How To Turn Abandoned Shopping Carts into Successful Sales

Old-school 20th century marketing and advertising usually involved casting a pretty wide net.

The internet has dramatically revolutionized the entire discipline of marketing, allowing for unprecedented levels of specific audience targeting.

These amazing new capabilities have led to the rise of what's known as “behavioral marketing” — tailoring your marketing messages to the actions that a specific user has taken.

Things like cookies, search histories, and browsing histories from users provide a goldmine of data about where they are in the buyer's journey, helping you hone in on possible conversions and snag the sale every time.

One way of leveraging user data for marketing is retargeting, both on Facebook and in Google PPC ads.

You can find potential customers who've already expressed interest in your brand, then reach out the them with the right messaging at the right time to inspire them to make a purchase.

A recent post from Kissmetrics offers a succinct step by step guide to how to implement retargeting for both Google and Adwords.

Retargeting

Retargeting and remarketing take into consideration the pages and products you’ve viewed, and then show them again even if you’re not on the original website. Both Google and Facebook offer retargeting options in their respective advertising platforms. You’ll need to think about which segment of your audience you want to retarget, and what kind of offer(s) you want to present to them.

How to Set Up Ad-Based Retargeting

To Set Up Retargeting in Google Adwords

Sign into your Adwords account

Click on Campaigns and click the +Campaign button

Select “Display Network Only” (click here if you want to set up a remarketing campaign for the Search network)

Leave “Marketing objectives” option selected and check “Buy on Your Website”

Enter your campaign name, bidding strategy and budget

Click Save and Continue

Enter your ad group name and bid

Under the option “Choose how to target your ads” click “interests and remarketing”

In the “Select a category” drop down menu, choose “Remarketing Lists” and then click Set Up Remarketing
At this point, Adwords will create a remarketing tag for you. You can send it to yourself or your developer along with instructions on how to add it to your website. If you have Google Analytics running, there’s a checkbox to “use the tracking code that’s already on your website” instead.
Adwords starts you off by creating an “All Visitors” list, so you don’t have to have a remarketing list already made up. When you’re just starting out, this list includes anyone and everyone who has visited pages on your site with the remarketing tag.

Next, enter your ad group name and bid. You’ll see the “All Visitors” list added to your ad group under the “Remarketing lists” tab

Then simply click Save and Continue to start creating your ads, or Skip ad creation to do so later. It’s a good idea to create both text and image ads in various sizes so that you’ll have an ad ready to show no matter what other pages your ideal customer visits.

To Set Up Retargeting in Facebook

Login to your Facebook Ad manager and choose Audiences

Click on Create Audience and choose Custom Audience. For this example, we’ll retarget people who have already visited your site.

Under “How do you want to create this audience?” choose Website Traffic

Choose your target audience from the dropdown menu. You can target a wide range of users, including
Anyone who visits your site
People who visit certain pages
People who visit certain pages but not others
People who haven’t visited after a set amount of time
A custom combination of your own choosing

Then, you’ll simply get your pixel code and you’re ready to start retargeting.
As a side note, if you don’t yet have a Facebook pixel code, you’ll need one in order to accurately track visitors for Facebook retargeting. Here’s a step by step guide from Facebook on how to do this.

In order to get the most momentum out of your retargeted Adwords and Facebook ads, you’ll want to plan your campaign accordingly. Who do you want to target? Create an ad that appeals to that specific segment. For example, people who looked at a specific product and possibly added it to their cart, but didn’t make a purchase may benefit from a retargeted ad offering a discount or free shipping.