aware that there is a positive, systemic effect that you can use to your advantage.
This is especially impactful if you advertise for a small business that benefits from the credibility and authority implied by ad placements on well-known, respected brands.
(It’s also important to recognize that this works in reverse. There may be websites or subject matter in YouTube videos that you do not want to advertise on if they’re not in alignment with your ideals or messaging.)
In my opinion, the most important factor in retargeting is the role of user behavior to include or preclude ongoing engagement.
Let’s consider some examples.
Imagine that one-hundred prospects visit the first page of your lead acquisition funnel and 20% opt in.
Conventional retargeting strategies suggest retargeting the eighty prospects who didn’t opt in. However, if we look closely, we’ll notice that a significant percentage of visitors who didn’t opt in also didn’t stay longer than ten seconds.
Why does that matter? Because prospects demonstrate their intentions with their behavior. It’s an incredibly powerful signal that we can use to positively inform our advertising strategies.
When we add qualitative filters like time on sight to our retargeting, we conserve ad spend and improve performance. All we have to do is respect what visitors are telling us with their actions.
Let’s add some nuance to the example above. One hundred prospects visit page one of our lead acquisition funnel that has a compelling headline, one paragraph of intro copy, and a 10-minute video where we explain the value of our free lead magnet.
Twenty visitors opt in to get that free report, and thirty visitors don’t stay longer than ten seconds. That means there are fifty visitors who didn’t leave immediately, and they didn’t take the action we wanted (i.e., opting in).
We don’t know for certain, but we might suspect that some significant percentage of our unconverted prospects don’t respond well to video. (I’m one of those people.)
This is especially true in my experience if the initial ad that attracted prospects’ attention was an image or text (particularly long form text), not video.
In this situation, the first thing I would do is retarget the fifty visitors who didn’t opt in and stayed longer than ten seconds to a different opt in page with text, not video. (The easiest way to do that is to convert the audio from the video to edited text and clean it up for readability.)
This works in reverse too. If the landing page is text, consider creating a different version that’s video (or a VSL if that’s appropriate).
The point here isn’t the specific content of the examples, it’s the importance of using visitor behavior to inform our ongoing advertising.
I can’t overstate how important this is. Observe your visitors, respect what their behavior is telling you, and then inform what you do next with those insights.
When you do that you will have more money to spend on fewer, higher-quality prospects.
Retargeting Done Wrong — Shawn
Many conventional approaches to retargeting are flawed. The most egregious version is to retarget everyone, across platforms because it’s cheap and easy (and, in aggregate, produces a positive result).
Here are two real, representational examples of what not to do.
Last year I purchased a shirt from Rhone. My shopping experience was straightforward and direct. I visited their site, browsed to the appropriate page, verified sizing, and ordered.
Several days later I received the shirt and it was too small, so I returned it and immediately ordered a larger size.
For months after making that first purchase Rhone retargeted me across the Google Display Network showing me the shirt I had already purchased (twice). Their ads were everywhere. Day after day, week after week, website after website I saw ads for a product I already owned.
Their retargeting was counter-productive because it quickly became irritating. (At the time the shirt was available only in two colors in case you’re wondering if they were retargeting me with an extensive color selection.)
Online tool retailer Garrett Wade is another example. I once purchased three items from Garrett Wade. Again, the shopping experience was straightforward. I visited their website, added three items to my cart, and checked out.
For weeks after that transaction, website after website I visited displayed the same three items I had already purchased.
This approach to retargeting is common. Does it work? Yes. (If it didn’t it wouldn’t be so pervasive.) It is optimal? Absolutely not.
Retargeting everyone all the time is a sledgehammer approach to retargeting that fails to take into consideration that users are individuals who signal their intentions with the totality of their behavior.
Rhone and Garrett Wade (among many others) acted on an incomplete view of my behavior. They noticed I had visited specific product pages, but they failed to consider that I also purchased those same products.
Instead of showing me something new, they missed (dozens, if not hundreds) of opportunities to show me alternatives.
A far better alternative for retargeting is to know our overall measure of success, and then look at our strategies and tactics through the lens of systems theory to identify optimal solutions.
I’ll explain how to do that next.
Retargeting Framework — Shawn
In Module 1, Part II, I described Fundamental Reality #6: We Have to Know What We’re Optimizing for Strategically to Make Better Choices Tactically.
