Create Facebook remarketing audiences and calculate CPM

1. Check that Facebook’s remarketing requirements are met, and there are enough website visitors to create remarketing audiences.

The pixel must have at least 100 events recorded in order to create an audience. If there’s not enough data on the pixel event, try with a longer time span. Technically, you can remarket to website visitors for 180 days. If these remarketing conditions are not met, consider placing more ads to cold audiences, to get more people visiting your site.

2. In Ads Manager, click on Business Tools > Audiences and Create a Custom Audience to set up an audience that consists of website visitors.

Select Website. Alternatively, create Facebook or Instagram custom audiences. From the drop down menu select the pixel event and the past number of days that you want Facebook to build the audience from. These are all the visitors to your page in the specified past number of days that have triggered a specific pixel action. Build audiences for every event on your page. In the example above these would be separate audiences for Page View, Add To Cart, Initiate Checkout, and Purchase events.

3. Choose one or more simple objectives for the remarketing campaign, like Traffic or Video views. Choose Conversions if you want to sell something.

As we are remarketing people that have already visited our website, we want Facebook to show our remarketing ads to as many people from the remarketing audience as possible. At this point in the customer journey you have established trust with your audience. You will find that remarketing ads are pretty powerful when it comes to conversions.

4. Make sure you have a reasonable budget for the remarketing stage.

As we are dealing with relatively small audiences in remarketing, it is vital to set the correct budget for remarketing ad sets. Setting a budget too high could cause high frequency on your ads which would harm their performance. The CPM metric determines our daily budget for remarketing ad sets: the cost of the ad shown 1000 times. If the remarketing audiences size is less than 1000, start with the daily ad set budget of $5-10.

5. Exclude audiences like purchases from the targeting when setting up remarketing ads.

You do not want to remarket people that already purchased, so exclude them from the targeting.

6. Set the remarketing ads live and leave them to run for a couple of days to find the CPM.

7. Check the CPM you are getting on your remarketing ads and calculate what daily ad set budget should be used.

If the CPM on remarketing ads is $15 for 1000 impressions and the total audience size you want to remarket is 10,000, then the cost of showing the ad to the entire audience should be $150. If we want the frequency of 2, then the total remarketing budget is $300. Divide that budget with the number of days you want your audience to see the ads and that is your daily remarketing budget.

8. Adjust your ad set budget accordingly with the data calculated from the previous section.

9. Monitor the frequency of the ads and ensure it does not exceed 4.

If people keep seeing the ad too many times they start to report it, which affects the performance of your campaign.

10. Make sure to feed your remarketing audiences with the constant inflow of new page visitors by regularly using page post engagements ads.