In this series, we will be working our way through remarketing using Facebook. Today’s article will cover what remarketing is and the benefits.

Facebook allows us never before seen technology to drill down and segment the perfect target customers for our products. Complete with demographics, likes, interests, and even buying patterns.

Pretty awesome!

What is Remarketing?

If you are currently spending money with online advertising and don’t know what remarketing / retargeting is… I think you will be pleasantly surprised at the power and cost effectiveness this new channel provides.

Remarketing in a nutshell allows you to tag visitors to your website, Facebook page, emails, and even apps and ‘remind’ them of specific product pages they visited.

This is a powerful new tool and allows you to maximize your ad dollars to the fullest.

Here’s an example of how remarketing works:

Let’s pretend you run a Google Adwords campaign for your local business. When a Google visitor clicks on your Adwords Ad they are redirected to your landing page.

Once they hit your landing page, the visitor is tagged by your website. This is done by placing a small snippet of code similar to the Google Analytics code you are probably using right now.

Let’s also pretend that this visitor did not make a purchase… not good!

And this is where remarketing really kicks your ad spends into overdrive. That tag we placed on their browser is now ‘following’ them around the web!

Yep.

For example, I’ve wanted to create a spiral notebook for one of my hobby businesses. I visited printpps.com and had a look around.

The next day I visited usatoday.com and in the right hand corner was an ad for printpps.com!

Pretty powerful.

To be honest, I had not considered proceeding with an order that day… but the next day I thought more about. Ultimately, I did not order because my hobby business is tiny.

Now let’s pretend we have setup our website and Facebook with remarketing campaigns. Most remarketing control panels like the one Facebook offers allow you to target based on the page they visited.

This will allow you to create an ad campaign for visitors to very specific pages on your Facebook or website.

The power is that your ad spend with Google AdWords now goes farther. Instead of the old way of the one-time visit and never returning, remarketing will ‘follow’ them to such sites as CNN, ESPN, and other major websites your target customer visits regularly.

Your ad dollars and conversion should increase immediately with the introduction of remarketing to your advertising campaigns.

The benefit of remarketing is that you are reaching out targets who already visited your websites or Facebook pages and know who you are.

Reasons to remarket:

1. Maximize paid traffic to the fullest reach (lowering your Cost of Acquisition)
2. Remind visitors to take action on your products, offerings, or free reports
3. Reconnect with organic search visitors after they have left your website
4. Help push visitors who didn’t complete a purchase over the tipping point
5. You can tag email users as well and deliver ads to your own subscribers

No matter what your current traffic levels, you should be using remarketing.

In fact, you should setup remarketing even if you do not have paid traffic campaigns. Quite simply, if you do well in local SEO or SEO in general, you can retarget all of those visitors once they leave your website.

Remarketing is also very inexpensive compared to other traffic mediums. Many of the campaigns I run don’t even hit their $5.00 budget per day.

To take advantage of remarketing, you need to get the tracking code installed onto your web properties.

Why You Should Setup Remarketing Tracking FIRST

I often suggest that the remarketing code is added BEFORE you even run ads… why?

Most remarketing companies such as AdRoll will not start your campaigns until you have reached a certain amount of visitors. In some cases, this may be 500 or 1,000 visitors.

If your website doesn’t get much traffic, it may take you a week or two to build up your ‘tagged visitors library’.

Once there are enough tagged visitors, the remarketing company will set your campaign live and start displaying it across their network of sites.

How to Use Website Custom Audiences

We will be using Facebook Custom Audiences and Adroll to do all of our remarketing.

First, I’ll explain the Facebook Custom Audiences or FCA that will allow you to serve ads to people who have visited your website.

When someone visits your website, no matter where they are coming from, they will be tagged by Facebook. Once they are tagged, they are no eligible to be served ads.

In addition, the level of ad delivery can be based on specific pages the visitor touched on your website. This is particularly helpful when it is a product specific page. Powerful  stuff.

The possibilities are endless.

I encourage you though at first to pick one of your products and focus. Once you have this down and are seeing conversions, you can move onto your next product and so forth.

Before we get to that point though, we need to get the foundation set.

Follow along step-by-step and we’ll have a remarketing campaign setup by the weekend!

In tomorrow’s article, I’ll cover installing the FCA code so we can start building our ‘tagged visitor library’. I’ll also walk you through setting up custom audiences for segmentation.