MD15: Facebook Ads Retargeting With Mario Brown

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If you have a website and expect to make money from it, you should be doing Facebook ads retargeting no matter how you expect to make money from your website.

Why?

I’ll answer that with another question; How do you feel the first time you shake someone’s hand as opposed to the second time you say hi to them?

That’s right, the feeling is much warmer (assuming you like the person of course).

Well the same thing happens with web traffic, the first time someone sees your website, your brand, they will be much more skeptical about you. But after they’ve got some time to process your image in their brain, and see you again, you will become somehow familiar and there will be much less friction.

This leads to a series of benefits like increasing the engagement with your website from this people, increasing trust and reducing your costs because you will have a much higher relevance score (a score that the Facebook ad platform gives your ads and rewards you with lower costs).

What You Will Learn About Facebook Ads Retargeting

– How to set up your first “custom audience”.

– The best type of pages to target for maximum engaement.

– How and where to paste the retargeting pixel that Facebook ads provide.

– Basic ad set up that can make or brake your campaign.

– Other types of retargeting/remarketing platforms outside of Facebook.

Resources

PerfectAudience (Banner ad retargeting)

Missionpreneur (Mario’s podcast)

Fiverr (For help with the pixel)

UpWork (Same as above)

Thanks a lot for listening. Let me know how do you plan on implementing retargeting?

Transcript

 

Hey, what’s up divers? Welcome back to the show. Thank you for these couple of minutes that you’re going to give me of your life. I have a terrible sore throat right now. I’m having a hard time doing this right now but you know that feeling when you can’t even swallow? Well, that’s me right now.

Anyway, I have Mario Brown with me on this show today. We’re going to talk about Facebook Ads retargeting — one of the most powerful ways of paid advertising because you get to target people who has already landed on your website who are already familiar with you, with your face, with your brand, with whatever that you are offering, that are not cold traffic and that are going to convert way better than cold traffic advertising.

We’re going to discuss how you can start your first retargeting campaign, how to copy the little pixel that Facebook give you, how to place it — how to actually place it on your website so that Facebook starts tracking down people that come through that page. You can even target people that visit specific pages inside your website, which is what I do. At the end of this podcast, stay tuned because I’m going to tell you how I use Facebook Ads retargeting for my own websites and my own businesses.

Like I was saying, you can target people who land on a specific page inside your website so that you know what they’re interested in, you know what they’re thinking, what they’re looking for, and you can also exclude people who land on other pages like your “thank you” page. So, if people already subscribed to your list, you don’t want to target them again and waste money on clicks that are not meaningful because, obviously, they’re already on your list.

So, let’s not waste any time and let’s dive right in to the interview with Mario. Again, I want to remind you of this week’s contest where you can win a lifetime premium membership to the one and only WordPress framework, themes, and plugins with dynamic web personalization features that allow you display different versions of your website to each of your different visitors to engage them, convert more people into subscribers, and convert more subscribers into customers. If you want to participate, head on over to Missionpreneur.net/borja-contest and you’ll be able to read the guidelines for the contest right there. Again, let’s dive right into the interview with Mario.

So, Mario, welcome to the show, man. Thank you for coming. I’m so glad to have you here.

 

Mario Brown: Hey, thanks for having me. I’m excited, I’m pumped to provide some value for your audience.

 

Borja: Yeah, definitely. So, Mario, would you mind telling anyone who might not know about you a little about your business and how Facebook retargeting, which is what we’re going to talk about, has helped your business and your products?

 

Mario Brown: Yeah, sure. So, basically, I’ve been teaching for many years now. I think about — almost 9 years now — other entrepreneurs how to set up their business in terms of using online marketing strategies. I’ve helped them optimize webinars and funnels and set up their own coaching programs. I do a lot of live events so I teach that as well. To promote my own webinars, my own websites, I’m doing a podcast right now to get more readers. I’m doing, like I said, live events to get more traffic to it and help myself, my brand with name recognition. I use something that is called retargeting or in Google they call it remarketing and it’s extremely powerful and I’m excited about talking about it today and just kind of putting it together so that your audience understands how it works and how to really get the best out of it.

