The cheapest way to generate leads and sales for your business using Facebook advertising is to use Facebook retargeting audiences to reignite your warm audiences to get them to opt-in for what you have to offer or purchase from your business.
This is great if you have thousands of new people performing these actions on a regular basis. But, if these things aren’t happening very often for your business, then chances are your Facebook retargeting audiences aren’t going to be very big and you won’t be able to target those warm audiences in your Facebook Ads for too long as you will exhaust them quickly.
The solution would then seem to be building your warm audiences using Facebook ads and Saved Audiences.
But targeting cold traffic can be expensive, particularly if you don’t get your targeting right.
For example, it might cost:
- 50 cents to get someone to like, comment or share your post (who would then join your engagement audience)
- $1 to get someone to click through to your website to (who would then join your Website Traffic retargeting audience)
- $3 to get someone to subscribe (who would then join your Customer File retargeting audience)
That sure can add up in a very short period of time!
Therefore, it’s important to find a way to build Facebook retargeting audiences without breaking the bank.
Smart Ways to Create Affordable Facebook Retargeting Audiences
The cheapest way to build Facebook retargeting audiences is to build video view audiences. This is great news, as video ads have many benefits that go beyond just building retargeting audiences.
A video audience is a list of people who have spent time watching your videos on Facebook or Instagram.
You can create audiences based on people who have watched your videos for:
- At least 3 seconds
- At least 10 seconds
- Up to 25% of its duration
- Up to 50% of its duration
- Up to 75% of its duration
- Up to 95% of its duration
Those who have watched your video for at at least 3 seconds will be the cheapest Facebook retargeting audience that you can build.
If you are targeting your video ads well, you can build a 3 second video view audience for less than one cent per person. However, just because someone watched your video for 3 seconds, does not mean that they are a warm audience. It might must mean they are a slow scroller. 🙂
Depending on the content in your video, 10 seconds might also not be enough time to determine whether or not those people are interested in what you have to offer and therefore still might not be what I would call a warm audience. For example, they might be still watching at 10 seconds only because you haven’t got to the point in your video by then and they could have stopped watching at the 11 second mark when they finally realized they were not interested in what you were talking about.
Because of this, I prefer to use one of the percentage options to determine whether or not those people watching are likely to be a true warm audience. Which one I choose would depend on the length of the video:
- 1-2 min video – I usually define a warm audience as this people who have watched 75% or more.
- 2-5 min video – I usually define a warm audience as anyone who has watched 50% or more.
- 5 min+ video – I usually define a warm audience as anyone who has watched more than 25%.
This may vary from video to video, based on the topic, video composition and other factors, but it is a rough guide to make sure that the people you retarget who have watched your videos are likely to be interested in the next thing you have to offer in your Facebook Ads.
(This is a matter for another post, but consider getting to the point earlier in your videos — our attention spans are getting smaller by the day.)
The price does usually go up as the percentage of the video you watch goes up, but so too does the quality of the Facebook retargeting audience. Your Facebook retargeting audience size will also go down as the percentage video view goes up. So you might have to make a trade off between the quality of the audience and the size of the audience you can use for retargeting purposes.
But don’t always retarget those audiences that were the cheapest audiences to build. You also need to look at which ones convert at the best cost.
By continually testing the audiences you build on Facebook, you will start to be able to determine which are the best Facebook retargeting audiences that you should invest money in moving forward, both in terms of how much it costs you to build those audiences and also in terms of how much it costs for those audiences to convert down the track.
