How to Set Up Facebook Retargeting Ads for Amazon Products
Bottom line: there are several methods that allow you to retarget Amazon customers on Facebook. You can use past order data (if this data is available in your Seller Central account, or you can retarget visitors to your landing page or your own site.
Retargeting usually results in better performing Facebook Ads, as you’re targeting people who have shown a real interest in your brand or products.
Facebook retargeting (aka Facebook remarketing) is one of the best and simplest Facebook Ads strategies out there.
Ever go onto a site, click away, then all of a sudden start seeing ads for that site on Facebook or on other sites? That’s retargeting, and it’s a tactic used by millions of businesses online.
Retargeting ads are powerful because they are only shown to people who’ve previously interacted with one of your products or your brand.
These people are a lot more likely to buy than the general population. You know they have at least some interest in what you have to sell.
Retargeting for Amazon products is pretty difficult, because you don’t have control over the customers who landed on or interacted with your product listing.
But there are a couple of ways you can retarget your past customers, or people who have shown interest in your product. This post will explain how to do remarketing as an Amazon seller.
Retargeting works by adding a code snippet (often called a pixel, such as the Facebook Pixel) to your website.
This piece of code tracks people who view your site, and relays that data to the ad platform (i.e. Facebook Ads Manager), which uses the data to target the same people with ads.
The problem with this approach is that as an Amazon seller, you can’t add the necessary retargeting code to your Amazon listing. This complicates retargeting for Amazon product listings.
However, you can also use an existing list of people to manually serve retargeting as to. As long as you have enough info for Facebook to match to Facebook profiles, you can create a Facebook audience and run ads to this audience.
Thus, there are two approaches that you can use to set up Facebook retargeting for your Amazon business:
Option 1: Retarget your existing customers. This option lets you show retargeting ads to your previous customers. This is handy if you launch another product in the niche, or if you have a product your customers can buy again (such as a nutritional supplement).
Option 2: Retarget landing page visitors. If you drive traffic from outside Amazon to a landing page (which you should), you can place retargeting code on your landing page. This will allow you to retarget your visitors.
The rest of this article will walk you through setting up a successful Facebook retargeting campaign.
First, Choose Your Goal
Before setting up retargeting, you want to think about your goals. I.e, what do you want to accomplish? The answer will shape how you run your remarketing campaign.
There are a number of ways this might go:
Send people to a landing page that allows you to capture their email address [goal: build an email list]
Retarget buyers asking for honest feedback in the form of Amazon product reviews [goal: get more reviews]
Run ads promoting an offer, such as an exclusive discount code [goal: boost sales, BSR and rankings]
Drive traffic to your own site [goal: boost off-Amazon sales]
Settle on your goal before you start. In most case, you’re going to want to build a landing page for your campaign, so check out this guide to learn how to create an effective landing page.
Retargeting networks
There are two pretty huge retargeting networks available to you: Facebook Ads and Google Ads. Let’s take a quick look at what each one offers.
Facebook Retargeting for Amazon Sellers
Facebook retargeting lets you place ads in your prospect’s Facebook and/or Instagram feed.
The key to a successful Facebook retargeting campaign for your Amazon products is to understand Facebook Custom Audiences. Using Facebook Custom Audiences, you can show ads to your customers, or to people who have visited your website or your landing page.
Creating ads with custom audiences is similar to creating a “normal” Facebook ad campaign. The main difference is that, instead of targeting people based on their interests, you can choose to target a custom audience.
We’ll talk about how to set up Facebook custom audiences for your Amazon business later in this chapter.
This method lets you show ads across Google’s ad network, which includes Google search, sites displaying Google AdSense ads, and YouTube, to people who have interacted with your brand or bought from you in the past.
To keep it simple we’ll focus on Facebook retargeting for the rest of this article. Google Ads (particularly display ads, which are the most common way to run retargeting ads with Google) can be pretty complex, so if you’re just getting started, it’s best to learn Facebook Ads first.
That being said, Google Ads retargeting can be a powerful way to drive traffic when done right, so feel free to investigate it further. You can learn more here.
Retargeting your existing Amazon customers on Facebook
People who have bought from you in the past will be likely to buy from you again in the future. They’ve shown they’re willing to spend money on the products you are offering. That’s the power of retargeting ads.
In comparison, detail targeting can be a bit of a shot in the dark. You’re using interests, behaviors and demographics to make a guess about who may be interested in your products.
So, our first option for retargeting is to target past buyers.
The way to retarget your existing Amazon customers is by uploading your customer database to Facebook so you can create a Custom Audience.
Your Amazon customer list contains data (eg. name, zip, city, state) that Facebook can match with their users.
This isn’t perfect. You won’t have a 100% match rate, but you will be able to target a lot of your customers this way.
What kind of match rate can you expect?
A while ago, Amazon let you export your customer’s phone number. Phone numbers make it very easy to match your Amazon customers to Facebook users.