This is especially important for retargeting.
I’m going to assume that you’re optimizing for happy, long-term, repeat customers and that is the goal of the business system you’ve created.
With that goal clearly defined, we now need to consider three elements of systems theory to inform our retargeting decisions.
Those are:
- Your business is a system of interrelated parts from which results emerge, not a collection of individual steps to be optimized separately.
- Throughput — the rate at which your system produces its overall goal — is the most important decision-making metric.
- There’s always one — and only one — constraint slowing down the whole system.
Conventional thinking suggests that businesses and funnels are linear constructs that can (and should) be optimized step by step, piece by piece.
Systems theory, on the other hand, suggests that businesses and funnels are holistic constructs where results emerge from the relationships and interplay of the various elements.
Instead of optimizing the parts, systems theory emphasizes optimizing the whole.
For example, instead of evaluating a paid ad and asking “how can I get more clicks?”, or an opt in page and asking “how can I get more leads?”, we evaluate our ideas and actions by asking “will this contribute to acquiring more happy, long-term, repeat customers?”
That is the only question that matters, and asking it for every decision is a discipline that must be practiced and developed over time.
This is a good place to mention Fundamental Reality #2 — Results are not guaranteed, so we need to think in probabilities, not absolutes (from Module I, Part I).
It is difficult — and often impossible — to know in advance if a decision will produce a specific result. Recognizing that reality means we need to think in terms of probabilities — i.e., “is the decision I’m making more or less likely to get the overall result I want?”
For example — if our goal is to acquire happy, long-term, repeat customers, are we more likely to achieve that goal when we retarget prospects who have abandoned our funnel in less than ten seconds, or prospects who have stayed longer than ten seconds?
The obvious answer is that prospects who stay longer have demonstrated with their behavior that they’re more likely to become customers, probabilistically speaking.
When we begin to develop ideas and strategies for retargeting, our focus always needs to be on the overall goal of the system, not the individual parts of that system.
In earlier modules I’ve written extensively about the core metrics that matter most — CPA, AOV, LTV, and/or ROAS. I’m introducing a new term from systems theory — throughput — which is not meant to replace those, but to give us a new, enhanced level of understanding instead.
Throughput is the rate at which your business system produces its highest-level goal.
If our goal is to produce happy, long-term, repeat customers, we need to convert that to metrics we can measure and then define our terms clearly.
Happy is subjective and includes many positive behaviors — unsolicited positive feedback, referrals, public acknowledgments, etc.
Metrics for long-term and repeat customers are subjective too. And those may not apply to your business, so consider them optional (but recommended if they add value).
My recommendation to simplify this idea into something immediately actionable is to include refund rates in your high-level calculations so you have a more complete, accurate assessment of your business performance. (My broad assumption is that customers who refund are not happy.)
Let’s consider an example.
Example Business No. 1 generates 100 customers per day from paid traffic with a 5% refund rate (over 60 days). That means every sixty-one days they have created, on average, 95 happy customers.
In an attempt to improve results, they rewrite their sales page with higher-pressure, persuasion-focused sales copy that generates ten additional sales per day (wow!), but increases their total refund rates from 5% to 15%.
Did they improve their performance? The immediate answer is yes — daily sales increased by 10% (i..e, 110 sales instead of 100). However, if we look through the lens of throughput we’ll see that their performance suffered.
Here are the numbers.
Initially their throughput was 95 happy customers per day (100 sales per day, 5% refund rate within 60 days).
Then they increased sales to 110 per day, but they refunded seventeen of those sales within 60 days. That means their throughput dropped from 95 to 93 (110 — 17).
Their ‘improvement’ actually made their performance worse.
This is not uncommon, and the problems are easily missed if we only look at short term metrics (particularly total sales).
Including refund rates in throughput calculations is an easy, effective, and informative step to take and I highly recommend that you consider it in your business metrics. There is immense power in seeing a single, accurate representation of your business’s performance.
The third element of systems theory we’ll borrow to enhance our understanding of retargeting is an idea from the Theory of Constraints.
A foundational premise of TOC is that there is always one — and only one — element of a system that limits the performance of the entire system, and the only way to improve a system is to focus on improving the constraint.
