2nd EDITION NOTE: This section is entirely new!
I apologize for the last chapter. I’m doing final edits on this book the day after Thanksgiving, and clearly the turkey has been getting to me…
So, what is “Retargeting”?
Have you ever noticed that once you engage with a certain company online (such as liking one of their ads, or going to their website), their ads seem to follow you all over the Internet? They’re doing that because it can take as many as 7-10 “touches” for a customer to buy something, and usually at least as few as 3.
I mentioned before that we’d like to think that the moment someone sees our brilliant ads, clicks through to witness the sheer genius of our blurb and mind-blowing cover art, that they’ll instantly mash that “Buy Now” button and drop everything they’re doing to read our book.
But they don’t.
No, they’re busy trying to get the kids ready for school, rushing to a meeting, trying to just chill out for a bit, stressed about a loved one who is going through a hard time, or maybe just searching for the right nacho dip.
That’s why you’ll need to reach them again. Remind them how awesome your book is. They’ll get there, don’t worry. The way you do that is through retargeting them with ads that take them through a journey toward purchase.
In marketing, this is called a funnel. I’ll talk a lot more about building a full marketing funnel in Jill’s and my upcoming book on Marketing Strategies. Think of this section as work that will prime you for the big leagues.
Some of what I’ll describe below, and what we’ll teach in the marketing strategies book, comes from years of working on multi-million-dollar marketing campaigns that led customers through a funnel to an ultimate purchase and continued engagement (marketing-speak for “buying more of your stuff”).
OK, so let’s talk turkey…or rather, not turkey. We had enough semi-delirious, tryptophan-induced commentary in the prior chapter. Let’s get to the details.
Before we get to how to build audiences with the pixel, I should note that you do need traffic on your website to capture data with the pixel.
If your site isn’t getting a hundred or more visitors a month, you might need to do some work to drive traffic there. An easy way to do that is by running ads on Pinterest. You can set a max bid of $0.10 per click there and drive 100 people a day to your site with a $10 budget.
Alternatively, you can have a lot of really awesome boards on Pinterest, where the pins link back to your pin pages. Other options include making your regular Facebook ads go to your website and require people to click “buy” links to go to the retailers.
Those options will also get you traffic that you can then use to retarget, and isn’t a terrible idea for the purposes of feeding those people more ads.
Ideally, Amazon (*cough cough* If you’re reading this, Amazon rep, listen up) would let us put the pixel, or some other conversion-tracking code, on our product pages so that we could tell who bought and who didn’t. Then we could retarget the folks who did not buy after visiting our site.
Other systems let us do this, and I’ll talk about them later.
A final method to get some more traffic to your site is to do some giveaways that require people to go to your site to take various actions (like get the book).
NOTE: Readerlinks.com also supports the Facebook pixel. If you utilize their book links system, you can plug in your pixel ID and then when people redirect through their system, you’ll be able to track and retarget those buyers with more ads.
This is gold and saves you from doing any legwork.
When building an audience, you have few ways to go about it. Thus far, I’ve mostly focused on building with interests, but now we’re going to toss that to the wind and dive into the custom audience.
First, we need to make a new Ad Set (in a new campaign or an existing one, either works), and under the “Audience” section, pick “Create New” and choose “Custom Audience”.
That will open a new window, where we choose “Website” as our source.
The simplest option is to pick all the people who visited your website in the past 30 days. I get about 1200-1800 people on my site when I’m not pushing any traffic to it, so I can drill down if I want; if you only have a few hundred, you might want to pick them all, like the default shows.
However, say you ran a promotion that sent people to a specific page. You might want to retarget people who just went to that URL.
Alternatively, you can also target the top 25% of people by time spent. This means the folks who spent the most time on your site. By nature, these folks showed the most interest in what you have to offer. You can also refine it by a specific book’s URL and then market that book to them, or if it’s in a series, market book 2 in that series.
Some special targeting I do is I run ads in print magazines. Those ads give links to specific URLs (in text and with QR codes), and then I run ads that specifically target those visitors.
I do the same thing at signings and shows. The cards I hand out often have special URLs, and when people visit those URLs, I feed them more ads to keep my books at the top of their mind.
Once you’ve made this new audience, you can make an ad for it, or use that audience to create a larger lookalike audience. This sort of lookalike has worked very well for me, as I can pump in all the people who visited my site in the past year (often in the tens of thousands), and build massive, very well-targeted lookalike audiences from them—especially when I pick people who spend the most time on my site.
To carry on with the ad set we were making, click “Done” and carry on as usual. You’re all set!
NOTE: Don’t run huge budgets on these ads if you have lower site traffic and smaller audiences. Use these special audiences for special targeted ads, or low budget trickle ads.
Now, let’s take those video ads you made that might only get a bit of clickthrough (as compared to regular single-image ads) and make them do double duty!
First, you need to let them run for at least a week or two to get some action before you start building audiences off them. We start the same way as we did with our pixel audience—by making a custom audience—but this time, we pick “Video” as our source.
Once you do, you’ll pick how much of your video they need to have watched. The longer they watched, the more engaged they are, but you might have a smaller group to target, so adjust as needed.
Once you make your selection, then you can pick the videos.
Despite what you pick, it only shows the number of people who watched for 3 seconds. Still, it’s a gauge.
You can combine multiple videos, though, so that helps if you don’t have a lot of views on individual videos.
Then you’re all set. Save your audience, and you can now use it.
In Part 11 we talk about converting your Instagram account to a business account and then connecting it to your Facebook Author Page. Chances are you’ve already done that, but if not, you’ll need to skip ahead to the Instagram section to learn how.
Well, well, well, now let’s make that Insta action do double duty!
Back to our “Custom Audiences”, and this time, pick “Instagram Business Profile”.
Some of these options are great! Look at that third one: “People who engaged with any post or ad”. That means if you had a bomb-ass post that got 1000 likes, you can now show those 1000 users ads!
This stuff is gold.
Once you select the option and save it, you can continue creating the ad set as normal.