Remarketing using Facebook’s Ad Exchange

A briefing on the Facebook Exchange (FBX)

Most social media marketers largely relied on the Facebook MarketPlace Ads to reach out to the billions of Facebook users each month. Although they were relatively effective in marketing, Facebook saw the need of introducing a better and more reliable social advertising option - The Facebook Exchange, otherwise popularly referred to as FBX.

FBX is a system where Facebook sells high quality inventory ads through an auction to many marketing bidders (Real Time Bidding). It significantly helps marketers reach out to the valuable consumers on Facebook. 

FBX enables advertisers to serve tracking cookies on users' browsers as they visit advertiser or publisher sites and then retarget those users with relevant ads once they enter Facebook, often for remarketing, i.e. to remind them about a retailer site they have visited for example.

FBX however, doesn’t quite work like the regular Facebook MarketPlace ads. Facebook doesn’t provide any data on the individual users. So, what exactly makes FBX effective? How can you target the general Facebook audience? FBX also enables advertisers to buy ads using search data from Google's users.

Learning the FBX basics

Since FBX advertising doesn’t rely on the data provided by Facebook, you need to rely on 3rd party data sources. This is done by anonymously dropping cookies in the users’ browsers to track their interests based on their online activity. The users are consequently retargeted with relevant ads once they access Facebook. This is done with the help of companies which have FBX access.

Apart from that, you could use a couple of secrets to target the Facebook audience. Start by assessing your FBX partner and confirm the integrations which it can work with.A reliable FBXpartner should effectively accommodate a wide range of retargeting options.

Choosing a partner

An excellent FBX partner should be able to target the Facebook audience based on the searches done on major search engines. Every internet user’s interests can be substantially tracked through the searches on the search engines. The interests should be subsequently reflected on the ads displayed to the respective users once they access their Facebook accounts.

Although Facebook doesn’t provide the geo-location of the individual users on FBX, your partner could. The geo-location data is provided based on the respective users’ IP addresses. Consequently, the Facebook ads can be optimized depending on the users’ geo-location.

You could also cleverly leverage FBX by targeting your own site visitors. A significant percentage of your regular site visitors are obviously on Facebook. Therefore, it would be wise to track their interests by collecting data and using it to customize the Facebook ads for each of the visitors.

Targeting your audience

The effectiveness of your marketing campaign largely relies on the particular times you choose to display the ads on Facebook.

It’s therefore highly advisable to focus on the particular times that you think your consumers are in the purchase cycle. This strategy should also be reflected on FBX by using your FBX partner to target the specific times of the day, week, month, etc.

Finally, apart from FBX partner, you could also consult a third party data provider. Such a company usually gives valuable data to marketers based on the users’ online activity. This can be effectually used to target the audience especially if your FBX partner accommodates this integration type.

Ben Plomion is VP of Marketing & Partnerships at Chango, where he heads up marketing and is also responsible for expanding the company’s data and media partnerships. Prior to joining Chango, Ben worked with GE Capital for four years to establish and lead the digital media practice. This led to the development of GE Capital’s digital value proposition and its execution worldwide. The new venture re-energized paid, owned and earned media across 70+ web sites. Ben graduated from GE’s Experienced Commercial Leadership program after completing his MBA at McGill University. Before GE, Ben held a variety of Marketing & Business Development roles in the e-payments industry, while working at Gemalto in London. Ben writes frequently for Digiday, CMO.com and Search Engine Watch. Thanks to Ben for sharing his advice and opinions in this post. You can follow him on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.