A Comprehensive Guide to Start Facebook Remarketing in 2018

It is time to mix up your digital marketing strategy and make converting your visitors your 2018 New Year’s resolution. By remarketing to your website visitors, you can deliver multiple ads across multiple channels to turn your visitors into customers. Make multi-touchpoint attribution a priority and kick those sales-minded silos to the curb.

By using Facebook remarketing in 2018 and beyond, you can remarket across sites in your display network and on social media. It is a multi-touchpoint perfect storm, and it is actually pretty simple to employ.

What is Remarketing with Multi-Touchpoint Attribution Anyway?

When someone visits your website, they are tagged and you can track them as they surf the web. It sounds a bit Big Brother, but it is highly effective. Next time one of your site visitors is perusing Facebook, they will be identified via that designated tag, and your ads will pop up as a friendly reminder.

This is why after looking for a vacation you see all those hot travel deals pop up every time you are online. Well, you were tagged, and expect to keep getting those little nudges for a while.

Facebook Remarketing in 2018 Made Easy

One of the easiest ways to implement a multi-touchpoint digital marketing strategy is through Facebook. You can create “Custom Audiences” based on a few factors and have your ads delivered in a timely and non-intrusive way. This increases those touch points, and we all know that the more relevant, segmented touch points, the better.

Why Facebook? Well, for starters, Facebook generates 1.37 billion active daily users, the highest among all social networks.

Facebook also nets 22 billion ad clicks annually, and their remarketing ads perform three times better than regular old Facebook ads when it comes to engagement. Numbers simply don’t lie, and the data all points to one thing . . . Facebook remarketing works.

However, you will need to do it right to get your slice of those 22 billion ad clicks, which by the way is nearly three ad clicks for every human being on the face of the planet per year.

To make the most of your 2018 remarketing strategy, let’s go over a few of the most important aspects of setting up your visitor-specific multi-touchpoint attribution model.

Creating Your Facebook Remarketing Ad

First, you will need to set up a Facebook campaign and choose your marketing objective. Since remarketing to visitors of your site is the goal, you should select the Conversions feature.

Next choose a name for your marketing campaign and select a campaign goal, like purchases, leads, registrations, or a custom campaign goal. For this example, registrations are the focus.

You will be directed to the ad page where you will first select a conversion event. For the purpose of remarketing to website visitors, you can track page visits on your site by choosing the “View Content” conversion event.

Custom Audience Remarketing Must Knows

After you have added your Google Pixel to your website, it is time to set up your Custom Audience. You will need to click “Create a Custom Audience” to choose your remarketing flavor of choice.

When you first begin your remarketing efforts, you will notice Facebook’s “Custom Audience” features. These include Customer File, Website Traffic, App Activity, and more. Each serves a unique purpose and maybe not all of these features are necessary for your business.

For example, if you don’t have an app, you can strike App Activity from your remarketing to-dos. But one day you may decide an app is right for your business, so this makes all of these features important to know.

Customer File

If you have been in business for a while, you probably have a nice healthy customer email list. You have most likely used this email list to deliver traditional marketing messages via newsletters and other email marketing campaigns. This is the part where you rethink those sales focused conversions and think visitor.

By adding your robust customer list to Facebook, you are taking a multi-touchpoint attribute approach that will feed your contacts ads in a subtle way over time. You can add emails, phone numbers, and Facebook IDs to the Customer List feature to begin your remarketing efforts.

Create audiences around exclusions, so you can exclude people who hit the checkout page, people who added to cart, etc. If they’re already added to cart or checked out, there’s no need for you to serve them the same ads.

App Activity

If you have an app, this is a valuable way to remarket to potential users and increase those necessary touch points to provoke an action. By setting this up, you can make your ads more personalized.

For instance, what do you do if a user installs your ecommerce app and begins adding items to their shopping cart, but suddenly abandons the app without paying? This is common.

Maybe they their lost signal, had to go to a meeting, or just didn’t feel like buying on the spot. Well, with Facebook remarketing, you can deliver ads to that customer with deals on the abandoned cart items. You would use your “Add to Cart” audience to deliver specific ads to incentivize them to complete the purchase.

Website Traffic

This should serve as your main focus in 2018, especially when it comes to multi-touchpoint attribution. By remarketing to those who visited your site, you are shifting your marketing strategy from sales conversions to visitor conversions.

For example, let’s say you sell high-end dog collars and you have a specific collar you want to have a fire sale on. You can remarket ads to people that have visited the page for that one item, and serve up a promotion on said dog collar.

Setting up this multi-touchpoint attribution is easy, and can your way of kick starting your 2018 remarketing efforts.

Creating Your Ads

Once you have your remarketing audiences ready, you can start creating ads to push them down the buying funnel. Some of the most obvious audiences you’ll have include:

Visitors (30 Day)
Added to Cart
Started Trial

Pushing Buyers Down the Buying Funnel

People who visited your landing page but didn’t add to cart or start a free trial may need additional incentives to convert. You can deliver a social proof video, influencer videos talking about their favorite features, or perhaps even discount ladder ads. These visitors should be segmented in a “Consideration” campaign where the ad set is “Visitors” so you can target them specifically at this stage of the buying funnel.

If they started a free trial or added to cart, but didn’t convert to a paying customer, you can add them to a “Conversion” campaign where you can give them time-sensitive discounts and scarcity ads to motivate them to complete the conversion.

Here you can see a remarketing ad on Facebook from TripAdvisor offering a 25% discount to convert a visitor into a paying customer.

Time To Get Remarketing Off the Ground!

If you haven’t yet, adding Facebook remarketing in 2018 will provide incredible audience creation and targeting options, as well as the ability to target people by buying stages, you’re leaving money off the table if you’re not remarketing on Facebook.

Nick Rojas is a self-taught, serial entrepreneur who’s enjoyed success working with and consulting for startups. Using his journalism training, Nick writes for publications such as Entrepreneur, TechCrunch, and Yahoo. He concentrates on teaching small and medium-sized enterprises on how best to manage their social media marketing and define their branding objectives.