How to Use the Reach Objective for Website Remarketing

Website remarketing, which targets Hot audiences, is one of the cornerstones of successful Facebook advertising.

It consistently produces the highest Return-on-Ad-Spend (ROAS) for new customer acquisition of the three different audience temperatures: Cold, Warm, and Hot.

Thanks to Facebook’s constantly improving machine learning, the Conversion objective, using optimization for purchases, has become the go-to campaign objective for direct response advertisers.

However, when implemented correctly, there is one campaign objective that is often overlooked for website remarketing: Reach.

Why Use the Reach Objective?

Before we cover how to create this type of campaign, we need to first understand why we are using the Reach objective in the first place.

  • It allows us to reach the most people in our target audience.
  • It prevents Facebook from optimizing and narrowing our audience size.
  • It slows down ad fatigue by being able to set a frequency cap.
  • The campaign audience is constantly being refreshed with new people (more on that later).

Use a 3-day Website Custom Audience for Maximum Relevancy and Responsiveness


Before building the campaign we first need to create our audience.

The key to success with this campaign comes down to the audience and the ad type (more on ad type later).

We use a small audience duration, as that contains the most relevant and responsive people. In this example, we’re using a 3-day website custom audience of all traffic excluding purchases. This is the audience duration and engagement condition that we’ve found to be most effective across multiple clients.

TIP: For this to work and for ad fatigue not to be an issue, you need to have at least a 1500 person audience size, which means an average of 500 people per day visiting your website.

For websites with large volumes of monthly traffic, in the hundreds of thousands or millions of visitors, you can further segment your website custom audience by views of a particular product page. You then position that particular product in the ad of the campaign.

To create the website custom audience, in your Audiences dashboard click on Create Audience and open the custom audience menu. From the custom audience menu, click on Website.

website custom audience

When the website custom audience creation window opens, make sure the “All Website Visitors” condition is selected and change the audience duration to 3 days.

Next, click Exclude and from the engagement condition drop-down list, select Purchases and change the audience duration to 180 days.

By using this condition we are excluding people that are already customers and have triggered the Purchase event action on our website in the last 180 days.

Finally, name your audience and click Create Audience. If you are not already using a naming convention, you can easily understand your audiences by using the following: WCA – All Traffic Ex Purchases – Last 3 Days.

3 day website custom audience

Using this naming convention means we can easily see that it is a website custom audience (WCA), using all traffic while excluding purchases, occurring during the last three days.

To create the audience, if you have a high traffic website, simply change the first engagement condition from “All Website Visitors” to the URL of the product page using the “people who visited a specific web pages” condition.

Or, you can use the View Content event that triggers on product page load, and segment your View Content actions using the content ID of that specific product.

audience content IDs

Creating the Reach Objective Website Remarketing Campaign

Now that we’ve created the audience we are going to use for this campaign, we can start creating the actual campaign.

In the Ads Manager dashboard click on Create Campaign. In the quick creation workflow, from the drop-down list of campaign objectives, click on Reach.

Name your campaign, ad set, select your Facebook page, and name your ad.

Creating the reach campaign

Move on to the Ad Set level of the campaign and set your budget and schedule. The aim is to reach as many people in our 3-day website custom audience as possible, without over-allocating budget, resulting in higher than necessary CPMs.

If you are already running website remarketing campaigns using other objectives such as Conversions, here’s how to calculate your starting budget.

Take your audience size of the 3-day website custom audience and round it down to the nearest thousand and then divide it by 1000 to get a whole number. For example, 2500 in our website custom audience becomes 2000 (rounded down) divided by 1000 equals 2.

Multiply your answer by your current cost per 1000 people reached to get your starting daily budget. In this example, let’s say that our current cost per 1k people reached is $20 so the starting budget would be $40 per day (2*20).

reach budget allocation

We round the total audience size down because the Reach objective delivers lower CPMs. Therefore, from the starting budget of $40 we will reach more of the audience than the estimated 2k people.

Now, in the Audiences section of the ad set, select your 3-day website custom audience from the custom audiences field.

Leave age and gender open, as we don’t want to narrow this highly qualified audience any more than the website audience condition has already done. Also, leave the detailed targeting section empty too.

Audience targeting reach objective website remarketing

In the Placements section, deselect automatic placements and edit placements instead. From the placement dropdown list, we want to only use the highest quality placements which are Facebook and Instagram Feeds and Stories. Deselect all other placement options.

Finally, to finish setting up the Ad Set, in the optimization and delivery section change the frequency cap.

If you want to be more aggressive with your campaign, set the cap as 1 impression every 1 day. This means that someone in your audience will see the ad once per day for three days in a row before they drop out of the website custom audience.

Frequency Cap website remarketing

Alternatively, this campaign has also worked extremely well with a lower frequency cap of 1 impression every 3 days, meaning they only see the ad once in the three days after visiting your website before they are removed from the audience.

The Best Ad Type to Use with This Campaign

The final thing to create for this campaign is the ad. The most effective type of ad to use with this campaign is a Reminder ad. These form one part of the RTM Method used for website remarketing, which consists of three ad types, Reminders, Testimonials and Messenger.

As we are targeting people that visited our website in the last 3 days, there is huge campaign relevancy and audience responsiveness. The Reminder ad creates urgency by reminding someone what they’ve looked at on your website and hooking them into engaging with your ad, revisiting your website and converting to a customer.

In the ad section of your campaign, select your Facebook page and Instagram profile in the identity section. Next, choose your ad format. No one ad format is more effective than another for this type of ad campaign. We’ve seen success with the single image format, video, and carousel.

The key to creating a highly engaging reminder ad is the Snap. This is the first line in the ad copy that grabs the attention of your target audience and immediately tells them the ad is for them.

We’ve found a statement callout reiterating they have previously been browsing our website works well, as you can see in the ad example below.

K&K ad example website remarketing

For the rest of the copy, you want to repeat any offer that they may have seen on your website or from other Facebook ads further up your ad funnel.

For example, highlight a price promotion such as a discount and the relevant code they need to use to redeem it. This to be followed by a call to action to drive people to the product page of what you are offering in the ad.

Your creative and headline should also be based on the product you are promoting. We’ve found that offer headlines focused on product perform very well compared to benefit headlines, which are most commonly used when building consideration further up the Ad funnel.

Vital Ad Example website remarketing

The audience will be updated frequently due to new people being added who have visited your website and existing people being removed. As a result, it can deliver great Return-on-Ad-Spend.

Results reach website remarketing

The structure of the campaign also means that a single ad can run longer than in Conversion campaigns before encountering ad fatigue issues because the frequency increases very slowly due to the frequency cap and short audience duration.

TIP: When creating this campaign, be sure to exclude your 3 day website custom audience in your other website remarketing campaigns, such as those targeting 7, 14, or 30 day audience durations.

Conclusion

Adding a Reach website remarketing campaign is an easy and highly effective way to increase your Return-on-Ad-Spend and improve your website remarketing.

By combining a short audience duration for maximum relevancy with a Reminder ad that creates urgency, you can quickly hook people who have recently visited your website, and convert them into new customers.

Have you used the Reach objective for website remarketing? What’s your approach, and what results have you seen?

Let me know in the comments below!