However, TOC initially dealt primarily with easy to understand manufacturing processes, later adding layers of complexity (like the restraining impact of beliefs as constraints).
For our purposes, we’re going to skip the details and dogma of defining constraints and focus on a term I use instead — ‘inflection points’.
Where are the critical transitions — i.e., ‘inflection points’ — in your business or offer funnel that can make a significant difference in performance?
Here are some examples to consider:
- The tone and content of your ad messaging (this affects the type of prospects you attract).
- The tone and content of the first landing page a prospect sees (are you focusing on building a relationship or making a sale?)
- The communication medium for your messaging (text, video, VSL).
- The structure of your offer — for example, lead generation vs. webinar vs. straight to sale vs. ecommerce.
- Offer timing (immediate, immediately after lead capture, days after lead capture, just-in-time webinar, scheduled webinar).
This is a small sampling to convey the idea. Let’s look at some examples to further clarify what you’re looking for as it relates specifically to retargeting.
Let’s imagine we’re making the same offer two different ways.
Version 1 is straight to offer. There’s a Facebook ad that links to a sales page and the prospect can buy or not buy. The ad is text, and the landing page content also is text.
Version 2 is a four-page multi-page pre-sell site with an opt in on page four. After opt in the prospect receives five daily emails before the offer is made in emails 6-8. After email #8 the prospect transitions to a relationship-building nurture sequence.
Version 1 has very few inflection points. Some percentage of people click on the ad and buy. Some percentage click on the ad and leave almost immediately. And the remainder engage with the content but still don’t buy.
For this example, retargeting would be very simple. Anyone who buys is not retargeted. Anyone who does not stay longer than ten seconds also isn’t retargeted. For the remainder, I might retarget to a different version of the offer page (e.g., video instead of text, or text instead of video, longer copy or shorter, different tone, etc.).
The only real inflection point to work with would be someone didn’t buy but showed signs of interest and I would explore ways to convert that interest into additional sales.
Version 2 has many inflection points. After clicking on the ad some percentage of people will leave almost immediately. Others will click through to page 2. Some to page 3. Some to page 4. And some will opt in.
Of those who become leads, some will buy on days 6, 7, 8 (and beyond). Others will become leads and won’t buy yet (remember Dean Jackson’s analysis that 85% of leads become customers after 90 days).
We have many options for retargeting high-value inflection points in version 2. People who see page 4 but don’t opt in are strong candidates to become leads (or to show the offer without requiring opt in).
Prospects who opt in but don’t buy could be shown lower-price options or given a gesture of goodwill (like a free course) to encourage future sales.
Remember, we’re optimizing for happy, long-term, repeat customers which means the decisions we make need to support that goal — even if that means doing things that seem counter-intuitive in the short term.
The key takeaway here is that you don’t need to retarget every step of the way. You can if that contributes to improving throughput, but generally it’s not necessary.
Without knowing your specific funnel structure and intent, it’s impossible for me to identify your highest-value inflection point(s). If you’re stuck, feel free to ask questions in the comments.
If you’re not entirely sure, make an educated guess. What seems to be the one thing that’s holding back performance the most? Start there.
Loren will explain how to setup retargeting in Facebook next, and I’ll explain how to setup retargeting on the Google Display Network after that.
Facebook Retargeting — Loren
The Current State of Retargeting on Facebook
Over the past few years, there has been a thrust by Apple and others to limit the extent of tracking on the internet. This has had a profound impact on Facebook’s ability to receive and use accurate data on off-platform activity (such as purchasing from an advertiser’s website).
It’s obviously problematic to retarget someone on Facebook when we don’t have accurate data on who has interacted with our website.
Facebook, however, isn’t sitting back while their data is stripped away. They have worked hard on their algorithm to compensate.
In particular, the algorithm has gotten very good at putting ads repeatedly in front of people to get them to take action – with just the right frequency. Facebook is doing this in your standard cold traffic ad sets.
In other words, Facebook is doing retargeting for you as part of your advertising to cold traffic.
These two shifts (Facebook receiving less accurate data and the algorithm doing retargeting for you) have changed the face of retargeting on the Facebook platform.
Many now advocate not even worrying about retargeting ads. This is particularly true of the ecomm world.
I don’t quite agree with that advice.
