A Beginner’s Guide to Remarketing & Custom Audiences

Have you ever visited a website only to notice that ads for that site seem to ‘follow’ you around the Internet? You’ve been retargeted.

Retargeting (also known as ‘remarketing’ or ‘pixel tracking’) lets you ‘tag’ visitors who hit certain pages or perform specific actions on your website, and then micro-target them with paid ads on other websites.

Custom audiences work in similar ways. Facebook will let you cross-reference segments of your e-mail list and deliver paid ads directly to those audiences—no pixel tracking required.

By contrast, lookalike audiences can contain people who haven’t yet connected with you. This approach lets you target people with profile traits and behaviors that mirror those of an existing audience cohort. For example, using lookalike audiences, you could ask Facebook to target your donor acquisition ad to people whose profiles resemble your existing donors. How cool is that?

These techniques operate outside of your web and email ecosystem while still allowing you to deliver tailored communication to specific audiences.

Three benefits of offsite segmentation

1. Reach people your email list can’t access. For example, you could retarget people who failed to complete an online donation and coax them back to your digital appeal.
2. Ease internal competition for your email list. With more than one way to reach segmented audiences, you can concurrently meet multiple program needs without exceeding your email frequency limits.
3. Increase impact by diversifying your media mix. If a supporter sees an urgent prompt appearing on multiple platforms, they’ll more readily recognize its importance.

How to get started

These techniques are only accessible through paid digital ad campaigns. However, you don’t need a big budget to get started. Facebook makes it easy to start using retargeting and custom audiences and lookalike audiences. (Bonus: it works on Instagram, too!)

From: A beginner’s guide to segmentation