All-in-One Guide to Facebook Remarketing Ads [+Examples]

This blog post was originally contributed by Ondřej Mrštný, a Client Solutions Manager at Httpool.

So you’ve done it. You’ve worked hard, found your niche, chosen your products, and built your online store. You have done everything in your power to bring people to the online store and make it as easy as possible for them to shop there. And they come and look at your products, and even add them to carts. But most of them just seem too hesitant to click the final purchase button.

Does the situation sound familiar? Don’t worry; it does to most online store owners. But the solution is simple—Facebook Remarketing.

We compiled the best resources on Facebook Remarketing and organized them to answer all of the most important questions regarding this topic. 

I. What Is Facebook Remarketing? 

To put it simply, Facebook Remarketing Campaign targets people who have visited your website without a complete purchase and brings them back to finish the purchase. That’s the gist of it. But to know what it really is and how it does what it does, you need to know a few terms you may have already heard of before.

Facebook Pixel

Facebook Pixel is a short snippet of code that enables Facebook to assign a specific online activity to a specific Facebook user.

To put it in different words, whenever someone comes to your website, Facebook Pixel notes all the activity they make on your website, like which products they browsed, which they added to the shopping cart, and if they visited any specific parts of your website. And it connects the activity of your website visitors to a specific Facebook account (anonymously, of course). 

It does not matter if they come to the website through Google, Yahoo, any social media, by writing the website in the browser directly or even if they come through Google Ads. As long as they are using the same device they use for Facebook, the Pixel will recognize them. 

And with this data, you are able to target people. And not just any people, you can create a custom audience and select customer groups to target. What’s more, you are given the opportunity to create specific types of Facebook custom audiences, which are generally called remarketing audiences. 

Remarketing Audience

Remarketing Audience is one of the best custom audience based targeting options you have. It is a group of people that have come to your website, browsed your products, even added them to the shopping cart, but they never finished the purchase. Except after adding Facebook Pixel to your website, they are no longer unaccessible anonymous internet folks that do not let you sleep at night. 

Through the power of Facebook Pixel, you can turn the people who visit your site into a remarketing audience and use this audience in your Facebook Ads Manager in any form you can think of. People who visited any landing page or visited a specific page.

• Do you want to run ads campaigns for people who browsed your products and did not purchase? Done.
• Do you want to run ads campaigns for people who added products to the shopping cart and did not purchase? Done.

What about people who browsed your spring collection? People who saw the sneakers that you desperately want to eliminate from your storage for two months? Even a couple of people that filled out the little form you have on your website and left you their phone numbers? 

With Facebook Pixel, you can take the people from your website and group them in any imaginable remarketing audience you want. But why should you do it? Well, because it works and because it is necessary. But more on that in the next part.

II. Why Should I Care About Facebook Remarketing? 

To a lot of people, the Why of Facebook Remarketing is more important than What or How. And for a good reason. Why should you make an effort to implement something if you do not believe it will really help you? Well, I am here to prove to you that Facebook Remarketing is definitely worth the effort you put into it and much more. 

The reasons to use Facebook Remarketing may sum up in two: first is customer base size, and the second one is performance.

Customer Base Size

I just said that Facebook Remarketing targets only the people that visited your site before, so why I am now saying that it can help you with your Customer Base Size. It can’t help bring in new people, right? Well, yes and no. Facebook Remarketing can’t help you bring in new website visitors. But your actual Customer Base Size might be much smaller than you think. 

According to studies, 96-98% of online store visitors do not make a purchase during their first visit to a website. So only 2-4% of your website visitors end up finishing their purchase. The rest will just leave. So to get the odds at least a bit in your favor, you need to bring back. And preferably not just one, but over and over again.

It’s probably not news to you. You might understand that from your own behavior. Every website out there is battling for the attention of every internet user. Interesting video on Youtube, funny gifs on Facebook, new posts on Instagram and Reddit, maybe even an email from work you know you should check instead of browsing through those shoes. Add some offline distractions to it like a phone call from your mother. Then add some situational realities. For example, you want to browse more shoes to make sure you like these the best. Also, the paycheck comes at the end of next week, so you do not yet have money for them. Plus, you have two other pairs, so you do not really need them even though they are so very pretty. 

When you add all these up, you come up with a conclusion that even though people come to the website and like the product, most of them are just not yet in the right state to make the purchase. 

But you learn very valuable information about them. They are interested in the product. That is where the second reason why to use Facebook Remarketing comes into play. And that is performance. 

Performance

Even if you disregard everything else, we mention in this article the performance of Facebook Remarketing ads alone should be enough reason for you to go and try it out. The reason is Facebook Remarketing does have higher performance than basically any other ads campaign type out there. 

We have seen remarketing results that were 3x, 6x, and even 12x better compared to other ads. You can go online, and just by searching for “remarketing performance”, you’ll get many more sites confirming such results. But I believe that telling you where the performance comes from is better than citing sources you can find on yourself. 