 

Borja: How much would you attribute retargeting to your business? Like, how much value do you see from retargeting in your business?

 

Mario Brown: Right now it’s — honestly, it’s my secret weapon and obviously after this episode it’s not so secret anymore but it’s definitely the best marketing strategy that I have in my business. Literally, I would consider it right now the best marketing strategy that I have just because you — not only do you get more revenue, more clicks and more subscribers or whatever your goal is in your business, but more importantly, you get a lot of intangibles, meaning branding, name recognition, exposure, you stay top of mind with your brand. When someone comes to your website and they don’t buy right away, now you can follow them around everywhere they go. There’s just so many benefits, it’s incredible.

 

Borja: Why do you think retargeting is so much better than other types of advertising?

 

Mario Brown: Yeah, so basically — let’s talk about really quick about what retargeting is and how it works. I think that will be super beneficial. Basically, when you go to a website and you don’t buy right away, what happens is when you go away — that say you have a sales page you, send traffic in and people don’t buy. Now you lost that traffic. Literally, it’s completely gone. So, if you spent a lot of money on Facebook traffic to send it there and they don’t buy, you lost all that traffic. It’s terrible but if you use something like retargeting, now when you send traffic to your sales page or to your webinar page, whatever it is, it’s not lost because your ad’s going to follow them everywhere.

Good example: Amazon right now, Target, McDonald’s — all those big brands, they use retargeting. Literally, if you’re listening to this right now and you go to Amazon and you look at a certain pair of sneakers or whatever it is, you will see that for the next 24 hours Amazon is going to follow you around everywhere on the internet with that exact pair of sneakers. It’s really powerful and they’re going to remind you to purchase that.

People think you have to spend thousands to do this, it’s actually super, super inexpensive and really easy to do.

 

Borja: Yeah, it’s way, way less expensive than cold traffic — than advertising for cold traffic. Definitely.

 

Mario Brown: Yeah.

 

Borja: The return on investment, I also believe is so much higher because you are targeting people who are already warm people. That brand recognition is already there and they’re ready to purchase. Maybe they’re not ready but they’re definitely warmer.

Let’s talk to that person who’s listening to us right now who says, “All right, this retargeting thing sounds good. I want to sit down and do my very first retargeting campaign.” What do they have to do? Do they have to first — I don’t know — where do they go and set it up?

 

Mario Brown: Basically, there’s two ways where you want to focus on it. If you’re listening to this, you should definitely jump on retargeting. Again, just the last point I want to talk about that is really great because if you spend, let’s say, $100 on Facebook traffic, you get so much more out of it if you have retargeting in place a because now your ads follow them around but the same as if you don’t spend money on advertising. Some people, they don’t spend money on advertising but they invest time for free traffic like blogging, article marketing — same thing, you get more leverage on your time.

Now, to answer your question, there’s two areas where you can retarget. There’s multiple areas, let me just talk about that really quick. You can retarget on Facebook so literally people are going to see your advertisements on their news feed or on the right hand side of it. That’s one important area where I recommend that you retarget.

The other one is on banners, meaning on websites. Literally, when people go to New York Times.com, Huffington Post, big websites like that, Entrepreneur.com, they’re going to see my ads shown on those websites if they were on my website — if they visited my sales page, which is powerful because now they’re going to associate your brand with something like New York Times or Entrepreneur.com, which is really, really cool.

So, you’ve got Facebook, you’ve got banners, and then another cool one is YouTube. That’s something that’s new to me, I’m just learning about it but you can also retarget people on YouTube. Literally, someone goes to your sales page and boom, they see you on Facebook, on let’s say, the New York Times and on YouTube. So it’s super, super powerful. Those are the areas.

I’m talking about this because you asked me where should they go. You kind of have to decide where you want to start. Let’s focus on Facebook. If you want to retarget on Facebook, the first thing you need is a Facebook fan page, which is really easy to do. Just go into your Facebook account right now and kick on the arrow on the upper right and just click on “Create fan page” or “Create page” and literally in three minutes, you’re going to have your page up running. It’s just a couple of clicks. You don’t even need content, you don’t need pictures, just create it. As soon as you created it, now you can officially advertise on Facebook, which is sweet. And hey, you can always — feel free to just stop me if I’m going too fast or something like that, okay?

