Run Facebook ads? If you’re looking to massively improve your return on ad spend and ROI, then you need to take a look at the substantial advantages of Facebook remarketing.
Whichever kind of paid traffic you are using on Facebook, it’s incredibly important that you get your remarketing right, as this is what can make or break the profitability of a campaign.
Dynamic remarketing on Facebook, if done correctly, can push you from breaking even into significant profit, so you’ll need to know exactly how to do it well.
You’ll struggle to find anyone more qualified to talk about Facebook remarketing than Dennis Yu from BlitzMetrics. I sat down with him to talk all about all the remarketing benefits, and some specific examples of how to conduct a super-successful Facebook remarketing campaign.
In this article, we’ll be covering the following:
- Why Facebook remarketing audiences are ideal for boosted posts
- The benefits of ThruPlay as a performance metric
- Why content snippets are so useful for dynamic remarketing on Facebook
- The numbers that you need to aim for
- The importance of building up custom audiences for remarketing Facebook ads
- You’ll have to handle rejection
- Leverage social proof to maximize engagement
- The 3-step process for success in Facebook remarketing with boosted posts
- Why you shouldn’t jump the gun
- Test, test, test!
- Closing thoughts on remarketing Facebook ads
Why Facebook remarketing audiences are ideal for boosted posts
When you’re thinking about boosting a post, your choice of audience segment can make or break your whole strategy.
If you have built up some custom audiences, they will be an extremely powerful asset when the time comes to choose who sees your boosted post.
In other words, if you’ve properly built your targeting in advance, your posts will be massively effective as exactly the right people are going to see them.
If you can pick out one of your custom audiences and know their position in your sales funnel, then you can boost the right kind of content to them that will do a great job getting them to the next stage in your funnel!
The benefits of ThruPlay as a performance metric
In case you don’t know, ThruPlay is an optimization and billing option offered by Facebook.
If somebody watches the entirety (actually, 97%) of your video post, or the first 15 seconds of it, that counts as a ThruPlay.
This is a metric that gets counted by Facebook, and you can see on each video post how many ThruPlays you got. As it shows the people who stuck around to watch, this is a great way to understand how engaging your video was.
If you choose to optimize for ThruPlays, Facebook will do its superhuman magic and serve up your video to people who are most likely to stick around. This is very powerful!
If your post is not a video, then link clicks act as a very similar metric to gauge the level of interest, and you can evaluate the engagement in a similar way.
In the screenshot here, we can see that this video post received 2,600 Thruplays out of a total reach of 11,600. That’s an almost 25% ThruPlay rate, which is excellent.
Why content snippets are so useful for dynamic remarketing on Facebook
Building content sequences is one of the secret arts of Facebook remarketing, and not enough people are making proper use of this sophisticated but effective concept.
For example, let’s say that one of your products is a digital course, and you’re looking for new ways to promote it as you aren’t getting the level of sales that you want.
What you could do is create some short clips taken from your course to give people a flavor of it, and also some video testimonials from happy customers. These will make up a collection of content snippets that you can then create as video posts.
Once you get some engagement on these posts, you can then take that specific, top-of-funnel audience which is showing engagement and interest, and remarket them to your more salesy post further down the funnel by boosting that post specifically to them.
In a way, the snippet acts as a bait which you can use to reel in your targets to the next post in the funnel.
This is the essence of dynamic remarketing on Facebook, and the remarketing can be done with either a boosted post or an ad.
To become very successful with your remarketing, consider collecting up a good volume of short-form content so you’ll have enough posts to use for this purpose. The volume of content you collect should be sufficient for a good amount of testing.
The numbers that you need to aim for
When you’re boosting posts for remarketing, you’ll need to keep a close eye on your performance metrics.
In fact, when most people boost posts, they don’t even bother to look back on their results and evaluate the next step, which means either killing the boost or adding money to the budget if it’s successful. This is a critical mistake.
No wonder you can find so many articles online saying that boosting posts is a waste of money – they are not evaluating properly!
When establishing the success of a video post, you’ll want to look for about 20%-30% ThruPlays.
If your posts are B2B in nature, then you’ll want to aim for a ThruPlay cost of 5-10 cents, or 2-5 cents B2C.
The most important thing to remember is that 90% of what you do won’t work, so be prepared to kill roughly 9 out of every 10 posts you try. This is really a numbers game.
Of the remaining 10%, you’ll want to expand the budget on 5%, 3% might need switching to a different audience, and in the 2% of cases that do really well, you’ll want to stack-boost, which means running 3-4 ads to the post at the same time.
