How to Increase Conversions Through Facebook Retargeting Ads for Fitness Businesses

Retargeting ads are an extremely useful method for reigning in the customers who did not follow through the first time around on your site. This is useful in just about every field of work but could grow your fitness business exponentially in just a short amount of time.

Retargeting ensures that your brand makes an impression on the customers that have considered your personal training, coaching, gym, or studio services. The more impressions you make, the higher your conversions will be. 

Think about all the times you pass by that new coffee shop and think, “I need to try that soon when I’m craving a coffee.” Retargeting can work the same way. The more often something makes an impression on you, the more likely you are to give your attention to it.

How Retargeting Campaigns Work

How often do you window shop online for goods or services? Many people take time to survey their options for finding a personal trainer or fitness center before they make a decision to purchase or are even ready to hire someone. 

Retargeting ads essentially keep your brand in the customer’s mind while they formulate this decision. Once they visit your site, you can then show them ads for your site after they leave without making a purchase.

On average 97% of your site visitors leave without making a purchase. This is the very tip of your marketing funnel. To narrow that funnel of visitors navigating your site, you have to employ retargeting campaigns to remind them of your business as an opportunity for them to make a purchase. 

Customers who return to your site after not making a purchase the first time around are extremely valuable. These customers serve more value than any other customer because they have already considered your training once before.

With retargeting, your customers are 70% more likely to convert and can increase average conversion rates by 146%. Those numbers are hard to argue with.

There are many methods of creating retargeting campaigns through social media ads, newsletters, and search browsers. You can track conversion rates through any of these means. 

How To Set Up Retargeting Campaigns

First, you have to consider your site an eCommerce site. You are selling your services as a fitness business through your site. Hopefully, you have some sort of transactions system set up. You can use PayPal or Stripe to manage transactions through your site. Although, that is going into a different topic. Nonetheless, there should be a way for people to reserve your coaching or training services through your site.

This is the first step to getting more conversions. Make purchasing sessions with you take as few steps as possible. These days, many companies are moving toward one-click purchases. One-click purchases leave less room for a customer’s cognitive dissonance. 

Your site should collect cookies on the users that visit. Additionally, you can track all cookie data that is collected through your site using Google Analytics. You can use the information that Google Analytics provides you to better understand the buyer persona of your customers. 

Facebook allows you to upload CSV files with information necessary to build an audience. You can export these files from Google Analytics and then upload them to create an audience.

Facebook Pixel is a powerful tool that Facebook provides that can track how people are navigating your website. This will help you to understand how people are bouncing around the pages on your site. Although it won’t provide the detail that Google Analytics does, it integrates perfectly with your ad campaigns. This is especially useful for retargeting ads.

Facebook Pixel also helps track conversions for the purchases on your page! In fact, there are 17 different events that Pixel helps you track on your page. The events unique to Facebook that are important to fitness businesses would be contacts, purchases, added payment info, lead, find location, subscriptions, and schedule. 

Building an audience that is specific enough to the customers you wish to attract will make for ad campaigns that will have a higher ROI.

Calculate ROI using this formula: 

Conversion rates will be much higher the better targeted your audience is. The demographics you need to understand before creating an ad are age, gender, location, interests, and income level.

Facebook owns Instagram now, so advertising on these two platforms can be easily done through Facebook ads manager.

After you have Pixel and your audience ready to go, all you have to do is create the fun stuff! 

Keep in mind that if you use Pixel for retargeting, then you will need at least two weeks’ worth of data. Pixel will start tracking how customers visit your site once you have it set up, but you will need a collection of data in order to actually create an audience.

You will need to choose your daily budget for the ad you are running and the bid strategy. This is where your ROI will come into play.

Basically, you are bidding against other ad competitors to serve your ad to the targeted audience you have specified. You are paying to get those impressions and conversions. You will also need to set your campaign objective to conversions.

Therefore, you have to choose the right strategy for a retargeting campaign. For beginners, you can just leave the strategy to the lowest cost to get the most results out of your budget.

You need to select the action event that you want to track. For retargeting, you most likely want to choose schedule, purchase, or added payment info. This will just depend on how you have set up your services on your fitness business site.

When you get to the audience section, you will choose the saved audience you created using your uploaded CSV file or Pixel.

When you get to Optimization for Ad Delivery, just leave it as is so that Facebook will do its own work in delivering the ads you create to the most specific audience. This is to maximize your budget. 

From this point, all you have to do is add in the creative assets! 

Facebook allows you to create multiple variations of the same ads so that you can see which ones are more successful. You can create variations of the visual section of the ad like the image(s) or video and you can create different variations of the headline and description.

Make sure that only 20% or less of your ad visual consists of text. Facebook no longer docks you for having more, but it’s best advised for ad effectiveness.

When you upload an image, Facebook will do an automatic check for the 20% rule.

Overall

Retargeting ads are a great way to catch the low-hanging fruit. If used strategically and adequately through Facebook, then you will see much higher conversion rates for your personal training business. 

Facebook retargeting ads allow you to target your audience well as it’s very likely that most, if not all, of your prospective customers, use Facebook or Instagram or both. Therefore, you are much more likely to reach people who have already considered your training services.

Try it out and watch your business grow as new clients come filing in. If you need help managing all of the new clients you acquire, then check out FitSW Fitness Software for the all-in-one app for personal trainers and studio gyms.