Understanding how to target the right audience for your Meta ad campaigns can be stressful and time-consuming. If you are relatively new to running ads especially, building a relevant and well-honed audience right off the bat for your Facebook and Instagram advertising can require a huge amount of testing and patience – often leading to mixed results or, at worst, wasted resources.

Well, there’s a better way – one that uses the audience insights you already have.

One strategy that has proven highly effective across both B2B (business to business) and DTC (direct to consumer) campaigns for our clients across publishing and education is dynamic retargeting on Meta using video content.

What is dynamic retargeting? 

Dynamic retargeting on Meta is an advanced advertising tool that enables you to re-engage with consumers who previously interacted with your business via the platform. This interaction could include website visits, Facebook page followers, or clicks or reactions on your ads. 

However, due to international data laws, and Meta’s own privacy policies, retargeting can be imprecise, especially if you don’t have a Meta Pixel on your website. For instance, while businesses can target users who have engaged with ad content, they’re unable to specify which ads to target, making re-targeting complex and imprecise, especially if a business has multiple campaigns running concurrently.

So, how do you solve this problem? We’d like to introduce you to the powerful partnership between dynamic retargeting and video content on Meta.

How can I re-target video watchers? 

Meta allows you to create audience segments based on watchers of individual videos. This means that, if you are using video content in your ad campaigns, it becomes more straightforward to target cohorts based on campaign engagement metrics.

It’s crucial to have strong video content to serve on Facebook and Instagram – especially as we find video performs better on the Meta platform regardless, even without the added benefit of retargeting.

You can go even further than this. Your videos don’t have to just be served as paid content in order to retarget the Meta users who watched them. With this in mind, a whole world of opportunity opens up for dynamic retargeting on Meta. 

Building audiences from Facebook Groups 

Using video content and dynamic retargeting in Facebook Groups in particular can help you create valuable, highly-relevant audience segments for your campaigns that are typically inaccessible due to limited targeting options in Meta Ads Manager.

Posting organic video content in relevant Facebook Groups aligned with your business’s interests can be a strategic approach. You will likely need to gain permission from Group admins to do this if you’re posting from a business page. Focus on informative or educational content rather than a direct sales call-to-action. 

Once you’ve posted in your target Groups, wait for the video watches to rack up. In Ads Manager, create a Custom Audience made up of those video watchers. I tend to go for users who have watched 75% or more of the video, to make sure they have legitimately engaged with my content and didn’t just pause on the video without truly watching it. 

Once you’ve built your Custom Audience, you can create additional Lookalike Audiences, using the characteristics of the ‘source’ audience – the Custom Audience you’ve just created – to find similar users who are likely to be interested in your business or content. Wait for the audiences to populate – up to 48 hours – and begin! 

Watch your campaign metrics flourish

Using dynamic retargeting on video content has changed the game for our paid advertising on Meta. We’ve seen CTRs triple and CPCs drop by over half using this method. And this works across the board – whether it’s a brand or celebrity author recording a face-to-camera piece introducing their new book; or a short video animation for an EdTech company advertising a new product or SaaS.

Think of dynamic retargeting using video on Meta as a shortcut to finding an audience that is truly interested in what your business has to offer, allowing you to cut out the middle-management of test-and-learn interest targeting. 

Kirsty Capes is Digital Marketing Strategist at BookMachine and has over 8 years’ experience in the publishing industry. Kirsty leads on campaign strategy for a range of BookMachine Creative Agency clients including DK Books and DK Learning, Hodder Education, Juniper and Just Content. She also has a wealth of experience marketing romance fiction, commercial fiction and celebrity-authored fiction from previous roles at HQ/Mills & Boon (HarperCollins). More recently, Kirsty worked on the gift, illustrated and narrative non-fiction list at Welbeck/Headline (Hachette).