At its core, a Meta retargeting campaign is a powerful strategy to show ads to individuals who have already interacted with your online education business in some way. Maybe they’ve visited your course landing page, joined your email list, or engaged with your content on Meta platforms.
These are potential students or members who are already somewhat familiar with your offerings — they’re “warm leads,” in marketing terms.
Since these individuals already have some awareness of your brand, Meta retargeting ads are an excellent opportunity to encourage them to take the next step — whether that’s purchasing a course, enrolling in a membership program, or signing up for a webinar.
By strategically placing retargeting ads in front of these warm audiences, you’re more likely to move them to action.
Essentially, retargeting helps guide prospective students or clients further along their learning journey, moving them from mere awareness to becoming paying customers, leveraging their prior interactions to drive meaningful conversions.
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Do You Have an Audience for Meta Retargeting Ads?
When planning your retargeting strategy, don’t overlook a key factor: the size of your audience.
To run effective retargeting ads for your online courses or memberships, your audience needs to be large enough to matter. Retargeting an audience that’s too small — like just a handful of website visitors or email subscribers — won’t yield the results you’re looking for.
Most platforms, including Meta, require a minimum audience size to get started.
Typically, you should have at least 100 people in a retargeting audience on Meta. However, even this number might not be sufficient to generate meaningful engagement or sales, especially for online education businesses aiming for higher conversion rates.
For a retargeting campaign to truly deliver results, it’s best to aim for a minimum audience size of 1,000. This larger pool allows your ads to reach enough potential students or clients to generate the reach and frequency needed to make an impact.
Larger audiences not only boost your ads’ performance but also provide more data for Meta’s algorithms to optimize your campaigns. The bigger your audience, the more effectively you can experiment with different ad creatives, refine your targeting strategies, and ultimately drive better conversions and course enrollments.
So, before diving into Meta retargeting, ensure you have a sufficiently large audience to achieve meaningful returns on your investment in your educational offerings.
Meta Retargeting Comes Down to Audiences
The first step in launching a successful retargeting campaign is to create custom audiences.
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These custom audiences should include people who have already interacted with your online education business — whether they’ve visited your course sales page, engaged with your social media posts, or subscribed to your email newsletter.
Essentially, you’re identifying groups of individuals who are already somewhat familiar with your educational offerings.
Once you’ve built these custom audiences, the next step is to set up a campaign and an ad set that specifically targets these groups. This approach ensures your ads reach people who have already shown some level of interest in your courses or programs.
This targeted strategy helps you get the most out of your advertising budget by focusing on warm leads, ultimately increasing the chances of converting these potential students into enrolled participants or members of your community.
Saved Audiences, Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences
At its core, retargeting is all about effectively leveraging different types of audiences within your ad account. To run a successful retargeting campaign for your online courses or educational programs, you need to understand the types of audiences available and how they function.
First, there are Saved Audiences.
These are audiences you manually create based on specific criteria such as age, location, or interests.
For example, you might decide to target individuals aged 25 – 40 who are interested in online learning and live in a specific city, and save that as an audience for your future ad campaigns.
Next, we have Custom Audiences.
These audiences are built from data you already have about people who have interacted with your online education business. This data could come from various sources — both online and offline.
For instance, you could create a custom audience based on a list of students who have purchased a course, people who have watched a specific tutorial video on your Facebook page, or users who have visited your Instagram profile to check out your educational content.
Custom audiences are particularly powerful because they allow you to retarget individuals who have already demonstrated an interest in your educational offerings.
Finally, there are Lookalike Audiences.
This audience type takes your custom audience and uses Meta’s algorithms to find new people who are similar to those already engaging with your courses or programs.
Essentially, this approach helps expand your reach by identifying potential new students or members who share similar characteristics with your existing audience, thereby broadening your marketing efforts to attract new learners.
Depending on your specific goals — whether it’s driving course enrollments, boosting webinar attendance, or growing membership sign-ups— you can use the most suitable audience type to craft highly effective retargeting campaigns that reach the right people at the right time.
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Check Your Meta Ads Retargeting Settings
When setting up your ad set for a retargeting campaign, avoid narrowing down specifics like age, gender, or detailed interests.
Why? Because you’re retargeting individuals who have already shown interest in your online education offerings, and placing restrictions on these categories could unintentionally exclude some potential students or members.
Keeping these options broad ensures your ads reach everyone who has already engaged with your courses, webinars, or other educational content, regardless of their demographic details.
However, there is one targeting option you might consider refining: location. If your online education business primarily serves a specific region or you want to focus your efforts on a particular geographic area, you can adjust the location settings to target that region.
Conversely, if your courses, memberships, or programs are available to a global audience, set the location to Worldwide. This setting ensures your ads reach all individuals who have interacted with your business, no matter where they are located.
Conclusion
Once you’ve set up your ad set with these considerations in mind, the next step is to create your ads. The ad creation process for a retargeting campaign is much like creating any other ad — you don’t need to do anything particularly unique or complex.
The main difference is in who you’re targeting: in this case, it’s an audience that has already shown interest in your online courses or educational content.
After you’re happy with your ad copy, visuals, and settings, hit publish. Your ads will go live and begin retargeting those who have interacted with your business, whether that’s through your course website, Facebook page, or Instagram profile.