Chapter 7: Ads Strategy
Another thing to think about as you’re scaling is retargeting. Retargeting has changed a bit on Meta over the years, mostly due to Advantage+ targeting being required for our ads these days. We can’t directly target small groups of people (like those who added something to their cart but didn’t check out) without Meta expanding the target audience to include other people. With that in mind, there’s two main approaches we can go with to retarget potential customers given our Advantage+ circumstances:
Option 1: Retarget with Creative
These days, the Meta AI has gotten pretty good at showing people ads - so instead of fighting it, we can lean into it. One thing you’ll notice in your analytics for your campaigns is “Frequency”. This refers to how many times the average person saw your ad. This number is always greater than 1, and sometimes its 2.5-4 depending on the ad. This means that the average person is seeing your ads more than once. So how do we take advantage of this? We give Meta a different ad to show people for their second or third interaction.
In any one of our ad sets, we have multiple different ads running, each with flexible options split testing between 5-10 variants. This makes it extremely easy to create an additional ad that is focused on retargeting, and just add it to the bunch. The ad creative and copy should be geared towards somebody who has already seen one of your other ads. Something like “what are you waiting for?”, or “Don’t miss this offer!”. Ads like these only work if someone is already loosely familiar with your brand.
The goal here is to trust that the Meta AI is smart enough to recognize that this ad shouldn’t be the first ad that people see, but would do well as a follow up, and then deliver your ads accordingly. This might sound hard to believe, but I’ve seen really good results by simply adding a retargeting style ad into the mix with my normal ad sets/campaigns.
Option 2: High-Level Retarget
The next option for retargeting is to simply cast a very wide net (and hope that Meta doesn’t expand the audience too much). To do this, we will create a custom audience including the following:
365-Day Instagram Engagement
365-Day Facebook Engagement
365-Day Website Visitors
Excluding: Purchases
We can then create a dedicated ASC using this saved audience in our ad set targeting. The ad copy & creative should be geared towards people already familiar with your brand; same as in Option 1. For something like this, I would allocate ~5-10% of my overall budget to this campaign, and see how it performs. I’ve also seen good success with this wide-net approach.
Ideally, you should do both options at the same time to maximize your chance of capturing people who have interacted with your brand but never converted.