#062: Should You Run Retargeting Facebook Ads?

Read Time: 4.5 Minutes

Retargeting Facebook Ads allow us to show specific Ads to people who have interacted with our brand in some way, such as:

– Visited our website

– Joined our email list

– Purchased a book from our direct sales store

– Started checkout on our direct sales store but didn't complete their order

– Interacted with our Facebook Page

– Engaged with our Facebook Ads

When we're sending traffic from Facebook Ads to Amazon, I like to use a Retargeting Audience of people who have interacted with our Facebook Ads and/or our Facebook Page.

I haven't used Retargeting since the end of 2022 because back then, I was finding they had lost a lot of their effectiveness.

However, I started testing Retargeting Audiences again about 6 weeks ago and although spend is low, it's definitely helping overall sales, page reads and royalties.

So today I'd like to show you how I'm integrating Retargeting into my Facebook Ads strategy.

If you're a member of Facebook Ads Mastery For Authors, I have a full lesson on Retargeting inside the course (you'll find it in the Bonus Lessons module).

The Setup

If you follow my account structure inside Facebook Ads Mastery For Authors (one campaign, per country, per book), I simply have one Retargeting Ad Set inside my Campaign.

Here's what it looks like:

With the budget set at the Ad Set level, I can easily control how much spend goes towards Retargeting.

Talking of spend...

How Much To Spend

As I alluded to earlier, Retargeting is my smallest spending Ad Set.

The reason... the audience is very small compared to the Ads targeting a cold audience.

Our Retargeting Audience size is around 160,000 people. Compare that to the tens of millions in the cold audience Ad Sets, it's tiny.

If you try and spend the same amount of money on Retargeting as your cold audiences, you'll soon burn through your audience and your Ads and your results won't look too pretty.

I recommend keeping your Retargeting budget to around 10% of your overall daily budget.

For example, if you're Facebook Ads budget is $50 per day, I would allocate $5 per day towards Retargeting.

The Retargeting Ads

I'm not using Dynamic Creative (DCTs) with Retargeting; something I do when testing Ads for cold audiences. Instead, I'm using standard Ads (i.e non-Dynamic Creative Ads).

Could you use Dynamic Creative? Sure. But as this is always going to be a low-spending Ad Set, I don't feel the need to test with Dynamic Creative to find Ads that can scale, because you can't scale Retargeting Ads to high budgets in my experience.

In terms of the content of the Ads, it's fairly similar to the Ads targeting cold audiences, and still very much on-brand.

The main difference is that I'm advertising the entire series with the Retargeting Ads and sending people to the series page on Amazon.

With my cold audiences, I show them Ads for Book 1 and send them to Book 1 on Amazon.

But a portion of our audience have already read Book 1, they're familiar with the books, the branding, etc, so I want to entice them into the full series rather than keep showing them Ads for a book they've already read.

Many people in the Retargeting audience won't have read any of Lori's books, but they will be familiar with the Ads for Book 1. So the idea of the Retargeting Ads is to show them something different and draw them into the series that way.

For the past couple of weeks, I've been advertising the Box Set to Lori's series with our Retargeting Ads, but performance hasn't been too great.

I don't believe this poor performance is down to the Facebook Ads though.

I believe it's because the Box Set only has 6 ratings at the time of writing. Six 5-star ratings, yes, but the quantity just isn't there to provide enough social proof for more people to make a purchasing decision.

To gather more data on this Box Set Retargeting Ad, I'm going to let it run for another week. If performance (i.e. sales and page reads of the Box Set) doesn't pick up, I'll turn this Ad off and go back to focusing spend on the Ad sending people to the series page instead.

Once the Box Set has 100+ reviews/ratings, I'll look into running Ads for it again.

Our Results

Yes, spend is low on our Retargeting Ads, and with low spend, stats are artificially inflated to an extent. As you scale Ads on any platform, conversion rates and ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) tend to dip a little.

We're seeing 5% - 6% conversion rates with Retargeting, which, compared to our cold audience targeting rates of 2.5% - 4%, is significantly better.

Cost Per Sale with Retargeting is around £2.50 - £3.00, which is £1 - £2 lower than our cold audience targeting.

Our only issue with Retargeting, though I knew this going into it, is that we can't scale much past the £10 - £20 per day we're currently spending on it. I could push the budget a little higher potentially, but that would almost certainly result in the Ads burning out and fatiguing after a few days, possibly weeks if I'm lucky.

Frequency and Cost Per Click are always going to be higher with Retargeting than cold audiences because the audience Facebook has available to show our Retargeting Ads to is so small. It's to be expected.

For us, our Frequency is sitting around 2.5 and our Cost Per Click is around £0.20 - £0.25.

Compare that to our cold audience targeting with Frequency sitting at 1.2 - 1.5 and Cost Per Clicks of £0.10 - £0.16, it's considerably higher with Retargeting.

But our conversion rates and Cost Per Purchase are strong, so the Frequency and Cost Per Click don't concern me in the slightest; they are secondary metrics.

Wrapping Up

The reality is Retargeting shouldn't be your main source of traffic from Facebook Ads – despite how good the stats are.

It's something to run in addition to your main Ads targeting cold audiences.

If you have the budget, I would encourage you to test Retargeting Ads and budget 10% of your overall Facebook Ads daily budget to them, even 5% of your daily budget if that's as far as you can push it.

Just keep in mind that because spend is lower with Retargeting, you should wait 2-3 weeks before assessing results, rather than the 7-day window I use for cold audience targeting.

The reason for an extended run-time with Retargeting is that it's going to take more time to gather statistically significant data from a smaller audience and a smaller budget.

And a final note on audience size for Retargeting. If you're going down the same route as us (Retargeting people who have interacted with your Facebook Page and Posts and/or Facebook Ads, I would recommend a minimum audience size of at least 50,000.

Any smaller, and your Ads are unlikely to be delivered (i.e. spend money).

That's it for this week. Thanks for reading and have fun retargeting.

To Your Success
– Matt