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5 Common Mistakes With Facebook Ads Retargeting
If you’ve ever carried out any digital marketing with Meta, then you’ve probably heard of Facebook advertisement retargeting. Retargeting is being able to show particular ads to audiences that have already shown interest in your brand.
That could be someone visiting your site, abandoning their cart, viewing a product page, engaging with your social media, watching a video you’ve uploaded, or you could simply retarget an email list gathered by your business. However, there are common mistakes that we see time and time again at The Good Marketer that are wasting spend and costing you sales – let’s take a look at our top 5.
1. What Did YOU Leave In Your Cart 60 Days Ago?
The headline for this common mistake says it all… Can you tell me any items you added to your cart and didn’t purchase 30-60 days ago? No? Then why do we reach abandoned cart audiences for 0-60 days?
The abandoned cart audience (let’s call this audience Sarah) is known as a “hot” audience or a “bottom of the funnel” audience. That’s because, as marketers, we understand that Sarah’s journey looks something like this: Sarah sees a TOF (top of the funnel) ad targeting broad audiences, and she clicks through to the site and views a product she likes. Sarah adds the product to her cart but doesn’t purchase it.
The purpose of running abandoned cart (ABC) ads is to reach those audiences who added an item to their cart and didn’t purchase – they are your brand’s HOTTEST prospects. However, the more time that passes from them adding to their cart, the colder of a prospect they come. Depending on what your business sells, the ABC reach period will vary – for example, you’re unlikely to remember a pair of jeans you left in your cart 35 days ago, but an expensive piece of tech such as a GoPro or laptop will likely stay on your mind for much longer.
If you’re already working with The Good Marketer, a retargeting ads agency, then we’ll be able to decide the best-abandoned cart reach period based on years of experience, but a good rule of thumb to apply is if your product is a pretty common purchase for people then abandoned cart audiences will likely stay hot for a shorter amount of time.
2. Run A Damn DPA Campaign
DPA doesn’t stand for “Damn Perfect Ads”… But it could!
DPA (Dynamic Product Ads) campaigns are a great way to take full advantage of what digital marketing can offer. Through Facebook, you can set up a “Catalogue Sales” campaign which dynamically shows audiences the items they viewed or added to their cart within the last x days.
DPA campaigns show the products that we know your customers are interested in, allowing them to click through directly to the product page where that item can be found. In short, by using a DPA campaign, you’re taking full advantage of the benefits of digital marketing from collating data and then using that data to deliver a super relevant ad that helps and informs your customers’ purchase, making their experience smoother and faster.
3. Let’s Play Connect Two: Right Message + Right Audience
Targeting people who abandoned their cart 0-30 days ago means they can all be given the same message, right? Wrong.
As I explained earlier, depending on how long ago someone abandoned their cart, they become colder and colder in terms of their strength as a prospect. This means that you should tailor the messaging depending on how “hot” a prospect is.
For example, you could segment the ABC targeting into two different ad sets, one reaching people who abandoned their cart 0-7 days ago and another reaching people who abandoned their cart 8-30 days ago. The people who abandoned carts within a week are likely still a very hot prospect and are considering purchasing, so you can match them with direct, sales messaging containing lots of social proof and testimonials. However, the ABC 8-30 audience will likely be colder in terms of their intent so you could employ a small discount code, only shown to this group of people in order to tackle the “price” pain point and pull them back into the funnel.
4. Is Your Money In The Right Place?
I know it can be tempting to increase budgets in the warm & hot areas of the funnel because performance is so good. But you need to remember that the only reason those campaigns are doing as well as they are is because the cold campaigns are doing all the heavy lifting!
The cold campaigns are where you’re funnelling new traffic to your site & finding new customers. The cold campaigns are where the majority of your spend should go, if you decide to neglect the cold campaigns and push more spend into the warm and hot campaigns, you will see a continued decline in performance in those campaigns.
5. I Don’t Think You Have The Facilities For That Big Man
If you’re a new business and don’t have a lot of traffic on your site, then your focus should be on finding new audiences, rather than reaching the small pool of people that have visited your site.
As a general rule, you don’t want to retarget an audience with a reach smaller than 1000. There is a “sweet spot” for cold audiences that ensures that you’re reaching the right amount of people (not too broad, not too niche). But, when it comes to warm audiences there is no such sweet spot… We know that everyone in that audience pool is your exact target audience and is at least interested in your business, so the more, the merrier!
And P.S. if you decide to increase the targeting pool by increasing the time you’re reaching your retargeted audiences, then congratulations, you’ve gone full circle and are back to common mistake #1.
In Summary…
If you stick to these rules then you’ll be on the right track, you can minimise wasted spend and ensure that your warm & hot retargeted audiences are high intent. One last note to success that I didn’t touch on in this blog is not to run Facebook ads retargeting immediately. If you’ve just set up your Facebook ad account and installed your pixel, then your focus should be on the top of the funnel & generating high volumes of interested traffic to your site. The pixel doesn’t mine/backdate through historical traffic to your site, it’ll start recording traffic from the day you install it.
If you found this blog useful, then consider reading through the many other blogs written by our expert team. The Good Marketer, a Facebook Ads Agency, covers blogs in all areas of digital marketing to help you get closer to your goals.
