The Truth about Retargeting with Facebook Ads
Retargeting is a Luxury problem!
So many brands focus on retargeting as a path to success, not realizing that Facebook is doing retargeting for you already.
Often we need to decide if success is Facebook looking good, or the business succeeding. Retargeting is widely used to prop up platform-level performance at the cost of overall growth and skill. Making the platform-level performance look more efficient is a great path to showing out-of-context success.
However, this often comes at a lack of understanding of overall blended costs. To put somebody into a retargeting audience and then to convert them is an expensive and complex process.
Also, trying to determine why somebody is in a retargeting audience, i.e. not somebody that has already taken the desired action, and then designing content specifically to overcome this issue, is extremely difficult.
While a lot of people will tell you that you need to create a customer journey, and then overcome objections, and define value, and then ask for the sale, this ignores the fact that Facebook is not built in a linear customer journey fashion.
Whereas in a website, or email, you may very well be able to control the use of flow from touchpoint to touch point… In Facebook, the average user is exposed to many different touchpoints, with potentially many different points of messaging.
In order to optimize your messaging for each one of these touchpoints, with context to all of the other touchpoints, in a way that maximizes the overall blended output, you are likely to have to spend an insurmountable investment.
Many folks see success with retargeting.
Retargeting is not in and of itself A bad idea.
The issue is that most advertisers, especially those with less than $1 million a year run rate and spend, do not need dedicated retargeting to be an element of their ad account.
Remember, Facebook is already doing retargeting on your behalf even before somebody clicks. Facebook is designed to create Intent at Scale, and curating a customer journey with various pieces of content to maintain somebody’s time on site is their business model.
Forcing messaging on somebody to drive an overall business objective, doesn’t make sense in the theoretical, but for many many advertisers this is a problem that they do not need to try to solve, and an issue that creates more harm than good.
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