 

Borja: No, that was fine. Don’t worry.

 

Mario Brown: Okay, good. So, that’s the first one, create the page. Now you can officially advertise. Now you again click on the little arrow on the upper right. You click on “Create Ad” and inside of that it’s going to be called the “Ads Manager.” It’s not so easy to explain if you can’t see but if you just follow along it’s actually really straightforward. Once you are in the ads manager, you click on “Audiences.” So, really easy. Facebook, fan page, create ad, then click on “Audiences”, and then “Create Audience”.

As soon as you’ve created the audience, it’s going to give you little piece of code. You put that code on your website. If you don’t know how to do it, it’s pretty straightforward. Just hire someone on Fiverr, on oDesk. They charge you five bucks to put on your website and boom, as soon as it’s on your website, now you can officially retarget all you have to do is create a couple of ads, upload some images, write a little bit of copy and boom, that’s basically it.

 

Borja: Beautiful. And they call it pixels — sorry, audience pixels, right? Facebook called them audience pixels?

 

Mario Brown: Correct. They call it a pixel, yup. It’s a piece of code. You know, I’m not a technical guy so I totally get it people right now are freaking out if this is the first time for you but literally, trust me, it is very straightforward.

 

Borja: Yeah, I agree to that. I mean, if you’re using WordPress, it’s very simple. You just copy that little piece of code that Facebook’s going to give you and log into your WordPress account to your WordPress website and where it says “appearances,” you can click there. Then it’s going to open a little — I mean, you know it’s going to happen. You then click “editor” and you’re going to see all the files. Then go to where it says “head.php”. Open that one and then search for the head tag. Right inside the head tag, you can paste that little pixel that Facebook gives you. If you don’t have WordPress, you can just go to Fiverr, oDesk, hire someone, or maybe you have a web developer.

You mentioned banners, right? I’m now inside Facebook I want to make a pause from the Facebook process for a second so that we can talk about these banners that you mentioned. Are these Google AdWords banners that we’re talking about?

 

Mario Brown: Well, not directly. I wouldn’t call it Google ad words, necessarily. The service that I use to do banner retargeting — again, it means that your banners are shown on websites — I use Perfect Audience. Now, I have no idea how that works. I just submit my ad and they make it appear in all those websites so I’m not sure if they use Google ad words. I usually don’t get into the nitty-gritty. I just — I like to take imperfect action, what I call, where it’s more of a shotgun approach. Just put out there, get some results, and I don’t really worry so much about the nitty-gritty. I use perfect audience. There’s another one called Ad Roll that you can use, but perfect audience is just a little bit easier to use, it’s more affordable, and it’s the one that I use.

 

Borja: Beautiful. Okay, let’s carry on with Facebook. So once you have your pixel up and going, what is the next thing that you do?

 

Mario Brown: Yeah, then you have to create an ad. So, literally, you take the pixel — the little piece of code, you put it on your website just like you described right now, and then all you have to do is send traffic there. That pixel — that piece of code, is going to basically remember everyone who landed on your website at now they’re building something which Facebook calls a “custom audience.” So if you send 1000 people to your website, then you have now an audience of 1000 people. You can now create and ad in Facebook, which is really straightforward. Just click on “create add,” put your image, start the ad, and boom. Now your ad is going to be shown only to those people who visited your website. The reason why that is so powerful is because they already raised their hand and said, “Yes, Mario, I’m interested in what you have.” They already clicked through to my website so they are already interested, I just have to remind them to sign-up for the webinar, or purchase the product, or whatever my call to action is.

 

Borja: Yeah, and do you exclude some pages? Like, let’s say within my website I want to target people who visit a certain page — just that page. Do you do that? Do you know how to do that?

 

Mario Brown: Yeah, I usually don’t do it just for time reasons but in Facebook they actually make it pretty easy. When you create your audience, they’re going to ask you for a URL so you can literally, in there, tell them which URL you want to retarget. The best way to explain this is Amazon. Amazon has so much traffic on Amazon.com but it doesn’t really make sense for them to retarget it but if someone goes to, let’s say, Nike Air Jordan — like, Amazon.com/NikeAirJordan — that’s a very specific page so obviously, the visitors are really interested in that pair of shoes and now you retarget them only with that shoe, for example. So, yeah sometimes I use it, but usually for time reasons because it’s just one sales page where I send them to or one webinar page, I don’t really have to have specific pages, if that make sense.

