Social networks give brands a direct line to extremely engaged consumers. Retargeting on social gives you access to some of the largest audiences online and lets you take advantage of native tools such as shares, likes, and comments to further expand your reach. Because users on social are already more engaged while browsing, be ready to interact with prospects who come across your retargeting ads. This is a good opportunity to dedicate some time to build out your Facebook page or tweet about new products or content offers to help highlight your brand personality and connect with users.

Facebook Exchange allows online marketers to target audiences while using the social network.

It works like site retargeting except it involves placing a Facebook tracking pixel on your website. The pixel lets you capture audience data for Facebook retargeting. This technique also includes in-app retargeting or targeting people that are performing certain actions in your mobile application.

Facebook delivers a custom audience tool that allows marketers to build audiences based on consumer emails lists (using either a simple CSV file or Mail Chimp file).

Email-based custom audience creation is great for targeting existing customers and for reaching out to new ones by 1) creating an audience based on third party provider information—for example, by building a prospective audience pool by uploading a targeted email list from a provider like data.com to Facebook; 2) using existing and prospective customer lists from your company CRM solution; and 3) applying a Facebook look-a-like model to type 1 or 2 lists.

Facebook isn’t the only social network in the retargeting game: In 2013, Twitter introduced “tailored audiences” which enables marketers to deliver promoted tweets to the company website visitors and custom audiences. By leveraging websites and behavioral data, online marketers can now create custom audience segments for retargeting through this social network.

Social networks give brands a direct line to extremely engaged consumers. Not only does retargeting on social give you access to some of the largest audiences online, it also lets you take advantage of native social tools such as shares, Likes, and comments to further expand your reach. Many consumers turn to social media for product recommendations and reviews. Building up your presence on these platforms will help to familiarize customers with your brand. As consumers spend more online media time on social networks, marketers are investing more in social advertising—with high returns. We surveyed Us advertisers across industries running retargeting campaigns over a six-month period. On average, brands that added Facebook to the mix drove 2.8x more impressions, 3.05x more clicks, and 2.18x more conversions.

 

How to Set up a Retargeting Conversion Campaign on Facebook

For this example, we’ll pretend we’re setting up a remarketing campaign for HubSpot. To drive qualified leads to a free trial, we’ll set up a mock Facebook retargeting campaign for leads in our database who we know are interested in marketing automation. Here’s how we would set up that campaign.

1) Creating a List

First, you’d would need a list of leads to retarget to. In HubSpot (or your marketing software of choice), you’d compile a list based on two criteria: 1) their lifecycle stage, 2) their interests based on the topic of their most recent download. If this list is sufficiently large, you can move on to the next step. If it’s not, you should revisit your segmentation properties and/or type of retargeting to implement.

2) Uploading the List to Facebook’s Audience Manager

Once our list is processed, we can export the .CSV file and import it directly into Facebook’s Custom Audience manager to match up email addresses with Facebook Profiles. (There are other third party-platforms that also sync these lists on social media and across the web, so feel free to pick which upload/sync option works best for your company.)

Once you hit “Manage Your Ads” on Facebook’s advertising home page, click “Audiences” on the left toolbar. This will allow you to create a customer list by uploading a .CSV or .TXT file and you can sort by user ID’s, phone numbers, or emails (which we recommend). Make sure to give your list an appropriate naming conventions to easily find it later, and leave at least a few hours for it to populate — if you try to create an ad immediately, the audience may not be fully loaded yet.

3) Determining Your Destination URL

To create a new campaign on Facebook, hit the green “Create Ad” button in the top right of the ad platform home screen. This will prompt you to choose an objective for your campaign, such as sending people to your website, promoting conversions on your pages etc. Whatever option you select (we recommend one of the first two to get people to click through) it is important to include a UTM tracking code — a little snippet of text added to the end of your URL — to help you track success and attribute clicks and conversions from your campaigns. For example, we would create a campaign called “Retargeting” and our URL for the free trial would look like:

Once you enter your URL to promote, the next step is to rename your campaign directly underneath the URL textbox. Try to keep similar naming conventions for your campaigns — this will make it easier to track if you have multiple running at the same time.

4) Segmenting Your Ads

At this point, you can select your custom audience that you uploaded earlier and set the geographic location you want to target. The location is an “AND” setting, meaning if your list contains leads from all over the world and you only select “United States,” some people won’t be served your ads. Depending on your buyer personas, you can also segment by interest, behaviors, age, and other demographic settings which can help you get even more targeted. For conversion campaigns, you’re retargeting to a specific list of contacts already interested in your product, so including other Facebook categories might not make sense.

5) Setting Your Budget

Before even starting the campaign, you should have a set budget for paid tactics, broken out by channel. For Facebook campaigns, you should set a lifetime budget for the length of the campaign, then monitor and adjust accordingly. Most beginners should leave the bidding to “Optimize for Website Click.” You can also name your ad set at this stage, which is helpful if you’d like to differentiate lists, creative, budget, etc. for different ad sets in the same campaign (i.e. leading to the same page).

6) Creating Your Ad

Each ad can have up to six images associated with it, so you can test which ones perform the best and get the most people to click and convert. It’s critical to be clear and concise with your positioning as the headline underneath the image can only be 25 characters long and the text above the image is capped at 90 characters. You can also include call-to-action buttons such as Shop Now, Learn more, Download, etc. on the bottom right of the ad.

Some important details on Facebook ads:

  • Image size is 1200 x 628 pixels
  • Images can only contain 20% text.
  • Static images are rejected if they feature a “play button” that will confuse it for a video.
  • Under “Advanced Options” you can write a News Feed link description up to 200 characters to better explain your ad.
  • By default, ads are shown on mobile newsfeeds, on the right column on desktops, and in partner mobile apps. Depending on where you’d like your customers to see these campaigns, you may want to turn one or all of those options off to only display in the desktop News Feed.

Once you have everything set up, go ahead and click the green “Place Order” button in the bottom right of the screen.

 

 

7) Tracking Your Progress

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

You can get a glance of how your Facebook retargeting campaigns are doing by going to your Facebook Advertising home page. If you want to dive further into the ad’s metrics, you can go into the ad set where you’ll see information like clicks and spending per day. It is also easy to make edits to your ad from this screen, such as extending the budget, schedule, and creative assets.

 

If you’re using HubSpot, you can look at the performance of your destination URL to track views, clicks, and submissions back to specific retargeting campaigns.

 

Tracking Retargeting

 

Retargeting is a great way to keep your prospects engaged and interact with people who have already shown interest in your company. While it may sound like a simple enough concept, there are many aspects of a retargeting campaign that must be worked out before you make the ad copy and creative. Be sure to give enough time to make your lists, set goals and types of campaigns, determine the platforms your ads will run on, and tie the whole conversion path together.