Facebook Remarketing: Advertising to the Right People

Remarketing is a powerful way to reach prospective customers who are most likely to convert. Facebook isn’t spying on you but using something called a pixel to capture your data. Whether you are a beginner or expert at Facebook ads, the information I am about to share will improve your paid social campaigns and lead to higher conversion rates. I am going to break this down into 3 main topics: What is a Facebook pixel, building custom audiences and lookalike audiences.

Think about a Facebook pixel as an identifier. This brings me back to the example I was talking about earlier. Say you are browsing the web and you go on a Shopify website looking at the latest pair of Jordans, then when you go on Facebook and you notice an ad on your newsfeed showcasing that same pair of shoes. Now you might ask yourself, how the heck does Facebook know what I was looking at?? The way they know is because of the Facebook Pixel.

This is essentially a  piece of code from your Facebook ad account that you put in the backend of your website and then whenever someone visits your website (if they are a Facebook user) it will capture their information so you can later retarget this person.

Anyone who knows digital marketing will tell you that retargeting is where the magic happens. People who are remarketed to are MUCH more likely to convert than marketing to a cold audience. Using the Facebook Pixel is absolutely pivotal for anyone who is trying to master Facebook ads.

Creating a custom audience in Facebook’s ad manager is how you are going to put the pixel to work. There are four different kinds of audiences you can create: customer file, website traffic, app activity, and engagement. The two that I use the most and have had the most success with our customer files and website traffic.  

For customer files, you can use things such as email lists or give data points on your customers such as phone numbers, addresses, etc. The more data points you give Facebook the more accurate your remarketing campaigns will be.

Another audience that you will have a lot of success with is website traffic. So this can be anyone who has visited your website within a specific time frame. You can customize it even further and Ill give an example to be more clear on what can be done. Say you own a eCommerce store that sells the world’s softest t-shirts. You can create an audience that includes website visitors from the past 180 days that put items in their cart but never ended up purchasing.

Creating an audience based on online behaviors is going to put you in a much better position to generate a higher return on your ad spend.

Now let’s talk about what a lookalike audience is and how to create one. But first let me put this into perspective. Facebook has an UNBELIEVABLE amount of data. More than we can even fathom. Lookalike audiences really utilize all of this data.

Let’s break it down: you have an email list of 2000 customers, you want to find people who have similar shared interests so they are likely to turn into new customers. So when you give Facebook someones email they take that person’s information and say, ‘ok we have 200 different data points on this person, make me a lookalike audience based off of these data points’. Facebook will then generate an audience that is very similar to the people in your email list. Also the more information and data that you give facebook, the more accurate your audience will be.

A lookalike audience based off an email list of 5000 people will be much more accurate than one based off 100 people.

You can also create lookalike audiences based on website visitors. The same rules apply, the more traffic you have had come to your website the more accurate the lookalike audience will be!

Keep in mind that you need to have a Facebook pixel on your website in order to capture people’s data and create these audiences.