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Maximize ROAS with Smart Retargeting Lookalike Audiences

This playbook serves as a guide for our customers looking to maximize ROAS by leveraging Whatmore's Smart Retargeting feature

Shyam Srinivas avatar
Written by Shyam Srinivas
Updated over a month ago

Step 1: Choose Your Whatmore Event

On the whatmore dashboard, you can track over 6 shoppable video engagement metrics:

  • Video Click

  • Product Add-to-Cart via Video

  • Video Like

  • Video Shares

  • Video product-tile click

  • Video watch-time

Once your events are pushed, they need to be verified, view this guide to verify your events. Once you have pushed the events, let Meta populate the audience for at least 7-10 days for Meta to generate a useable audience size.


Step 2: Create Your Custom Audience

On the Audience Manager in the Facebook Ads console, choose the whatmore event that you’d like to use and create the audience. We recommend these events based on the campaign strategy:

Use a customer list to create custom audiences in Facebook
  • High Intent Audiences: These audiences are typically the highest and have very strong intent

    • Product Add-to-Cart via Video

    • Video Clicks

    • Video Product Tile Clicks

  • Mid-Tier Audiences These audiences are not very high but do have buying intent

    • Completed Video Watch

    • Video Like

    • Video Share


Step 3: Initial Campaign Setup

Once you’ve created the custom audience, head over to the campaign manager to create your retargeting campaign. We recommend the following setting to maximize conversions:

Campaign Objective: Sales

We recommend a manual setup (vs) Advantage+ Shopping Campaign

Campaign Type:

We recommend running Dynamic Product Ads by connecting Facebook Ad Manager to your Shopify Console. This is highly recommended for the following reasons:

  1. Automated and precise targeting and also for its automated product substitution logic

  2. Ensures only active inventory products are shown, automatically updating when products sell out

  3. DPAs generally target product-specific pages for higher conversion

Campaign Structure:

For High Intent Audience (Add-to-Cart and Clicks):

  • Use dynamic product ads (DPA) for personalized retargeting

  • Set tight Cost Cap strategies to achieve desired ROAS and ocassionally use Value Cap for increasing volume of conversions over immediate ROAS, thereby balancing long-term audience building

  • Utilize attractive, conversion-focused video ads

  • Consider moderately flexible Cost Caps or Value Caps for building volume

Facebook Introduces Cost Cap Bidding to Maximize Cost-Efficiency

Attribution:

It’s recommended to test your campaign using different attribution windows (1-day, 3-day, and 7-day windows) to identify the optimal conversion tracking method. This changes from brand to brand

Employ short windows (e.g., 3-5 days) to quickly assess performance and decide on further optimization or scaling

Meta Ads Attribution Setting: A Complete Guide - Jon Loomer Digital

Creatives:

Use curated video ads targeted at specific product collections, especially during relevant seasonal or thematic periods (e.g., wedding season)

One strategy is to use:

  1. Videos with high engagement rate on Instagram and/or other social media channels

  2. Videos with high video clicks from the Whatmore Dashboard → Engagement Analytics

Video Catalog Ads - How To Make Product Level Videos On Meta - Confect.io

Budgeting:

Cost Cap and Value Cap Strategies:

  • Utilise Cost Cap campaigns to ensure profitable Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), targeting minimum ROAS thresholds (e.g., 2.5).

  • Occasionally use Value Cap for volume over immediate ROAS, balancing long-term audience building

Step 4: Lookalike Campaign Setup

Once the primary retargeting campaign has been setup, you can expand your reach and boost ROAS by creating Lookalike Audiences.

Lookalike audiences allow you to reach new people who are likely to be interested in your business because they share similar characteristics with your existing customers.

What is a lookalike audience? - Ortto

By leveraging whatmore events and creating lookalike audiences, brands will be able to reach out to customers that have behaved in the same way as those that have interacted with whatmore videos.

Head to the Audience Manager, click on the custom audience used for the primary campaign and create a Lookalike Audience.

Campaign Objective: Sales

Campaign Type:

We recommend running Dynamic Product Ads here as well

Lookalike Size:

You can create multiple lookalike audiences based on different sizes and test the best performing lookalikes based on the chosen whatmore event.

  1. Start small (1%-3%) for high relevance; scale gradually based on performance

  2. Broaden (3%-5%) only when smaller audiences saturate

New Best Practices For Facebook Ad Targeting | Toptal®

Creative:

Video creatives work the best. Use the best performing creatives from your previous campaigns or from top engaged videos on Instagram

Audience:

As a precaution, negate customers that have already made a purchase (using the purchase event) so that your lookalike campaign reaches out to only new people


By adopting these best practices and leveraging Whatmore’s Advanced Retargeting events, you can significantly improve your retargeting efficiency, ROAS, and audience relevance.

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