Does Retargeting Help in Sales, and Does It Drive Leads?

Do retargeting if you have a large audience; it works well, especially on Facebook and Google.

What is retargeting?

Retargeting is chasing people on the internet who didn’t finish things you wanted them to do.

Omnichannel retargeting is when you have all the pixels firing, so you are like the ultimate parasite. 

You have the Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, and LinkedIn pixel all chasing people around over the next few days. But if your audience is small, and you have only a few people coming to your website and few people watching your video views, which you natively can retarget, then retargeting doesn’t do any good.

Because it is too small for an audience, and if your audience is too small, your CPM goes way up, TikTok and all the networks are discouraging you from running tiny audiences.

It also costs the system because every impression is a unique auction. If you add another item available on your auction, that’s more processing load on the server. They want to discourage you from doing that.

So here is something that everyone needs to understand, and almost nobody gets it for some reason.

Understand objective seeking.

Objective seeking is I want leads, so if you tell Facebook or TikTok, here is a fish pond. You could say inside this pond, this little part of the pond seems to have more fish.

So you tell the algorithm– you want to fish in this part of the pond. But there is fish all over the pond; if you restrict it and tie their hand, they can only fish in this part. So you are redistricting your algorithm to be able to seek against your objective. 

If you are driving sales through online marketing trackable through pixels and getting a couple dozen per week, you can run untargeted.

Why do You do zero targeting?

Because objective seeking says, I want to get leads for less than $50. I want an ROI of at least 400%.

The system will look at the pond– the system knows where already the fish are, and the system will fish. 

The algorithm used to be so dumb back in the day. You had to tell it what to do. Otherwise, you burn impressions.

So if you advertise on Twitter and LinkedIn, those algorithms are so dumb that they will burn your money without regard for the cost per lead, cost ROI per sale, or no conversion consideration.

But Google, Facebook, and TikTok are so clever that you do not even need to target anymore.

Many people will misinterpret what I just said and say, ” Well, Dennis told me to run something against the whole world, and I automatically get sales. No, I did not say that.

I said if you are feeding the signal, so they understand what the fish is, it will find you fish, but you must catch a couple of fish yourself.

We don’t talk about this whole discussion about targeting anymore.

For example, you get a dozen leads in a week or two, and then you can run them as lead ads without targeting.

Have a solid strategy for advertising

It is the critical realization we have here. If anyone does not understand it, we should not move forward. 

If you do not have a solid strategy, advertising will not solve your problem.

There is a whole chapter on digital plumbing, and people do not want to know what digital plumbing is. They want to come and start creating TikTok ads, but if you are not already driving sales if you do not have any tracking, how will the system learn and get you more networking?

The algorithm is so robust that if we have a clear MVP (Minimum Viable Product). It has to be niche enough. It has to be a very particular problem for a particular audience via a specific technique.

That is, X, Y, and Z models

People be like, why is Dennis talking about the X, Y,  Z technique? What does it have to do with TikTok ads

retargeting
My Book on TikTok Advertising

If we do not have clarity on that, the system cannot get us more than we want.

That is like hoping TikTok is magic Jennie, and a psychic somehow knows what you want.

Advertising does not solve a strategy problem. Advertising gives you more of what you already have.

If you are confused, do not know your customers, or have ten different kinds of customers, advertising will not solve that.

A significant part of retargeting

Suppose you have a straightforward customer buying for an apparent reason and a clear product with obvious pain. In that case, you will find TikTok fantastic because you have your convergence traffic in place and feed in all the convergence of people who have bought. That’s why you upload a custom audience.

And this is marketing. To educate the algorithm so it can find more people like that as opposed to – I’m just trying to retarget people that have been on my site for the last 24 hours.

Yes, that is part of retargeting, but a more significant part of retargeting is I am trying to educate the machine. Mechine does a retageting for me.

We should have an exact plan about retargeting, the same words I need to say, but the designing of this whole system is around feeding the algorithm so it can do all the work for us.

The system is so intelligent that it does 95% of the work for us, everything like optimization, changing budgets, creating ads, how many campaigns I should run, and what percentage I should spend. That doesn’t matter anymore, and the system handles everything for us.

But we need to tell the system what convergence is worth. Some convergence is worth $50, some $100, and the system doesn’t know what you have to say to it. That is where manual bidding comes in.

Initially, you have automatic bidding. It is the go-ahead for the lowest cost by default.

You might say this cost is meager, and these leads are so good I will pay twice as much. Go to Facebook or Instagram and reupload the TikTok. How do they feel about that?

Both of them have said not to do that. Do you think they want to be promoting that?

It is what they are trying to promote, going native or making it right there inside the editor.  

Right now, there are not so many penalties. Once this thing gets more competitive, you bet there will be. 

Run a Facebook campaign to get thousands of leads – if they are responsive – – we can convert them.

Should you run ads against the signs up? 

It all depends on how strong your follow-up is when you collect coming leads.

How much are you paying? What is the worth? What kind of follow-up do you have against them?

Because when people do lead ads, they do the default, which is to get name and email. We always like to ask one or two qualifying questions. It increases the cost per lead, but it is worth it.

Facebook and TikTok lead ads copy each other.

What’s working for your lead ads on Facebook? Copy it to TikTok. And generally, you will find more performance and half the cost per lead, but you have to ensure that your video adapts well.

If you have decent videos on TikTok, it will do well even if you are against the demographic or targeting Facebook. And you generate enough leads.

It goes the other way as well.

Many local businesses, chiropractors, churches, and real estate agents run lead ads on TikTok. They find it pretty good and copy it on Facebook lead ads.

If unsure, the safe bed fires everything through the tag manager because the whole point of tag manager is one tag rule them all.

The tag manager container has all the tags, and you control the events when they fire. So it is better to have all the rules inside the tag manager.

I have seen a lot of people who are scared of tag managers and do not want to use them.

I have seen plenty of times where they double-fire. When someone manually puts in their convergence pixel and then setup tag manager and some pages, they forget to remove it, so it’s a double fire.

You have to generate leads and need your stuff to be out there. That’s where your focus should be on.

Dennis Yu
Dennis Yu
Dennis Yu is co-author of the #1 best-selling book on Amazon in social media, The Definitive Guide to TikTok Ads.  He has spent a billion dollars on Facebook ads across his agencies and agencies he advises. Mr. Yu is the "million jobs" guy-- on a mission to create one million jobs via hands-on social media training, partnering with universities and professional organizations.You can find him quoted in major publications and on television such as CNN, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, NPR, and LA Times. Clients have included Nike, Red Bull, the Golden State Warriors, Ashley Furniture, Quiznos-- down to local service businesses like real estate agents and dentists. He's spoken at over 750 conferences in 20 countries, having flown over 6 million miles in the last 30 years to train up young adults and business owners. He speaks for free as long as the organization believes in the job-creation mission and covers business class travel.You can find him hiking tall mountains, eating chicken wings, and taking Kaqun oxygen baths-- likely in a city near you.