Okay, so you were on a hunt for some cool looking sports shoes online. You browsed through a shopping site and found some neat pairs but one of them really caught your attention: Orange and black shoes with nice white soles made by a famous brand. And, while reading the positive reviews, you toyed with the idea of actually buying one, but then something else came up and you completely forgot about the shoes—not for long.
A few days later, while scrolling down your YouTube feed, you happened across an ad of the same shoes. Wow. Then, a week later, you saw the same ad for the same shoes on a different website, reminding you that you were in a need of them, and you wondered what in the world is going on here? Thinking that the gods wanted you to buy those shoes, you ended up ordering them.
So what happened here? Were those shoes in your destiny, was it in your fate to buy them? Or maybe it was really the gods who were trying to remind you of the existence of those shoes. The truth is, it was none of them, but some really smart marketers taking advantage of a tool called remarketing.
You must be wondering what is remarketing and how does it work? In simple words, remarketing is promoting a specific product or service to a targeted audience who were interested in those products or services. Remarketing is an ingenious way to connect with the people who visited your website and may not have made any immediate purchases. Using remarketing, you can drastically increase the conversion rates and ROI. It allows you to stay connected with your buyers even after they have said goodbye.
It is a very cost-effective form of advertising and works through the use of cookies which are small packets of information stored on a user’s computer. With this, you can turn all those people who said no into saying yes, and there are a lot of people who will say no. According to many surveys and research, out of the total traffic that visits a site, only 2% of them actually end up converting into buyers on the first visit. That means, 98% of your traffic doesn’t buy a thing and even if they add some products to their cart, mostly 70% of them will end up leaving the site before completing the process.
Facebook has a ton of features when it comes to remarketing. For example, you are getting a lot of traffic from Australia but the conversion rate is very low, which means there is no point in remarketing audiences in Australia. So, you can tell Facebook that you don’t want to remarket people living in Australia and Facebook will stop showing ads to those users. Another great thing that Facebook does is that it allows you to create lookalike-audiences. You can do this by telling Facebook to target audience showing similar behaviours to the people who visited your site and actually bought something from it. Facebook even allows you to use your email list for remarketing, and Ad-blockers don’t work on Facebook, as it doesn’t display ads on banners but directly put them in the user’s feed.
But unlike Google (Which allows you to remarket in many different sites), Facebook only targets people on Facebook and not on the other sites. So does it makes Facebook any less useful when compared to Google? Well, the answer to that is actually no because Facebook is currently the most popular social media in existence and has more users than any other social or video-based platform. In 2017, Facebook had two billion active users. That’s a big number and using Facebook Ads, you are giving yourself an opportunity to target this enormous user base. Things like active user base, a variety of tools, and immunity to Adblockers makes Facebook a great platform for remarketing. So, make sure that you take full of advantage of it.