Retargeting Shows Promise With Facebook Advertising
July 1, 2015
There is something virtually every online marketer knows: their leads are on Facebook.
It’s pretty obvious. According to Alexa, Facebook is the second most visited website in the world, second only to Google. It’s the Internet’s social hub.
However, being the social hub has not translated into being an advertising hub. On the contrary, the social nature of Facebook stymies advertising. Up till now, most Facebook ads made as smooth a connection to buyers as a salesperson breaking into a pitch at a backyard barbeque.
When people are sharing with friends, they don’t want to be sold to. Facebook’s staggering popularity as a way to connect socially made leads easy to find, but not where they were receptive to advertisements.
Retargeting Enters Your News Feed
Facebook advertisers needed to slip relevant advertisements into people’s social experience in a way that didn’t make them feel like advertising targets.
This is the goal of native advertising, which are advertisements that look “native” to the editorial content they appear in. Somewhat like old newspaper advertorials, it’s a promotional that looks like just another news article.
And native advertising has a perfect home in the Facebook news feed. When blended with retargeting, it’s relevant while barely visible as an ad.
Here’s how it works:
First, a sales lead visits a retailer website, shopping and browsing. They don’t buy anything, but the website places a cookie on their browser that tracks what they did and where.
Now you use Facebook retargeting so that an ad will display in the lead’s news feed, looking native, like just another post from a friend.
For example, I recently did some browsing for snowboard coats. Suddenly, this “ad” showed up in my news feed:
Notice this ad even shows that one of my friends has “liked” the company page.
As I’m scrolling through my news feed, the ad is another post – not really intruding. Furthermore, it’s relevant to me personally because I am in the market for a new snowboarding coat. The enticing free shipping offer motivates me to go back and buy.
The personalization of retargeting combined with effective native advertising techniques looks like a promising way for advertisers to reach the coveted Facebook audience.
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