[5-Step Guide] How To Set Up Remarketing Campaigns On Facebook & Instagram

In addition to acquiring new customers, you also need to focus your marketing efforts on remarketing campaigns.

Remarketing campaigns isn’t only about retargeting your customers. You can also retarget site visitors, people who interacted with your content on Facebook or Instagram and more.

This pool of audience will definitely be warmer than people who have never heard of your brand, products or services. All you need to do is nurture them further down your funnel (eg. educate them about your business, products or services, provide a free eBook, subscribe to your weekly newsletter).

Today, I’ll show you how we can set up remarketing campaigns on Facebook and Instagram.

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1. Install Facebook Pixel On Your Website

Facebook Pixel provides Facebook with data about your website’s visitors. You can retarget these visitors, measure the effectiveness of your Facebook and Instagram ads, optimize for conversions and more.

To create Facebook or Instagram remarketing campaigns (retargeting site visitors), you must install this Facebook Pixel on your website.

Under the Measure & Report column of the menu, click on Pixels below Events Manager. Create a Pixel if you have not already done so. By default, Facebook will name the pixel after your ad account name.

There will be step-by-step instructions on how to install the Facebook Pixel code. But I highly recommend that you add this Facebook Pixel code via Google Tag Manager. This way, you only add one code on your website. Google Tag Manager allows you to manage all your codes in one place including Facebook Pixel, AdWords Remarketing code and more.

2. Check If Your Facebook Pixel Is Working

After you’ve successfully installed the Facebook Pixel on your website, you should be able to see some activity like PageView event.

Here’s how my Facebook Pixel looks like:

If there’s no data yet, you just have to be patient and check back again in a few hours.

In the meantime, why don’t you create some remarketing audience lists first?

3. Create Remarketing Audience Lists In Facebook

Again, open the menu at the top and click on Audiences under the Assets column.

When you click on the Create Audience button, there will be 3 options.

• Custom Audience: audience made up of your existing customers
• Lookalike Audience: new people who are similar to your existing customers
• Saved Audience: audience you saved so you can re-use them for another ad set

You can create your remarketing audience lists under Custom Audience.

TIP: Lookalike Audience converts well if you base it on existing customers (where Facebook will use its algorithm to find new people who are potential customers). Saved Audience saves you time by saving your usual targeting so you can re-use them for numerous ad sets.

Under Custom Audience, there are many remarketing audience lists that you can choose to create. Each of these lists can be used for both Facebook and Instagram campaigns. So you can create Facebook ads and target your site visitors or create Instagram ads and target people who have watched your videos.

3a. Customer List

You can start with Customer List if you already have some information about your customers. This could be your customers’ names, phone numbers, email addresses etc.

Facebook will match this information you provide with their user database so you can retarget these customers.

You can upload your customer file with lifetime value (LTV), customer file without LTV or import from MailChimp.

The easiest would be the second option where you simply enter your customers’ data into a CSV or TXT file.

Try to upload as much information as possible about your customers:

• Name
• Email
• Phone Number
• City
• Country
• Date of Birth
• Gender
• Age
• etc.

Remember to state the original data source. Whether you collected the information directly from customers, sourced from partners or both.

This audience is suitable if you’re running a remarketing campaign to upsell or cross-sell a product or service. Since they’ve already bought a product or service from you, it means that they somewhat trust you. This would be a good chance to promote your other products or services.

You could also run a remarketing campaign that invites these customers to an exclusive event (only for your brand’s customers). Or perhaps, you could give these customers an exclusive discount to reward them for their loyalty.

3b. Website Traffic

Website Traffic is appropriate if you want to remarket to users who visited your website.

Bear in mind that this website traffic is different from the customer list above.

Customers are people who have already bought your product or service or at least, signed up for your newsletter. On the other hand, these site visitors contain people who might be interested in your products or services and thus, visited your website. But they have not bought anything from you nor gave you their details so you can send them newsletters. In other words, they include potential customers.

I would recommend that you target these site visitors while excluding your customers. This way, you could give them an irresistible offer that encourages them to buy from you. It could be an exclusive discount, a 7-day free trial or a no-obligation, one-on-one demonstration.

There are a variety of options to choose from:

All Website Visitors

This refers to any websites or pages where you’ve installed the Facebook Pixel. So if you’ve installed the same Facebook Pixel on 2 websites, All Website Visitors will include visitors from both sites. Hence, I highly recommend that you create a Facebook Ad Account for each business respectively so they have individual Facebook Pixel.

People Who Visited Specific Web Pages

I prefer using this option because you can be more specific about the URL. Whether the URL contains, doesn’t contain or equals to something. This way, you will definitely be targeting the exact page you want.

Visitors By Time Spent

You can also target people who spent a lot of time on your site. Besides choosing the top 5%, 10% or 25% visitors, you can choose to include only people who visited specific web page(s). Note that this is warm traffic. Since they’re spending so much time on your site, it could mean that they’re still in the consideration phase and are researching more about your brand, products and services. All they need is a little push down your sales funnel.

3c. App Activity

If you have an app or game, you can create a remarketing audience list based on App Activity.

