The Truth about Facebook Retargeting
Now, one of the big things that I want to tell you is it's not that retargeting is necessarily a bad idea. However, retargeting is basically a luxury problem. And that's the case for three reasons.
Number one, retargeting can make your Facebook ROAS look great, but if you're runnig email or a search or any other platform, the more you rely on Facebook retargeting, the more likely that every sale you make is actually taking credit for something else. So if you make a sale, Facebook might get credit, but your email team might, and your search might.
Just because you're hitting that person repeatedly doesn't mean that that's the ad, or the resource, or the position that gets the person to take the click to get them across the finish line. So number one reason why we retargeting is a luxury problem is because if you have any sorts of a multi-channel marketing approach, basically you're trying to lean into Facebook taking credit for more and more work, and it does not necessarily increase the amount of revenue that you get.
Number two, Facebook is already doing your retargeting for you. Now this is a big thing that I think so many people fundamentally misunderstand. Facebook is already doing your retargeting for you. If you notice, if you haven't gone into the frequency section on your columns, you'll see that it is never 1.0. Meaning, Facebook is showing your ad to the same person more than once even if at broad, which means, Facebook is retargetting people even at broad, because it's showing that person that ad repeatedly.
Now remember, Facebook's objective is to show people content to keep them on the platform. So their other objective is to also help you make sales based on the ads on the platform. So they really try to take your content and show it to the people that are most likely to receive it positively. Now when you target broad, it doesn't mean that Facebook is showing it to just anybody, it means that you're letting Facebook show it to anybody that they think will react positively.
Now, between you and me, who do you think is going to react more positively? Somebody that has never ever heard of you any day in their life, or the person that added to cart yesterday, and is back online today? Fact is, that person that added cart yesterday is in your broad audience right now, unless you exclude them. And I'm not saying you should get into exclusions.
What I'm getting at is your broad audience is already doing your retargeting for you. And this is another reason why honestly, the concept of a retargeting ad versus a prospecting ad is also total bullshit. Just have the ads that get the job done and let them see anybody anywhere in the funnel, because every ad set, every audience is a retargeting audience. Even if you've excluded all of your retargeting audiences, you didn't exclude people that were shown an ad before, you can't do that.
Even if you have gone so far to get every exclusion for every single thing, and you're saying my prospecting has to convert the person on the very first thing, "Hello, buy this thing." You are proposing marriage knocking on the door on the very first date, and that's how you're going to run your business, which by the way is a terrible idea. The point here is, Facebook is doing it already so you don't have to. Which brings us really to the third biggest piece.
It's not that retargeting has no value, there is value to it. And this value really comes after you've already gotten a large enough saturation at broad, and you're noticing diminishing returns at bringing in new customers. And you're able to really evaluate that my pain point is somewhere in my middle or bottom funnel. Facebook retargeting for me is actually doing so much of it, then I need to take control. So you are taking back control because Facebook's doing too good of a job at it, and it's actually preventing you from growing your business.
If all of your ad dollars are spent retargeting everybody, eventually there's nobody new to retarget. In these cases, it might be worthwhile to introduce some targeting and some exclusions to force money up the funnel. Now between you and me, that generally happens at thousands of dollars a day in ad spend. If you're at $100, or $500, unless your product is like $3 to make a sale, odds are you are not reaching nearly enough for people that are already aware of your business to really need to install a level of complexity.
Now the second side of this is that, it's also incredibly expensive. Now I know you're saying, "Well, no Charley you don't know you're talking about. My retargeting ads get a customer for so much cheaper." But that's an added cost to get that customer. So it's not just retargeting audience spend, it's also the prospecting audience spend. So it's not, "Hey, well I spent $50 to get a no on prospecting, but I got them for $3 on retargeting so my customer acquisition cost is only three bucks." No, it's bigger than that.
Because you have to spend money to make them into this audience and then spend additional money to convert them here. In addition to that, if you're going to get your retargeting effort out of the learning phase, that's additional money. And that's going to make your prospecting dumber, because you're not able to give your prospecting or your broad full-funnel campaigns the whole picture. So they're inherently seeing worse inventory at a lower level of data, which makes them dumber so you're making the choice to make Facebook stupid.
In addition to that, if you can't get that retargeting audiences out of the learning phase, odds are the results are not going to be very consistent. And if you are making different ads for it, now you have to test all of those ads. So do you have the time and money and the runway in your business to prove out which retargeting audiences is right? To prove out that not only is that a good retargeting audience, but it actually brings incremental sales volume to your business and allows you to scale the top of the funnel to support it.
Also, did you have the right creative for that effort? Is there the right ad for that? Is it the right offer? Is it the right landing page? You're going to treat that person completely different? Do you have the budget, the time, the sense, the know-how and the tracking and attribution in place to effectively run several businesses to sell one product? Because it is a very, very different discipline to focus purely on hitting people that already told you to fuck off or they didn't want to buy for whatever the reason was. Maybe they didn't like your product.
Maybe they didn't have a credit card on them. Maybe they were just drunk when they were clicking in the first place. Retargeting people as a whole business in and of itself. Do you have the budget, time, money, attribution, manpower, and whatever else needed to not only keep your normal business as usual, but steal resources from it while making it worse, to run a second business that hopefully is able to... For lack of a better word, act as a vampire on the first one, because collectively that's going to make all that you're doing in business better.
Now the answer to this at some point in time is yes, most businesses at Scale can figure this out. But there's a big word there, at Scale. If you can't make prospecting work for your brand, maybe going to purely retargeting is what you need because Facebook isn't where you're going to find new customers. Maybe your SEO, maybe your influencer, your affiliate, everything else is bringing you enough new traffic that you can just spend money on retargeting, and it might be a really good idea. That tends to be about 5% or 10% of overall advertisers.
My point is, for the vast majority of you out there, unless you are spending thousands of dollars a day, I highly recommend that you do not make a specific effort to spend more money, to make work far more difficult, to make Facebook dumber, to increase your workload, and your uncertainty just so that you can make the Facebook ROAS look better, because your Facebook ROAS doesn't mean shit.
What's really important is your overall store revenue, and your overall marketing spend And making your Facebook ROAS look better while not actually improving all those other metrics, doesn't do anything but boost your ego. And if you're the media buyer, it's also going to help you lose your job, because if your customer base isn't growing, you're not going to work there anymore.
Anyway, I hope that's helpful. I hope you liked it.
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