What is Retargeting:

Retargeting is a type of online advertisement that is shown to potential buyers who have previously visited your website or interacted with your business in some way (e.g. signed up for your email list, downloaded a white-paper, previously clicked on your ad or purchased from you).

Retargeting (also known as re-marketing) is particularly powerful as it enables you to show targeted ads to buyers who have already expressed an interest in your products or brand.

Benefits of Retargeting:

Highest ROI:

Retargeting is universally considered the most effective form of online advertising, with the highest Return on Investment (ROI). It is not uncommon for sellers to get $8~$12 in revenue for every $1 they spend on retargeted ads. AdRoll, a company specializing in retargeting reports an average ROI of 10X across its user base.

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Precise Targeting:

Nothing wastes money like showing ads to non-customers.

The average conversion rate of e-commerce websites is between 1%~2%. This means that out of every 100 people visiting your website, at least 98 leave without ever purchasing. These people have already visited your site, seen your products and in some cases, even added them to the cart. Yet, they left without purchasing. These people are the most likely to purchase from you since they are already familiar with your products and brands. Here is your chance to bring them back to your site to complete their purchase.

High brand recall:

Studies have shown that it takes multiple interactions, sometimes up to seven, with a new/unknown brand before customers decide to purchase from it. Retargeting shortens the amount of time and reduces the cost of building the trust needed to buy from you.

Both Google and Facebook offer Retargeting services. Google calls their re-targeting offering 'Re-marketing'. We’ll be discussing Facebook Retargeting here.

What is Facebook Retargeting?

Facebook retargeting works by identifying registered Facebook users who’ve visited your site or interacted with you.

Sellers can enable this by installing a small snippet of code known as the ‘Facebook pixel’ on their websites. This enables Facebook to track and identify users who are visiting your website, and later target them with your ads.

Facebook Dynamic Product Ads

In addition to standard re-targeted ads, Facebook also offers a special type of retargeting ads available only for the e-commerce and travel verticals. These are known as Dynamic Product Ads (DPAs).

So what are they? Well, here’s Facebook’s own definition:

“Dynamic ads look exactly like other single image ads or ads created in the carousel format on Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network. However, instead of individually creating an ad for each of your products, you create an ad template that automatically uses images and details from your data feed for things you'd like to advertise.”

To make this work, you will need to upload a ‘data feed’. For e-commerce, this is the 'catalog' of all your products. Your product catalog will contain details like product ID, name, image, URL and price for each product, availability and condition etc.

Once Facebook has this information & you’ve installed the Facebook Pixel on your site, FB can track each visitor’s detailed activity (i.e. which pages and products did each visitor visit). Later Facebook uses this information to personalize your ad to each user.

Benefits of DPAs

The biggest benefit of DPAs is that each ad is personalized to the user viewing them. Users are shown ads for products that they’ve previously viewed. This means that your re-targeted ad is more likely to grab the viewer's attention and less likely to annoy her or cause ad fatigue. According to a study, 80% of buyers either like these ads or are completely neutral to them.

DPAs also help you:

1. Save time: Promote targeted products without having to configure each individual ad.
2. Automatically increase your ad audience: Set up your campaigns once and new visitors to your site will keep being added to your ad audience.
3. Reach your buyers wherever they are: Show ads to people on mobile, desktop, and tablets on Facebook, Instagram, and the Audience Network.

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Have you set up retargeting ads yet? We'd love to hear about your experiences.

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