Facebook and Instagram Retargeting: How to Do It Well

Facebook retargeting shows ads on Facebook and Instagram to people who have already visited your website, watched your videos or engaged with your profiles, so your budget goes on an audience that already knows who you are. It tends to convert more efficiently than cold prospecting, provided the audiences, exclusions and messages are planned with care. Priority Pixels builds retargeting into the Facebook and Instagram advertising for B2B organisations we manage and the approach below reflects how those campaigns are set up and reviewed.

Retargeting is often called remarketing and the two terms describe the same tactic on Meta’s platforms. Done well, it picks up the conversation where a prospect left it, with a message that reflects what they looked at and how close they are to getting in touch. The points below summarise what good Facebook and Instagram retargeting involves.

• Accurate tracking through the Meta Pixel and the Conversions API, set up with cookie consent in place.
• Separate audiences for website visitors, video viewers, social media engagers and customer lists.
• Recency windows, so the most recent visitors see the most direct offers.
• Messages matched to what each audience viewed or did.
• Exclusions that stop converted leads and customers seeing acquisition ads.
• Regular frequency and creative fatigue checks, with reporting tied to leads and revenue.

Each point is covered below, starting with how Meta builds a retargeting audience. Instagram follows the same principles, with differences in format and creative covered in their own section.

What Facebook Retargeting Is and How It Works

Facebook retargeting works by matching the people who interact with your business to their Facebook and Instagram accounts, then letting you show ads to those groups as custom audiences. The most common starting point is the website custom audience, built from visitors recorded by the Meta Pixel on your website.

Meta describes website custom audiences as a way to reach people who have already shown interest in your business and gives the example of retargeting people who visited your website in the last 30 days but have not converted. The Pixel records page views and events such as form submissions in the browser. The Conversions API sends the same kind of event data from your server, website platform or CRM directly to Meta, which gives a more reliable signal when browser tracking is blocked or limited.

In practice most accounts need the two working together. Our guide to Facebook conversion tracking covers how the two share events and avoid duplicates. Without dependable tracking, audiences shrink and Meta has less data to optimise against.

A typical example of retargeting looks like this. A finance director reads two of your service pages and a case study, then leaves without making contact. Over the following fortnight they see a Facebook ad featuring a related client story and an Instagram Story offering a buyer’s guide, both shown only to visitors of those pages.

The Audiences You Can Retarget on Meta

Meta offers four broad audience types for retargeting, which are website audiences, engagement audiences, customer lists and lookalikes built from any of these. How you combine them matters more than the size of any single audience.

Website audiences can be built from visits to specific pages, from actions such as completed forms and from how recently someone visited. A person reading your pricing page is further along than one who landed on a blog post, so they belong in different audiences. Recency matters too and separating visitors from the last seven days, the last 30 days and a longer window lets you bid and write differently for each group.

Engagement audiences come from activity on Meta itself. You can create a video engagement custom audience from people who watched your videos on Facebook or Instagram, for example people who viewed at least 10 seconds and choose up to 200 videos as the source. Lead form, Facebook Page and Instagram account audiences work in a similar way and Meta refreshes them continuously as people move in and out of the retention window you set.

Customer lists let you upload email addresses and phone numbers from your CRM. Meta hashes customer information before matching it, turning it into randomised code that cannot be reversed and deletes the hashed data after the match process is complete. Lookalike audiences then use a source such as a customer list to find new people with similar characteristics and Meta’s guidance on lookalike audiences notes that smaller percentages match the source more closely and larger percentages create a broader audience.

Lookalikes are prospecting rather than retargeting and they depend on the quality of the source. Your most valuable customers or qualified leads usually give Meta a better signal than every contact in the CRM.

Matching the Message to the Stage of Interest

Retargeting works well when the ad reflects how far someone has progressed, so each audience should receive a message that suits its level of interest. A person who watched part of a video has shown far less intent than someone who read your pricing page twice and treating them the same wastes budget on both groups.

For B2B organisations the gap between a first visit and an enquiry can be long and several people are often involved in the decision. A three stage structure keeps messages consistent across that period and gives each audience a sensible next step.

Social proof carries more weight in retargeting than in cold prospecting, since the audience already knows your name and is deciding whether to trust you. Case studies that answer a specific objection, such as implementation time or compliance, tend to work better than general praise and B2B buyers who must justify a decision to colleagues respond well to examples from their own sector.

