Something’s been frustrating me for the past several weeks. I see some very good marketing people making a simple mistake over and over again.
It’s an item that can be fixed quickly and easily with an added step on marketers’ checklists before they send people to any web page.
What are they not doing? They aren’t placing any tracking pixels on their websites—not from Facebook and not from Google.
How do I know? I have a pixel checker in my browser that I use to test clients’ pages, but it works on all pages. When I go to a page it shows if there is a tracking pixel on the page. I’m in the habit of looking at it on all pages I go to. Many of the pages I go to don’t have one.
When I ask, and I have sent emails to some of these people asking, I receive many different answers:
• I didn’t think of it.
• I wasn’t planning on using retargeting.
• I don’t need to do that for this page. I have their email addresses.
• It takes too much time to set up.
All of these are terrible excuses. You’ll overcome the first excuse by reading this article. After that, you have to change your plans slightly when you’re setting up a new campaign to improve your results.
First, let me tell you what retargeting is for those of you who don’t know. It’s the ability to reach the people who have come to your website after they leave.
It looks like this. You go to a web page to look at an item or read about something that interests you. I was recently checking out a new laptop. So I went to Dell’s page, a favorite of mine, and HP’s page. A short time later I was scrolling through my Facebook page and I saw an ad for Dell laptops. I’d been retargeted.
This can also happen on web pages. Many web pages sell space to the Google Display network. I see ads from Dell here as well as on YouTube videos. This happens with all products, and you can participate, too.
They may have come to your web page from anywhere; it doesn’t matter. They may come from a link in an email, a Facebook post, a tweet, an organic Google search, a paid Google ad, a paid Facebook ad, a friend, a printed ad, a radio ad—you get the idea.
What happens is that people creating web pages overlook all of this traffic that they can retarget. Most people think of using retargeting when they are setting up a campaign to sell something online, but they overlook all of the other traffic for which retargeting can be profitable.
When I’m setting up Facebook campaigns for clients, most of them are all over the idea of retargeting. They want to be able to reach people who come to their sites and don’t buy or leave any contact information.
What they overlook is the ability to retarget traffic that comes to their blogs or websites other ways.
You don’t have to be using a formal campaign to build an audience.
If you’re reading this on my blog, you’ve been pixeled. If you’re reading it in an email, I have to get you to click on a link to my blog to pixel you.
It doesn’t hurt; you don’t even know it happens.
I can then reach you about other information that I think you may find useful.
Watch for next week’s article and I’ll expand on what you can do with all these audiences you create.
What about the people who say they don’t need to use retargeting because they have the email addresses of the people they are sending to a page.
My answer is that retargeting can help you reach people in a different way. In an earlier blog article I talked about the danger of having only one way to reach your audience.
As you know, the open rate of your emails is not 100%, not even if you’re only sending to family and friends. They’re busy, too.
With a retargeting pixel, you can easily reach people who have expressed interest in your products and services. You don’t have to guess.
All in all, retargeting is a powerful tool for all businesses that have websites. It can be set up fairly easily by your web designer.
When you want to use these audiences, you do have to pay to run ads to them, – however, you don’t have to pay to start creating the audiences.
Facebook will tell you how many people you have in your audience. If you don’t feel it’s big enough to target, you don’t have to run an ad. But if you want to test it and the audience is less than 1000, $1 per day will reach a significant percentage over a month.
If you’re using your website for selling, you NEED to be creating a retargeting audience. If you want help setting one up, my 1-2-1 Facebook Strategy Session is perfect for this. For a one-time fee, I can get you going with Facebook retargeting. Go to gosocialexperts.com/coaching for more information and to schedule a time to talk.
Click here to find out more about the Facebook pixel checker. It will take you to a Facebook help page with information about the pixel checker and a link to download it, if you choose.
Have a great day!