This has since changed, as Amazon limits how much customer data they give access to. The remaining relevant data points you can still access are:
First name
Last name
Zip
City
State
Country
(in regards to name, you may have access to “Buyer Name”, “Recipient Name”, or both. Any of these should work for creating custom audiences).
Using these data points, you will be able to match a good percentage of your customers to Facebook users. In one test, we uploaded about 5,500 customers, and Facebook was able to match 2,200 of those people to Facebook accounts. This is a match rate of approximately 40%.
Downloading your Customer list
Here’s how to download your customer data to use for a custom audience.
First, go to Reports -> Fulfillment
Then, go to Sales -> Amazon Fulfilled Shipments.
Go ahead and schedule a report. As mentioned above, the match rate you can expect is about 40%. Considering that your custom audience should be as large as possible (in an ideal word 10,000+ people), we recommend going for a long time frame: 30 days or more.
Alternatively, you can go to Sales -> All Orders, if you don’t find the necessary data in your Amazon Fulfilled Shipments report.
Download & format your spreadsheet
Download your report and open it with Excel, or any other spreadsheet editing tool. The only change you’ll need to make to your spreadsheet is to split the name column into two: First name and Last name.
If you sell multiple products, you may want to split your spreadsheet by product purchased – especially if they aren’t all related. To do so, sort or filter your spreadsheet by Product, and copy and paste your customers into a new empty spreadsheet.
Once you’ve formatted the spreadsheet, you can upload it to Facebook to create your custom audience.
Creating a Facebook Custom Audience from your Amazon customers
Log into your Facebook ad account and go to Assets -> Audiences.
Choose Create Audience -> Custom Audience.
Choose Customer File -> Add customers from your own file or copy and paste data.
Now, upload your spreadsheet. Match the following fields:
First name
Last name
Zip
City
State
Country
Phone number (if available)
Congrats! You’ve just created a Facebook custom audience from your Amazon customers. Depending on your audience size, you’ll need to wait up to a few hours for Facebook to fully process your upload.
Now that you’ve created your custom audience, you can start running Facebook ads.
You’ll need to set up all the relevant budget, creative and placement options for your ads.
You can also add interest, behavior and demographic targeting on top of your custom audience. For example, to restrict your audience to females between the age of 18-35.
In general, you may contact buyers (Amazon.com customers) only to complete orders or to respond to customer service inquiries. You may not contact buyers for marketing or promotional purposes (including via e-mail, physical mail, telephone, or otherwise).
It’s unclear if showing Facebook ads to people counts as “contacting buyers.” The above policy is aimed at preventing sellers from emailing, snail mailing, or calling buyers.
Regardless, Facebook retargeting seems like a bit of a gray area, so do proceed with caution.
A safer approach that is still highly effective is to create a lookalike audience (instead of a custom audience) from your Amazon customers.
Lookalike audiences are people that have similar characteristics to the list of people you’ve uploaded. Using this approach, you’ll be able to show targeted Facebook ads to people very similar to your customers. You also won’t risk violating Amazon’s terms of service.
Retargeting landing page visitors
The second option you have is to retarget people that visit your landing page. This approach is very effective, and completely legal with Amazon TOS.
Step 1: Set up a landing page funnel
First, you’ll need to start sending traffic to your landing page.
We cover this more extensively here. To sum up the key points, you first need to get the attention of potential customers outside of Amazon, such as with Google Ads, Facebook Ads, any other social media, or email.
You’ll send them to a landing page, and then if they decide they want to buy your product, they’ll click through to Amazon.
See this sales funnel visualised here:
The important point here is to ensure your landing page has the Facebook Pixel installed.
This will relay data to Facebook on people who interacted with your landing page. You can then segment these people and create audiences based on people who clicked through to Amazon, or those who viewed the page but didn’t click through.
If you use LandingCube for your landing page, adding the Pixel is easy. The Pixel itself is already installed on all our landing pages – all you need to do is add your Pixel ID.
Find your Pixel ID in Facebook Ads Manager, by clicking to the Events Manager page.
Step 2: Drive Traffic
Start driving traffic to your landing page and wait. Facebook will start collecting data about your visitors. You’ll need to drive at least 100 visitors to your landing page before you have enough data to start retargeting.
Step 3: Set up your Facebook retargeting audience
Set up a Facebook Custom Audience for the people that interacted with your landing page. Keep in mind that Facebook’s minimum size for custom audiences is 100 people. This is a precaution by Facebook that ensures you can’t target specific people individually.
Go ahead and create a Facebook Custom Audience.
Choose Custom Audience
Choose Website Traffic
Now, you can either choose to target everyone (All website visitors), or only people that performed a specific action. In this example, we’ll create a custom audience for people that triggered the Lead event. LandingCube triggers the Lead event when someone enters their email in exchange for a coupon code.
Click Create Audience and you’re done.
Step 4: Set Up Your Ad
Finally, set up your Facebook Ad as you normally would.
This post walks you through setting up your ad, and best practices for doing so. You can also check out this free video course, which takes you through every single step of setting up your Facebook Ads campaign.
If you haven’t created a LandingCube account yet, click here to open an account and try it free.
