Facebook Retargeting

Facebook Retargeting: The Basics And Benefits

In Blogging by Brian Town

While conversion rates are not everything in marketing, they are one of the most important things. This number represents the rate at which all the people who visit your website do something, such as making a purchase or otherwise, rather than nothing. This is crucial data to know in regards to how many potential customers you convert into actual customers for your product or services.

One of the trickier aspects of conversion rates is understanding why potential customers abandon a website in the first place. There is a myriad of reasons, from promotions not capturing interest quickly enough to simple distractions like receiving a text message. One marketing tool that has grown to be increasingly beneficial across the board is Facebook retargeting. This is easiest to understand if we first break it down into those two separate components: retargeting and using Facebook for this purpose.

What Is Retargeting?

Let’s say you go to www.buysneaker.com. You click on a product, but then get distracted in remembering how much you love novelty shirts, so you leave the sneaker site to go to www.buynoveltyshirt.com. When you first entered the sneaker site, a cookie was left on your internet browser by a few lines of code embedded on the site. Although you have already left sneakers to look at shirts, you see an advertisement on a sidebar somewhere for the specific sneaker you were looking into just moments before. That’s retargeting.

The details like the cookies and lines of code are usually handled and monitored by third party companies who specialize in retargeting, and you see the sneaker ad on the shirt home page because those two businesses have a partnership. While this may seem intrusive on a consumer end, you only have to clear the cookies cache to get rid of it, and a good company sets limits on when and how often these ads show in accordance with data on, and reported by, their audience. The beauty of well-managed retargeting is looking at specific people with specific interests to limit intrusiveness.

There are several ways to retarget, and one includes social media like Facebook, where the process has been streamlined for efficiency and usability because of the win-win situation it presents for companies and consumers alike.

Why Facebook?

There are several reasons to look into partnering with Facebook, the following being only a few:

1. More than a billion people use Facebook to observe and share content with family and friends; almost a billion visit daily. That’s a large audience! Your own data may even be able to tell you how your audience uses Facebook.

2. Facebook advertising may cost you as little as $5. Because other marketers often compete for the same or similar audiences, you need to set a budget for your ads then set a “bid”, which is how much you’re willing to pay to have your ad shown. Facebook promotes systems that are easy to customize, which make them as economical for you as it needs to be.

3. When using Facebook resources, you may customize your audience with parameters like age, location, etc. The strokes are not broad unless that’s how you choose to define them. The more specific of a niche you can place your audience into, the better.

4. Facebook provides data analytics similar to how you may already measure the effectiveness of your content. This allows you to be able to see how actionable your methods are and how to improve them.

These are only a few of the many reasons; the important thing for you to consider now is further research. You must determine what benefits social media outlets, like Facebook, provide to you in regards to retargeting, and  figure out how they fit with your business goals and audience needs. Perhaps another social media outlet is a better fit, or a different type of retargeting is a better starting point. All in all, just know that the resources are there for you to pursue, and with careful planning your conversion rates are waiting to increase!

Visit www.michigancreative.com to see how our marketing staff can help you!

– Kris Johnson

 

Sources:

http://mashable.com/2013/11/21/conversions-metrics/

http://threeladdersmarketing.com/learning-center/the-basics-of-retargeting

https://www.facebook.com/business/learn/how-much-facebook-ads-cost/

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