Over the past few years I’ve run hundreds of Facebook Ad Campaigns for clients, and have learned a lot about which campaigns work best, how to divide them, and most importantly, how to get results from them. Of all the types of campaigns, Retargeting is my favorite, specifically:
Retargeting Without Purchase
and
Add To Cart No Purchase
It makes sense right, to reach back to folks who have been on your website and even put something in the cart, but they didn’t click BUY? You may be using the Shopify’s nifty email follow up tool … but what if they added to cart, but never entered their email address? How are you stalking – remarketing them?
You’ve already spent time and energy getting them to your website, why aren’t you trying to close the deal? With many carts it’s simple to set up, yet so few folks execute it well.
For this example I am going to use Shopify as the cart — but if you can use the same strategy on almost any shopping cart.
By now you probably know how to run Facebook campaigns, so I won’t get into those details here. For this post we’re just going to simply look at the kinds of audiences you can setup to run retargeting aka remarketing campaigns.
Simple Retargeting Audience
This is the most basic audience you’d want to use for retargeting, it’s not the best, but it beats running no retargeting campaigns at all.
In Facebook you’ll go to your Ads Manager https://www.facebook.com/ads/manager/
Then under TOOLS you’ll find AUDIENCES
Then you’ll go to Create Audience and choose Custom Audience
Next you pick Website Traffic … this is based on your Facebook Pixel. If you don’t have a Facebook Pixel installed on your website, you’ll have to do that first for this to work.
This one is pretty straightforward – you just have to decide how many days to use. I have different reasons to have audiences from 1 day up to the max of 180 days … it just depends on your buying and RE-buying cycle.
TIP: Use descriptive audience names that make it easy for you to know who is in the audience, i.e. 30 Day Website Visitor – Retargeting — instead of Audience 1
Retargeting Visitors Who Have Looked At Product Pages
BUT what if you want to target folks who looked at a product page, but didn’t buy? For Shopify we know that ALL product pages have the word ‘product’ in the URL, so we can target that.
We also know that the new responsive check out uses ‘/checkout/thank_you’ for the Order Complete page.
Choose the People visiting specific web pages but not others option to enter “URL contains” keywords.
Again, you can decide how many days back you want to go.
You can get creative with this, too, one client has better margins on a certain set of items, so we created a custom audience based on the keywords in the URLs of the items and put all the folks visiting ANY of those pages into a ‘special’ retargeting audience.
RESULTS – Retargeting No Purchase
Your results may be different, but here are the results that I achieved retargeting a specific brand audience for a client with an above average product price.
$200 spend and $3,929 in sales.
Retargeting Add To Cart Visitors Who Didn’t Checkout
The BEST and most productive campaigns I’ve run are for folks who’ve Added to Cart, but haven’t purchased. That’s a no-brainer, right? They liked it enough to add to cart, but for whatever reason, it’s not a closed deal. I call these ATC – NP and it works similar to the one above. Instead of using ‘product’ – just use ‘cart’ instead.
(UPDATED: Some of the themes in Shopify using different URLS for the shopping cart, so I have update the audience to include cart or checkout, check your checkout URL on your own Shopify store.)
RESULTS – Retargeting Add To Cart – No Purchase
Again, your results may be different, but here are the results that I achieved for a client with an above average product price retargeting the audience that landed on the cart page, but did not check out.
$592 spend and $61,660 in sales.
And here’s the PERK of using the “did not check out” part … once they do checkout, you stop spending money on those buyers, and your budget can be used to target folks who have not checked out yet.
And there you have 3 ways to setup Retargeting Audiences, and the precise way to do it for your Shopify store.
TIP: The more traffic you have on your website the better this works! You have to have at least 20 to run ads and really you need 100 or more to start having the ads flow better.
If you’re not running Retargeting Ads, there’s no time like today. Get to it.
P.S. And remember when you set up your ads, connect them to your tracking pixel so you can see how great they’re working!
