Moteefe’s Retargeting Guide

Jan 2, 2020 | Blog, English, Homepage, Tips, Tips & Contests

This post will be focused on retargeting – if you are running Facebook ads, this is an absolutely essential part of your winning strategy! There are several ways it can be done and today we will present one of them. If you’re not doing it yet you must start ASAP, as retargeting adverts gives the highest return on ad spend!

“Previously purchased” custom audience:

To retarget people you will need to create custom audiences within Facebook. The first audience to create should include everybody that has purchased your product in the last 180 days (you can also use 60 days). To do this you will need to go to the ‘Audiences‘ tab, which is under ‘Assets’ in Facebook Business Manager (they are all in the top drop-down menu).

You must have your product’s URL, which will look like this:

https://moteefe.com/test?color=white&product=men-s-t-shirt

You will only need to use this part to create the audience:

https://moteefe.com/test

Make sure you have the right Facebook ad account selected in the drop-down, underneath where it says ‘Audiences‘ on the left-hand side. You can share your custom audiences between ad accounts, but each set of audiences is associated with a single account to start with. In the ‘Audiences’ tab, click on the blue button which says ‘Create a Custom Audience‘.

A pop-up will appear called ‘Create a Custom Audience‘. On this pop-up select ‘Website‘, the top option on the left-hand side. From the drop-down select which pixel you would like to use (if you have multiple pixels within the ad account). Then if you click on ‘All website visitors‘ you will be able to select ‘Purchase‘, and then set the number of days you wish to include in this audience.

Now click ‘Refine by‘, the blue link under ‘View content‘, and select the top option ‘URL/parameter‘ – you can now paste your URL into the box. In this example I would use “https://moteefe.com/test”. Now name your audience – it’s important to use a good naming convention so that you can easily find these later. For purchases I normally use purchase, then product name, then the amount of days, so for this it would be: “Purchase Test 180“.

Now click ‘Create audience‘. Well done! You have just created a custom audience of everybody that has purchased this product in the last 180 days. Important: You can use this audience as an exclusion audience within an ad set, so that previous purchases will not view your retargeting advert.

“Previously viewed” custom audience:

Now we will make a custom audience of everybody that has viewed the product. You can create a custom audience of viewers for 1, 3, 7, 14, 21 and 28 days for retargeting. Remember that even though these audiences will be quite small, they can be highly profitable! So if you are making one day audiences, your ad spend is likely to be extremely low. However you may well still make a few sales!

The process is similar to the previous one. To create this audience click on ‘Create Audience‘, then in the ‘Create a Custom Audience‘ pop-up select ‘Website‘ and insert the pixel that you are using for your campaign. Click on ‘All website visitors‘ and in the drop-down menu select ‘View content‘, then enter the amount of days you wish to use. I suggest starting with 28 days.

Now click on ‘Refine by‘, in the drop-down select ‘URL/parameter‘, and paste your URL into the box – in this example the URL is “https://moteefe.com/test”. Now, using your naming convention, name the audience! I use VC + product name + amount of days – so it will be “VC Test 28 days“.

Note: Facebook will say that it is populating these audiences and that it will take 2 to 3 days to do so. However you can start using them straight away!

Now, if you go back to Facebook Ads Manager and create a new campaign, in the ad set menu ‘Custom Audiences‘, select your ‘View content 28 day audience‘. If you then click the blue exclude link underneath, then another box will appear and you can select your ‘Purchased (product name) 180 day audience‘. Facebook continuously updates these audiences.

Do not select any detailed targeting and it is best to run these adverts on all placements to begin with. You can run retargeting ads per placement for each campaign, so that would be one ad for your Instagram feed, one for the Facebook News Feed on mobile, one for the Facebook News Feed on desktop only and another for the Stories feed etc. Placements work best if you’re receiving a substantial amount of traffic and remember, you can set your budget as low as one dollar with these adverts so feel free to mix it up!

Retargeting ads that are using automatic placement should use a square image of around 1000 pixels by 1000 pixels, as Facebook now displays website conversion adverts in the News Feed with square images. Some advert accounts will allow you to select a separate image for each placement which can be helpful – if your account allows it, make a different image for each placement. Select them under the ‘Ad‘ tab.

TIP: If you create multiple custom audiences for the people that have viewed the product, you can tailor your advertising the following way:

1) Show people that have viewed it in the last day a similar or the same image used in your original advertising campaign without a discount

2) People who have viewed the product in the last three days can see a variation of the image with a 5% discount and so on…

You can try different offers with different audiences. The people who have viewed the product the longest time ago will get the biggest discount.

You can also exclude people that viewed it one day ago from the three day audience, so that they will not see the deeper discount. You do this by adding the one day into the ‘Exclude‘ section of the ad set. This is in the same place where you are excluding purchases.

Add to cart audiences:

You should also create audiences for everyone that has added the product to the cart for the last 28 days and run a separate ad set to them. This audience will be smaller than the audience of people who viewed the campaign, so adjust your budgets accordingly, especially if you break this audience down by 1 day, 7 days, 14 days, and 28 days. This is only recommended if you are getting a large amount of traffic. If not, just run it to everyone that added to cart in the last 28 days.

Other custom audiences:

With some custom audiences, Facebook allows you to target people over the last 365 days. Here’s a list of other custom audiences that you should create and run ads to now:

Everyone that has engaged with your Facebook page – make a separate audience for 1, 3, 7, 14, 28, 60, 90, 180 and 365 days.

Everyone that has engaged with your Instagram profile – make a separate audience for 1 ,3, 7, 14, 28, 60, 90, 180 and 365 days.

That have liked your Facebook page

Congrats, you’ve successfully set up your custom audiences for retargeting! This is a big step, as retargeting is the most effective form of advertising! If you’re running Facebook ads, it’s critical to test and to get this right.

So what are you waiting for? Pick a campaign that you’ve launched at http://www.moteefe.com and get your retargeting adverts going right now! Good luck and as always, let us know how it goes!

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