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If you’re reading this article, you’ve probably heard all sorts of things about Facebook’s ad retargeting technology. Let me tell you, most of the things you’ve heard are absolutely correct.
Perhaps you’ve heard that ad retargeting enables merchants to bring customers back to their shopping carts so they can buy something. That is absolutely true. It doesn’t work 100% of the time, but it works enough to make quite a bit of a difference.
Similarly, ad retargeting also enables merchants to drive people back to content pages that would eventually convert customers into paying buyers. That part is true as well.
However, despite all the excitement about ad retargeting technology, there is a secret sauce that you cannot ignore. Seriously. If you understand how the secret sauce works, then you would know how to craft together a more effective ad retargeting campaign.
On the other hand, if you remain clueless regarding this element, chances are your campaign would probably be hit or miss. Often times, it’s more of a miss than a hit.
What secret sauce am I talking about? Proven interest. That’s right. When people come to your website, they have a proven interest. Ad regarding essentially gives you a tool to bring those people back to your website.
However, here’s the problem. If you’re just going to bring them back to the home page, you’re wasting your time. Real proven interest boils down to internal pages. That’s when you know that this person is serious. That’s when you know that this person actually is engaged enough with your content that they would go to internal pages.
I’m not just talking about one main page. I’m talking about secondary pages or other internal pages. In fact, the deeper you get them into your website, the better the results. This means that they have looked through other content, they’ve somehow figured out how everything works, and they’re more likely to convert later on.
This is why if you’re running an ad retargeting campaign, it’s really important to focus on bringing back people who have gone into an internal page and not just the home page.
Two ways to retarget
Now that you fully understand that ad retargeting is all about getting people who have gone to an internal page to come back, there are two ways to retarget.
You can remind them to go back to where they left off. Maybe this is a purchase page. Maybe it’s a shopping cart. Maybe it’s some sort of article that goes into a conversion page with one click. Whatever the case may be, you just remind people to go back to your website and they end up where they left off.
The other way you can retarget is to pull them deeper into your website. This is an often neglected strategy when it comes to ad retargeting, but this is actually quite powerful. You have to understand that not anybody’s going to interact with your content the exact same way. Some people will find themselves very deep into your site, others will find themselves in a fairly shallow or common secondary page.
The key here is to pull them deeper from that page, but not necessarily driving them to a sales page. In other words, you’re just going to be pulling them deeper into your content, but not necessarily dumping them into a shopping cart, sales page, or any other type of conversion page.
This is how you get better sales. You condition the mind of the visitors so they voluntarily drill deeper into your site until they eventually convert.
Maximize ad retargeting’s results
How do you take your results to the next level? It’s very simple. Instead of pushing sales with your content retargeting, push your squeeze page. This is the page that recruits people to your mailing list. It will be your mailing list that will do the heavy-lifting of converting that visitor into a buyer.
Of course, if you already have people showing up at your shopping cart, then your ad retargeting should focus on bringing them back to the shopping cart. But outside of that, if you’re dealing with people who stop short at content pages, push them to sign up to your squeeze page and let your mailing list convert them eventually.
