Which Facebook Remarketing Audience Has the Best ROI? Here’s What One Company Found

If you're using Facebook ads to promote your business, there are several ways you can segment custom audiences.

You could focus on people who've engaged with your Facebook page recently.

Or, you could target people who subscribed recently to your email list, or who've downloaded an ebook from your website.

But among these types of audiences…

What groups of people are the most likely to convert?

This month, AdEspresso's monthly case study focused on this question. They compared three different remarketing audiences to find out which had the lowest CPA (cost per acquisition).

The ads prompted users to sign up for a free trial of AdEspresso's software, and directed them to a signup form.

For the experiment, they set up a daily budget of $30.

The experiment ran for 21 days, bringing the total cost to approximately $500.

Their initial hypothesis was that among the three custom audiences, the people who had downloaded their ebook and signed up for their newsletter would be the most likely to convert on the offer.

Here's what they found.

Test Results

If you haven’t yet made your guess, do it now: Which one of these three remarketing audiences had the lowest cost-per-acquisition and cost-per-click?

People who had engaged with our Facebook Page posts in the past 7 days

People who had downloaded our eBooks or subscribed to other offers in the past 7 days

People who had visited our website in the past 7 days

Here are the results:

[image source: AdEspresso]
Just as we hypothesized, the retargeting audience of 7 Day Leads (eBook downloaders) had the lowest cost-per-acquisition.

The remarketing audience of 7 Days Website Visitors (CPA: $4.618) had a 71.4% higher cost-per-free-trial than 7 Day Leads (CPA: $2.693).

The 7 Day Engagement audience had the highest CPA of $5.801.

This means that the remarketing audience of 7 Day Leads (CPA: $2.693) outperformed the audience of 7 Days Website Visitors (CPA: $4.618) by 171% and the audience of 7 Day Leads by 215% (CPA: $5.801).

[image source: AdEspresso]
Regarding the CTR, the 7 Day Engagement audience (CTR: 0.371%) had a 90% higher CTR than 7 Day Website Visitors (CTR: 0.195%). The 7 Day Leads audience had the highest CTR of 0.517%.

[image source: AdEspresso]
Based on our findings, it can be said that the retargeting audience of leads outperformed the rest. That may be because these people have already visited our website and read our content, making them warm leads.

It must be noted that the 7 Days Website Visitors was by far our largest remarketing audience, including 5 times more people as other Custom Audiences and resulting in over 80% of the conversions.

When looking at the number of conversions, one could also argue that each Custom Audience returned good results:

7 Day Leads: 9 conversions at the Avg. CPA of $2.693

7 Day Engagement: 8 conversions at the Avg. CPA of $5.801

7 Days Website Visitors: 85 conversions at the Avg. CPA of $4.618

In all cases, the cost-per-acquisition was lower than in our other campaigns targeting cold leads. This said, we recommend that you also experiment with new Facebook audiences, especially when retargeting warm leads.