The hard truth is that almost all your website visitors (97%) don’t buy anything on their first visit. However, there are pretty good chances that they will buy from you later — you just need to bring them back to your online store. This is why marketers use Retargeting — an advertising tactic that specifically targets people who visited an online store but left without completing a purchase. To make the impact of such ads even more powerful, they can feature exact items previously viewed in your store by your potential customers.

Retargeting ads work best for the following objectives:

• Boost the sales. Since you will be promoting products to people that are already familiar with your brand, your ads are expected to have a higher return on ad spend.
• Promote new arrivals. It is a bit trickier to sell products that people are not very familiar with, but retargeting ads are of great help here. You can include items from new collections into the mix of the products featured in a retargeting ad.
• Destock. This one is a real pain in the neck for many online retailers — you have sold most of your items and are ready to move on and restock, but you still have some products left that your customers are not crazy about. You can feature these products in your retargeting ads with a discount to make sure that those items sell.

With Adwisely, you can run the following Retargeting campaigns:

• Standard Retargeting to deliver ads to website visitors that didn’t purchase anything
• Enhanced Cart Recovery to target people who added a product to their cart but didn’t purchase anything.
• Special Offer Ads (run only a couple of days around Black Friday/Cyber Monday) to show ads to people who added a product to their cart within 180 days and visited a web store within 30 days.

Learn more about Retargeting ads in our Help Center.

To set up Facebook retargeting ads, you first need to verify your domain and install Pixel on your online store. It is a piece of code with the help of which you can not only automatically track who visits your website, but also see the actions they take (events).

To better understand Facebook retargeting, let’s check Johnny’s buying experience. Johnny is looking for a pair of new sneakers. Luckily, your store has got just what he is looking for. He checks your website, browses through a couple of pairs, and finds the ones he loves. Naturally, he adds them to the cart…

Oh no! Johnny’s cat Ravioli jumps on the table and knocks the vase over. What a mess! Johnny rushes to the kitchen to get the mop, and of course, completely forgets about the sneakers left in the cart.

However, Facebook Pixel has already informed Facebook that Johnny was checking your website and even added the sneakers to cart. The next time he checks his Facebook or Instagram, he will remember about your product, click on the ad and complete the purchase, unless Ravioli does his gymnastics routine again.

Google Retargeting (aka Remarketing), is the marketing technique of displaying ads to users that have viewed products on your web store on — you guessed it — Google and partner websites. These ads do not focus only on driving sales, they can also result in a registration increase for a promoted event and brand awareness boost.

Google Ads offer you the following tactics:

• Standard remarketing: showing your ads to website visitors on Display Network that gathers over 2 million websites, videos, and apps.
• Dynamic remarketing: showing the ads that feature the products and services that the visitors have viewed.
• Remarketing lists for search ads: showing your ads to the people that search for similar products and services after they visited your site.
• Video remarketing: showing your ads on YouTube and Display Network to those who have visited your site.
• Customer list remarketing: showing ads to your customers on different Google products after uploading a list of contacts using Customer match.

Facebook and Google are the most popular advertising platforms among eCommerce marketers. They are both cost-effective and offer rich advertising opportunities. However, there are some differences between them when it comes to Retargeting.

The main difference is the ad placement, of course. For instance, your Facebook Retargeting ads can appear on:

• Facebook in the feed, stories, video feed, in-stream videos, Marketplace search results, and right column.
• Instagram in the feed, stories, Instagram IGTV, and Explore section.
• Messenger in the inbox and stories.
• Apps that are part of the Audience network.

In turn, Google Retargeting can be displayed on:

• Google Display Network.
• Google Search Network — search-related websites that feature ads and free product listings.
• YouTube — skippable and non-skippable in-stream video ads, bumper ads (six-second, non-skippable video ads before the main video), discovery ads (an image and short copy on the right side of the page), banner ads that overlay the video.
• Gmail ads in the Promotions and Social tabs of inbox.
• Discovery ads that appear in Google Discover.

Another difference is how you set the campaigns up. To start your retargeting ad campaign on Facebook, you only need to add a Pixel to your website to be able to track your visitors and a catalog to automatically target potential customers with the products they have viewed on your website. With that said, we still encourage you to run retargeting campaigns when you have more than 100 daily online store sessions. If you have a newly opened online store, click here to find more about what you need to start running retargeting ads with Adwisely.

As for Google, you need to add a remarketing tag to your website to generate your remarketing lists. Also, you have to set up Google Search Network and Google Display Network ad campaigns separately. Google requires you to have 1, 000 unique users within 30 days for remarketing ads on Search Network, YouTube, Gmail, and Discovery ads. To run such ads on a Display network, you need 10 times fewer unique monthly visitors — only a hundred.

The answer to the question "Which platform is better for Retargeting?" is different for each store. On one hand, Facebook ads are easier to set up and have budget options that work even for small businesses. On the other hand, Google Ads, especially Search ads, help brands reach out to people who have a strong buying intent since they target people who are actively looking for a product or service. Check out this article to better understand which platform would better work for your store.

Our advice would be to try both. If set up correctly, Retargeting on Facebook and Google work great together. To learn more about the capabilities of each platform, check out our guides with tips on running retargeting ads on Facebook and Google.

Adwisely can spare you the hassle of figuring out how each platform works and will definitely save you some precious time. With the app, you can easily set up your ads, automate and manage them in one place. Find out more on how to create your first Adwisely-powered ad here.

We don't recommend running several Retargeting campaigns on one platform for the following reasons:

1. Competing against yourself. Each time before displaying an ad, Facebook runs an automatic auction, and the ad with a higher bid is shown to a user. This means that if you run two Retargeting campaigns, you will end up bidding for the same user twice, which will increase your cost per impression.
2. Campaigns may be suspended. The ad platform may detect identical campaigns and suspend one of them.
3. Troubles tracking results. It may be difficult to track which campaigns and ad sets prompted each conversion.
4. A higher risk of people getting tired of your ads. Since there is no synchronization between two retargeting campaigns, your targeted audience will see your ads again and again. This may lead to negative brand perception and even people hiding your ads.

Nonetheless, there still is a way for you to increase the return on ad spend (ROAS). First, you can try different types of retargeting on the same platform, such as Standard Retargeting, Enhanced Cart Recovery, etc. Also, you can run different retargeting campaigns on both Facebook and Google. Adwisely enables you to put all these tactics to practice automatically.

Yes, the app will use a Pixel that you have already installed on your website. During the set-up, you will be asked to share your account with Adwisely, so it can track users' activity in your web store and target them with personalized ads.