How to Use Facebook Retargeting Ads (Sequential Ads)

Using Facebook Retargeting Ads (or Facebook Sequential Ads), you can take someone who has never heard of your business before and turn them into a raving customer.

Is it quick and easy? Not at all. But if you know what you’re doing and know the best way to approach these ads, you can significantly increase your campaign’s ROAS. On that note, let’s jump right in.

What Are Facebook Retargeting Ads?

Basically, they are a series of ads that enable you to warm customers up further down your sales funnel.

You start with an audience of people who don’t know anything about your business. The first few ads don’t make any sales pitches. Instead, your focus is to get the audience familiar with your business so that when you run the 4th or 5th ad, they’re much more likely to become a paying customer. The more ads you run the warmer the audience get; the warmer the better.

You can also use Facebook retargeting ads to tell a story, where you want ads to be shown in a specific order.

Diving Into the Retargeting Ads

Remember: people that see your first ad have likely never heard of your business. At this point, the chances of them buying from you are significantly lower compared to if they were familiar with your business.

A common mistake is getting hyper-specific with Facebook targeting. With this Facebook retargeting ads strategy you don’t need to do that. As you run more sequential ads, your audience will be refined and the majority of users you target will be interested in what you’re offering.

You can also speed up this process by retargeting people who engaged with your previous Facebook Ads campaigns, who visited your site, or who watched more than 50% of your Facebook video ad. These people have already shown interest so they’re closer to becoming a customer than a cold audience will be.

1. First Sequential Ad

Your first ad shouldn’t be a sales pitch – this is incredibly important. You do, however, want the first ad to offer users some sort of value. What we’d recommend doing is sending users to a landing page or a specific blog post that you want to promote. On the page, have a content upgrade (e.g. a free ebook, cheatsheet, or checklist) that requires them to enter their email. The important thing is that you’re offering value.

Choosing your target audience shouldn’t be too difficult. Try targeting users who like a competitor’s Facebook page, or maybe even try a Facebook lookalike audience.

2. Second Sequential Ad

After your first ad has run it’s course, you’re out of the awareness stage and into the consideration stage. You’ve now got an audience who have some familiarity with your business, great! What’s next?

The next ad you run will have more of a focus on a lead magnet. Even if your first ad was created around a lead magnet, your second ad should pressure your audience more to opt-in to your lead magnet. Again, you could send them to a landing page or you could even use a Facebook lead gen form.

Why are we doing this? It’s simple. Your audience now knows who you are; they’re going to be more willing to opt-in for that lead magnet. After opting in, they’ll be far from a cold customer.

3. Third Sequential Ad

For the third Facebook sequential ad, you’re in a much better position. You’ve already run two ads, both of which will have cut out a large portion of uninterested users. Not only that, but the remaining audience are much warmer and closer to becoming paying customers.

This third ad should be pushing your audience to take an action. Have them book a call, email you relevant questions, inquire about a free trial – something that gets them to engage on a more personal level.

You’re now targeting people who have opted in to your lead magnet, the people who are showing a lot of interest every step of the way. Your third ad needs to have a bigger push on the CTA (call-to-action).

4. Next Steps

When you’ve run the third Facebook retargeting ad, you have a couple of options.

One option is to keep going and run more ads to warm up your audience even more. Like we said, the warmer you get them the more likely it is that they’ll buy from you.

On the other hand, you can make your fourth ad the sales pitch and finally try to sell your product or service.

How to Build Facebook Retargeting Ads

There are a few different ways of setting up Facebook sequential ads, but we go with the simplest way that most marketers will be familiar with.

Start by logging into your Facebook Ads Manager account and going to the Campaigns menu. Click on Create.

Creating the Campaign

Next, you need to choose an objective. Typically we go with Engagement since this encourages people to like and comment, or Video Views if we’re running a Facebook video ad.

Choose an Objective

You’ll then need to change a few settings. You don’t need to enable Campaign Budget Optimization or Create A/B Test yet, so disable those. Give your campaign a name and specify the type of engagement you want to get out of it. Click Continue to finalise setting up your Facebook retargeting ads campaign.

Campaign Details

After a Few Days...

After a few days have gone by and your ad has had some time to run, you’ll have enough engagement on that ad that you’ll be ready to run the second ad.

This time, start by going into the Facebook Ads Manager and heading to the Audience section. Click on Create Audience and select Custom Audience.

Create a Custom Audience

You’ll then be given a list of sources to choose your custom audience from. In this case, we’re going to retarget people who watched our video ad.

Custom Audience Source

This next part will differ depending on which source you chose, but you’ll have a lot of options to check out. If you choose video, you’ll be able to target people who watched a set length of your video – this can be in seconds or a percentage of the video’s length.

You can then choose which video you want the audience to be taken from, as well as which timeframe they must have watched the video within (e.g. in the last 30 days). Give your new audience a name, click Create Audience, and you’re good to go.

Finish Creating a Custom Audience

Now you can go ahead and repeat the same steps as before to create your second Facebook sequential ad. The only differences are that this time you’ll be targeting a custom audience and you’ll be pushing for more engagement.

Preparing the Rest of Your Facebook Retargeting Ads

For the rest of your ads, it’s just a matter of rinsing and repeating. After you run the second ad, you create a new custom audience based on the second ad’s viewers and further refine your target audience. Then you target that new audience with a third ad, and so forth.

Are Facebook Sequential Ads Worth It?

Yes, one-hundred percent yes. It’s almost an essential part of running Facebook Ads because if you’re making sales pitches to cold audiences, the results won’t be anywhere near if you had ran a series of Facebook retargeting ads.

There are plenty of other benefits to this strategy too, such as it helping you to find the cracks in your funnel. If you discover that only 10% of your audience watched more than 25% of your video ad, you’ll know that your content needs to be worked on. On the other hand, if you just run the sales pitch ad, you don’t get any data from this – you can’t tell where your audience is at in the sales funnel.

Best Industries to Use Facebook Retargeting Ads

A question that lots of clients ask our team is “Is this the best strategy for our industry?”, and usually the answer is yes. This is a great strategy for pretty much any industry. We recommend this strategy even more to companies who sell software, services, or high-ticket items.

"Why Can't I Just Send People to My Product Page?"

We get it – you just want to increase your sales. So, why do you have to go through all of this work, and why can’t you just show them an ad featuring your product?

If you’re still not sold on the fact that Facebook sequential ads work, think about it this way: when was the last time you saw an ad from a company you didn’t recognise and made an impulsive purchase? Likely never. This isn’t something people do very often, if ever.

You really do need to warm them up to the idea of buying from you. Get them familiar with your company, offer them some free value, then pursue sales.

Start Running Facebook Retargeting Ads with KonvertLab

This might seem like a lot to take in, and it is for those unfamiliar with Facebook retargeting ads. It’ll take weeks of running ads before you see any kind of results but overall, taking this approach is really worth your time and money.

On the other hand, you could hand off the job to an experienced team who know what they’re doing. KonvertLab is a Facebook Ads agency with years of experience, and we’re ready to grow your business’s sales beyond what you believed was possible.

All you have to do is click the button below, book a call with us, and we’ll discuss what we can do for you.

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