The costs of advertising are rapidly increasing, even as you read this. As an advertiser (either a merchant, marketer or agency), it is imperative that you keep the cost of your retargeting and regular campaigns low and your return on investment high.
According to Wordstream, here are the benchmarks for the average CTR (click-through rate) and CPC (cost per click) sorted by industry.
The average CTR across industries is 0.90% and the average CPC in Facebook ads across all industries is $1.72. The graphs also show CTR and CPC by industry, such as apparel, beauty, education, fitness, and healthcare.
These are the averages and these averages might not mean anything to you if you don’t get your Facebook advertising and campaign management right in the first place.
To optimize your ads and get close to those averages, you’d need to set up your campaigns properly — with the right kind of Facebook campaign setup, a strong offer, matching landing pages, smooth sales funnels, and marketing automation for following up with your leads.
We’ll be honest with you: Most businesses don’t get it right. They make blunders while launching Facebook campaigns. As if to rub salt on the wounds, many freelancers and even full-time agencies don’t launch Facebook campaigns the right way.
Regardless, it’s proven that you’d do better if you started with remarketing campaigns instead of launching regular ad campaigns first.
Note: You’ll need to set up audiences (such as an audience of all your website visitors or lookalike audiences of your existing customers or email subscribers) before you launch remarketing campaigns.
Here are the top reasons why you should start with retargeting campaigns first:
Retargeting ads just make sense
Since about 80% of your visitors don’t take any action when they visit your website and/or landing pages, retargeting is a natural and progressive way to get your visitors back. Retargeting ads are highly-targeted, relevant, and timely.
Because your retargeting ads only reach out to people who’ve already visited your website and/or landing page, you are basically targeting a warm audience (as against a completely cold audience) leading to better results.
By the time your retargeting ads reach out to the audience that is already aware of your brand, products, and services, your audience is primed up to take action. They are more likely to respond to your campaigns than cold audiences do.
Read more:
How Retargeting Helps Improve Your Conversion Rate
Retargeting: Smart Tips To Get More For Less
Refuel Your Funnels: Basics Of Retargeting You Can’t Afford To Ignore
Considerably cheaper
The cost of regular digital advertising for a few industries can go up to $50 a click or more (depending on the geographic location and the industry).
As such, with those insane rates per click, it becomes harder for a few businesses to run profitable ad campaigns. That’s when retargeting really shows what it’s really worth.
Apart from the fact that retargeting helps with brand lift, brand recall, increase in traffic, and an increase in overall time spent on your website. It’s also considerably cheaper than running regular campaigns.
Google’s Data reveals that if you used Google’s Display Network for retargeting, you’d be able to achieve CPA (Cost per Acquisition) 2% less than the typical CPA on the search network.
Claire Pelletreau, for instance, managed to make $1.60 for every $1 spent, thanks to retargeting on Facebook.
Do you really need more convincing than this?
Gets you higher conversions
According to an infographic from the folks at Invespcro, website visitors who are retargeted with relevant and timely campaigns are 70% more likely to convert than others.
Larry Kim of Wordstream launched remarketing campaigns that helped increase repeat visitors by 50%, boost conversion by 51%, and increased the overall time spent on site by an insane 300%.
According to Neil Patel, you could boost your conversions to up to 128% or even more.
Retargeting campaigns are inherently brand-aware, instantly recognizable (because your visitors still remember you), and are highly relevant.
Helps convert abandoners
Shopping cart abandonment, page abandonment, offer abandonment — regardless of what you are trying to achieve, the “abandonment” part of the equation is literally bleeding every single business out there.
More than 96% of the people visiting a website leave without taking any action on the site that’s actually beneficial for the business. A whopping 70% of the people abandon their shopping carts (without ever buying anything).
While those are the overall stats of Shopping Cart Abandonment, the reality is that at least 80% to 90% of all businesses do not do anything to get those abandoners to come back and complete their transactions (or actions that benefit businesses in some way or the other).
Retargeting helps you complete the loop by specifically targeting people who view specific product pages, service pages, pricing pages, or actually add items to their shopping carts but don’t complete their purchases.
Agreed that you have to get a lot of things right to make them work — such as targeting, ads, copy, your offers, retargeting specific sales funnels (or eliminate them?). But retargeting, if you do it well enough, could be the game-changer for your business.
Interested in putting the power of retargeting to work for your business. Fill out this form and allow our team to get in touch with you to discuss your needs now.
