Last week I talked about the fact that many marketers don’t use retargeting on their web pages. Click here if you missed that article.
Once you’ve done the work to put the pixels on your web pages, what can you do with the audiences that you have built? How are you going to profit from this?
You won’t be getting each person’s name and contact info. What you will be getting is a group of people you can target with ads.
These ads don’t have to be selling a product: More on that in a minute.
On Facebook, once the pixel is placed on your site, Facebook collects information about who goes to each page of your site. Until the pixel is placed, Facebook doesn’t have any information.
As a side note, this also makes Facebook’s ad targeting better, because Facebook knows who is interested in what topics by where they click and what websites they go to.
So you have the pixel placed. Now what?
On Facebook ads manager, go to the Audience tab and click on Create Audience. Choose Custom Audience and then Website Traffic. You’re going to get a screen with options on it, and this is where the power of this tracking comes in.
Here are some of the choices you have for who you track:
Anyone who visits your website. This is easy—it adds to your audience everyone who has a Facebook account who visits your website. This is helpful for everyone with a website, but especially for websites that have a smaller amount of traffic. If you only have a few hundred people a week coming to your site, this is the option for you. You really want to be working with audiences in the 1000s if you can. It gives you a higher chance for success.
People who visit specific web pages. Here is where you can target people who visit one or more web pages. You can create an audience based on one page or a combination of several pages.
For example I could create an audience of people interested in retargeting. I could have just this article in it, or I could have this one, last week’s, and several others that talk about retargeting. When I use multiple pages, I have a larger audience to work with.
People who have visited certain pages but not others. If you went to a page where I had information and that page asked you to “click here,” but you didn’t click, you would stay in the audience for the first page.
People who haven’t been to your site for a certain amount of time. This lets you reconnect with people before they fall off your audience. Facebook only lets you keep a person in your audience for 180 days. If they don’t come back, they fall off your audience.
Custom combinations. With this option, you can create more rules yourself. Explore it once you have the other options taken care of.
As I mentioned last week, it doesn’t matter how the people got to your website. They don’t have to come from a paid ad. You are creating these audiences from all traffic to your site.
So what can you do with this information?
First, you can target everyone who comes to your site. You can thank them with an ad, offer them more information about what you do, offer them something in exchange for leaving their email addresses, or try to sell them something.
How will that work?
People are only willing to do business with someone they trust. If they don’t feel comfortable with you, they aren’t going to give you their money, it’s harder to build trust on the Internet than it is in person.
You can use retargeting to build trust. When people visit your site, you can give them more information about you to build your relationship.
This information can be a more in-depth video about a topic, or another blog post in the same area as the one they looked at, or, if you have a physical location, it could be a special offer they bring to you to redeem. It should be something low key and low risk for the consumer.
After they get this post and go to another web page, they’re removed from the first audience and put into another audience. Once you’ve established trust at the first level, you work on moving it up level by level until they trust you enough to buy from you.
Using a custom audience isn’t about selling something to people all the time. It’s about creating an audience of people who know, like, and trust you.
The wonderful thing about the Internet is that you can have people in all the different stages of the process at the same time, and a properly set-up system will nurture them to the next stage for you.
Eventually, they will become customers, but the better you are at nurturing the relationship along the way, the easier selling them will be.
I’m not going to kid you. Setting up a process—or in marketing speak, a funnel—like this takes some time, knowledge, skill, and testing. They don’t always work at first. Click here for an article about commitment.
It’s best to use the services of a professional to set up this funnel. It will cost you some money up front, but you will get results much more quickly.
If you choose to do it yourself, find a mentor you can follow who has done it before and invest in his or hers training. Yes, it will cost you a bit, but the results will offset the investment faster than doing everything yourself. I know I tried doing it myself, and I can do it now, but it took a year longer than it should have.
If you want to look into what it takes to set up a system like this and get a cost estimate, sign up for a complimentary discovery call with me here. We’ll discuss what you want to accomplish, put together a plan to make it happen, and determine a cost estimate. You can then either implement it all yourself, or we can work together to achieve your goals.
Have a great day!