Why Your Meta Remarketing Isn’t Working – And How To Adapt

Key Takeaways

• Changes in pixel match rates, Apple iOS privacy policies, and engagement for audience sizes have made finding match criteria and targeting audiences more challenging. 
• To make your remarketing strategy worthwhile, it’s important that you utilize first-party data, develop your audiences using strategic criteria, and understand when to either remarket or focus on lead generation
• Meta’s new audience targeting filters may help you refine your audiences even further for better remarketing criteria.

Remarketing on Meta Platforms

Remarketing is a great tool when you’re able to dial it in properly, but with less data available and having to rely on the algorithm for audience targeting, you could be throwing away spend on ineffective ads. Remarketing across Meta platforms has become increasingly challenging due to expanding privacy policies, algorithm changes, and flawed match rates.

If your Meta remarketing isn’t working, it doesn’t mean you need to cut it out completely, but you do need to adapt with aspects like first-party data and strategic grouping. Despite all the headaches it can bring, Meta remarketing is beneficial when you can hone in on a strategy that works for you and maintains a clear view of your business goals.

Recent Meta Changes

Both changes to Meta and the wider marketing world have made remarketing more difficult. Some of the most notable changes requiring marketers to adjust include:

• Inaccurate pixel match rates – Sessions in GA4 don’t match pixel-tracked site visits, creating discrepancies on who you should actually be remarketing to.
• Apple iOS opt-outs and privacy changes – These changes have limited pixel data and made it difficult to track sessions and audience pathways for remarketing.
• Using engagement to build out audience sizes – Using engagement to build out audience sizes requires additional mindfulness about which engagement metrics are most reliable for refining your remarketing groups.
• Changes in attribution windows – Changes in click-through attribution and the addition of engage-through attribution criteria create new engagement metrics to weigh and possible discrepancies in understanding behavior.

Why Meta Remarketing Has Stumbled

The above changes have led to several challenges that have stifled a lot of marketers in their remarketing efforts. These two primary factors have led to a dip in remarketing success: 

• Limited pixel data from iOS users means there is little data for nearly 54% of U.S. audiences, with more limitations due to other privacy settings for non-iOS users.
• Attribution generally has become more challenging and clouded decision-making when creating and refining campaigns.

Because attribution becomes tougher, remarketing ultimately struggles, and we see lower match rates, and it becomes even more difficult to build meaningful custom audiences. All told, remarketing is still worth it, but it’s important to be mindful of low match rates and have a strategy for utilizing first-party data to reinforce those match rates and create a strong foundation for your efforts.

How To Implement Effective Remarketing 

An effective remarketing strategy relies on knowing how it slots in between lead generation and having a well-defined target audience. To implement an effective remarketing strategy, we recommend these best practices.

1. Know When To Remarket

Remarketing shouldn’t be the core of your strategy, but it is worthwhile when you know how to use it to supplement the rest of your advertising. Many people put too much faith in remarketing as a must, so we suggest being intentional about your full-funnel strategy before putting too much faith in remarketing.

Remarketing makes sense when: 

• You have the budget for it
• You have high website traffic, but would like to see more conversions
• You have high engagement with your social media ads, but they don’t translate to conversions
• Your audiences historically require consistent brand visibility before making a purchase
• You have strong first-party data to guide your efforts

However, if one or several of these aren’t true, you’re likely better served focusing your energy and ad spend on upper funnel efforts. Once you have built a strong audience from lead generation, then you can revisit remarketing.

2. Use First-Party Data

First-party data is the information you collect directly from your audience across platforms. This data includes not only customer lists but also any behavior that can be tracked on your site, including website behavior and purchase history, providing valuable context for personalized marketing.