After choosing the app, you can create the audience based on:

• Anyone who opened the app
• Most active users
• Users by purchase amount
• Users by segment

Due to the numerous options available, I suggest that you experiment with each targeting. You can mix and match the different audiences and choose the best combination for your remarketing campaign.

For instance, I might run a remarketing campaign that targets people who opened the app in the last 30 days and excludes the top 25% most active users. Simply put, I’m targeting users who infrequently engage with my app. I might offer a daily login reward to encourage them to log in every day. Or I could offer a gift to users who haven’t logged in for a long time to entice them to continue using the app or playing the game.

Source: AdEspresso

Anyone Who Opened The App

This is one of the broader options. As long as someone opens the app, they’ll be added to the list.

Most Active Users

As the name suggests, active users are people who have used the app numerous times. This is your most engaged audience: people who frequently use your app and may even engage with your app a few times in one day.

Users By Purchase Amount

For me, these people are VIPs. They are valuable because they’re the ones who contribute to your revenue. The only exception is if you have a paid app or game where users need to buy first (meaning that everyone is a paid user who spent at least a penny). Otherwise, if yours is a free app or game, paid users would be those who made in-app purchases. And those who spend a lot on your app or game is definitely your VVIPs. Again, you can target the top 5%, 10% or 25% top spending users.

Users By Segment

Segment is where you define a group of people using your app by their actions, demographics, device information and more. You can create segments in Facebook Analytics. This is useful if you want to target a specific group of people and if you already have a fixed set of criteria.

3d. Offline Activity

If your customers can reach you in-store, by phone or through any other offline channels, you can consider creating a remarketing audience list based on Offline Activity.

To be honest, I haven’t created an audience based on Offline Activity yet so I’m not really sure how it works. But Facebook does provide an in-depth FAQ about offline conversions so check it out! It seems like you can upload a data file (.csv) or automate uploads with offline conversions API or a partner integration.

3e. Engagement

The last type of custom audience you can create is Engagement.

This is where you create a list of people who have previously interacted with your content on Facebook or Instagram. They could be people who have interacted with your video, lead form, Facebook page etc.

Here’s the range of options you can choose from:

Each option will then have more choices for you to select. Take video for example. You can choose to reach people who

• viewed at least 3 seconds of your video
• have watched 25% of your video
• etc.

Take your time to explore and run various remarketing campaigns to find out which audience gives you the most ROI.

4. Wait Until Remarketing Audience Lists Have Collected Enough Users

Once you’re done creating all the remarketing audience lists, all you need to do is wait.

Wait for Facebook to match the customer file you uploaded and its user database. Wait for Facebook to consolidate the audience based on the criteria you set. Just be patient and you should be able to see some data soon.

When your remarketing audience list is ready, the availability status will change to Ready and the audience size will also be revealed.

If it’s less than 1000 people, Facebook will also highlight that it might be too small or the website traffic is too low and thus, your ads may not deliver.

Facebook also highlights if an audience is out of date and hasn’t been updated for a long while (not used in an ad for at least 30 days or was created over 90 days ago and has never been used).

If your audience isn’t ready yet, you can create your remarketing campaigns while waiting for Facebook to update. I guess the campaign will automatically run when the list is ready (but you can always pause first and resume running only when your list is ready).

5. Create Facebook Or Instagram Remarketing Campaign

Simply create a campaign as you usually do.

Choose the campaign objective that aligns with your goal. Then, when you’re creating the ad set, scroll down to Custom Audiences. This is where you target the remarketing audience lists you’ve just created.

Note that you can also choose to exclude certain lists.

And another tip, unless your audience size is very huge, I suggest that you don’t set too many targeting. In other words, if your audience is small, just choose the necessary targeting like country, age, gender and language. This is because every new targeting you add will only narrow the pool of audience.

Also, you don’t have to use those custom audience lists you’ve created earlier. You can also remarket to people who are fans of your Facebook page. Just scroll down to Connections and choose to target people who like your Page.

Whatever targeting you’ve decided on, you should be able to run both Facebook and Instagram ads. Just choose the placements that you want your ads to appear on.

Rather than sticking to one fixed targeting and audience list based on your assumptions, I recommend that you experiment with various targeting and audience lists. This way, you’ll get data on what works and what doesn’t. The insights you gain will also help you to optimize your remarketing campaigns. You could also take the experiments further by running A/B tests on the ad copy, banner image, call-to-action button and more.

Now It’s Your Turn

And you’re done!

Set a daily budget and retarget your customers as well as potential customers.

If you encounter any issues while setting up the Facebook or Instagram remarketing campaign, let me know. I’ll try my best to help~

You can attend classes like Facebook Marketing For Small Businesses, Creating Effective Paid Ads On Facebook and Hype Your Brand On Instagram to get more Facebook and Instagram marketing tips. Or simply check out CreativeLive free online classes and watch streaming broadcasts! There are online courses at Fiverr Learn too~

Also, bear in mind that your ad creatives play a key role in arresting your target audience’s attention. Do consider using tools like Canva to create stunning images for your Facebook and Instagram ads.

If you have marketing budget or prefer spending time on more important business matters, you can consider hiring a social media marketing expert from Fiverr instead. There are also top-rated professionals from Fiverr Pro who are hand-vetted for stellar quality and service.