Facebook Remarketing Strategies For Your eCommerce Store

In an ideal world, you would not need to read this article to discover the best Facebook Remarketing Strategies For your eCommerce Store

In that ideal world, your prospects would see the first ad that you deliver to them on Facebook, instantly fall in love with your product, click on your ad, and buy.

In the real world, however, this rarely happens, even if you have an amazing product at a discounted price. And this means that you really need to read this article.

Our expert is going to give you a simple yet complete Facebook and Instagram remarketing strategy that will bring results to any eCommerce business. Yours included.

And there’s more. Our expert, Paul Fairbrother, the Maradona of Facebook advertising (a well-deserved title considering how many business goals he helped our customers hit) is willing to give you a FREE masterclass to help you master the art of Facebook remarketing.

Why you Need Facebook Remarketing Strategies For Your eCommerce Store

Conversion rates from clicking on the ad to purchasing on the website are often around 1-2%, meaning 98-99% of people that visit your website after clicking on an ad don’t buy from that initial click.

Why is this? Some reasons include:

• 94% of Facebook ad revenue comes from mobile devices; people surf Facebook when traveling or on a break at work and don’t always have time to complete the purchase, plus it’s more difficult to shop on a small screen.
• Even though the prospect means to come back later and complete the purchase, as the average person receives well over 100 emails a day, visits dozens of websites and sees countless Facebook posts, the harsh reality is they quickly forget your brand before they manage to visit your website again.
• A single ad can only do so much, especially as up to 85% of videos are watched with the sound off and a 10-second video view is considered to be good.
• Even if someone did watch a long video and read the lengthy text that went with it, a single piece of ad creative can’t cover all the funnel stages of awareness, interest, consideration, intent, evaluation, and purchase in one go.

Does this mean we should give up on cold traffic ads if the conversion rates are so low?

No! It means we need to double down on our remarketing strategy to turn these prospects into purchasers.

And that’s why we’re here!

Creating A Remarketing Strategy

In this article, we’re going to give you a simple yet complete Facebook and Instagram remarketing strategy for eCommerce businesses.

We’ll start by considering the user journey and what pixel events fire at each stage of this journey. From this, we’ll look at the custom audiences we can create.

Next, we’ll consider when we can use dynamic product ads and the difference between always-on “evergreen” campaigns and seasonal remarketing campaigns.

We’ll then give our campaigns some polish by covering what audiences should be excluded from each stage of the funnel.

Finally, we’ll put it all together and create a remarketing blueprint that you can adapt for your own eCommerce business.

Pixel Events On Ecommerce Sites

Before we design any ads, we first need to consider what audiences we are going to display them to.

For a standard eCommerce website, there are 5 Facebook important pixel events that outline the customer journey, and are used to build custom audiences:

• Page View: this is the default pixel fire on every page of the website, we can build a general website custom audience (WCA) from this
  
• View Content: this event is triggered when a visitor lands on a product page
  
• Add To Cart: as you’d expect, this is activated when a product is added to cart
  
• Initiate Checkout: when our potential customer has finished adding items to their cart they navigate through to the checkout page which fires the Initiate Checkout event
  
• Purchase: the final stage in the shopping process when the purchase has been completed

If you’d like to see these events in action for yourself, navigate to your own eCommerce store and load up the Facebook Pixel Helper extension for Chrome, and you can see what events fire as you navigate around the site and interact with it.

Now that we’ve defined our pixel events, let’s put them to good use and turn them into audiences.

Creating Website Custom Audiences From Pixel Events

In the Audiences section of Facebook Business Manager, if you choose the Create Audience option you are given a menu of options for creating a custom audience:

If you select “website” as the option for the source you can then pick a pixel event to use and also specify the time window, such as a 30 day Purchase audience shown here:

Pixel audiences dynamically update and are free to create so go ahead and create a range of different event audiences and time windows so that you have them to hand when creating your retargeting campaigns.

Engagement and Video View Audiences

What happens if the prospect interacts with our ad and likes what they see, but for whatever reason doesn’t click through and visit the website? After all, this is common if we consider the classic sales funnel where a top of funnel ad is designed to generate awareness, with consideration and evaluation being left for future interactions via remarketing.

This is where three powerful custom audience sources can be used:

• Video views: specify the videos, the amount of video watched, and a time window.
• Facebook page engagers: select a Facebook page, the type of interaction, and a time window.
  
• Instagram page engagers: this works in the same way as Facebook page engagers

To summarize, we can retarget people at every stage of the journey, from viewing a video to engaging with the ad, then visiting the website, and then a specific product, followed by adding the product to their cart, starting the checkout process and finally completing their purchase.

Ad Types: Dynamic Product Ads

We’ve discussed eight different custom audience types above, but two of these are special, the View Content and Add To Cart pixel events.

Why is this? It’s because they pass back information about the exact product the website user viewed. This allows us to remarket to them using dynamic product ads, so that they see a highly relevant ad showing them the product they were interested in, and urging them to come back and complete their purchase. Use the Catalog Sales campaign objective for this:

Dynamic product ads become more important the more diverse your product range is.

