Paid Traffic: The Effectiveness of Facebook Retargeting

The basic definition of retargeting is marketing to people after they have visited you website. In effect it’s when you leave a website, but then ads from there keep popping up on other sites for days and sometimes even weeks. You can install a simple piece of code into your website called a Pixel. This allows you to run ads to people after they have visited your site. The code tells Facebook what actions the person is taking who visited the website. Facebook can then determine whether an ad should be shown to that person.

Retargeting is a much better way to advertise than more traditional targeting. Stats show that up to 70% of online shoppers will abandon their shopping basket before they checkout and without retargeting, only 8% of them would return to complete the purchases. It’s also estimated that around 60% of people notice ads for products and services that they have looked at after leaving a website. So you can see why retargeting works and nearly 50% of Search Engine Marketing professionals believe that retargeting is the most under-utilised tool in the business.

When it comes to Facebook retargeting it works by the pixel being embedded on your website. This then installs cookies which can track the person’s Facebook visits on the site. The pixel is unique to the advertiser so that it can track which parts of your site are being viewed and by who. It’s a sort of hot traffic technique as these people will already know you, they’ll know your brand and they’ll know your products and services too. When done right through Facebook, retargeting will help to drive sales enormously and the ROI on investment should be mightily impressive. This is a tactic employed by many big brands from all niches including Real Madrid in the sports niche and even Party Casino in the online casino niche.

The more targeted the advertising is, generally the more effective and successful it becomes and Facebook can help people put together an extremely targeted ad campaign that will go out to specific targets, using various devices, in different locations. The fact that you are able to target specific audiences is probably what makes Facebook retargeting so effective. This means your ads will be displayed to the right people every time and therefore there’s more chance of success. If the ads are going out to the wrong people, the chances of success are minimal.

Facebook then provides you with ad reports showing you what worked and what didn’t work. This allows you to make necessary adjustments to further improve your retargeting campaign. So all in all, Facebook really is the place to be for retargeting as it literally has everything you need in terms of the tools to get everything set up. Not only that, but there are over 2 billion active accounts on the platform, with over 1 billion Facebook users logging in on a daily basis. It’s the most populated social media platform around and it has the most active user base too. When it’s people and audiences you wish to target, you should look no further than Facebook.