Sloppy Seconds: Facebook Remarketing Reconsiderations

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Sloppy Seconds: Facebook Remarketing Reconsiderations

Let’s face it: it’s easy to get lazy with remarketing. When first creating an account, setting up a Facebook pixel should always be a priority. It provides savvy marketing moguls the ability to grab site visitor data and curate audience pools for immediate and future use. What those advertisers do next appears to vary greatly.

From visiting sites, checking to see if Facebook pixels have been installed correctly (observable via Google Chrome’s Facebook Pixel Helper extension), and actively reviewing ads served in one’s newsfeed, it's evident that some brands are spot on with a tight remarketing strategy.

Others? Not so much.

Let’s review a few no-nos and fo-shows in the remarketing realm.

 

Don’t:

Install a pixel, confirm it’s firing correctly, create a few basic audiences, and then for all intensive purposes forget about it.

NOTHING with a long-term focus in the digital marketing universe should ever fall under the category of “set it and forget it” – no matter what that persistent, sale-focused marketer in your life is telling you. Great audiences aren’t often created that quickly and advanced strategies shouldn’t be built with less-than-great audiences.

 

Do:

Continually review pixel data and test multiple audience variations to attain best possible results.

After proper installation, test different audience configurations based on pages viewed, time on site, interactions with site elements, and days from initial trigger. Every audience may think, look, and act differently. Respond to individuality with varied creative, objectives, call-to-actions, and suggested user journeys.

 

Don’t:

Set all audience lookback windows to 180 days.

Yes, 180 days (Facebook’s current max amount of days to gather data from) will grab the most amount of site visitors for the longest period of time. And yes, this does give marketers (and Facebook’s algorithm) the most data to review and optimize from. But that isn’t always best. Digital marketing devotees may be wise to consider the role “time away from site” or “time since action taken” plays in an audience’s story and how that affects users and their purchase cycles.

 

Do:

Recognize that the length of "time since site engagement" plays an important role in accurately portraying a customer's experience and level of intent.

Instead of lumping the last 6 months of visitors together, consider breaking them out into 1, 3, 7, 14, 30, 60, 90, and 180 day segments. Use these lookback variations to observe visitor behavior, prioritize budget, and optimize targeting via liberal doses of exclusions and psychographic targeting layers.

 

Don’t:

Only create remarketing audiences targeting “All website visitors”.

Not all site visitors are created equal (in the eyes of insightful marketers, of course). Again, leaving this default selection WILL return the largest possible audience, and bigger audience size equals more data to utilize. But really, how valuable is an amorphous blob of all site visitors to business-specific objectives? Don't those people take different paths on site? Have different stories to tell? Stories and preferences that could influence and optimize advertising? Yep. Thought so.

 

Do:

Consider building multiple audiences based on site page categories.

For example, if running an outdoor recreation retail store, one may create one audience for camping, another for hiking, and another for biking (I.e. segmenting audience pools based on visitors who visited a site page associated with each category). Observe initial data via audience insights and by testing the effects of excluding one audience from another (to see how much of any given audience is ONLY interested in its category and nothing else, and how much – if any – audience overlap exists). If audiences don’t overlap much, consider using this information to your advantage by crafting custom, category-specific ad creative.

 

Don’t:

Forget about additional targeting layers to better sculpt audiences.

Just because site visitors are low-hanging fruit, already familiar with your brand or product, and are rightly considered to have a higher degree of intent, that doesn’t mean they're the perfect target for all campaigns.

 

Do:

Utilize additional data layers as much as possible.

Take site visitor audiences and narrow said group by other targeting layers to better assure you’re marketing to the best audience possible. Helpful psychographic targeting layers may include location, age, income, and/or campaign-specific interests.

 

cleaning GIF

With invigorated, motivated aspirations for campaign spring cleaning, reexamine current and future remarketing campaigns, craft a finely-tuned strategy, optimize an advanced approach, and make marketing dollars matter.

 

Happy (re)targeting!

// Dan (@dangardeen)

Established in 2017 on data-driven servant leadership, Adnomadic utilizes years of digital marketing experience, cutting-edge platform tech, and a holistic approach to paid search and social campaign strategy.

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