 

Borja: Right, right. Because in my case, for example, when people visit my WordPress provider — WordPress themes provider is Smartduu.com — there’s several pages there like one page for every plug-in that I offer, one page for every theme that I offer.

 

Mario Brown: Right.

 

Borja: Then there’s the actual shopping cart. So, sometimes I create my own audiences based on where people are visiting, like, what pages are visiting because if they visit one plug-in, I know that they’re interested in that plug-in or if they visit the shopping cart, I know they’re just one step away from purchasing. That’s actually the one audience of all my different target audiences that converts better because they’re almost ready to purchase.

 

Mario Brown: Right.

 

Borja: But yeah, do you have any particular ad anatomy that you use for your retargeting?

 

Mario Brown: Yeah. I mean, not really. The one thing that you want to keep in mind with retargeting is there is a couple of best practices. One of them is that you don’t want to retarget for too, too long because it’s really powerful but if you do it for like 3 or 6 months, people are going to freak out. You’re going to be annoying [Laughing] with your ads.

Borja: Yeah.

 

Mario Brown: So make sure that you do it for like 7 days, maybe 14 days, 3 weeks, but don’t do it for like 3 or 4 months. You have to give people break. Another important thing here is — just like best practices — you want to change up your colors. I, for example, never just upload a blue ad. I make sure that I have one in blue, one in red, one in pink, one in yellow so that it really stands out. There’s something called banner blindness meaning — and you might, the listener here, you might have experienced it — if you see an ad too often, at some point you start ignoring. It’s called banner blindness or banner fatigue. If you can mix of your colors, if you can mix up your copy a little bit, then you’re always going to keep your clicks high, that’s another best practice.

In terms of actually responding to your question, there is no secret that I use when I structure my ad. I usually like to have a big visual. The most important thing is that you have an image. I usually use my face because I’m the brand. So, Mario Brown, Missionpreneur, that’s the brand — it’s me. So, I make sure that I’m always in the pictures. If you’re not the brand, you can use an iStock photo, that’s totally cool that I use an image of myself. I usually use bright colors and something a little bit inspirational and a question in the headline. I like to ask questions.

 

Borja: Definitely. Questions drive — it’s like an eyebrow catcher.

 

Mario Brown: Right.

 

Borja: And it drives more clicks. And you can include a call to action with your question.

 

Mario Brown: Mm-hm, absolutely.

 

Borja: You mentioned that you shouldn’t do it for than maybe two weeks, three weeks but what if you change out your ads and what if you change up your copy and the actual content you’re driving people to? Or would you say that maybe they’re just getting tired of seeing you personally?

 

Mario Brown: Yeah, I absolutely think that they are. You can — I mean, I can tell you from when I get retargeted from different companies. Any company — big company like GoToMeeting, any of those they retarget you. For the first couple of days it’s really cool, two or three weeks. It actually really works because it reminds you, especially if there’s a free trial or special deal, it’s really powerful. But after four or five weeks, it’s like it’s getting old. So, even if you mix up the images and stuff, I would still give it a break after a couple of weeks and then may be restart it with a new book or a new offer for new special, something like that. I would definitely give it a break after a while. It will go down in terms of performance.

 

Borja: Yeah, that’s a pretty powerful insight there because perhaps you’re two months in with your ad and you start seeing impressions to drop or clicks to drop and you have no idea why that’s happening and you’re actually — your ad is going to actually backfire on you and create an effect that you don’t want, which is people to hate you for not like you — whatever. Where do you go from there? You keep — because I imagine you could retarget and retarget those who you already retargeted and then retarget those who you already retargeted, who you already retargeted so that you’re always like building up or not losing traffic — I don’t know. Where do you go from there?

