SOP 007:How to Create a Cart-Abandonment Remarketing Campaign Using Facebook Ads

Goal:
To create a simple Facebook ads campaign that targets those who almost purchased your product.

Ideal Outcome:
You start generating more sales by marketing to your most qualified leads by investing under 30 minutes of your time in setting up a paid campaign.

Prerequisites or requirements:

You can only do this once you have already installed the Facebook Pixel on your site.

Why this is important:
Remarketing campaigns are perhaps the first type of paid campaign you should start running if you already have consistent website traffic. Cart abandonments are easy-to-capture revenue opportunities.

Where this is done:
In the Facebook Ads Manager and Google Tag Manager.

When is this done:
When you have a significant number of people going through your checkout flow and want to implement a process to bring a portion of them back to your site (and complete their purchase.)

Who does this:
The person responsible for executing the campaign.

Environment Setup

Important:

This SOP describes a process that requires the installation of the Facebook Pixel. If you haven’t done that, you can check out our SOP 005 (web version)
You should have created or gotten access to your company’s Facebook ads account before following this process.
You should have also previously created a Facebook page for your company.

Creating a Custom Conversion

In this step, you will create a conversion for the purchase of your product. This will allow you to optimize your campaign for this conversion.

Open your Facebook Ads Manager click into the > ‘Events Manager’

2. On the sidebar, hover over to the green circled + icon and click “Custom Conversions”

3. Click “Create Custom Conversion” to set up to set up a new conversion:
Give your conversion a name like “Purchased [name of your product]”.
Select the Data Source (Your Business’ Pixel). If you don’t see it then select “Web visitors”
Under the “URL Contains” field, write the URL of the thank you page your customers are redirected to after purchase. Next, select “Purchase” as the conversion category.
Optionally set a conversion value if you there’s a value associated with your product. Just check “Enter a conversion value”.
Click “Create”.

4. You will get a success message, click ‘Done’

5. You will see your custom conversion with a “No Activity Yet” (or “Inactive”) notification under “Status”

6. Visit the thank you page on your browser to activate the custom conversion. Then, refresh the Facebook Ads Manager page and the status should have changed to “Active”

Creating a Remarketing Audience

In this step, you will create your remarketing audience.

Head back to your Facebook ads manager.
Click the sidebar drawer and select “Audiences”.
Click “Create Audience” and select “Custom Audience”

4. Choose “Website” from the options available.

5. Select to include “People who visited specific web pages” instead of “All website visitors” and write the URL for your checkout page under the URL field.

6. Next, click on “Exclude.” Select to include “People who visited specific web pages” instead of “All website visitors” and write the URL for your thank you page under the URL field.

7. Give your audience a name like “Abandoned carts for [name of your product]” and click on “Create Audience”, you will get a success message:

Preparing Your Campaign Assets

If this is your first cart-abandonment campaign, we recommend that you start with the simplest ad format: single image. However, it’s best practice to test different ads on each campaign you run.

1. Prepare 2 images to use for the campaign, with the following specifications:

Dimensions: 1,200 x 628 pixels

2. Prepare 2 versions of ad copy.
3. These will be the versions or variations of your ads:

Variation #1: Image 1 + Copy 1
Variation #2: Image 1 + Copy 2
Variation #3: Image 2 + Copy 1
Variation #4: Image 2 + Copy 2

Creating Your Ad Campaign

In this step, you will set up your advertising campaign.

Click on “Create Ad” from any place on the Facebook Ads Manager.
Choose “Conversions” as your campaign objective.
For “Campaign Name”, use the following nomenclature: Remarketing -[Product name]
Click “Continue” to move on to the creation of your ad set.
For “Ad Set Name”, use the following nomenclature: Remarketing - [Product name] - Abandoned Cart
Under “Conversion”, select “Website”, and choose the custom conversion you recently created.
Under “Custom Audiences”, choose the custom audience you recently created.
[Optional] You can choose to further segment your audience by location, age, gender, language, or interests.
Under “Placements”, you can start with “Automatic Placements”.
Choose a budget that you’re comfortable (e.g $10 or $20 per day) spending daily. Verify that the campaign is optimizing for conversions, and set a conversion window of 1 day after clicking. Finally, set a bid cap that’s lower than the revenue generated by a product sale.
Click “Continue” to move on to ad creation.
For “Ad Name”, use the following nomenclature: Remarketing - [Product name] - Abandoned Cart - [Ad variation]
Select your Facebook page from the drop down and choose whether to use the Facebook page for Instagram ads or connect an Instagram account.
Select “Single Image” ad and ad format.
Upload one of the images that you prepared for the ad.
Input your ad information:
Destination URL. We recommend that you use UTM parameters to be able to track the performance of your campaign in Google Analytics (you can use our UTM tagging SOP to do that)
- Headline
- Text
- Call To Action
- News Feed Link Description