What percent of your B2B ad budget should go to retargeting?
The scalability of retargeting is very dependent on the size of your company. You can only retarget people who’ve interacted with your company in some way, after all.
The exact budget you put into retargeting really does depend on the specifics of your business and ad account. But there are some rules of thumb.
When you’re working for a seed or early Series A stage start-up, retargeting can be budgeted at a few hundred dollars per month. It’s very easy to reach your entire audience on a low budget.
As you scale, your retargeting budget should generally be kept at a percentage of your total budget. For most companies in the growth stage, retargeting budgets are most efficient at around 10% - 15% of the prospecting campaign budgets.
Generally, the greater the percentage of your target market you’ve already captured, the more effective retargeting is compared to prospecting. If you’re working at a public company with $1b+ in annual revenue, retargeting campaigns can be run efficiently even at 50%+ of your total budget.
Where should you run retargeting?
This is pretty straightforward - run retargeting anywhere people are.
This includes the big three ad platforms for B2B - Meta (Facebook and Instagram), Google (Search, Display, Youtube) and LinkedIn.
There are a lot of tools that can get your ads to show up and follow people everywhere on the web. We usually recommend Google Display Network for this. This keeps tracking performance simple and in the same UI and tool ecosystem as normal AdWords campaigns.
ABM and Retargeting For B2Enterprise Ad Accounts
In ABM campaigns targeting enterprise accounts, the lines between prospecting and retargeting are blurred.
In most ad accounts, prospecting and retargeting are considered different campaigns. The pool of people who have engaged with your company, and the pool of people who have not yet engaged.
Enterprise accounts can take 6-18 months to close. Every user that enters your prospecting campaign will also be hit by retargeting before closing. This would be unheard of in B2C e-commerce, or even B2SMB ads. This means you don’t have to separate your retargeting and prospecting campaigns. In fact, because B2Enterprise sample sizes tend to be low, splitting retargeting and prospecting into explicitly separate campaigns can be counter-productive. You can make master campaigns targeting your key accounts, and only exclude existing customers from it.
Sometimes, in an enterprise, even existing clients can be worth targeting! Often, one division of a giant company will use your product, but other divisions still never heard of it.
If you have access to intent or ABM data such as 6sense, Bombora, G2 Crowd etc, they are great options to us for targeting in the LinkedIn ecosystems.
Create separate campaigns based on level/stage of intent
Most companies that use G2 or websites like that don’t realize they can use this functionality
Miscellaneous Retargeting Tips
For general audience recommendations, everyone should have their CRM/MA System attached and pushing updated customer and current lead lists for exclusions. This can come from:
Marketo
Salesforce
Hubspot
If you collect leads natively on Facebook or LinkedIn, you can also set up automatic retargeting for those leads without any fancy CRM hook-up.