Following Dennis Yu’s famed dollar-a-day strategy, you’ll spend $7 over a week boosting your post, and after that week has passed, it’s time to evaluate.
In most cases you’ll kill off the boost as it’s not working, but if the numbers are good, consider upping your weekly budget to $30 and testing again. If it’s still good, give it $100 a week. You can even go up to $1000 a week if it’s still doing well!
Everybody wants an evergreen funnel, so keep boosting what works, even if the posts are getting very old.
Bonus tip: To keep track of how many times you’ve added to your budget, leave a clue in the cents! For example, if you’re increasing budget for a third time up to $50, then set the budget as $50.03. You’ll thank yourself later!
The importance of building up custom audiences for remarketing Facebook ads
One very important point to grasp here is that you need to keep building up remarketing audiences so that you can keep optimizing your targeting.
In order to measure the value of your boosted posts and to maximize their ROI, you need to create remarketing audiences from their successful results. This is not as easy as looking at Facebook ad metrics which are all done for you.
That’s probably why so many people don’t bother boosting posts, but they’re missing an opportunity!
If you boost a post and people engage, you need to set up the next stage for them. Engagement is a gift that you should never waste!
You’ll have to handle rejection
When you’re doing boosted posts, you’re more likely to have rejections from Facebook because boosted posts have to pass two levels of approval, whereas traditional ads only need to pass one.
Your post will have to pass Facebook’s standard terms of service as well as Facebook Ads policy too.
Don’t worry too much about any rejected posts that you get. Keep persevering, as leveraging boosted posts is more than worth this extra hassle. This is yet another obstacle that your competition may be too lazy to get past.
A lot of Facebook Ads reps and experts advise against boosting posts because of this inconvenience. Don’t listen to them!
Leverage social proof to maximize engagement
We all know how important authority and social proof are to building a successful marketing automation, and boosting your posts can help you with this, as the boost can make you ‘look bigger than you are.’
If you have footage of yourself on stage, or speaking with people who are well-known in your field, then it’s a great idea to create content snippets and test what works as a post. Boost the ones that work and build those remarketing audiences!
Below is an example from Dennis Yu, who posted a video of his conversation with AJ Wilcox, a well-known LinkedIn specialist.
The 3-step process for success in Facebook remarketing with boosted posts
To help you better understand how to get started with this excellent strategy, let’s boil it down to three steps!
Step 1: Test what works
Find out which of your posts work well for boosting. You don’t want to waste time and money boosting posts that are not likely to receive the engagement that you need.
Step 2: A dollar a day
Once you’ve got some well-chosen posts that show signs of good engagement, start boosting them with a dollar a day for 7 days, with engagement as your primary goal.
You’ll spend only $7 over the week, and the results will tell you enough about what you should do next.
When you find your winner, increase your budget incrementally and boost the post some more. The more engagement you can get, the bigger the remarketing audience you can use when you create your automation.
Step 3: Targeted ads
Once you have used the first two steps to build highly targeted custom audiences, you’re ready to run brilliantly targeted ads to whichever call-to-action you’d like, whether that’s a Messenger chat window or whatever else!
Why you shouldn’t jump the gun
Every internet marketer always has the end conversion in mind, so this can be a difficult strategy to accept.
Most people are eager for the sale and want to drive traffic straight to the location of their final conversion objective, whether that is a messaging automation, a landing page, or whatever other destination you have in mind.
With this highly effective boosted post remarketing strategy, you’ll have to stay patient and postpone that final conversion. For the strategy to work, you must use the boosted posts to build the remarketing audiences first.
That’s the thing though – the more targeted the audience, the better the conversions. So delay that gratification!
Test, test, test!
As we mentioned earlier, 90% of your posts won’t work and you’ll have to kill them off.
Keep this statistic in mind and don’t be discouraged. You’ll constantly need to remind yourself that you’re only expecting 1 in every 10 posts to work.
If you keep trying and keep testing, success is inevitable with this method!
Closing thoughts on remarketing Facebook ads
Dynamic remarketing on Facebook using boosted posts doesn’t seem to be so straightforward at first, and you’ll need to build up a good volume of content to get good tests.
On top of that, many quite authoritative people in the Facebook Ads space like to discourage boosting posts altogether.
However, if you persevere with your content and testing, you will find that creating remarketing audiences by boosting your posts makes an incredible amount of sense, and once you’re used to the method you’ll treasure it as a highly effective tool in your marketing arsenal!
Are you doing Facebook remarketing? Let us know how it’s going and any questions you have in the comments.
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