While retargeting ads have certainly lost their effectiveness, there is still a place for them – particularly for more complicated funnels.
Retargeting ads may also be ineffective for low-priced products that sell a lot of volume, but they can be quite lucrative for high-ticket products and services.
Like almost everything on the platform, test and see whether it makes sense for your business.
Strategy and Creative Assets
Retargeting should start with strategy.
What is the goal for our retargeting ad? What next step do we want this retargeting audience to take? What is possibly keeping them from taking that next step?
Once we have our retargeting strategy, the creative assets should be easy to determine.
Maybe we want new leads to see ads promoting our core product. Maybe we want those who abandoned the shopping cart to be invited to complete the transaction and reminded about our guarantee policies. Maybe we want sales page viewers from the last two months who didn’t purchase to be told of our current sale.
We could answer objections. We could show testimonials and social proof. We could show recent purchasers some of our upsells or cross-sells. We could ask recent purchasers for testimonials. We could show blog visitors an ad promoting our email list or a webinar.
We don’t even need to be restricted to “transactional” ads. We could show a “thank you” video to recent purchasers to educate them on the product and to generate goodwill. We could retarget new leads with some of the best content from our blog.
Remembering the context in which our audience will see these ads is important to our creative. Images featuring our brand, our products, or any key spokespeople may do a great job of stopping the scroll. Copy should be congruent with the prospect’s journey so far and relevant to where they are now. Don’t be afraid to reference the product they added to cart or the webinar they registered for. Just talk to them naturally like you would if they were right in front of you.
Technical Setup
Once we have a rough conceptual view of our retargeting strategy, we can take a look at the technical capabilities of Facebook to implement our vision. And often as we review the technical capabilities, new strategies pop into our minds.
There’s so much that you can do with retargeting. Enjoy the possibilities instead of being frustrated by all the potential options.
As you’ll see, less is often more.
Custom Audiences
The core of Facebook retargeting lies in custom audiences.
In previous modules, we have talked about creating large cold-traffic audiences using interests or lookalikes.
Facebook also allows us to create custom audiences, which gives us very tight and defined groups of people to use in our targeting.
We can base custom audiences off of website views, pixel events (like product purchase or add-to-cart), Facebook page or Instagram engagement, views of our Facebook videos, and several other criteria.
We can then further define these audiences by the recentness of the interaction (within the last 30 days, for example.) or other lesser-used criteria (like purchase value or frequency of transaction).
This allows us to create custom audiences like these examples:
- Anyone who has visited our website in the last 30 days.
- Anyone who has visited a specific page of our website in the last 3 days.
- Anyone who has visited a page on our website with the word “fitness” in the URL within the last 10 days.
- Anyone who has purchased any of our products in the last 180 days.
- Anyone who has purchased a specific product in the last 21 days.
- Anyone who signed up for our email list within the last 5 days.
- Anyone who engaged with our Facebook page in the last 365 days.
- Anyone who watched at least 25% of a specific Facebook video within the last 5 days.
Those are just examples — there are nearly infinite variables to change.
One quick aside: one important factor to consider in your retargeting is time spent on a page. Someone who spent a minute on a page is a much more engaged prospect than someone who spent one second and clicked away.
However, in almost all circumstances, I would not recommend using Facebook’s feature to create custom audiences based on time on site. They do this by taking the percentage of people who spent the most time — for instance, allowing you to create a custom audience of people in the top 25% of most time spent.
The problem with this percentile-based method is that one page might have 100 people who stuck around for one to three seconds, and the top 25% of the audience would still be low quality. On the other hand, let’s say there’s another page with 100 visitors who stayed for two to three minutes. In that case, 100% of the visitors may be engaged and great prospects — why would I arbitrarily limit my audience to only 25%?
Instead we can use a little Google Tag Manager magic as discussed in Module 6. Create a timer to fire a separate pixel event once a visitor has been on site for 15 seconds (or 8 seconds, 30 seconds, whatever), and then use that pixel event to create a custom audience.
Remember, we can use these custom audiences in a variety of ways. We can create lookalikes based off them (as discussed in Module 5 Part I). We can include them as audiences we want to target. We can also exclude them as audiences we don’t want to see ads. (For instance, exclude a custom audience of those who have purchased a specific product from seeing your ads promoting that product.)
