5 Facebook Retargeting Audiences You Should Try

Do you always act on a first impression? 

In marketing, it’s highly unlikely that someone is going to convert after seeing your advert for the first time. Marketers used to live by the “rule of 7”, meaning that potential customers needed to see your ad 7 times before making the final decision to purchase. Today, with such a saturated market where you might see an ad on your social feed every few seconds, ad blindness is a real thing!

Since conversion ads are at the more expensive end of the Facebook ads spectrum, getting your messaging right for your audience is key to getting a good conversion rate and return on ad spend. 

This is the beauty of retargeting ads!

If you imagine that the first time a customer sees your ad, they ignore it; the second time, they take note of the name; the third time, they read the messaging, and so on. Retargeting on social media allows you to very specifically modify your messaging to appeal to each audience at their current stage of the funnel.

Retargeting is one of the most effective tools in a marketer’s toolbox. The benefits of this are huge, including:

• Promoting brand recall
• Increasing conversion rates
• Increasing return on ad spend

Today we’re recommending our top 5 retargeting audiences and when you can use them:

Site Visitors

Users who have already visited your site are an audience that are already somewhat warmed up. They will likely recognise your brand identity if they come across you elsewhere. 

When setting up your audiences using your Facebook Pixel data, you can choose a time period that they have visited in, for example, the past 30 days. Again, this gives you the opportunity to modify your messaging; those who have visited more recently are more likely to remember your brand and will be more receptive to more sales-focused messaging, whereas those less recently may need a reminder of your core offering or values before being driven towards sales.

Not only can you target people who have visited your site in general, you can also specify people who have visited only certain pages. For example, if you’re running a campaign that focuses on healthy dog food for a pet store, you could specifically target the group of people who have spent time on a blog post about the top kibbles for health-focused pups.

We also like the option for targeting people who have spent the most amount of time on your site with the “Visitors by time spent” option. These are potential customers that are more invested in your brand already as they’ve spent more time than the average.

Abandoned Carts

Even better than simply targeting site visitors, you can target customers who have abandoned their cart at checkout and give them that final push that they need to buy. 

There’s often a reason why people have added a product to their cart but not completed checkout, for example, the delivery cost was too high or they realised their basket was more expensive than they were expecting. For this audience, your messaging wants to give them that extra incentive to checkout, here are some ideas to do that:

• Exclusive discount code
• Free delivery
• A reminder of your unique company values, especially if they’re in line with your customers’ values (ie. eco-friendly, community spirited).

You can also specify a time period here and tweak the messaging depending on how long ago they abandoned that cart. For example, if you were hit with a retargeting ad that asks “Coming back for me?” for something you added to your basket 180 days ago, you’d likely not even remember taking that action in the first place! Instead, you want to start reheating that audience before driving intense sales-based ads at that.

Page Engagers

Even if you don’t have an online site or a Pixel set up on it to track your Facebook users on it (which we highly recommend any online business should have!), you can use data from your Facebook page to retarget customers instead.

You have the option of retargeting Facebook and Instagram users who have engaged with your business page, your posts or your ads in a variety of different ways from everyone who has engaged with your page in any way, to more specific actions such as those who have clicked on a call-to-action button.

75% Video Views

Retargeting users who have watched videos on your Facebook page is a fab way to find users who are already part way down your funnel. Even better though is the ability to choose people who have watched a good portion of your video!

We tend to like the 75% option as most people will only watch a few seconds of a video before deciding if they want to continue watching it. 50% is also good, but users who have watched 75% are truly interested and ready to take the next step.

Previous Purchasers

Facebook also gives you the option to upload customer lists so that they can match them to their users. This is brilliant for retargeting your existing customers, allowing you to upsell or cross sell items to them, as well as nurturing customer loyalty and advocacy. Here you can offer them exclusive discounts for their loyalty if they’re returning to buy, or you can encourage them to review your brand or service.

If you need advice on which retargeting audiences would be best to use for your customers, or you’re totally lost with your Facebook Pixel and how to set up these audiences, drop us a line. We’ll be happy to help!