Facebook and Google Remarketing for Local Businesses

Remarketing

Want better results from your online advertising? Use Facebook and Google remarketing with people who have already visited your website.

Simply put, remarketing lets you advertise online to people who have previously visited your website. You may also hear this called retargeting, but the two terms are pretty much interchangeable.

Here’s how it works:

  1. A person visits your website.
  2. Special code on your website tags that person as having visited your site.
  3. When that person goes to another website, they see your ad because you’ve tagged them.
  4. The person is then more likely to click back to your website and do business with you.

Have you ever gone to a company’s website only to later see an ad for that same company on Google, Facebook or another website? This isn’t coincidence … you’ve just experienced remarketing!

For example, I’m a big fan of ClickFunnels, a landing page / conversion funnel system that we use here at LMI. When I first visited their website, they tagged me with Facebook remarketing code. Now, when I look at my news feed in Facebook, I often see their ads.

Remarketing Example

With remarketing, as people visit your website, you begin to build up an audience of people that you can advertise to. You don’t get any contact info, so it’s not quite as good as building your email list. But it’s still a lot better to spend money advertising to people who have already visited your site versus people who haven’t! People who have already visited your site are much more likely to convert into customers or repeat customers.

Remarketing for a Local Business

Remarketing isn’t just for big companies … it works extremely well for local businesses too. There are many different remarketing networks, but for a local business, the two most important are Facebook and Google.

Facebook Remarketing

  1. Log in to the ad manager for your page on Facebook.
  2. Click the “Tools” tab and select “Pixels”.
  3. Then click the “Actions” button and select “View Pixel Code”.
  4. Copy the code and put it on your website, or email the code to your web developer and ask them to do it for you.
  5. As people visit your site, they’ll be tagged and you’ll start building a custom audience in Facebook.
  6. Create an ad within Facebook and target the ad specifically to your new custom audience.
  7. Check out the Facebook ads help center for more information on their remarketing options.

Google Remarketing

  1. Log in to your AdWords account.
  2. Click “Shared Libraries” on the left side of the page, then click “Audiences”.
  3. Click the “+Remarketing List” dropdown, then click “Website Visitors”.
  4. Enter the settings you want for this remarketing list and click “Save”.
  5. Once back on the “Audiences” page, find the “Remarketing Tag” section and click the “Tag Details” button
  6. Click the “View AdWords tag for website” link and put the code on your website, or email it to your web developer and ask them to do it for you.
  7. You can now create a campaign within AdWords and target the ad specifically to your new remarketing list.
  8. Check out this Google AdWords help document for more information on their remarketing options.

Don’t forget, you can also limit your ad campaign in both Facebook and Google to your local geographic area. This way, you’re only spending money on ads to people in your specific geographic area AND who have visited your website in the past.

And the best thing about Facebook and Google is that you only have to pay if someone actually clicks your ad. We’ll talk about what you should do when someone clicks in another post, but even if someone doesn’t click, your local business is getting a lot of free exposure to some very qualified prospects!

My biggest advice … don’t wait to try this. At the very least, get the Facebook and Google remarketing tags on your website today and start watching your remarketing lists grow in Facebook and Google. Then when you’re ready, spend just a few dollars a day and start experimenting with a couple of remarketing ad campaigns.

Eric Shanfelt
Eric is the Founder and CEO of Local Marketing Institute. He has 25 years of experience in digital marketing and has been the Chief Digital Officer for several B2B and consumer media companies. Eric has a passion for local businesses and focuses on practical digital strategies to help them attract more customers, build customer loyalty, and grow their business.