GSDdaily Talks About Retargeting Pixels
Now, Monday we talked about the importance of retargeting and some gave you some tips on retargeting campaigns. Also gave you a little bit of homework, and the homework was to set up an AdRoll account and then install your Pixel. Yesterday, we went through and designed banner ads, and then we also showed you how to set up your audiences inside AdRoll.
Today we’re going to talk about Pixel data. A retargeted ad is probably going to be the best way to get started, as long as you have website traffic or you have an email list or any of that stuff. Then we’re also going to cover Facebook Audiences, and we’re going to talk about Audiences and AdRoll again because there was some confusion from yesterday. We’re going to cover that again.
For those of you who don’t know who I am, my name is Jason Drohn, creator of Done For You. We specialize in three things, creating offers, building sales funnels, and setting up marketing automation and traffic, the foundational pieces of building a business online. GSD Dailies is where we talk about some of the cool shit we do. We give you some tips, strategies, and techniques that you can roll out in your own campaigns. We will also show you some of the stuff that’s working really well for us.
If there’s anything you need, you can reach out through the comments at any time. You can go over to Done For You, grab a spot on our calendar, any of that stuff. Today we’re going to get into retargeting Pixels.
Retargeting data is the quickest path to cash.
Whenever we look at campaigns, whenever we are talking to clients, whenever I am looking at something of our own that we’re going to roll out, the first thing I asked myself is what is the quickest path to cash? What is QPC, the quickest path to cash?
The quickest path to cash is oftentimes the place where we start, because, at the end of the day, business is about generating revenue. The that you have half done, or it’s sitting in a hard drive somewhere, or the half-baked thing, and you haven’t thought about it in a little bit. Or the campaign that you never quite optimized, or the Pixel that has been sitting on your website for six months, and you’ve never done anything with it.
Those are assets. Those are always the things we start with because your email lists that maybe have gone unnurtured, and un-mailed to forever, those are always where we start. The thing about the retargeting Pixels is they are constantly sucking in the information. They are constantly pulling in all of the people who are visiting your website. They do that for up to six months, 180 days.
If you installed your Pixel, your AdRoll Pixel, your Facebook Pixel, three months ago, and you just haven’t done anything with it, all of that data is still there. You can still reach out to those 7,000 people who showed up on your website because you have that Pixel information.
The data is the most important part of your ad campaigns.
It’s the hardest thing to get when we’re starting from scratch, and it’s always the thing that separates the campaigns that do really well from the campaigns that take a little bit longer to start ramping up. The first thing we look for always is, is there any data in the Pixel already? Has the retargeting Pixel been installed months ago, years ago, whatever? How can we separate that data? What are your sales pages, order pages, add to cart pages, your key content pages? How are people moving through the pages that are already on your website?
Assign Buckets for Your Pixel Data
If we can segment them into buckets, so this person goes to your website when they are looking to book an appointment, this person goes to your website when they’re looking for more information, whatever, so we can put those into buckets then we can advertise to those buckets. Having the Pixel data makes all that possible because really it’s just identifying why somebody is going to your website and what the purpose is, and then putting them into a bucket and showing them an ad for that purpose. That is always a kind of step number one.
Upload your email lists to Facebook
If you have a prospect list, then we can upload that into Facebook. If you have a buyers list, we can upload that to Facebook. We can create lookalike audiences from that. There’s a lot of other things that people have done. They’ve given us an export of their Gmail and then cleaned it so friends and family weren’t there. They’ve given us an export of their LinkedIn contacts because their LinkedIn contacts are business contacts. Then we’ve scrubbed that. LinkedIn is usually a treasure trove of information anyway, and then we’ve created a look-alike audience for that.
There are things that we can do there, but retargeting the Pixel data and that audience data is the key to a good campaign, at least start. In scrolling through this article here, so retargeting ads just makes sense. About 80% of your visitors aren’t going to take any action whatsoever. They’re going to bounce, leave right off the page, not going to click. Most of them will not be going to scroll down the page. They are not going to add something to their order form. Probably, not even going to watch a video, 80% is just going to leave, which means once they leave, you want to follow them around.
Facebook Retargeting is Cheaper
You want to follow them around through retargeting. That’s where retargeting ads come into play. That’s where AdRoll comes into play, and Facebook retargeting, it’s considerably cheaper than going after a cold person, not necessarily cheaper on a per click basis. There’s one thing you have to understand. Oftentimes, you can run a Facebook ad and get somebody to your website for 20 cents or 16 cents or 24 cents or 42 cents.
