Retargeting: Challenging But Important
Retargeting helps convert people who've abandoned your site or app into customers. According to AdRoll, only, "2% of shoppers convert on the first visit" to a site. But what about the other 98%? Retargeting can get those potential customers back by tracking them and displaying your targeted ads to them as they journey around the Web or social media sites.
Note: if you're not sure about the basics of retargeting please check out our post Retargeting in 2016: What you Need to Know for more information. It will give you the basics of retargeting and how you can get started with your own campaigns.
Planning a retargeting campaign can be challenging - and we've made a free tool to help make that process much easier.
Beware Ad Fatigue
Retargeting campaigns generally take a longer time to run than their normal social or direct advertising campaign counterparts. Why? With a retargeting campaign you generally don't want to show as many ads as possible in as short a time as possible to generate conversions. Those folks targeted in a retargeting effort have already taken an action on your site or within your app and abandoned. Hammering them with tons of ads for your campaign across the Web and on social isn't going to result in high conversion rates! Ad fatigue is a very real thing; no one wants to see your ads plastered on every site they visit. Limiting impressions to a few per day is a good rule of thumb.
Budgets are Hard to Estimate
But limiting impressions to what should already be a focused, segmented list means that it takes much longer to burn through a retargeting budget compared to a traditional display or social advertising campaign. You need to allocate enough money and time to ensure that enough of your targets see your ads; moreover, that you give the campaign enough time to run while limiting the number of ad impressions each target sees in a given time period.
So how much money should you allocate?
How our Free calculator can help
We find that there's a single number that can help determine this: the number of unique visitors to the page(s) you're dropping pixels on for your retargeting. The more visitors, the more money you should allocate. Simple as that.
This is where our free ad retargeting calculator comes in.
Our calculator can take that single number and give you:
- Optimal budget you should allocate to the campaign (and budget tiers showing you how spending less will affect your outcomes)
- Estimated impressions of the ads you'll see in the campaign
- Expected clicks on the ads you use
We've based this calculator's results on our efforts running hundreds of these campaigns over the years in multiple industries, both on Facebook and the Web.
➜ Deep Dive: How to Set Up the Facebook Pixel for Retargeting
Best of all, it's free.
Give it a try, and let us know what you think. We're always making improvements!
