We all understand the power of Retargeting…or we definitely should know!

But let me back track a bit….

Before you even start to advertise on Facebook you MUST have the Facebook Pixel installed on your website.

First you need to create a Pixel in Business Manager. At this time it will give you a long number and this is the number that will be installed onto your website.

It’s like a tube that will enable your website to talk to Facebook to transfer across data when it happens.

So if anyone has made a purchase on your website from your ad, your website will communicate this back to Ads Manager and it will then report it back to you.

Then next is installing this code onto your website.

It’s quite easy to do this yourself with plug ins such as PixelYourSite (if you’re on WordPress). Otherwise if you’re unsure it’s a lot safer to get your programmer to do this for you.

Some programmers may insert code on the header or footer of each page in your website and this is another safe way of installing Pixel code on your website.

Plugins sometimes run into problems of interference with other plug in, but personally I have never experienced a problem with using plug ins (and I’ve installed a lot of Pixels on websites).

ONLY after this is done should you create a campaign that is designed to gather data for retargeting.

You can’t retarget if you haven’t installed the Pixel code onto your website.

OK so back to retargeting on a small audience…

Sometimes Facebook has trouble when you only present it with a small audience. That’s why cold audience should ideally have around 350K – 500K to start off with (as you probably know this varies a lot as some audiences can be as little as 100k and others 2-3M)

So what happens when you have only a small audience of around 300-1000 on perhaps Add to Cart?

If you have a conversion campaign with an audience this size you will often find that Facebook will “stall” and not spend your budget.

It’s because it finds it hard to find such a small audience. The algorithm is designed to find the right people in a mass audience for your product or service.

So when you present Facebook with a small audience, it basically scratches it’s head and says slowly in a confused low voice (imagine this!) “I can’t find these people so I’m going to stop looking”!!!

Then it stops looking and doesn’t spend your budget.

But this doesn’t help you if you want to target those “warm” or “hot” buyers specifically.

So what I would recommend when you have a small audience to retarget would be to try the REACH objective.

You are basically saying to Facebook “Reach as many people as you can from my audience. You don’t need to look for any particular people, just everyone in the audience”.

Now we know that EVERYONE in this audience is either “warm” or “hot” (as they have added to cart) so it really doesn’t matter who Facebook targets. They’re all a good target!

Does this make sense?

So next time you are retargeting using a conversion objective and you experience “stalling” or your results just don’t seem to be right, consider re creating another campaign with the Reach Objective.

As always, make sure you are testing everything until you are getting the results that you need.

On a final note, I have heard that Facebook has recently been stalling even with a reach function with audiences under 100, so before you start retargeting I would suggest you build a bit of data up and make sure your audiences are over 100. (again I would test this in your campaign as this may change from time to time)