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If you are using Facebook ads to grow your business then Facebook retargeting is a must. It is one of the most cost effective ways to get results from your facebook ads campaign. In this article I will show you how it works. How to set it up… and one really cool thing you can do with your new re-targeting audience.
What is Facebook Retargeting?
Facebook’s ad retargeting is a way to show ads on Facebook to people who have already visited your site. Why would you even want to do this?
Let’s say someone was ready to buy a new bike from your online bike store. They got to your check out page and got distracted. Maybe the phone rang. Maybe their kids needed help with something. You would really be shocked to see how often this happens.
Well with Facebook retargeting you would know that they they were on the bike check-out page. You can then show them an ad for the bike and get them back over to the checkout page to buy it.
You are not tageting a lot of people. But your engagement will be sky high because all of those people are very interested in the bike. Facebook gives you a great ad rate because you ad is so incredibly targeted.
How Facebook Retargeting Works
So how does all this black magic happen? Well Facebook generates you simple code snippet to put on your site. When someone visits a page with Facebook retargeting code snippet on it they get a tacking cookie put on their browser from Facebook (not you or your website).
Later when they return to Facebook that tracking cookie gets found and Facebook shows your ad.
It is really pretty simple.
How To Set up Facebook Retargeting
Setting up Facebook retargeting is farily easy too. A lot of people (maybe even you) get a little freaked out because you have to generate some Facebook tracking code. Then put it on your site.
I am going to walk you through it now:
First head on over to www.facebook.com/ads/audience_manager/ and pick “Create Custom Audience”
Next Pick Website Traffic
Choose “Anyone who visits my site” and give it a name.
Next press the COG at the bottom
Now you have Facebook’s tracking code. Just copy and paste it to your browser.
Standard Website
If you use a regular site (not wordpress) then you just need to open up the Page’s HTML and page the code right below the <head> tag. Every page should have one. They are at the top and shouldn’t be very hard to find.
Here is an example:
WordPress
If you use WordPress it is the same idea. You just have to do these steps to get the Header file of your wordpress theme.
Select “Appearance” and “Editor”:
Now find the link that says “header”. Every WordPress theme has one so you should be able to find it.
Finally (just like we did before) find the <head> tag and paste the Facebook code right below it. Then press Update.
That’s all there is to it.
One Cool Facebook Retargeting Trick
One of the best retargeting tricks you can do is use your website visitor audience (your retargeting audience) to generate a new lookalike audience. With a lookalike audience Facebook will look at all your website visitors and see what they have in common. Maybe they all like a certain TV show. Maybe a brand of car.
The amazing part is Facebook finds out what is common between all these people at much more detailed level than you or I ever could.
Next they take your audience and what they have in common. Then apply it to everyone. Facebook finds you the top 1% of everyone on Facebook that match your audience. Truly amazing stuff.
Now obviously someone in the top 1% that matches people already visiting your website will be a better fit than just anybody off the street. So you can use this new lookalike audience to get much more targeted ads than without it.
So make sure you use a lookalike audience after you have 100 visitors through your remarketing campaign. If you look under your custom audiences facebook will show you this.
Facebook re-targeting is extremely powerful and should be the starting point for your facebook ads campaign.