Retargeting is the heart of digital marketing and advertising. Facebook Ads retargeting has especially revolutionized the digital marketing and ad landscape, offering a near accurate way to reach out to potential customers who have taken specific actions with your business or on your site. Pay-per-click (PPC) retargeting, however, has taken a big blow since new data privacy measures have been introduced over a few years in the past. That’s where cookieless retargeting kicks in, and in this blog post, you will browse through everything you need to know about, how to retarget without cookies.
Cookieless Retargeting
Traditional retargeting engagements are basically formed around cookie-based targeting. You’ll establish data tracking on your website, along with data tracking via Facebook’s pixel. When users browse a specific page on your website, that pixel might fire. And Facebook can then track the users’ ID and identify, that they can be shown, a bespoke retargeting campaign relying on their activity.
This novel type of retargeting, however, applies cookieless tracking. This would include tracking certain user data on your own site that doesn’t require third-party tracking pixels or data. Then follow that up by syncing that data to Facebook right away involving no use of pixel. You’re communicating data from your server to Facebook letting retargeting to still happen.
It’s Importance
Retargeting without cookies is essential since it allows you to generate strong, actionable, and useable first-party data regardless of that cookie-based tracking, is not as effective as it once was. Simply saying it needs to be a part of your first-party data strategy.
This can be done when you’re tracking user data on your site and using your own CMS system; like specific users who open your emails, who’s downloading eBooks, and visitor buying on your site. You can convey this information straight to other platforms that can in turn use that for retargeting with no cookie-based tracking needed.
Certain platforms come with attributes that allow for this. Google has improved conversions, for example, and Facebook has its Conversions API.
Facebook Ads Retargeting
If you’re trying to find a way to retarget without cookies with Facebook Cookieless Ads, you will want to pay attention to the Facebook Conversions API. FB’s Conversions API lets you track data on your website and through your e-commerce business, logging events including which users visit what landing pages, or which consumers purchase.
The API lets you sync data gathered through your website to Facebook itself. There, they can pair user actions with user IDs and formulate custom audiences you need, to create effective retargeting ads. At present, the best practices encourage businesses to put Facebook Tracking Pixel in place, but not to depend specifically on it. They say that companies must use the Facebook Conversions API also, notwithstanding they haven’t seen a massive shift in their numbers after privacy-related updates.
The Facebook Conversions API takes very little time to set up manually and entails little technical knowledge, unless you want to go for a much more optimized integration approach.
The Final Words
After the most recent changes Apple made a year ago it’s now more important than ever before to have familiarity with advanced options for retargeting in a cookieless world. Facebook’s Conversions API is ultimately the best tool you can use for that purpose as of today. Moreover, it has helped fill in the gaps for marketeers all over the world. Not only do you get to create an increased number of cookieless retargeting audiences (or more detailed audiences with much lesser missing members!). But you can also track the data that is gleaned from those campaigns much more effectively and usefully.
