Retargeting Website Visitors

The Facebook Pixel is a piece of code that you place on your website, allowing you to monitor conversions from Facebook ads, optimise ads, build targeted audiences for future adverts and retarget people who have previously interacted with your website. The Facebook Pixel works by dropping a cookie that will track visitors on your website so you can reach out to them later, also known as retargeting.

Once you advertise to people that have been on your website, you can also use the Facebook Pixel to track their behaviour when they’re back on your website. This, in turn, helps you find out what advertisements are most effective, whilst allow you to target audiences with increased relevance.

Imagine someone clicks on your link ad, ends up on your website and buys one of your products. This will lead the Facebook Pixel to trigger and report the action that has just taken place. Thanks to the Facebook Pixel you’ll know when a customer took an action after seeing your Facebook advertisement. This way, you’ll also be able to reach this particular customer again by using a Custom Audience.

It goes without saying that once more and more conversions happen on your website, Facebook will automatically get better at delivering your adverts to people who are more likely to take action. This is known as conversion optimisation, something that we are quite good at using smart algorithms.

Of course, the Facebook Pixel isn’t just there to help you target customers who have already completed a purchase from you before. It can also help you target shoppers that have shown an initial interest in one of your product by clicking on the ad and viewing it. Some may have even gone as far as adding the product to the cart, before deciding to abandon it and cancelling the purchase.

Since the pixel is monitoring every action taken on your website, you’ll be able to easily discover which products have attracted interest from shoppers. By collecting the information of all interested page visitors from your Facebook ad, you’ll be able to start efficiently retargeting them.

Let’s look at the step-by-step instructions for setting up a Facebook remarketing audience of past website visitors:

Step 1. Access Facebook Custom Audiences

To create a Facebook Custom Audience, open Facebook Business Manager, and click on the menu in the upper left corner.

Navigate to and select Audiences from the menu to begin creating your Facebook Custom Audience.

Open your audiences page in Facebook Business Manager

Step 2. Click on the blue “Create Audience” button and select Custom Audience from the drop-down options.

Create a custom audience

Step 3. Then select the second option on the list titled “Website Traffic.”

Making a custom audience from past website visitors

Step 4. Decide whether your audience must meet one or all of the conditions you set. For this example, we select “All” from the drop-down.

Setting conditions for your custom audience

Step 5. Choose which visitors you want to be included in your audience using the drop-down.

You can include anyone who has visited your website, visitors that only viewed individual pages, or a combination of pages. Now enter a timeframe in the past 1 to 180 days.

For example, we select “All website visitors” from the drop-down and leave the default “past number of days” at 30.

Select which pages’ visitors you want to target

Step 6. Now, it’s time to name your audience. For this example, we name the audience “All Website Visitors – Past 30 Days”.

Step 7. Finally, click on “Create Audience.”

You now know how to create Facebook retargeting audiences of past website visitors.