For example, if you were an author with just six books in a series listed on your website you could skip the dynamic product ads and just use a carousel ad showing the six books.

However, if you were running ads for Amazon, a dynamic product ad would be required as they are estimated to list over 1 million book titles, and perhaps the website visitor was shopping for a blender or a paddling pool and isn’t even interested in books at all.

Here’s an example of how we can set up a campaign to retarget people that view a product within the last 3 days, excluding 30-day purchasers:

Campaign Types: Evergreen vs Standard Remarketing

An important consideration when planning your remarketing strategy is dividing your audiences into evergreen and non-evergreen ones.

An evergreen audience uses a tight time window e.g. three days or seven days. That means the audience is constantly being refreshed, so ad fatigue isn’t an issue and the campaign can be run for several months or possibly even a year.

For example, if you built a three-day website custom audience and retargeted them with a coupon for free shipping, the audience is dynamic and so the campaign will never saturate.

Compare that to a 180-day website custom audience where it only updates very slowly, so you would have to pause the free shipping campaign when the frequency got high as the response to the ads would decline.

Excluding Audiences

The final thing to be aware of when planning your remarketing strategy is to exclude audiences that are being used lower down the funnel.

For instance, perhaps you have a campaign for general website visitors and a dynamic product ad campaign for View Content and another for Add To Cart. Ideally, the website visitor campaign should exclude the View Content, Add To Cart and Purchase audiences, and the View Content campaign should exclude Add To Cart and Purchase.

By using exclusion audiences this eliminates audience overlap to reduce internal competition and keep ad pricing low, plus you don’t want to mix messages and offers from different stages of the funnel.

Once a custom audience has been created, it’s easy to exclude it from an asset. In this example, we are excluding 60-day purchasers:

Putting It All Together: Your Remarketing Blueprint

Now that you’re familiar with the different types of custom audiences, when you can use dynamic product ads and evergreen v standard remarketing campaigns, let’s put it all together into a comprehensive retargeting strategy.

Please remember that every business is different, don’t rely on our template 100% and instead, adapt it for your business and refine your strategy as you go along based on the results that you get.

Evergreen Campaigns (Using Small Time Windows)

Campaign 1:

Include

• 2-day Facebook page engagers
• 2-day Instagram page engagers
• 2-day video viewers, minimum 10 second watch time
• 3-day website visitors

Exclude

• 3-day View Content
• 7-day Add To Cart
• 30-day Purchase

This campaign uses tight time windows so the audiences will be super hot – not just warm – but the audience sizes will be small. Expect these recent interactions with your website, videos, and pages to yield a good ROI. These prospects haven’t viewed a particular product so a standard ad (image or video) should be used.

Campaign 2:

Include

• 3-day View Content

Exclude

• 7-day Add To Cart
• 30-day Purchase

As the prospect viewed a product, use a dynamic product ad so that the user sees an ad with the exact same product as the one they recently viewed. This highly relevant ad should also give a good ROI.

Campaign 3:

Include

• 7-day Add To Cart

Exclude

• 30-day Purchase

Dynamic product ads can be used for the Add To Cart event just like the View Content campaign. Add To Cart is a strong signal that the person is intending to buy, so expect a high conversion rate. As the Add To Cart audience is small but very warm we can extend the time range to seven days.

Non-evergreen Campaigns (Using Longer Time Windows)

Campaign 4:

Include

• 90-day Facebook page engagers
• 90-day Instagram page engagers
• 180-day website visitors
• Mailing list custom audience – preferably dynamically updated using a tool such as AdEspresso Data Sync

Exclude

• 2-day Facebook page engagers
• 2-day Instagram page engagers
• 2-day video viewers, minimum of 10 second watch time
• 3-day website visitors
• 7-day Add To Cart
• 30-day Purchase

Once prospects have fallen out of the time windows for the evergreen campaigns, they can be used in remarketing campaigns once or twice a month, perhaps when there is a new product launch or seasonal promotion such as Mother’s Day or Black Friday. The mailing list and website visitor audiences are strong audiences, the engagement audiences tend to be a bit weaker so a good compromise is to use a 180-day website audience but only 90 days for engagers.

Wrapping it Up

Those four campaigns, three of which are always on and one for seasonal special offers, is all you need for an efficient but highly effective remarketing strategy. Of course, you can include some extras as you go along such as a lead generation campaign and perhaps a page post engagement campaign using AdEspresso’s automatic post promotion tool.

The take-home message though is that once you have your ad creative ready, the actual retargeting framework can be set up in very little time.

There are 11 custom audiences to create – this should take about 10 minutes in total – and then you can just plug the audiences into campaigns using the template above, or your own modified version of it.

Within an hour or so you can have your retargeting dealt with, leaving you more time to focus on cold traffic campaigns and new promotional ideas.

And if you still have some doubt or want an expert guide to set you on the right path, join us Thursday, August 27, at 10 am (Pacific Time), our Facebook ads specialist will be there to teach you more tips and tricks and to answer all your questions. Register now, your path to Facebook retargeting success is just one click away!

What do you think? Do you have a strategy in place for your retargeting campaigns on Facebook? Share your experience in the comments below!