Retargeting is back baby!

Whoops. I was meant to keep the weekly Social Ads Squad Weekly newsletter weekly not monthly, but a lot has happened since we last crossed paths.

I'll take you back to April when we last went out.

I was saying how hot it was to set campaigns up to get more eyeballs on your website and podcast content.

That was two months ago and that is an age in the world of social media.

Since April Meta have ditched their watch, said goodbye to steady ship COO Sheryl Sandberg, might bin multiple Instagram Stories, expanded more monetization support for Reels, and admitted they'll probably lose a tonne of cash in the Metaverse for the next few years.

Twitter have been taken over in a $44bn deal by Elon Musk (that's yet to complete at the time of writing this).

and TikTok have put Binley Mega Chippy firmly on the map.

At The Social Ads Squad we have seen a shift in better retargeting modelling from Meta. It's something that seemed very unlikely after the iOS14 update from Apple in 2021.

Many of the bottom or middle of funnel ads that we run in client campaigns, retargeting users how have engaged already with the brand on Facebook, Instagram , email and website have been working far better than top of the funnel.

Two months ago I recommended that we run retargeting ads but I didn't often believe the data in the Meta Ads manager and had seen an impact in the effectiveness of pixel-based retargeted across the board.

However, over the last 30 days we've seen a x13 return on ad spend for a product based business we work with just running ads to everyone who has visited their website in the past 90 days (ex purchasers).

It helps they have a killer SEO profile and get shown on Page 01 of Google for some of their key business keywords.

Retargeting ads allows them to target those users who looked but didn't buy, although after the Apple iOS14 update we thought this was going to be extremely difficult.

If a user had opted out of being retargeted with the Facebook Pixel (and apparently a whopping 96% had) then how could we serve them an ad?

We'd have to target them another way that isn't directly related to their custom journey and hope it worked.

It felt a little bit like this sometimes to be honest:

This is a problem that has cost Meta a lot of money and they have tried to solve this using statistical modelling although that hasn't been super accurate in the last year and the little caveat warning next to the reported numbers often leaves us scratching our heads.

It's meant that we rely more on middle of funnel/warm audience retargeting more than we used to and we have advised clients to use lead magnets to build those email lists up to use for retargeting instead as traction is much more reliable this way.

However the account results I shared above above aren't just an anomaly - we're seeing better results for website/URL retargeting across the board.

The data is not always accurate from what we see in Meta vs what we see in Google Analytics which makes using UTM parameters an absolute must. These enable you to see the traffic from ads directly in the 'campaigns' section of Universal Analytics.

It's also hard to not keep showing these ads over and over but we'll need to refresh them soon as users have seen them about 10 times already.

We're mindful to cap that as people get really annoyed when they see ads too often as this study from InSkin/Rapp shows:

If they are already in your world they probably won't mind it so much but there's a fine line with the frequency and the creative that you use.

If you are going to retarget your website or landing page visitors then make sure you take note of the following:

• Compare the data you're getting in the Meta Ads manager with Google Analytics. Don't believe everything Meta tells you!
• Try to limit the amount of time your users see your messages. The audience size is usually smaller so the lazy algorithm will just keep serving the same people over and over.
• Be smart about the messaging that you are using. This is all about convincing your users to finish the purchase or take another stab at considering it.

I'm hoping that with better reporting in Google Analytics we can see more returns again for our clients using retargeting campaigns.

We'll be moving more over to G4 very soon and also using Google data Studio as standard for reporting.

If you liked what you read above and want to chat to us more about how we can help you with your ads, why don't you fill in The Social Ads Scorecard?

It's a fun assessment we put together so that you can understand if you even need ads right now. You can then book a call with us at the end for a chat.

As usual thanks for reading and I will see you next week!