Why Run Retargeting With Facebook Ads And How Does It Work?
The short answer is because if you don’t, you’re simply leaving money on the table.
The term retargeting and remarketing are used interchangeably in digital marketing and refers to the same thing. It’s a method which marketers use to serve ads to users who have visited their website, or a specific web page, and who have or have not taken a specific action, such as abandoned carts, product views, purchasers within last 30 days, and many more.Facebook retargeting/remarketing works similar to Google Ads remarketing, but rather than showing your ads across websites within the Display Network, your ads are shown on the Facebook platform.If someone visits your site in the first place, you’ve piqued their interest and they’re now aware of your business. Here are the four phases of a typical customer journey:Awareness —> Consideration —> Conversions —> Loyalty
Retargeting works in the consideration phase and our goal in showing these ads is to remind and entice them into purchasing, into the conversions phase.
The Website
Case study for Blazin Paddles (blazinpaddles.com), an outdoor sports and adventure service that offers self and guided kayaking tours in the Las Vegas, Nevada and the Arizona area.
They have been in business for many years and have made themselves quite a name in the industry. It’s a seasonal business and they are busiest in the summer months, and less in the colder months
The types of products/tours available are: full day tours, half day tours dan twilight tours (night).
It’s a very well built website, with the following implementations:
- Trust: Featured on ABC News Las Vegas and ranked in the 2022 Viator Experience Awards top 20 for the USA. They also have numerous reviews across review sites.
- Ease of navigation: Clear call to action and customer journey.
- Mobile friendly: Site adapts to different devices and resolutions.
- Testimonials: Acquired happy customer testimonials, as well as good photos and videos content showing their customers on the tour.
Setup – How To Set Up Retargeting Ads On Facebook
Installing The Facebook Pixel
The first step we need to do is to place a script on the header of our website. With WordPress, we can easily install a plugin and simply paste the code in the header section. This allows the pixel to work and track activities on every page of our website.
Simple Formula – All Website Visitors
We won’t get into segmenting audiences here, add to carts, remove cart, non purchasers or lookalike audiences. We are simply targeting visitors who have visited our website within the last 30 days, regardless of their source of traffic (organic, direct or paid search) and what they do on our site (add to cart, view items, contact us etc..)
Budgeting
The total budget’s allocation for Facebook ads is about $120 per day and here is how we’re dividing it across the campaigns, with about 30% on remarketing.
$40 – Cold 1/2 Day Tour
$40 – Cold Full Day Tour
$35 – Remarketing
Keep in mind that in order for the daily budget of the remarketing campaigns to be fully utilized, we need to send enough website visitors on blazinpaddles.com to be targeted on. Therefore, although the other two campaigns are not performing as well as the remarketing one, it’s imperative that we keep them running.
Using Google Ads
Using Google and Facebook as a synergy is one of our favorite strategies. According to Alexa, these are the ranks of the most visited websites in 2022.
Most Popular Websites 2022 (Monthly visit):
Google, 91,140,000,000;
Youtube, 35,910,000,000;
Facebook, 21,130,000,000;
Twitter; 7,010,000,000;
Instagram; 6,800,000,000;
Baidu; 5,620,000,000;
Wikipedia, 5,500,000,000;
Yandex, 3,920,000,000;
It’s a fair assumption to say that most people who use Google, also use Facebook.
Buying Google’s traffic is generally more expensive than buying Facebook’s as Google ads are known to provide better quality. We managed to get 1710 visits for the month at $1.82/click.
Google search ads will attract customers with the highest purchase intent – you can’t get more accurate that someone searching for Colorado river kayaking or kayaking tours Las Vegas.
So for those who aren’t ready to make the purchase just yet, we’ll show them our retargeting ad copy, to remind them that they’ve visited our site in the past.
The Ad Copy
For this campaign, we used a carousel ad, with each card directing to the respective tour package plus an option for an offline pick up offer from The Las Vegas Strip.
We’re using a simple yet effective ad copy this time without any promo or discount code, due to the fact that we are in peak season.
How Important Are CPCs & CTRs?
Typically CPCs and CTRs are the metrics that we start with. Aiming for a high click through rate will eventually lead to a low cost per click, by using click-baity elements in our ad copies and images. They are not nearly as important as purchases, so we cannot be too quick in turning off our campaigns solely by looking at the CTRs and CPCs, before FB can optimally do its job by finding the ideal audience.
The retargeting ad has the highest cost per click at $2.97, but this alone is not enough to justify as to whether the ad is performing well. The most important metric is the purchase value, which we’ll look at next.
Results – ROAS
Return On Ad Spend
Here is a full month’s recap for all Facebook ads, in August 2022. Retargeting is showing the highest ROAS at 13.51x even though it has the highest CPC at $2.97. It’s also showing the lowest cost per purchase (the cost that we pay to acquire a customer) at $26.19.
Here are the stats:
