Top 3 Facebook Retargeting Tips for SEO Marketers

Facebook retargeting is probably not the first marketing tactic that comes to mind when you’re focusing on SEO. But, what if you could yield an extra 20, 30% revenues without making any changes to your site?

So, your SEO strategy is finally starting to pay off. Your site’s traffic is increasing and the conversions are coming in.

Now it’s just a matter of being consistent with your SEO strategy and waiting for the conversions to increase over time. Right?

While SEO is crucial to your website’s success and is probably the best quality traffic source, it can take years to rank your site organically on the first page of Google.

However, there is another way to find very high quality traffic without having to break the bank on PPC and without having to wait until you’re retired for your site to reach Google top spot.

It’s been right in front of you this entire time.

I know that because I was in your shoes until I decided to jump on a call with Laurent (founder of AnyTrack).

Now, I’m sure you’ve heard of retargeting.

Retargeting is a marketing tactic that can be used across many platforms if you’re using the right tools.

Remember that time you were checking out Unbounce landing page builder and a day later you started to see ads for this product everywhere on Facebook and Instagram?

And then maybe a few days later that same advertiser was showing you a special offer for that product?

That’s retargeting.

Do you also remember seeing ads to start your free trial even after you signed up for a product?!

That’s also retargeting! But not smart. 🙂

Now, you’re probably thinking: “Well if I’m seeing ads even after I signed up then that means you can tag the customer across the entire buying journey”.

And you’d be right!

Yet, as a marketer you often don’t have the luxury to add your Facebook Pixel on the merchants “thank you page”.

So how do you build your data pipeline and track the entire customer journey back to your Facebook Pixel?

You need to leverage your existing SEO data by creating custom audiences in Facebook PIxel so you can run Facebook retargeting campaigns.

This post is going to show you how to do exactly that and more. Even if you’re an affiliate marketer and you can’t place your Facebook  pixels on your offers thank you page.

So, buckle up because you’re going to learn more in this post than you would from some guru charging you an arm and a leg for inferior information.

We’re going to show you step by step how to:

• Leverage your SEO conversion & event data to build highly relevant custom audiences
• How to set up and run Facebook retargeting ads to re-engage high intent users.
• How to create lookalike audiences and get Facebook to work for you and find you customers that are similar to your best customers.

But before we dive in, let’s go over some basics.

How does the AnyTrack Facebook integration work?

AnyTrack is fully integrated with the Facebook Marketing API, so you can fully take advantage of what the Facebook marketing platform has to offer.

The Facebook Pixel

The Facebook Pixel is code that you place on your website that gives you insights into what actions people are taking on your website. Actions, or events, can be anything from a person clicking on a link to making a purchase.

The Facebook Pixel automatically tracks standard events, and AnyTrack sends onsite events such as outbound clicks and form submissions to the Facebook Pixel as well.

You can find all of your website’s event data in the Events Manager.

The Facebook Pixel is great for tracking events that happen on your website. Yet, but it is not 100% reliable, especially when you run funnels across multiple domains.

For example, how do you track conversions when you can’t place your pixel on the merchant’s “thank you page”? Or when you want to track conversions from an affiliate network?

This can be done using Facebook Conversion API (formerly called Server-Side API).

Facebook Conversion API

The Facebook Conversion API allows marketers to send conversion data from a server (like an affiliate network, CRM, or payment processor) to the Facebook Pixel.

It tracks and stores the same type of events, properties, etc. but it’s not “called” when the visitor takes an action on your site.

This means that if you’re an affiliate you can track conversions in Facebook, without a “Thank You Page”!

Once you connect your AnyTrack account with your Facebook Pixel, AnyTrack will send all of your tracked conversions, regardless of source, to Facebook through the Conversion API.

Because the Conversion API and Facebook Pixel both share the same ID, all the data it collects can be used to track your ads conversions, build custom audiences, and build lookalike audiences.

AnyTrack’s direct API integration with Facebook takes care of this entire process for you. It is completely automated, so you don’t need to lift a finger.

What is a Custom Audience?

The Facebook Pixel holds your audience data and comes with tools that let you build what is called a custom audience. A custom audience is basically a set of rules and filters that you apply to your audience data.

You can create a custom audience based on a number of different identifiers, like actions taken on your website, purchases, purchase value, and more.

One type of custom audience you can build is what’s called a Lookalike Audience.

What is a Lookalike Audience?

A Lookalike Audience is a type of custom audience you can create that “looks like” a custom audience you’ve created.

In general, we recommend creating a Lookalike Audience out of people that are highly valuable to you.

For example, visitors that have purchased multiple times, or for more than $X.

Creating a Lookalike Audience is like instructing Facebook algorithms to go find and customers on your behalf!

This feature can help you find new & relevant customers at a fraction of the cost.

What is retargeting?

Retargeting, or Remarketing, is a paid advertising strategy where advertisers run ads to people who have previously visited or have taken an action on their website.

If only 2% of your users convert, then retargeting is a simple way to bring the 98% back to your website for another opportunity to convert.

Like Neil Patel suggests, Remarketing can increase your chances to trigger more conversions!

Pro tip: It can be helpful to think of custom audiences and lookalike audiences like this:

Custom audience – Effective for retargeting past website visitors

Lookalike audience – Effective for identifying new potential customers

However, these are not mutually exclusive!