Instagram Retargeting and How It Differs From Facebook

Instagram retargeting uses the same audiences, ad account and Meta Ads Manager as Facebook, so the difference lies in creative and placement rather than set-up. Most campaigns run across both platforms at once and let Meta’s delivery system decide where each impression goes, with placements restricted only when creative has been built for one format.

Instagram adds one audience source of its own. Meta lets you build an Instagram account custom audience from people who followed or engaged with your Instagram professional account, with a retention window of up to 365 days. Personal accounts cannot be used, so a business still posting from a personal profile needs to switch to a professional account before it can retarget its Instagram followers.

Creative is where the two platforms differ most. Instagram is visual first and Reels, Stories and feed posts tend to perform when they show the product, service or people behind the brand. Facebook gives more room for longer copy and detailed case studies, which suits B2B audiences who want substance before they enquire. Our article on Instagram ads for B2B covers creative approaches that suit professional audiences on the platform.

Instagram remarketing ads in Stories work well for content with a deadline, such as event registrations or an upcoming webinar, since the format is brief and fills the screen. Vertical video with captions is the safer choice across Reels and Stories, so the message still lands when a video plays without sound.

Exclusions, Frequency and Audience Controls

Exclusions stop your budget going on people who have already converted and they are one of the simplest improvements to make in an underperforming account. Someone who submitted an enquiry yesterday should move out of the acquisition audience and, where it makes sense, into a separate nurture or retention campaign with a different message.

Meta’s guide on how to use custom or lookalike audiences gives the example of excluding current customers from a campaign aimed at gaining new ones. Customer lists need regular updating for this to work and Meta flags a list as outdated when it has not been refreshed for over 30 days. Meta recommends that a customer list custom audience includes at least 1,000 customers, so very small lists can struggle to deliver.

Frequency needs watching on every retargeting campaign, since these audiences are smaller than prospecting audiences and see the same ads more often. Meta describes creative fatigue as an audience seeing the same creative too many times, which can make people less likely to engage and push up cost per result. Ads Manager shows a Creative limited or Creative fatigue status when it detects the problem and the usual responses are new creative that differs materially from the original or a wider audience.

A monthly review of exclusions and frequency catches most of these issues early. Priority Pixels includes frequency monitoring and creative fatigue in every monthly Meta Ads audit, alongside audience performance and conversion tracking checks.

Is Retargeting Still Effective After Privacy Changes

Retargeting is still effective, but audiences are smaller and less complete than they once were. The change most advertisers noticed was Apple’s iOS 14 update and Meta’s guide to creating a website custom audience notes that these audiences may decrease in size as they may not include events from some iOS 14 users.

Consent is the other factor in the UK. The ICO’s guidance on cookies and similar technologies says you must tell people about the cookies you set and get their consent, with an exception for cookies that are strictly necessary for a service the user has asked for. Advertising cookies such as those set by the Meta Pixel fall outside that exception, so visitors who decline will not join your website audiences through the Pixel.

These limits make the Conversions API, customer lists and engagement audiences more valuable. Server side events fill some of the gaps left by browser tracking where consent allows and engagement audiences built on Facebook and Instagram do not depend on your website’s cookies at all. A balanced retargeting programme now draws on all three sources rather than relying on the Pixel alone.

Measuring Retargeting Performance

Retargeting should be measured on leads, cost per lead and revenue rather than clicks or impressions, since its purpose is to turn existing interest into business. Return on ad spend matters for ecommerce and for B2B lead generation the most useful view follows each lead into the CRM to see which audiences produce qualified opportunities.

Conversion volume affects how well Meta can optimise. Meta’s guidance on the learning phase says ad sets usually exit it after about 50 results in the week after their last significant edit and retargeting audiences are often too small to reach that on enquiries alone. Consolidating similar ad sets or optimising for an earlier event, such as a landing page view, can help smaller accounts produce stable results.

There is no fixed price for retargeting ads, as Meta sells impressions through an auction. Costs depend on audience size, competition and how often each person sees your ads.

Retargeting on Meta rarely works in isolation. Some prospects are easier to reach on LinkedIn by job title and our guide to LinkedIn retargeting ads explains how the two channels can share the work. The landing page matters as much as the ad and our article on PPC landing pages that convert sets out how to match the page to the message that brought people there.

Testing should change one variable at a time, whether that is the headline, the image or the offer, so you can tell what made the difference. Paid media retainer clients can follow retargeting results in our reporting dashboard, which brings ad platform, CRM and Google Analytics data into one view so budget can move towards the audiences that produce qualified leads.