campaign Studies show that 72% of all visitors abandon their shopping carts without completing their purchase. However, 26% of them may return to complete the purchase later – if there is effective retargeting.

This means that with a good retargeting campaigcampaignn, almost 1 in 4 customers can be converted who otherwise might never have completed their purchase. For most companies, this is a huge increase in revenue and something that is welcomed.

Customers are people and people are complex and indecisive. Especially when it comes to our internet habits where we constantly jump from one thing to another.

What is Facebook Retargeting?

There can be many reasons why a customer does not complete their purchase, for example:

• They received an important email from their boss
• Their 4-year-old daughter refuses to put on her socks
• They just shopped on their phone and wanted to save products for later
• They just wanted to check how much the shipping would cost
• They’re still a little unsure if what you’re offering is worth the price

The list goes on and on. But the fact is that many of them can be solved with a little nudge or by creating added value for the customer.

Was the customer distracted at checkout? If they see your product in their news feed, they might be reminded to go back and complete the purchase.

Was the customer unsure of the price? Maybe a targeted discount offer is what it takes to make the first sale and start building the customer relationship. The best thing is that you only offer it to customers who are at the end of the buying process. All others pay full price.

With retargeting, you can do all of this and that’s exactly what the e-commerce giants have been doing for over a decade. With Facebook’s retargeting functionality, every e-commerce company now has the opportunity to make specific, personal retargeting ads campaign.

Some e-commerce companies worry that retargeting can be “too much”. But the truth is that most consumers expect to be tracked online and understand that information is used to market products and services to them.

In fact, a growing majority of customers report that they appreciate it when companies show them offers specific to their interests.

A good retargeting campaign shows that you pay attention and care about the customer’s buying experience.

Step 1: Install your Facebook Pixel

The first step is to make sure you install your Facebook Pixel correctly. Without this pixel, you cannot track who visits your website and how they behave. Then it becomes impossible to retarget them.

Step 2: Create a custom audience

Once you’ve set up your pixel, head over to Facebook’s ad manager and create a custom retargeting audience . Go to “Menu”, under the “Resources” column you will see the “Target groups” tab at the top, click.

Then select “Create Audience” > “Custom Audience” ….

Then create a target group based on “Website Traffic”.

You will be able to target people based on how they interact with your website by visiting specific web pages:

Who you target depends on your campaign goals. In this guide, we will focus on creating an abandoned cart recovery campaign.

To do this we will target everyone who has viewed both our discounted dresses and checkout. This tells us that they looked at our products and then went to checkout.

Make sure the URLs you include here cover all the products you are looking for. This is another important reason why your URL should always include the product title.

Now everyone who has been to the checkout with our discounted dresses sees the ads. However, we do not want to show these ads to customers who have already completed their purchases. The risk is then that it costs more than it should, disturbs or confuses customers.

To avoid this, just click “Exclude people” at the bottom right and filter the audience to exclude everyone who has visited your thank you page.

This should be the URL of the page you redirect the customer to immediately after they complete a purchase at checkout.

The other parameter you can control here is time. Again, it’s your goal that dictates what applies. If you want to target people who viewed your content or blog posts, I usually recommend the 30 days as the default.

For ads campaign regarding abandoned shopping carts, however, it may be better with 10-14 days (depending on budget and average order value). If the customer still doesn’t want to buy your product after two weeks, you’re probably just being annoying and wasting money.

Now that you’ve configured your filters, all you have to do is name the group and save.

You will then be redirected to a page with all your custom audiences. If you’ve recently installed your Facebook Pixel, don’t worry if you see a warning that says ‘Target Too Small’ under ‘Accessibility’.

Facebook requires at least 20 users to match your criteria before it can run.

Step 3: Start your retargeting ad

Once you’ve set your target audience, you need to reach out with targeted ads campaign. It is usually most effective to create specific ads based on specific products or categories.

If you have a large product catalogue, you can set up specific retargeting campaigns for best sellers and more general ones for each category. You can also use Facebook Dynamic Ads, which can create automatic ads for all your products.

That said, you should still include your brand and logo in the image if possible because you’ll get a lot of impressions from this campaign, even if the buyer decides they won’t shop this time.

When you’re ready, click “Create ad” in the upper right corner of the dashboard.

Step 4: Determine your goal

You start by choosing your goal. The most common options here are “Traffic” and “Conversions.”

Facebook will start optimising who they show your ads campaign to based on who they predict will help you achieve this goal. The two most common goals are:

Traffic Goal – this goal will generate the most traffic to your store

Conversion Goal – this goal focuses on getting customers to complete a desired action (usually a purchase)

Both goals have their place and purpose, so it’s really up to you.

If you sell an expensive product and find that customers often need to visit your site multiple times before making a purchase, or if you target customers by category and blog views, it’s probably best to stick to traffic goals.

Also keep in mind that opting for conversions will require you to put in a little more work setting up your website to track specific events and goals that we talked about briefly in step one.

Conversions are a bit more complicated, so I’ve chosen to use this one as an example.

To get started, name your campaign and click “Continue”. Then you need to choose your conversion target and configure your pixel.

For this type of ad, it makes the most sense to choose “purchase” as the conversion goal. If you need help with this, click “Read more”. Facebook has some guides on how to set up goals and processes.

Step 5: Choose your target audience

Under “Custom target groups”, select the retargeting group you created in step 2. Click save – then you’re done!

Step 6: Enter placements

Once you’ve designed and targeted your ad, you need to decide where to show it.

Honestly, the best option here is automatic placements. So I won’t spend too much time on it.

If your situation requires it, you can also target the ads campaign based on specific devices, platforms and locations.

But for most situations, Facebook knows better than you. Let them put the ads campaign where they convert best.

Step 7: Enter your budget

Budgets vary greatly from company to company, but remember that you can always start small and increase the budget on your most profitable campaigns.

New customers find your website and abandon their shopping carts daily, so you should continuously run your retargeting ads campaignfor best results.

In the meantime, check in and make sure your campaigns are working, remember there’s no reason to stop a campaign that’s working.

Step 8: Create your ad

Make sure you spend time creating compelling ads campaign with bold images and smart triggers.

Summary

I used the abandoned carts example above because it shows some advanced features. In addition, it is one of the most important and common strategies today. But you don’t have to sell dresses or do e-commerce.

You can be a PPC service agency, a software company, a staffing agency or a company that wants to engage its target audience. I would like to say that all businesses can benefit from retargeting if it is set up with the right target group and goals. There is no magic formula that works for everyone, you have to try different things and use what works.