For retargeting, we can use exclusions to give us some very interesting strategic possibilities.
As a simple example, we could retarget those who abandoned a shopping cart — in other words, include a custom audience of those who saw the shopping cart but exclude those who purchased.
Or let’s say we have a webinar funnel directing webinar viewers to a sales page for a product:
- We could have “Ad A” shown to those who signed up for the webinar but never watched or went further in the funnel (include webinar signups, exclude webinar viewers). Note: we would also exclude sales page viewers if we had an email sequence directing to the sales page since then someone could visit the sales page and bypass viewing the webinar.
- We could have “Ad B” shown to those who signed up for the webinar and watched it but didn’t go further (include webinar viewers, exclude sales page viewers).
- We could have “Ad C” shown to those who saw the sales page but didn’t get past that (include sales page viewers, exclude add-to-carts).
- We could have “Ad D” shown to those who visited the cart but didn’t check out (include add-to-cart, exclude purchases)
These four retargeting ads address prospects at different points in the funnel. This gives us the ability to craft our ad to speak to the unique context of prospects at each stage. Someone who never watched the webinar could be reminded to watch a replay, someone who visited the sales page but never added to cart could see testimonials about the product, someone who abandoned the cart could see ads about guarantees or other last-minute objections.
These are not necessarily recommendations but just explanations of what’s possible. I know your head is probably getting ready to explode — perhaps with overwhelm at the dizzying amount of options, perhaps with glee as you start to envision brilliant and complex implementations.
But first, there are a few more restraints we need to understand. You’ll see the reality of retargeting on Facebook is actually much simpler.
Audience Size
Our retargeting audiences are much smaller than our cold traffic audiences, and this creates some issues.
First, an audience needs to be sufficiently large before Facebook will even deliver ads at all. I’ve been told you need at least 20 people in the audience, but that doesn’t seem to be a hard and fast rule.
Let’s say you want to run retargeting ads to those who have abandoned the shopping cart within the last day. In that case, your audience size might be less than 10 people — and your ads might not even get delivered. They might be marked as “active” inside of Facebook but you will notice they receive 0 impressions.
To fix that, you may need to broaden your criteria in order to have a larger audience. Instead of targeting those who abandoned the cart within the last day, you may try targeting those who abandoned the cart within the last 7 days.
So if you were planning some elaborate structure that partitioned your audience into very defined segments, you may need to reconsider. The tighter we define an audience, the greater the risk it will be too small to be functional as a target.
Plus, this is more than just making sure an audience gets delivery. Audience size can also affect results. I have heard many Facebook marketers say they had more success retargeting to an audience of those who visited a sales page in the last 30 days as opposed to visiting the page in the last 7 days. One would think the more recent audience would be higher quality and produce better results, but the algorithm may be good enough to do a better job if we let it roam a little wider. Sometimes experimentation may be in order.
Matching Budget to Audience Size
As discussed in Module 5 Part I, the larger an audience, the larger the pool for the algorithm to roam around in. A larger audience gives Facebook lots of opportunities to deliver your ad and get results at a low cost.
With a smaller audience, Facebook can’t be as choosy. There isn’t as much low-hanging fruit. The algorithm does the best it can, but there are fewer options.
A similar effect happens with budget. The algorithm will do exactly what you’ve told it to do. It will roam around in the pool you’ve specified, spending the budget you’ve specified.
With higher budgets, the algorithm has to show your ads to more Facebook users in order to spend your specified budget. That means the algorithm can’t go after only the lowest hanging fruit and then stop. It has to continue to go after people to reach your specified budget. After the low hanging fruit is gone, the algorithm has to keep going and show your ads to worse and worse prospects.
What does this mean practically? It means that smaller audiences often lead to worse results than larger audiences. And larger budgets often lead to worse results than smaller budgets. This may mean an increased cost to show the ad (an increased cost per thousand impressions or CPM), or it may mean that lower quality prospects are shown the ad (you’ll see a drop in CTR or an increase in cost per result).
When we talk about retargeting, these effects can get compounded very easily. Retargeting audiences are often much smaller, and overly eager marketers may set high budgets as they want to stay in front of these warm and high quality audiences.
