Facebook Retargeting for High-Quality Leads

Written by Colette Nataf, CEO Lightning AI

For as long as they’ve existed, SaaS companies all around the world have struggled to optimize their Facebook ad campaigns. Due to a few limitations, they’ve had a hard time fully leveraging Facebook ads in their business. Part of this is because Facebook only keeps data from the past 28 days, which means purchase data from sales cycles that take longer than 28 days can’t be fed back into Facebook’s AI. This has proven to be a big roadblock for many SaaS and B2B companies.

Typically, most SaaS companies bid low on a large audience because they’re unable to properly identify and optimize for high-quality leads. This is a key problem. However, companies that are taking a different approach with their ad strategy are seeing a much higher return on investment. 
In order to effectively retarget top quality leads on Facebook, you first need to optimize your bidding against leads that you actually want. To accomplish this, we use our partner company Madkudu’s AI. Madkudu’s predictive score identifies a lead’s value at the top of the funnel and is excellent at predicting the amount that a lead will spend based on historical data.

Lead scoring is the present and the future.

Focus on your highest quality leads

Once you’ve started using lead scoring, you’ll want to turn all of your marketing efforts toward your high quality leads. Instead of wasting your time on all of the leads you generate, it’s much more beneficial to just focus on retargeting your top quality leads. To retarget top quality leads, you’ll first want to build a custom audience on Facebook.

To create a Custom Audience:

• Go to your Audiences.
• If you already have audiences, click the Create Audience dropdown and select Custom Audience.
• If you don't have any audiences, you'll see audience creation buttons, rather than dropdowns.
• Choose Website traffic
• Set a rule section. (You have to start with an inclusive one.) There are standard rules and pixel event rules. You’ll need to choose “pixel event rules” and then “purchase” (sometimes you’ll need to type this in if it doesn’t auto-populate).

• Select “refine by” and then “aggregated value”. Choose “average of”, “value” greater than (or equal to), and then type in the expected value assigned to good and very good leads (MadKudu can help you get this number if you don’t know it already!).

• Give your audience a name (and description, if desired).
• Click Create Audience.
• When we finish creating your audience, select it during ad set creation to reach the people in it with ads.

However, when you’re creating your custom audience you’ll need to choose to build an audience from a Facebook event. This event is called a “purchase” on Facebook, even though it just represents “lead score.” To take it a step further, use your data to create your audience with the 25% of “purchasers” so you can effectively retarget them through your ad campaigns. When you build your ad campaigns, you’ll retarget this custom audience you built so that you will be only reaching your highest quality audiences. 

Too many companies are wasting their time sifting through low-quality leads and even worse-- retargeting low quality leads. By getting super strategic with your approach, you’ll ensure you only retarget your best audiences. And this will result in higher conversions overall.