Are you sick of spending too much money on ads for your ecommerce business? It can be easy to think that ads are set-it-and-forget-it, but that is simply not the case. It can be very frustrating to see poor results from expensive ads… You might be thinking that you are just going to throw out the entire ad campaign you started on Facebook and give up.

Before you end your Facebook ad campaign, stop and read this article! Facebook ads are actually some of the easiest ad campaigns to run. They work very well for attracting the right buyers to your ecommerce business if you know how to make them work for you!

Don’t chuck your Facebook ads into the garbage before reading on to learn more about these valuable ad campaigns that get you great results.

What is Facebook Retargeting?

The key to successful Facebook ad campaigns is the retargeting process. There are so many kinds of advertising that you will have access to. Most of them will not allow you to customize your target audience or the kind of outreach that you do to connect with them. This is one of the places that Facebook really shines. If you have been struggling to get results with your Facebook ads, you probably just need to learn a little bit about retargeting to get them back on track.

Retargeting is the process of creating a target audience that will guide the Facebook algorithm to look for the right kind of customers for your product. Facebook’s ad manager actually shows you detailed information about your audience and helps you to select the right kind of targeting factors to expand this audience until you are doing effective outreach to the right people.

The first step that you should consider is installing the Facebook Pixel on your Website ( more on this later) but you can also retarget your ads by hand if you wish.

Does It Actually Work?

You are probably right to be skeptical. There are a lot of advertising schemes out there that do not serve your needs the way they claim they will. For many people in the ecommerce world, ads can be a big nuisance to leverage until you find the right fit for your particular target audience. Without the ability to selectively target this audience, you end up fighting with these ad types until you eventually get it right.

The nice part about Facebook ads is that their ad manager is set up with the intention that you will retarget your ads, making it much easier to use your ad campaigns effectively. Facebook retargeting does actually work and it works very well for ecommerce businesses. Even simple retargeting work can lead to an increase in the chance that someone will visit your site by 15%.

If small changes can offer this much of an effect, imagine what you will gain when you start actively retargeting your ads to the right people!

Install the Facebook Pixel on Your Website

This is one of the best resources that is available to ecommerce business owners when they utilize Facebook ads for marketing. The Facebook Pixel is a piece of code that helps you to measure and optimize the audience that you are building through your Facebook ad campaigns. Many other advertising types will not allow you to optimize your ad’s outreach from both sides of the equation.

Being able to utilize the information that you are getting from the visits to your own site and then apply that information to your Facebook ad campaigns can create a major bump in traffic and ad clicks. If you are not sure how to insert the code into your website, there are some great plugins out there that will do it for you.

The Pixel will track the actions that people take on your site like viewing content, adding to cart, initiating checkout, and completing purchases. You can also have the Pixel track certain audience characteristics for you so that you know how to alter your Facebook ad campaigns to better match your frequent site visitors.

Create Your Custom Audience

This is an essential part of leveraging Facebook ads, and you cannot skip this step if you want your Facebook Ad Campaigns to work hard for you.

With the help of the Pixel and a week or two of ad data, you can start to see some trends that you can harness to make your ad campaigns work harder for you. In the ads manager tool, you will be able to select the tab that says “create audience” to alter the kinds of demographics that you want your ads to aim for.

One of the best features of the create audience options that Facebook offers is that you can create numerous audiences to track and promote for different intentions. It is always wise to create a custom audience for website traffic, as well as an app activity audience. 

You can tell the create audience tool to match the demographics of an existing audience, or you can upload your own information into the create audience tool to have Facebook use existing data that you have collected to target your campaigns.

Creating the right custom audiences makes it possible for you to only have to tweak small factors like images, videos, and language within the ads that you are going to be showing to customers. The ads that you have been running will simply adjust these details but will continue to do outreach to the right segment of your target audience unless you tell them to stop.

Determine Your Campaign Objective

This is an important step that many people miss when they are setting up their ad campaigns. This option shows up right off when you initiate a campaign. You will want to select the objective of your campaigns to get the most out of the targeting that Facebook is doing for you. It is always best to do a mix of different kinds of outreach about your ecommerce business to make sure that you are getting your ads in front of as many people as possible.