Summing up the AnyTrack Facebook integration

1. AnyTrack sends all the tracked on-site events to your Facebook Pixel.
2. AnyTrack sends all the tracked conversions to Facebook from 3rd parties like affiliate networks, API’s, CRM, etc through the Facebook Conversion API.
3. AnyTrack provides a Tracking URL template built for Facebook Ads. It enables you to see your Facebook traffic in Google Analytics.

Please refer to their documentation for more information.

The 4 steps to creating Facebook Retargeting Ads

Step 1 – Identify a valuable audience segment

Your Facebook pixel is filled with lots of valuable engagement and conversion data.

There are infinite combinations of custom audiences you can create.

For demonstration purposes, let’s say we want to run retargeting ads to users who:

• Visited at least 3 pages on our website
• Has clicked out to at least 1 affiliate offer
• Has not made a purchase yet

Now we move on to creating the custom audience.

Step 2 – Create a custom audience

We start by heading over to our Facebook Ads account, and clicking on “Audiences”

We then click on “Create Audience” then “Custom Audience”

After clicking on “Custom Audience” this view will pop up. Click on “Website” so we can create a custom audience based on your website data:

After clicking “Website”, you’ll be able to add all the parameters and filters you want.

Following our example, the final view would look like this:

Here’s a step-by-step checklist to creating the sample audience above:

1. Include people who meet ALL of the following criteria.
2. Choose your Facebook Pixel
3. Select “PageView” in the dropdown menu right under “From your events”. You can choose the timeframe with 180 days being the maximum.
4. Refine by: Frequency is greater than or equal to 3
5. Click “Further narrow”
6. Select “AnyTrack CallToAction” in the dropdown menu and you can choose the timeframe
7. Click “Exclude People”
8. Select “AnyTrack Sale” and choose the timeframe you want
9. Name your audience
10. Create your audience

Once you’ve created your audience it will take a few hours to fully populate, but you can already start running facebook retargeting ads to your new custom audience.

What about lookalike audiences?

Step 3 – How to create a lookalike audience

Lookalike audiences are powerful because Facebook’s algorithms can classify as many as 52,000 traits of users!

Imagine leveraging all those data points when you create a lookalike audience of users who have converted.

So for this example, let’s create a lookalike audience of all the users who’ve converted in the last 180 days.

We first need to create the custom audience of all the users who have converted.

You remember how to create a custom audience on Facebook right? 🙂

After we create our custom audience, we then head over to “Create Audience” and then select “Lookalike Audience”

Which will open up this view:

You can create your lookalike audience in 4 simple steps:

1. To select an existing audience source simply click the empty field and a drop-down menu will appear. We then select “Other Sources” and find our custom audience in the dropdown menu.
2. Select your Audience Location
3. Select your Audience Size
4. Select Create Audience

Now you’re all set to create your new Facebook campaign.

Step 4 – Create your Facebook Retargeting Ads

Your custom audiences are ready to go and now it’s time to use them in your Facebook campaigns.

Here’s a quick checklist for doing that:

1. Create your campaign
2. Select a campaign objective
3. Select your audience
4. Select the conversion objective (Choose the conversion event you will set as your conversion objective. I.e AnyTrack Sale)
   1. Note: The audience is already somewhere in your funnel (they’ve seen your site, clicked on a product but didn’t make a purchase, etc.) so they are “warm” and primed to take action.
   2. Your ad copy / landing page should meet the audience where they’re at in your funnel. For example, try promoting a special coupon or discount in your ad and landing page for the product they checked out.

3 tips to get more juice from your (marketing) squeeze

Here are a few tips I personally use for my own projects and have helped clients with:

Choosing the right campaign objective.

Before creating your Facebook Retargeting Ads, you must choose a campaign objective.

We recommend both the “Traffic” and the “Conversions” objectives.

The jury is still out regarding which objective yields a lower CPA, so it’s a good idea to split test your campaigns and see which is more profitable.

Leverage your Google Analytics data to optimize your Facebook Retargeting Ads even further

Go into your Google Analytics account and check out the “Demographics” and Interests” tabs. In these tabs you can get access to insights like the age, gender, and interests of your best customers by selecting “AnyTrack Sale” and seeing which group had the most conversions. Then plug this information into your Facebook campaigns!

For example, maybe in your Demographics and Interests reports you see you had the most conversions from:

• 25-34 year old women
• With a high affinity category for Food & Dining
• And a high in-market segment for Apparel & Accessories

What you would then do is simply plug in this information to your Facebook campaigns to get even more value from your lookalike audiences and retargeting campaigns.

Create a lookalike audience of your best customers, then run Facebook Ads to them

This one is self explanatory. After you create your lookalike audience you can target them at will. Rinse and repeat!

Putting it all together

This marketing flow is one of many that you can experiment with when you feed your pixels with your conversion data.

Using AnyTrack has been a game changer for tracking my SEO and running affiliate campaigns on Google Ads. But it has also helped me branch out to new marketing channels like Facebook, Outbrain, etc. and create a thorough marketing plan. AnyTrack has also given me insights to help me understand my audience better and improve my content.

One thing I know for sure is that you can spend countless hours reading blogs and watching gurus on YouTube, but until you get all your conversion data synced across your entire marketing stack, it’ll mostly be a waste of your time. You need clarity at every stage of your buyer’s journey to maximize your conversions and scale your business.

So now that you know what’s possible with AnyTrack, you can and should leverage the strategies you learned today for your next campaign. You should also experiment using what you learned today with other major platforms as well. But that’s for another post!