Your retargeted click is probably going to be a buck, or how a buck 50 or two bucks or 60 cents. It has to do with, first of all, the quality of the banner creativity, of course. The banner creative has to be clickable and noticeable and preventing against banner blindness and all that other stuff but think about it. For a retargeted ad to show, it has to override…
Whenever a page loads, all the ads all over the page load. For a retargeted ad to show, it has to outbid the ad that was supposed to be there. Ads show, say, each of these ad placements is 50 cents, and then the retargeted ad overlays it. Let’s say there are four or five or six people who are bidding to overlay that. Well, of course, the highest bidder wins. Your banner ad might be a buck a click or whatever. It’s still all bidding.
How retargeting works are they outbid the ads that show up on the page? Per click, your retargeted ad is going to be more expensive on a per-click basis, on a CPM basis, because you’re overriding the ad that was supposed to be there. However, since these people are aware of your company since they know of it since they know of the website, then what happens is, is your click-through rate is through the roof because this isn’t the first time they’ve seen you.
Oftentimes the seventh, 12th, 30th time that they’ve seen your ad, so the click-through rate is really high. Then the CPA, the cost per acquisition, is really high, so that person is more likely to purchase from you. Your return on ad spend from a retargeted standpoint is going to be much, much, much higher on a retargeted ad.
When we say here, retargeting is considerably cheaper, we’re saying retargeting is considerably cheaper on a per acquisition basis, not necessarily on a per-click basis, because if you marry the two up, if it’s per click on cold traffic, per click on retargeted, retargeted is always going to be more expensive if you don’t factor in the sale aspect of it.
Retargeting Gets Higher Conversions
Here, we go into your retargeting gets you higher conversions and it absolutely does. Retargeting people, you’re going to convert 6%, 8%, 12% of those people. It’s not the first time they saw the offer. It’s not the first time they saw the brand. They consciously chose to come back and purchase, and probably the biggest, help is retargeting helps convert abandoned visitors, abandoned shopping cart folks.
If somebody adds something to your order form or adds something to your shopping cart and then leaves, they should be seeing a two or three-day retargeted ad that pulls them back into the shopping cart. The same way they get emails, so your discount is expiring, your offer code is expiring, blah, blah, blah. You’re at risk of losing the deal, so on and so forth. Retargeting is also set up to convert those abandoned shopping cart folks as well. That is why retargeting Pixel data is so much more effective than a general per click buyer.
Now, let’s go over into our Facebook add on, and this is our ad audience. I’m just going to talk you through how this is all structured. If we look at some of our add on audiences here, let me just make this a little bigger. If you run Facebook traffic, you know of this audience panel. There are some naming conventions that I use that have worked out pretty well. Obviously, this is a lookalike audience, and so lookalike US 1% of all Done For You website traffic in the last 30 days, so that our ad audience is always updating from a lookalike audience standpoint.
Whenever they go to a VSL sales page, then we always tag them as being part of a VSL sale or as a sales page. It might be a VSL. It might be a long-form sales copy, like a course sales page or whatever, so that we can retarget to them if they do not purchase. We have a VSL prospect, then we have buyers. If they hit a sales page, but they did not become a buyer, meaning they did not enter the buyer audience, then we show them retargeted ads.
As soon as they cross over and buy, that retarget and that buyer Pixel fires, they no longer see ads or they shouldn’t any longer see ads. Sometimes some things slip through the cracks, but whatever, so as soon as they hit that buyer Pixel, then they shouldn’t be seeing ads anymore. We have video views campaigns, and this is how this one is set up. Video views, they’ve watched 75% in the last 30 days, just 75%. If we edit this, you’ll see that basically this is people who have watched 75% of your video and it includes 87 total videos.
If you just look at this, then we have a bunch of videos here that we can select. Then Facebook, for as long as that video is up, Facebook is tracking who is watching and how much they are watching. Then if they watch more than 10 seconds, a through play, which is 15 seconds, 25%, 50%, 75%, and 95 and 100%, we can target them specifically with ads. This particular one is 75%. This is going to be our people who have watched an entire video or they just fell asleep when they were scrolling, and it happened to be on one of our videos, and that is that.
Here we have a sales audience, so this is a buyer audience. Here, we have a warm audience, so this isn’t cold… Somebody who is basically opted in for something, they’ve been to the website five or more times. Then we have an add to cart, ATC is added to the cart. We have website visits in the last 180 days, website visits in the last 30 days. We like keeping track of both of those numbers.