First-party data is the biggest ingredient in a winning formula for an effective remarketing campaign, driving stronger match rates that allow you to identify who is the most likely to want to hear from you and act after they do. Leverage some of these first-party data points:

• Product views
• Cart abandonment rates
• Purchase history
• Offline conversions
• Website visits
• Email engagement rates

Utilize your CRM tool to upload lists for your custom audiences and use pixel data to match web audiences. Once you build up audiences who have a history of high-value actions, start segmenting and adapting your creatives to each group for higher returns.

For example, high-lifetime-value customers who have made big purchases benefit from different messaging than the group with a history of cart abandonment, needing a different form of encouragement. 

3. Carefully Develop and Refine Your Audiences

Refining your audiences based on the right behaviors helps you avoid significant budget drain and prevents the algorithm from running too broadly. Specifying your remarketing attribution for users who take high-value actions, like clicking on a link or watching a video for more than 5 seconds, yields better conversion rates than casting too wide a net. 

Create audiences who are most likely to benefit from your remarketing and adapt your creatives specifically to address them in a way that resonates. Adjusting your click-through, engaged-view, and view-through windows in a way that feels right for your business helps you narrow in this scope.

4. Work Within Your Lead Gen Strategy

Your lead gen and remarketing strategies should work together to create an effective flow through the customer journey, from upper-funnel engagement for awareness to remarketing to drive the final conversion. Find a balance between both, then align messaging down the funnel to capture your customers’ interest. 

Though there may be exceptions, your remarketing budget should rarely be higher than your lead generation budget. While having a higher remarketing budget may make sense in some hyperspecific cases to support focused objectives, remarketing is typically a supplement to your lead generation efforts, not the strategy that carries the rest.

5. Leverage Meta’s Custom Audience Retargeting Filters

Meta offers two new retargeting filters for reaching your engaged audience, and they are worth taking advantage of. These two filters are: 

• “AtLeastInclude” for people who have engaged with your ads or account a specific number of times you determine within a specific time frame you set.
• “InthePast” for targeting people who have seen or engaged with your ads within a window of time you set.

These features offer more options for targeting your audiences and pinpointing who sees which of your remarketing ads based on proven engagement. Using these filters, you can then adapt your messaging and can refine who sees what based on which might best resonate with your audiences, given the engagement you’re already seeing.

How We Insert Meta Remarketing into Our Overall Strategy

As far as we’re concerned, remarketing is a supplement to our overall lead generation strategy when we know that we have a warm audience. Our approach to remarketing hinges on knowing when to let the algorithm decide and when to supplement it with additional data and audience filters. When we do it right, we’ve been able to achieve some of the following results. 

Adventure and Experiential Tourism 

On an account for an adventure and experiential tourism client, we were able to increase ROAS by +14.36 with a focus on remarketing campaigns. Though we started with heavy investment in their Google Ads and YouTube strategies to drive up funnel engagement, remarketing drove the final result.

Our remarketing ads produce social engagement and FOMO that drive interested parties to a final booking. With a small budget used to focus on a single objective, we were able to pinpoint a singular geo to increase bookings.

Higher Education 

For a higher education client, we were able to drive higher-quality actions further down in the funnel. The use of first-party data allowed us to target a new audience segment of future students who needed to complete orientation before they started school.

Prior to accessing first-party data, all we were able to push for was requests for information (RFIs), but utilizing the first-party data helped us expand the funnel to reach leads who are more likely to convert with higher-value actions like applying for a program. 

Solve for Your Remarketing Pain Points with collystring 

Meta remarketing has become increasingly challenging with hurdles like privacy-driven data loss and constant algorithm changes. With less information to work from and algorithmic changes that are consistently fluctuating, knowing when to remarket and how to use the right first-party data to do it is crucial for driving success.

The Paid Social team at collystring helps you navigate the everyday challenges and fluctuations of not just the Meta algorithm but across any of the platforms where you can find your ideal target audience. We’ll help you find the balance between remarketing and lead generation efforts, scale spend, and pull the right levers so your ads target your ideal audience with messaging that drives them to act. 

Contact us to discuss your biggest social media marketing pain points.