Remarketing on Facebook

Hundreds of different kinds of ad targeting are available on Facebook today. The marketer's job is to target ads as relevantly as possible, so the budget is not wasted on people with no interest in your product or service.

The type of targeting that (almost always) works best is remarketing (Facebook also uses the term retargeting, but it is the same thing). It means targeting users by their cookies, email addresses, phone numbers and other attributes we have available and which can identify a particular user. Let us break it down and look at retargeting and remarketing more closely.

Targeting people by cookies (the Facebook Pixel)

You have certainly come across an ad showing exactly the same thing you were perhaps looking at only ten minutes earlier on an entirely different website. That is thanks to the cookies in your browser, where information about your activity on other sites is stored. That data is then matched to your Facebook account and the remarketing ad can "follow" you across every device you are signed into Facebook on, or once signed into.

To target ads at people who visited your site, the Facebook Pixel has to be implemented on the site — send it to your developer or set it up yourself through Google Tag Manager. A beginner's guide can be found in our earlier articles. If you have a WordPress site you can also use one of the plugins. If you work with an agency, you simply share access to the Facebook Pixel with them (following our guide, for instance).

Within the Facebook Pixel you can also configure various "events" or "parameters" that occur on your site, and so target ads only at people who abandoned the basket without buying, for instance. You also gain the option of showing only the products people were looking at in your ads.

Once the Facebook Pixel is set up, audiences have to be created. You will find them under "Audiences", and you can configure them by clicking website visitors. There, besides general audiences with a 1 to 180 day window, you can segment visitors by the pages they visited or by the product categories they searched for.

As the last screenshot shows, remarketing need not be used only for site visitors but also on the basis of their behaviour on Facebook or Instagram. So you can target your fans, people who watched one of your videos, or who interacted in the past with posts on your FB page or IG profile.

Targeting people by email or phone number

Collected emails and phone numbers can be used to build audiences on Facebook and then targeted with ads. Under the "Audiences" tab you again add a new audience, but this time click "Customer list". There you upload a file with the identifiers, or simply paste and save them.

The matching process then begins, pairing email addresses with the email addresses of registered users. It works the same way with phone numbers, so if a user has a phone number on their profile that they entered when registering on your site, you can start showing them ads. Usually the system will not match every address on an email list or every phone number (that is not a fault), because people are not always signed into Facebook under the same email as the one they entered when registering on a site.

The contacts you have available can also be segmented, so you can prepare various audiences according to what information you hold alongside those contact details.

We recommend testing audiences built from emails or phone numbers whenever you have such data available and can put it to use this way. A particular case arises with companies working in the B2B segment, whose customer is a company. There the ratio of email addresses on the list to matched Facebook users (matched profiles) tends to be very low, since people usually do not sign into Facebook with a company email. This is precisely where uploading lists of phone numbers is worth trying. The result can look like this:

For one of our B2B clients we built an audience from a database of email addresses. With the email addresses, though, Facebook identified only 7.45% of the database; we then tried building an audience from uploaded phone numbers and the match rate rose to 58.6%. We could then reach a far larger and maximally relevant audience.

Further identifiers you can build audience lists from are: first name, surname, city, state, country, date of birth, year of birth, age, postcode, gender, Mobile Advertiser ID and Facebook App User ID. Similar targeting is possible on LinkedIn as well.

Target people similar to your customers

Everyone behaves differently online, but there are such things as behavioural patterns and similarities between profiles. Thanks to an enormous quantity of data, Facebook can identify them very well.

You can put that to use in building lookalike audiences, which contain people similar to those in the audience you build the lookalike from. If you have an audience of people who bought, for example, Facebook can find profiles of people showing similar traits to those in it. In Slovakia such audiences can currently run from 27 thousand to over 275 thousand users. Here too, of course, the smaller the audience, the more the people in it "resemble" the users in the source audience.

In performance terms this kind of targeting is the second best after remarketing. So when building audiences it is worth remembering that an audience need not serve only for targeting ads but also, for instance, for excluding people who have already bought, or for building a lookalike audience.

So good luck building and using audiences on Facebook and Instagram — and if you need advice, just write to us.