The visual message is Facebook.
There’s a reason that almost every ad format has some sort of visual component that goes beyond text. We’re primed to recognize color and patterns in a way that makes us more likely to engage with that kind of content.
As an advertiser, you can target all sorts of audiences on Facebook using demographic and interest-based targeting, but within those larger audiences how do you know who will respond to your product or service? How do you hone in on those people that are more likely to show interest in what you have to offer?
Traditionally, advertisers have used remarketing strategies to segment people based on an observed behavior. That behavior has often been tied to how people use and visit your site. If they visited a page we’d show them one ad, but if they visited a different page we might show them a different ad. In the end, it’s a way to segment people into relevant audiences and filter the messages we send.
The engine that drives the remarketing above happens at the site level. Without tracking the pages where people visit, we don’t necessarily have a great idea of what message we should be sending them.
Here’s a thought. What if there was a way to filter people inside the Facebook interface without them necessarily having to go to your site. What would something like this look like?
There is a way and it comes in two parts.
The first part is something you’ve been able to do on Facebook for quite some time: video ads. Video ads are pretty straightforward. You create a video that showcases a product or brand and informs people about what they should find interesting. People then watch your video and you can see how as whole they are engaging with the content.
As part of video advertising, Facebook already provides various metrics to see how much of your video people are watching.
Within the interface, you can see how many people have viewed your video total, but more importantly, you can see how far people are getting in the video before they stop watching. We might not be happy to find people quit after watching 25% of the video, but the people that watch over 50% might be signaling a level of interest. Those watching the entire video might be signaling an even higher level of interest.
So what’s a potential strategy where we can leverage these watching times to find those who are the most interested in what we have to offer? Enter video remarketing by percent viewed.
One of the newer features introduced by Facebook is the ability to remarket to people based on how much of a video they watched. This feature effectively gives you the ability to use a video as a filter for the most interested people and then remarket to them knowing they’ve watched a certain amount of your video
Creating A Video Remarketing Audience
Creating an audience for video views is done the same way you create other custom audiences. You’ll go to the audience section and create a new custom audience, but you’ll choose the “Engagement On Facebook” option as your custom audience type.
Next, you’ll choose the engagement type, days that someone should stay in the audience, and enter the name you want your audience to be called.
The difference between this type of audience and others come in the options you can choose for engagement.
You have the option to choose whether someone watched 3 or 10 seconds of your video, or if they completed a certain percent of your video (25%, 50%, 75%, or 90%). Once you choose how much of a video someone has to watch you’ll pick which videos you want to track. You can choose multiple videos or just one.
After you’ve completed these steps, you’ll have an audience that will populate with people who have watched your video based on the parameters you’ve chosen.
How To Use These Remarketing Audiences
Now that you have created some video remarketing audiences, how might you put them to use? Let’s look at two potential strategies for getting the most out of this type of remarketing.
Test which % viewed gets you the best results.
We might just say that those people who watched 95% of our video are our most committed, but the size of that audience could be very small. Instead, create three different audiences at the 50%, 75%, and 95% viewed to figure out at which level performance is in line with your goals.
Gauge interest to a product with remarketing follow up.
Test potential new products with a video to gauge interest and use the % viewed audiences to offer betas or invites to those who watched a higher percentage of the video.
Conclusion
Remarketing by % viewed on Facebook gives us some new tools to reach people that are the most interested in what we have to offer. Matching this tool with your overall goals and KPI’s could present a useful tactic in reaching your goals.