 

Mario Brown: Yeah, sure. There’s a couple of things that you can do with retargeting. It depends what your goal is. If you just have a new, like myself, I just launched a podcast. If I just want to get that out there in terms of branding, I can retarget with that specifically. Let’s say you want to sell something and you have an upsell. So, let’s say you have a sales page and after someone purchases now there’s an upsell. I just want to give you a specific example of a powerful way to use retargeting. You can actually tell Facebook or any other service to not retarget someone anymore if they took a certain action, which is really powerful.

Check this out: let’s say you’re sending someone to your sales page, okay? Buy my product.com — whatever it is — and they actually buy. After they bought, it makes no sense to still retarget them, right? Because they already bought. You actually would be wasting money retargeting someone to buy the product is they already bought so what you can do is the system is going to automatically know, “, they already bought. We’re not going to retarget them anymore.” But here’s the cool thing: after they bought and they go to your upsell page where you have offer B, now you can retarget them with offer B. Automatically, the system knows, “Oh, they bought number A, or letter A, product A.” Now they went to the upsell page, they didn’t buy yet and now you retarget them only with that product, which is really cool because in your retargeting ads you can say, “Hey, only 24 hours left. Special deal is gone tomorrow.” So, you can actually use scarcity in your retargeting. That’s a really cool concept that I also wanted to share really quick with the audience. You can actually stop the retargeting strategically if they took a certain action.

 

Borja: Yup, absolutely. My audiences are going to be familiar with what you’re saying because I implement that concept in a very specific way in every website that I own. What I do is once go to my blog, maybe you sign up, you see my pop-ups, you see my sign up forms, my call to actions to subscribe to my list because the first time that you go there that’s what I want you to do, right?

 

Mario Brown: Right.

 

Borja: So you subscribe to my list, now you’re a subscriber, you’re a diver — how I called the money dive community. And then perhaps you go back to Moneydiver — to my blog — but now you don’t see a sign up form. You don’t see pop-ups. You don’t see the same call to actions because now I know you’re a subscriber and so I replaced those sign-up forms with perhaps offers or products — basically everyone knows what’s my product, which is Smartduu.com. I replace everything that previously was a sign-up form, it’s now an ad for Smartduu. That’s called personalization and that’s what, obviously, my themes do. The aim is to keep people relevant and to keep your offer is relevant to whoever is seeing them.

Not only do I do that based on whether you are a subscriber not. If you become a customer, that’s a whole different story. You no longer see the ads that you were seeing, you no longer see the sign-up forms. Now perhaps you see something else. An affiliate offer, maybe a content offer — not an offer but a content feature — or whatever it is. That’s something that people have to start embracing because we have the power of being digital which is something that off-line people doesn’t have. Can you imagine going to a store — walking in that store and maybe they recognize that you are already — somehow magically, the store recognizes that you are already a customer and it features some new products based on whatever you previously purchased. You know what I’m saying?

 

Mario Brown: Right.

 

Borja: Definitely people have to look into that concept of keeping your ads relevant. If they already purchased, don’t target them again, you’re going to waste money. So, you mentioned you recently launched a podcast. Congratulations, man. I hope you really kill it. I know you will.

 

Mario Brown: Thank you.

 

Borja: Can you mention that so people can go and check you out?

 

Mario Brown: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you came out with your podcast — it’s a big movement right now. My podcast is called “The Missionpreneur Show,” and people can check it out on iTunes if they just go to Missionpreneur.net/itunes. They can check it out, listen to it, see if they like it, subscribe. But basically the whole point is I help entrepreneurs created business that is fun, that is highly lucrative, and also truly makes a difference. I only teach things that are working right now in my business. So, retargeting, mindset strategies, webinars, live events, conversions, daily routines, eating healthy. Basically, everything that is important to me personally and that’s working in my life to help me to become more successful as an entrepreneur and in general as a human being, I talk about that on the podcast which is like four episodes per week basically.

I’m excited about it, man. This is — I’m an internet marketer or I come from the internet marketing world where everything is just so focused on just revenue and it’s cool, I’m grateful for it but I felt like “You know what, there’s more in me than just sending emails and making money,” which is great. But I feel there is more in me and I have more to share and I feel the podcast where you can reach so many people, they can listen to you when they work out in the gym, I felt it’s a great vehicle for me to launch the Missionpreneur podcast and that way inspire people to hopefully live a better life and create a better business.