Let’s see, we have 30 days for warm website visitors. Basically, what we try to do is we try to like, we try to timestamp them. If they’ve been to the website in the last five days, 30 days, 180 days. Five days, super hot, 30 days are warm and 180 days are cold. Sometimes it’s worth advertising to them for certain offers, webinar promotions, anything that can bring them back into the fold quickly, but most of our activity centers around the people who’ve been around for 30 days or less.
If we haven’t seen them or they haven’t watched anything in 30 days or more, then they probably left the market, found other providers, whatever. They are no longer within our ecosystem. We just let them go. They might come back, and if they come back, they hit the website. Your audience will be reactivated and then they drip through the 30 days again. Does that make sense? All right, cool.
Now let’s go over to AdRoll. We talked yesterday about AdRoll, and we set up some banner ads to go to AdRoll. We also set up a couple of audiences. Here, we’re going to look at audiences. I’m just going to open these up. We went through how to set up one of these guys yesterday. We’re just to take a look at this thing.
This is our high intent audience, basically, it’s three days. They have been to the website in the last three days, and so they’re pretty warm. They’re a little bit warmer than like our Facebook folks with the five days, then we have our… We have total, we have website visitors, all, so we’ve got 22,000 in there. Cross-device insights, we’ve got 3800 in there. Then we have different audiences.
Here’s our heavy visitor. This heavy visitor has viewed more than five or more pages in the last 120 days. This heavy visitor audience is going to be more apt to do something, to purchase something, whatever. They have different banner ads going specifically to them. If somebody’s only been to the website, we’re probably going to try to get them back into an automated webinar. We have our all visitors list, webinar registration visitors. We have a funnel audience, an Amazon audience.
There are lots of places in between from setting up audiences and different ways you can do it. You can do it based on impression, so shows at least how many impressions. You can do it by pages viewed, so one page, two pages, three pages, four pages, by the URLs visited, by the user event, or an iPixel match, which would be a mobile cross-device thing.
One of the nice things about AdRoll is they have their cross-device, so they Pixel across devices. They also have some really cool email matching functionality. If they know of a visitor’s email address, they will send them emails on your behalf. Then you pay for the emails. It’s like email retargeting, which is super cool, so it will retarget banners, it’ll retarget emails.
They also do some cold traffic banners now. They continue adding new and new and new things to it. Truly, it is a fantastic ad platform, and they just keep making it better and better. I have been using them for a really long time for clients and ourselves. In my opinion, there isn’t a better all-around, all-purpose banner platform, and one of the reasons I actually… This is interesting, but one of the reasons I actually got into AdRoll in the first place was…
Once you have your audience data, then advertising becomes really, really easy. As the audience gets audiences to get bigger, you can segment them down more, but one of the things is… Let’s say you have a client. The client does some stupid stuff in their ad account. They end up getting a bunch of ads disapproved, denied I should say, and then their account gets shut down.
Well, what they can do is they can actually shut down the entire agency’s accounts. They can shut down other ad accounts that are inside the same agency. There are lots of different things that can happen if Facebook deems you as a bad actor. Now, when they shut down an account, the Pixel data also goes. You can no longer access the Pixel data, everything that you built up in the past no longer is good.
If you have half a million visitors and your Pixels gone, AdRoll will have a backup of Pixel Data. It also does Facebook, just general banner retargeting. My estimation was, with AdRoll, I always have a backup of my Pixel data for 180 days. It’s less ideal, but I still can reach out to the people who have been to the website for retargeting.
It almost became a backup for me, and now we run retargeting for our general web banners. Then we do retarget inside Facebook for Facebook folks. For us, it was a way of backing up all that information. Because Facebook doesn’t let you back it up, so that has worked out really well. I just throw that out in case you wanted a way of backing up your Pixel data.
For Questions and Guide
For those of you who would like to get on a call and talk about some of this, talk about retargeting, talk about setting up Facebook Ad campaigns, Google Ad campaigns, sales funnels, automation, all that stuff, go to doneforyou.com/start, fill out that little form. Then you’re going to be able to schedule a call on our calendar right after that. We will go through and take a look at your business. We’ll take a look at your offers, and then figure out a plan for you.
If there’s anything else we can do, just go to doneforyou.com, hit this little chat on the lower right-hand corner. You’re going to be able to type questions in here. You can pick the little thing, show me the Done For You services, show me products.
I will talk to you tomorrow. Tomorrow, we’re going to talk more about retargeting, of course, but we are going to… I think tomorrow we’re going to talk mostly about setting up Facebook retargeted ads. With that, have a fantastic day. I will talk to you soon. All right, thanks, bye.
