How Optimizely Improved Facebook Ad Retargeting Cost by 83%

For Optimizely, our primary audiences fall into technical and non-technical buyer personas. Reaching our technical audience is a big focus and has historically been more difficult. So, we were interested in using Adaptive Audiences to do more targeted remarketing to our technical audience.

After launching the Adaptive Audience campaign, CPA for our technical audience went from $34.47 for general remarketing to $18.80 for the targeted remarketing via adaptive audiences, so an 83% overall improvement for CPA for our technical audience – which is a huge win!

Before Adaptive Audiences

After Adaptive Audiences

If you would like to improve the CPA for your key buyer personas, keep reading to learn how we did it including our exact set-up for this campaign.

1. Add Tags to train Optimizely Web Experimentation’s machine learning algorithm

   Adaptive Audiences requires your website to have tags set-up in Optimizely Personalization, so those will need to be configured first. Full documentation for getting these set-up can be found on Optimizely’s Knowledge Base.

   At a high level, you’ll be defining the areas on your site you want catalogued for word processing by the machine learning capabilities in Optimizely Web Experimentation.

2. Set-up your Adaptive Audiences

   Make sure to create separate audiences for each of your key personas.

   Below, you can see a gif of how to do this and our own Product Audience configuration.

   

   

3. Create your personalization campaign

   Make sure the campaign’s URL targeting is set to your entire website so that the Facebook Pixel fires as soon as the visitor qualifies for the Adaptive Audience.

   Create different experiences for each of your key persona audiences, you can see we have Product and Marketer below.

   

4. Add Facebook pixel tracking code

   Note: Update the “trackCustom” value below to match the custom event you have configured within Facebook.

   

   Facebook Custom Tracking Code to Add in Optimizely Web Experimentation

   // optimizely utility library
   var utils = window["optimizely"].get('utils');
   // make sure fb is loaded then fire tracking
   utils.waitUntil(function() {
    try{
    var fb_loaded = window.fbq.loaded;
    return fb_loaded;
    } catch(e){
    return false;
    }
   }).then(function() {
    window.fbq('trackCustom', 'UPDATE VALUE', {});
   });

5. Set-up custom dynamic Ads

   based on your custom event tracking audiences. Facebook Documentation

6. QA in Optimizely Web Experimentation and Facebook, then launch!