The two most common ways to use Facebook retargeting for your campaigns are:

1. Conversions

This is a great way to leverage Facebook retargeting to help nudge people toward making a purchase. Conversions for ecommerce linger around 1% in many instances, but Facebook can run a targeted ad campaign with this goal in mind. Being able to remind people about their interest in a product and get them to click through to buy it is a huge factor in online sales.

2. Traffic

This is the most common Facebook retargeting that you will do through the ad manager. You will need to send people back to your page numerous times before you make a sale. This traffic-generating campaign goal will make this easy for you to do. These ads are well-placed to target the right demographics as they are scrolling, and you will just need to refresh your images and the language of your ads once in a while to keep things fresh.

Select Your Custom Audience

This is the step where you pick from among your custom audiences to choose who will see the ads you have scheduled. This is where your Pixel comes into play. You will need to select the Pixel if you want to track this data on your website. If you miss this step, you will not know if the campaign worked right or not.

You can also search for other audiences in the “audience” screen by typing into the custom audiences field. You will see the size of the target audience on the right side of the screen and you will be able to tell how targeted this group has been in the past when you used it to run campaigns.

Pick Your Ad Placements

Now you will need to decide where your ad will be shown. There are some options to choose from here. You will need to decide where to place your ads based partially on prior campaign data and partially based on recommended placements. Facebook’s recommendations are actually quite good for these kinds of decisions, and you can trust them in most cases.

Placements can be at the top of pages or dropped into the news feeds of your target audience. You will want to consider how much of the ad people will see as they scroll. Also, consider the right language and brand tone to convey your message as they scroll.

Set a Daily or Lifetime Budget

If only ads were free! Part of Facebook retargeting is deciding how much to spend on the various kinds of ads that you are running. You can pick a lifetime budget or a daily budget in this field, which is called “cost control”.

This is where some budgeting can make sense. You do not want to spend heavily on ads that do not show a good click-thru rate. Plus you want to focus your budget where you are getting the most out of every click.  It is always a good rule of thumb to start small at first and get your audience targeting properly before starting to invest more money into each campaign.

Your Pixel audience will help you to determine this budget and really zero in on where you are getting a lot for your ad spend.

Create the Visuals for Your Ad

This is one of the key factors in ad campaign success. You can target all the right people with your ads, but if they are not visually stimulating, or they do not communicate the information to your audience right away, they will not work well.

Facebook has some templates that you can use and they actually work really well to set up your ad for success. Take a look at competitor’s ads and visuals and then figure out the best kinds of calls-to-action that will generate clicks and website views. This can take some time, so do not be afraid to adjust as needed to try out new combinations of text and images.

Make sure that you take advantage of the viewer feature to see how your ads will look to customers. It might seem like you have all the right things in the right places, but when you take a look at the preview you will be able to tell that you need to adjust some of the parts of the ad for better visibility

3 Facebook Re-marketing Tips

So, now that we have talked about the parts and the processes related to Facebook retargeting ads, you probably want to know the best tips to use for this process. The biggest takeaways you should get from this article are as follows:

1. Install your Pixel and leverage it effectively – Make sure to get help installing this important part of your Facebook retargeting plan or use a plug-in to make sure that it is installed properly.

2. Make sure to monitor your ad results- Always check in on your ad results, the click-thru rate, and other factors. When you check on these frequently, you will be spared costly mistakes that happen when you accidentally run ineffectual ads.

3. Be willing to make changes as needed- Being willing to change your images, ad text, or your target audience is important if you are going to successfully Facebook retarget.

If you use all the tools that are in this article you will see huge improvements in your ad campaign success. But you will need to leverage your Pixel and monitor the results and stats of all of your campaigns consistently to get good results from your ad campaigns.

You cannot make any kind of ad campaign work well without retargeting to the proper audience or to the proper calls to action. Being willing to take the time to learn the nuts and bolts of Facebook retargeting will create major benefits to your ability to control your ad spend while also increasing traffic to your website and sales.