This may lead to ads being served at a very high cost. CPMs may skyrocket. Ad fatigue mounts very quickly, leading to plummeting engagement. Your ads may be negatively marked by your audiences who are tired of being hammered with your ads.
In this case, you may find better results and more long-lasting campaigns when you lower your budget.
Don’t stress about this too much. I know it seems like there should be some magic formula to perfectly match the budget to the audience size, but unfortunately it’s not that clean and scientific.
I would recommend just setting a budget that feels right and raising it up gradually until you hit a ceiling. This could come in the form of a drastic drop in results or if your frequency starts to get unacceptably high. (For the feeds, that may be something like a frequency of 4 for the last 7 days or 8 for the last month or so. There is no magic number. It’s a lot of personal preference.)
Setting Objectives
You may think that when you specify a retargeting audience of 100 people the algorithm would show your ad to all of those 100 people. Or at least a large portion of them. But that’s not the case.
Even with tiny retargeting audiences, the algorithm is still roaming around trying to give you whatever you’re optimizing for.
Optimizing for conversions will show the ad to the portion of the audience Facebook thinks will convert. Optimizing for landing page views will show the ad to the portion of the audience that Facebook thinks will view the landing page.
As the algorithm tries to get you the results you’re optimizing for, it may only show your ad to a small percentage of people in your audience — maybe only 20 or 30%. And simply raising the budget doesn’t help. For some reason, Facebook will hammer those people with the ad again and again instead of displaying the ad to others in the audience.
So what to optimize for?
If your retargeting audience is large and on the colder side in terms of engagement, you may find best results optimizing for conversions. With smaller audiences, landing page views may work well.
Feel free to experiment if you have the time. Otherwise just pick conversions or landing page views as your optimizing event and move on. Check back every now and then to see if the results are still acceptable.
Now if you really want to do the best job you can of permeating your audience, you can run multiple campaigns with separate objectives (hat tip to Keith Krance and Dominate Web Media for this strategy).
Run one campaign to your retargeting audience, optimizing for conversions. Run another campaign to the same audience, optimizing for landing page views. You can even add on extra campaigns optimizing for reach, for post engagement, for link clicks, and/or for brand awareness.
The theory is Facebook will show your ad to different pockets of your audience pool — pockets that are different for each objective. While each campaign may only hit 20 to 30% of your audience pool, the campaigns together may hit 75%.
I have found this strategy to be particularly effective for something like a product launch or a big sale when I really wanted to make sure my audience saw my message. Using multiple objectives, I was indeed able to serve the ad to a larger portion of the audience than I would have otherwise.
Also, I have found that conversions, landing page views, and post engagement were the campaign objectives that produced the best results by far.
A Final Note about Technical Setup
Perhaps I’ve gone overboard in showing you what’s possible with retargeting or in trying to explain some of the more technical nuances.
But if you remember anything, remember this:
Don’t stress. Just get started. Facebook retargeting can be complicated if we want to exploit every tool or feature. But retargeting can also be quite simple.
Retargeting campaigns are like locomotives. It takes a little effort to get them going. Maybe you’ve got to troubleshoot a little bit early on when your ads aren’t delivering or if you’re producing subpar results. But like a locomotive, once a retargeting campaign is going well it will likely keep up its momentum for a while.
Focus on getting it started and going. Keep the locomotive on the tracks. Any sort of minor optimization after that is just icing on the cake.
Vision of Success — Shawn
With all of this as context, let’s identify success for your first time through The Traffic Engine (as it relates to retargeting). Then we’ll discuss what to do next.
In an ideal world, when you complete your first pass through The Traffic Engine you’ll have one ‘bullseye’ Google Search campaign, one high-probability of success Facebook campaign, and one retargeting campaign on Facebook and the Google Display Network that supports the highest-value inflection point in your business / funnel.
One last point — if you’re not running prospecting campaigns yet but you’re getting traffic from other sources, retargeting probably will be valuable and it’s perfectly OK to create retargeting campaigns without prospecting campaigns.
I’ve exceeded 6,000 words already so I’ve decided to break this module into two parts. Part II will be an overview of retargeting on the Google Display Network, and some examples of retargeting strategies I’ve used for clients in a variety of different businesses to spark your own ideas.
—Loren and Shawn
NEXT: Module 7: Retargeting on the Google Display Network and Facebook, Part 2