The higher performance comes simply from the fact that all the people you target with Facebook remarketing are interested in your products. You know that because they were already on your website. People that are not interested at all are all filtered out. And since the campaign does not spend money on people that are not interested, the performance goes up. The CTR, conversion rate, and, of course, return on ad spend. Facebook Retargeting is capable of performing above average in all of those. All by targeting the remarketing audience.

III. How To Set Up Facebook Remarketing Ads

Let’s be honest here. Setting up Facebook Remarketing ads without any outside help whatsoever is complicated. And I mean complicated at a level that even the most skilled marketers out there would have a problem setting it up. The reason for that is Facebook Pixel. It may be an advertising tool, but it consists of multiple layers of programming code. So without advanced knowledge of coding, which most people just do not have, you’ll not be able to create it yourself. 

Seriously, take a look at this Facebook Pixel code example. If you understand it, congratulations, because most of us can’t.

That is why 99% of people, even experts, use tools for it. So I am going to take the same approach in this How to part. So in order to set up your Facebook remarketing do these two steps:

ROI Hunter Facebook & Instagram Easy Ads addon will add the Pixel to your eCommerce site. It will also create the retargeting campaign for you with advanced structuring based on how far the visitors got in the purchase process. And it will also create a catalog for you in order to set up your remarketing game and transform it into Facebook Dynamic Remarketing Ads. But more on all of that in the next part.

IV. Tips, Best Practises, And Examples For Your Facebook Remarketing Campaign

So you already know what Facebook Remarketing is, why it is important, and how to set up one. But what steps can you take to make sure that your remarketing campaign will perform to the best of its potential? I have a couple of tips on that topic for you. The first one is to utilize Facebook Dynamic Remarketing.

Facebook Dynamic Remarketing

Dynamic Remarketing is basically the next level of remarketing for any online store. Compared to regular remarketing, it brings one huge improvement. It will show the audience exactly the products they saw in your store. So instead of showing them a general ad with whatever catchy picture you can find, you’ll show them exactly the thing they were interested in and remind them that you are still selling what they want. 

It works very similarly to regular Facebook Remarketing. But you’ll need an extra tool to set it up, which is Facebook Catalog with the same set of product Ids as your Facebook Pixel has. Again, setting up such a tool manually is a huge chunk of work, so we recommend using some tools like ROI Hunter Facebook & Instagram Easy Ads.

Structure Your Remarketing

Facebook Remarketing is a very effective tool. But as with any tool, efficient use of it can bring your much better results than if you just set up some automatic campaign without any deeper thought about it. One of the ways to squeeze as much performance out of it as possible is to structure your remarketing campaign by how far the user got in the purchase flow. The general rule is that the further people get in the purchase flow, the better they will respond to your remarketing campaigns. 

A good retargeting strategy example to show this is separating your retargeting campaign in two ad sets—one for people who viewed products and one for people who added a product to cart. The view product ad set will help you drive the traffic, and the add abandoners ad set will help you finish the conversions. And it will let you send different messages to these two groups by changing the ad copy.

Facebook ad copy examples:

• Product Views Facebook Ads Examples
  • “Do you like what you see?”
  • “Special offer only for you 10% off with promo code ‘BACKFORMORE'”
  • “We know you like this, and we still have it here for you.”

• Abandoned Cart Facebook Ads Examples
  • “Hey, you forgot something here!”
  • “Only 10 pieces of [product name] left! Better hurry!”
  • “Don’t worry, we’ll keep your cart stored for you.”

Some other good Facebook retargeting ad examples? A good way to catch your customers’ attention can be Facebook Video Ad. A lot of times, flashy images are much more eye-catching than plain pictures. So video ads can serve very well as an addition to your Facebook Dynamic Remarketing. ROI Hunter Facebook & Instagram Easy Ads addon will let you create your own video ads from your product pictures.

Facebook video ad examples:

Use Tools

Not just the technical necessities of Facebook Remarketing seem hostile to a lot of people. For many, the Facebook Ad interface itself seems complicated, not intuitive, and hostile. One of the ways to deal with that is to use tools that can simplify the process of ad creation and optimization. 

If you are one of the people that have trouble dealing with the Facebook Ad interface, try using tools like  Facebook Ads and Instagram Ads or ROI Hunter Facebook & Instagram Easy Ads.

Optimize Your Facebook Sales

Facebook Remarketing is only a part of the machine that is driving sales your way. The best way to make it work better is to optimize the whole machine. Another way to put it is that the better the traffic you drive to your website, the better results you’ll get from your Facebook Remarketing. 

This article would be way too long if I would give you all the advice on how to improve your Facebook sales. But there is an amazing article that will tell you how to sell on Facebook in 2020. See Below.

How to Sell on Facebook in 2021 [Tutorial For Beginners] (opens in new tab)

Blog post How to Sell on Facebook in 2021 [Tutorial For Beginners]

To Sum Up

So what’s the TLDR of this article? Basically, just three points.

1. Facebook retargeting is a necessary tool that will help you bring back 96% of visitors that leave your store without a purchase. 
2. Creating Facebook retargeting on your own might be difficult, but there are tools that will make all the difficult steps for you. 
3. Do not be afraid to experiment a  little with the message you are sending to your customers to find the one that will work for you.