[xitoxic]

Running an e-commerce/Shopify store with a lot of visitors or add to carts but limited sales?

FB Retarget Ads are your #1 solution.

In 90% of cases, retargeting ads will give the most ROAS (Return on Ad spend) on your Facebook ads.
So if you are not setting up retargeting ads the proper way, you are literally leaving money on the table.

Some background about my experience with FB ads
I started doing Facebook ads initially to promote my freelance graphics business and after a lot of testing/researching, I managed to run some decent campaigns that gave me new leads and potential customers. After some success, I thought I'd give a try to Shopify and e-commerce.

I started with the regular dropship model (shipping products from aliexpress) and took my store to about 24k in less than 2 months with only Facebook adverts.


The key thing to note here is that I just had only 1 refund from a total of 680 orders which is even less than 0.1%.
The dropshipping model usually has about 6-10% of returns. You can imagine the level of trust I setup within my customers

Coming back to Retargeting tutorial:
Retargeting is basically advertising your products again to the someone who visited your store or added your products into the cart but didn't make the purchase. A survey showed that only 3% of the visitors convert in their first visit, so you cannot just leave the other 97% as you have already paid for their clicks.

The strategy:
For the sake of this tutorial, I will be assuming that you already have traffic on your store, with pixel installed in your website.

If you are dropshipping with FB ads, you always want to promote your product with a video ad, they always convert better than the images.

You have to Create retargeting audiences once you have about 1000+ visitors who viewed the content of your product page.

(You can create many type of custom audiences, from engagement audiences like 95% video viewers to user behaviour audiences like people who added to cart or initiated checkout. In this tut i have worked with view content audiences)

How to create an audience for retargeting

On your Facebook business manager click the hamburger menu on the top left



Click > Audiences



then Click > Create Audience > Custom Audience



Click website traffic

Now let's assume we want to run retargeting ads for a product called "MOOD-SETTING MOON" from bluecrate.com (It's one of their top sellers)
The product URL is https://bluecrate.com/products/mood-setting-moon
and we want this ad to be shown to people who have viewed content in last 15 days but did not purchase.

So, the settings will look like this

Name the audience in the textbox below and click "Create Audience"

Tip: Use proper naming conventions when creating custom or lookalike audiences
for this audience, I will name it "MoodSettingMoon - 15Day VC - NoPUR"
VC = view content
NoPUR = No purchase
A formatted naming convention saves your time when you are working with hundreds of audiences.

Anyways, after creating the audience facebook will show the status as "Populating audience"
It takes somewhere between 1-3 hours to update the audience and the status will be shown as "Ready"

like this



We are done with creating the custom audience, now it's time to create the campaign, adset and ad copy.

Click the hamburger menu on the top left and go to "Ads manager"

Create a new campaign and set the market objective as "Conversions"



Give a name to the campaign and click Continue.

Now, time to make the adset.
Give a name to the adset, make sure you follow the proper naming convention
I am naming this adset "MoodSettingMoon-15DayVC-Retarget"

Select the conversion as "Purchase"

The icon will show green if your pixel already recorded any sale on your website.
If it's showing red that means your pixel has not recorded any sale yet.
Just select Purchase even if it's showing as red.

Next the audience tab
click the dropdown box where it says Custom Audience and select the audience that we just created in the previous step.



Select the location as "Worldwide" region and Keep the age 18-65+ with All as gender selection.
basically you don't want to filter any visitors that have already shown interest in your product.

Keep detailed targeting empty and UNCHECK expand interests



next is placements
Keep this set to Automatic Placements because we want our ad to be shown everywhere to a warm audience.
They have shown interest, they just want a little push so they can pull the trigger and complete the purchase.



Budget and Schedule
Keep the budget at $5/day only because the retargeting audience is very limited so you don't need a big budget for this adset.

Conversion window
7 days click or 1 day view

Don't change any other setting and click Continue

Now time to create the Ad copy

Alright, to promote the product I recommend a video ad completely but I've personally experienced that showing same video ad to
cold audience (the normal campaign) and the warm audience (the retargeting campaign) doesn't really work well.

So for retargeting i usually go for a Carousel ad, where you can showcase the pictures in a slider with features written in bottom.
don't worry i will show you how to create one.

select Carousel Ad in format



Text for the ad
Ad copy plays a very important role in fb ads. Start your ad copy by thanking the visitor for checking the product, then you can give them a free coupon code.
End the ad copy with some scarcity like i did with this ad and a clear CTA (Call to action) which is Buy Now in this example.



You can use the same ad copy that i am using here, it has worked well for my dropshipping store.

This is how it will look on smartphones where most of your customers will come from



Don't touch any other setting below, just Click Confirm and you are done.

There you go, you have successfully setup the visitors view content retargeting,
now you can use the similar strategy for the users who added to cart but didn't purchase.

Just make sure you give at least 15% discount to the visitors who added to cart, they need a very little motivation and this usually works.

With this similar strategy one of my retargeting adset yielded a Return of ad spend (ROAS) of 13.41



The currency of my ad account is in INR. The amount spent roughly is $113 USD and total made back is $1516 USD.

This is the power of retargeting.

I hope you learned something with this comprehensive case-study + tutorial.
Go ahead and apply these strategies to your stores, they are very simple but really effective.

Another way you can retarget customers who abandoned checkouts is by sending them email flows with offers and scarcity.
I have recovered a lot of abandoned carts and turned them into buyers with an abandonment protector app



I might create another tutorial specifically about abandoned email strategy if people are interested.

Let me know if you have any questions about the strategy or if you want to learn some more advanced strategies like scaling and manual bidding.

Keep grinding. Good luck everyone :)

[Great Eight]

Nice tutorial, lad! Thanks for sharing, mate!

[xitoxic]

Nice tutorial, lad! Thanks for sharing, mate!

Thanks for the kind words :)

[Justin]

This seems pretty nice and it really inspires me to create better ads in the future. Thank you.

[Malaise]

really nice tutorial thanks for sharing!

[xitoxic]

I'm glad that you guys liked the content. Fb ads is hard to begin with. Once you start getting data to ANALYZE, it becomes easier.

[kisiludrew]

Awesome share mate..Also great to see you having such kind of success ...Would love to have a read of the email follow up.
Cheers.

[xitoxic]

Awesome share mate..Also great to see you having such kind of success ...Would love to have a read of the email follow up.
Cheers.

Thanks for your reply.

Yeah, I will surely make a complete tutorial on strategies to recover abandoned carts.

[Dеceived]

Really nice guide. Currently working on my own shopify store and will be following this to get started with advertising! 🤝

[xitoxic]

Really nice guide. Currently working on my own shopify store and will be following this to get started with advertising! 🤝

Sure thing. I am happy that It helped.

[xitoxic]

This will help someone out in the 4th Quarter that has already started.

Good luck bois

[kisiludrew]

Thanks for your reply.

Yeah, I will surely make a complete tutorial on strategies to recover abandoned carts.

Thanks,looking forward to it.

[ZeekHD]

Nice tutorial. thanks for sharing this!

[James Burnham]

Is bluecrate.com yours? Because I see that url in the pictures of the ads manager

[xitoxic]

Is bluecrate.com yours? Because I see that url in the pictures of the ads manager

Nope, just using it as an example