 

Borja: Beautiful. Mario, who is that ideal customer that you target with your business? Who is that ideal avatar, that ideal person that you like as a customer? Describe that person if you can.

 

Mario Brown: Yeah, absolutely. It’s definitely, right now, and entrepreneur or a very aspiring entrepreneur who’s building their business and they’re trying to figure out what to do but they’re kind of stuck. They’re stuck with the tactics, they’re stuck with the marketing, with conversion, with the webinars, they’re little bit overwhelmed with the technical side of it and also with the mindset and mental toughness. They’re definitely interested in entrepreneurship. They’re interested in more than just making money, they also want to really have an impact with their message or make a difference but they just don’t know how to take their business to the next level.

 

Borja: Beautiful. Once again, guys, if you want to go and check Mario out, go to Missionpreneur.net, right?

 

Mario Brown: That’s correct, yup.

 

Borja: Okay. Well, Mario, thank you so much for being on the show. I hope to have you again in the future and let people know how it is going with the podcast.

 

Mario Brown: Yeah, thank you. You know, one thing I always tell my students is “take imperfect action.” Like, don’t try to be perfect, don’t wait until it’s perfect; just take imperfect action. Good is good enough. Whatever you learned right now in this episode, just put it out there, you know? Get your feet wet, test it, and get some feedback and then move from there. I think too many people get stuck with it so I want to leave your audience with it. Take imperfect action. Thanks for having me, man.

 

Borja: Boom. Thank you. All right, so I hope you enjoyed that interview with Mario as much as I did. I love Facebook Ads retargeting. I geeked out about it a lot.

At the beginning of the show I promised that I would show you how I use Facebook Ads retargeting specifically. The way I do it is, for starters, I use my own images, of course, in my ads because people would already have seen my face on Moneydiver. Not necessarily on Smartduu, I don’t think there’s an image of myself on Smartduu anyway. But I use my own images. You might have seen it before. It’s me holding a WordPress sticker on a close up to the camera, it has a white background, I’m looking straight into the camera to make eye contact with people who see the image. I’ve been seeing a lot of success with that image as opposed to using a stock photo, which a lot of people don’t recommend using stock photos. If you listen back to episode 10, I believe it was, or episode 12 with Valerie Shoopman, we talked about generic Facebook Ads. She said that you shouldn’t use stock photos ever and I agree with that.

So, I target people that lands on pages and posts that are showing an interest in buying something. For example, I have a post in Moneydiver that’s ranking very well in the search engines for a keyword related to a product review. People who are looking for product reviews are obviously interested in purchasing, have their credit card on hand, ready to go. This product is obviously related to WordPress. So, I target people who land on that page and I introduced them to my framework — my WordPress framework, Smartduu — sorry, Cerebro by Smartduu.

I also target people who land in Smartduu.com on the pricing page and on the features page because if they just land on the front page they may not be warm enough. So I target people who land on the pricing page or on the specific themes’ demonstration pages because they are showing more of an interest, they’re spending more time on the website. I target them right away. Right after they leave my website, I start showing ads to them.

I was listening to an interview from Joey Kissimmee — sorry, from Rick Mulready with Joey Kissimmee on the art of paid traffic podcasts. I recommend it, I like it a lot. Joey was talking about targeting people on the same day that they are visiting your website — on that very same day. When you start setting up your retargeting campaign and your audience settings, you’ll notice that you have the option of choosing what kind of people should see these ads based on how long ago they saw your website. What Joey Kissimmee was recommending is that you target people on that very same day. So, don’t show it tomorrow for a week from now. Show it today because they’re going to be the most warm, the most ready to purchase, and they’re going to be with your brand on mind right there and this might work. I haven’t implemented a lot of this. I have only been trying it for about a couple days but it’s something that you definitely might want to consider.

Again, guys, thank you so much for listening to this show and giving me some of your daytime. I really appreciate that. I’m very, very conservative with my time, so I understand how valuable that is.

I want to know how you plan on implementing Facebook Ads retargeting. Head on over to the show notes at rebelgrowth.com/episode15 and let me know about that.

As always, go out, implement, and keep on diving.