Of course, the main goal of paid marketing on social media for most Shopify store owners is to generate revenue, and more importantly, to bring in more money than you spend.
So what’s the best and easiest way to make more money for lower costs?
Remarketing.
Remarketing basically involves showcasing ads to consumers who have already expressed interest in your brand - for example, people who have browsed your website but not purchased, people who follow your social profiles and organic content, or people who have signed up to your email list.
These consumers are classed as ‘mid-high intent’ users, as they’ve already been encouraged to interact with your business via a lower intent action, such as clicking a link through to your site or subscribing to your email list.
The power of remarketing ads can be channelled in many different ways, from driving purchases at lower costs, to driving higher click through rates in traffic campaigns.
Benefits of Remarketing for Shopify Businesses
Remarketing is an extremely valuable tool for Shopify store owners. As the process involves showcasing highly relevant ads to people already aware of your products or services, they’re more likely to take the action you’re optimising for, via the ad they see.
Key benefits of remarketing ads are:
- Increased revenue
- Increased conversions/conversion rate
- Increased return on investment (ROAS)
- Lower cost per acquisition/purchase (CPA)
- Increased click through rates
- Lower costs for email subscribers/SMS sign ups
- Evolution of ‘one time purchasers’ to ‘regular shoppers’ - increased lifetime value (LTV)
- Increased average order values (AOV)
The main focus for developing a successful remarketing strategy should be ensuring you’re sending carefully tailored ads to the right people at the right time in their buying journey.
Remarketing Audiences for Shopify Businesses
So what types of audiences should you use for your remarketing campaigns?
It depends on what you’re looking to achieve. Different audiences should be used at different levels of the customer buying journey to have the best effect. The buying journey of a typical consumer is:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Conversion
To support consumers along this buying journey, social platforms have split out campaign objectives for each area. For example, Meta campaign objectives are:
a) Awareness
- Visibility
b) Consideration
-
Traffic
-
Clicks
-
Landing Page Views
-
Engagement
-
Video Views
-
Page Likes/Post Engagement
-
Event Responses
-
Leads (via your website, forms, messenger or in app)
-
App Promotion
c) Conversion
- Sales
- View Content
- Search
- Add to Cart
- Initiate Checkout
- Purchase
Key Remarketing Audiences
Video views - watched 75-100% of video - use this audience to optimise for traffic driving, which should deliver a higher click through rate (CTR)
Website visitors (up to 180 days prior) - use this audience to market for lower funnel level actions, such as add to cart or purchase for lower costs compared to colder consumers
View content (including specific URLs) (up to 180 days) - showcase specific ads for products viewed to drive conversions at lower costs
Current organic social engagers/users who have interacted with any post or ad (up to 365 days) - use to optimise for lower funnel actions such as initiate checkout or purchase
Add to cart/initiate checkout (up to 180 days) - use to optimise for purchases
Email Subscribers (full list or individual shared list segments) - use to optimise for purchases for specific products according to the list segment shared, or re promote specific offers such as sales
This list is not exhaustive, in fact there are many ways to layer different audiences to support additional remarketing campaign types.
Layering Audiences: Examples
Add to cart X number of days, excluding Purchasers X number of days - use to showcase ‘abandoned cart’ type messaging
Purchase X frequency in X number of days - use to create a campaign driving repurchase behaviour (particularly if your product type is not reusable and expires - such as makeup, skincare, chocolate etc) and take the opportunity to offer exclusive discounts
So now that we’ve talked about some of the benefits and given you some ideas of remarketing campaigns to test, how do you make sure your social platforms and store are set up correctly to make sure your campaigns have the best effect?
Firstly…
Connect Business Manager with your Shopify Store
Connecting your social platform Business Manager/Center with your Shopify Store is relatively straightforward. Firstly, you need to make sure you have admin access to your Business Manager/Center and all related assets.
Then you simply go to Sales Channels and select the social platform you’d like to add. Follow the on screen instructions to connect up the individual assets such as your page/profile, catalogues, ad accounts and most importantly, your pixel.
Why Is The Pixel Most Important In This Case?
The pixel (or tag, or insight tag, as it is known on some platforms, such as LinkedIn) is most important from a remarketing perspective because it acts as the ‘communication wire’ between your Shopify store and social platform - imagine a telephone wire connecting two tin can telephones.
This means that when someone completes an action on your website, for example, adding to cart, viewing a specific product page, making a purchase etc, the installed pixel shares that information back to the social platform, and it’s that data the platform then uses when you build remarketing audiences of specific events.
Data Sharing Options
In the data-sharing settings on Shopify you have three levels to choose from: Standard, Enhanced, or Maximum.
We’ve included a general summary of how each option shares data, however these do vary somewhat for different social platforms, so take care to check exactly what methods each of the options use for sharing for different social channels.
If you select Standard, then a pixel collects data from customer behaviour in your online store, at a browser level. Browser-based ad blockers can prevent the pixel from sharing this data with the platform.
If you select Enhanced, then your store uses Advanced Matching, which shares personal information about your customers, including things like email, location and phone number to match users on the social network, as well as the pixel. Pixel browsing information can still be blocked by browser based ad blockers.
If you select Maximum, then your store uses the Conversions API, or a custom API as well as Advanced Matching and the pixel data. The Conversions API sends events between Shopify and platform servers. Data sent from server to server can't be blocked by browser-based ad blockers.
For the most dependable data sharing, we would recommend you use the Maximum data sharing setting so your Shopify store can communicate the highest level of consumer browsing data with your social platform, which will lead to more effective remarketing campaigns, as the social platforms then have more data to work with.
The additional benefit of setting up the data sharing using your Shopify integration, is that when setting this up manually - for example, when on Meta platforms and installing a pixel and the Conversions API directly on your website, you would need to add specific event parameters in to the code to avoid your Meta platforms recording the same event twice when the data is shared - such as the same purchase communicated by the pixel at browser level, and then via the Conversions API at server level.
This is known as ‘deduplication’ whereby Meta understands the events are the same, so one is kept and the rest are discarded. However, when you set up your data sharing using the Shopify store integration, this is all actioned automatically when your Shopify store shares data back to the social platform, so no specific action by yourself is needed.
Ready to Start Remarketing?
Once you’ve set up your social platforms and data sharing permissions with your Shopify store, you’re good to go!
Remember - paid social remarketing is a hugely valuable tool for ecommerce business owners, and with the right strategies you can generate exceptionally strong results in terms of revenue and return on ad spend, and typically for much lower costs compared to just marketing directly to colder consumers.
The main crucial aspects to make sure your remarketing efforts are effective and efficient, is ensuring your initial set-up is completed properly, and ensuring you thoughtfully tailor campaigns to different audiences at all levels of the buying journey to get the most value.
Drop us a line if you need support with your social media strategy!
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