A combination of cold PPC adverts and organic traffic from sources such as search, social, and referrals will drive new users to your site. And, if you continually create high-quality content and distribute it using systems like the ones we teach and use at Audience Ops, your new visitor traffic should improve over time.
The latter two steps of this procedure are intended to retain and re-engage those visitors. The goal is, of course, to convert them into repeat visitors, subscribers, leads, and, eventually, customers.
As previously said, a significant amount of people will never opt-in to your email list or become leads on their first visit. That doesn’t always mean they weren’t interested or turned off (after all, what drew them there in the first place?). Perhaps they didn’t have enough time, maybe they got distracted, maybe they weren’t prepared… It doesn’t make a difference.
What matters is that you invite them to return to your site for a second look or to view additional material that they may have missed on their first visit.
This can be performed by using retargeting advertising. The fundamental concept is to show advertisements to people who have recently visited your website.
Please keep in mind that you can only run Facebook retargeting ads if you have the Facebook pixel installed on your website. This enables you to construct a list of visitors to whom adverts will be shown later.
Even if you aren’t ready to start running sponsored ads today, this week, or even this month, you should install your Facebook pixel as soon as possible! It’s free, but building such retargeting lists can take some time, so don’t put it off.
The great thing about retargeting ads is that you can construct an evergreen series of them. Consider it analogous to an email autoresponder, however, instead of sending a series of emails, you show the person a series of advertisements.
On Facebook, you can set a “window” of up to 180 days. That is, you can retarget those who have recently visited your website! However, we noticed in our tests that the more recently someone visited our site, the more likely they are to click on a retargeting ad.
The cost per click is much reduced within the 14-day period. This makes sense because the more recently they visited, the more probable it is that they will remember us and click on our ad.
Here’s an example of a retargeting “sequence” that I designed for us:
- 0 – 7 days after their visit:
- Show an advertisement for our main lead magnet, a recorded video workshop.
- 8 to 14 days following their visit:
- Show an advertisement for an important article.
- 15 to 21 days following their visit:
Show promotion for our secondary lead magnet, our drip email course.
- 22 to 28 days following their visit:
- Display an advertisement for a related article.
- 29-35 days following their visit:
- Display an advertisement for a related article.
There are no hard and fast rules in this case. I encourage you to try new things and make adjustments. Experiment with a lower or higher number of days in each phase. Experiment with various articles and lead magnets. Your retargeting ad combination will likely differ from mine and the next company’s.
Targeting
You’ll need to develop distinct Facebook Custom Audiences and ads for each stage of your retargeting sequence. These will, of course, be based on recent website visits.
It is vital to “exclude” specific people from these tailored audiences. You most likely do not want to expose your advertisements to current customers. Anyone who is already in your sales leads funnel should probably be excluded. You may also want to leave out all of your email subscribers because you can communicate with them via email (more on that in the following step).
Keeping your Facebook Custom Audiences in line with your existing lists of customers, prospects, and subscribers may be tricky. A few software applications developed to manage this are worth looking into. However, I’ve simply had my virtual assistant update my custom audiences on a weekly basis with the exact criteria that I want.
Action Items:
- Install your Facebook Pixel on your website (right now!) if you haven’t already!
- Create Facebook Custom Audiences for different time periods since your website visit.
- Your tailored audiences should not include customers, leads, or subscribers.
- Create a retargeting ad series.
- Tweak and experiment over time.
