More than 90% of people who visit your website the first time will not purchase your product. In reality, that number is likely higher.

And most likely, a percentage of those put your product in the cart and went to check out. What happened and what can you do about it?

You have probably heard about “remarketing” or “retargeting.” If not, you’ve certainly seen it. After visiting a site, ads may follow you around for a while reminding you of the site or the products you viewed.

Sure, it can be a little creepy
a site stalking you as you go to other sites. Imagine in the real world someone following you around wherever you go for days to remind you to make a purchase. Can you say restraining order?

Online, of course, it’s a lot less creepy and there are certain products/services that can’t take advantage of this tactic because of that.

As a marketer, however, there’s a reason why you want to master retargeting. It is a very powerful strategy to improve sales and conversions on your website. In fact, for many of our clients this can be one of their most profitable campaigns. (If you aren’t getting sales, you are likely doing something wrong.)

One of the more effective ways to retargeting to another level is by targeting only those people who have shown interest in your product and added it in the cart but did not make it to the checkout page.

More than 50% of the customers who add items in the cart will not proceed further to the payment or check out page. You can imagine the amount of opportunity you are losing by letting them go away without making them take the next step in converting it to a sale. This is where retargeting can help you.

 

Why cart abandonment happens

There are multiple reasons for users to not complete the checkout process. Following are some of them.

  1. Trouble during payment because of credit/debit card issue.
  2. Extra charges like shipping and taxes.
  3. Looking for coupons online to get a discount.
  4. Distracted by external sources.
  5. Bad internet connection.
  6. Waiting for approval of another person.
  7. Too long and complicated checkout process.
  8. Looking for product reviews.
  9. They don’t trust your site.
  10. It’s a high ticket item and they are still warming up to the purchase.

Overcoming more and more of those obstacles, objections and anxieties can help drive up your conversion rates. Despite all the testing and fixes to your checkout process, sometimes winning the moment of truth – the moment they are ready to make that purchase – only happens after they leave your site. To reduce the number of cart abandonments, you need to nudge them through the sales process.

 

Retargeting your abandoned customers on Facebook

There are many platforms you can use to retarget your abandoned cart user. For our clients we often start with Google AdWords remarketing. In this post you will learn how to do it with Facebook, which is one of the largest social media platform with an audience of more than 2 billion active users. Probability of your customer using facebook is very high compared to other social media platforms.

If this is the first time you’re doing Facebook ads then we recommend you create an account on Facebook business manager. You will get access to Facebook ads manager, power editor, custom audience creation, events creation, and many other advanced features in Facebook business manager.

 

Facebook Pixel

You need to understand about the Facebook pixel before proceeding to retargeting campaigns. Because it is impossible to do retargeting without it. The first thing you should do as soon as creating Facebook business manager account is to add the pixel on your website.

The FB pixel is a tiny piece of code which must be added on all of your pages before following the steps in this post. It will track user behavior on your website and help create audiences, events and goals.

You can find pixel on the top menu inside of business manager.

 

Following is the 2-steps guide to create cart abandonment ad campaign on Facebook.

Step 1: Create an audience

This is the most crucial part of this retargeting campaign. That is, creating audience who have abandoned your cart without making a purchase.

Login to your Facebook business manager and visit “Audiences” tab on the top mega-menu as shown in the below image.

 

 

Next, click on “Create custom audience.”

You will see the pop-up where it will show different types of custom audiences which you can create like Custom file, website traffic, and App activity.

You need to select website traffic among all the options.

Now you will see the following screen. In the next step you select “People who visited specific web pages.”

 

Now enter the product URLs which you want to track by selecting “URL equals to” as shown below.

This indicates that we are tracking users who have visited your product page. Since our goal is not limited to normal visitors but to track cart abandoned users, you have to add the cart URL, as well.

Click ‘+ and also’

and enter the cart URL as shown in the below image.

 

Well done if you have completed the above two steps. The game is not completed yet. Now you have to exclude users who have successfully purchased your product. It doesn’t make sense to showing ads to people who are already your customers (unless you are doing some cross-selling or up-selling of something they might also purchase).

Click on “Exclude” button at the bottom right of the pop-up as shown in above image and enter the “Thank you” or “Confirmation” Page URL. This is the page where user lands when they successfully complete the purchase of your product.

Give a name to your audience and click on “Create audience.”

If you have more than one product on your ecommerce store or website then create multiple audiences.

 

Step – 2: Strategically Creating the Ad

Now that you have successfully created custom audience for cart abandoned users, you have wait for some time so that audience will build in the the timeframe you have selected.

After having enough audience built, you can create the ad focusing about the respective product, the site or even a promo.

Since this is an audience who has already shown interest in your product, write ad copy that entices or pushes them to take the next step in the buying process.

 

A/B Testing

Average users get exposed to huge number of ads every single day. You have to be unique and make the ad copy as personal as possible. Remind them about the items waiting in their cart and think about giving them a special limited time coupon code they can use.

Creating Ad campaigns is not a one time task. You have to constantly check what is working and what is not working. Especially if it’s an advanced campaign like cart abandonments.

Try different ad copies and Call to Actions. Test videos ads, image ads, and carousel ads and see which one is performing better. Some products convert well with video and some don’t. Let the data be your guide. As an agency, we are always testing. We never stop. The more you test, the more you will profit.

And there’s no better audience to test with than the one was only a moment away from purchasing with you.