Modern Creator
Ravi Abuvala Clips · YouTube

The Retargeting Sequence You Can Start for $5 a Day

A whiteboard walkthrough of a sequential Meta video-ad funnel that moves warm audiences toward a sales call, one 50% watch at a time.

Posted
2 days ago
Duration
Format
Tutorial
educational
Views
34
1 likes
Big Idea

The argument in one line.

Retarget a warm audience with a sequence of videos where each one unlocks only after 50% of the previous, so you spend on qualified people and never fatigue your ads.

Who This Is For

Read if. Skip if.

READ IF YOU ARE…
  • A coach, agency owner or consultant who sells through sales calls and already has some audience, site traffic or leads to retarget.
  • Someone running Meta ads who keeps watching frequency climb and creative fatigue set in within weeks.
  • A founder with a small budget who wants a always-on ad system for around $5 a day instead of a big cold-traffic spend.
SKIP IF…
  • You have no website visitors, followers or leads yet, so there is no warm audience to build the pool from.
  • You sell low-ticket products with no sales call, since this sequence is built to book calls.
TL;DR

The full version, fast.

Start with a warm audience, not a cold one, because moving someone from warm to client costs far less than moving them from cold. Build one Meta custom audience from website visitors, Instagram and Facebook engagers, leads and CRM sales calls. Then show them a numbered series of videos in sequence, where only viewers who watched 50% of video one see video two, and so on. The approach prevents frequency fatigue, wastes no spend on unqualified viewers, and runs in the background for about $5 a day, or $20 to $50 with a larger audience.

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Atomic Insights

Lines worth screenshotting.

  • Taking someone from warm to client costs far less than taking them from cold, so build the warm campaign before the cold one.
  • A middle-of-funnel audience can combine website visitors, social engagers, leads and CRM sales calls into one custom audience.
  • The goal of a retargeting sequence is to condense trust, what you do, their pain and their desires into the shortest time frame possible.
  • Show videos in sequence, not all at once, so the viewer follows a storyline instead of seeing random ads.
  • Gate each video on 50% watched of the previous one, and the right people move forward on their own.
  • Sequential gating prevents ad fatigue because nobody sees the same video again after moving on to the next.
  • Three-second views are a bad trigger because you can sneeze and still count as a viewer of an Instagram reel.
  • If someone scrolls past your early videos before the 50% mark, they are probably not your ideal customer and you should not spend on them.
  • A sequence of five videos is the minimum idea, and a real campaign can run 14 videos or more.
  • Organic content or separate ads bring strangers into the middle of funnel, and the retargeting campaign then warms them toward a call.
Takeaway

Sequence your retargeting so spend follows interest.

WHAT TO LEARN

A warm audience, an ordered video storyline and a 50% watch gate let a small daily budget filter for qualified buyers and avoid ad fatigue.

  • Start retargeting with the warm audience first, since converting warm people to clients costs far less than converting cold strangers.
  • Pool website visitors, social engagers, leads and CRM call data into one middle-of-funnel custom audience so every first touch starts the sequence.
  • Show videos in a fixed order so each viewer builds trust, understanding, pain and desire along a storyline, not a random pile of ads.
  • Use 50% watched as the trigger for the next video, because a three-second view says almost nothing about real interest.
  • Let early videos name who you help, so people who scroll past before the halfway mark filter themselves out and stop costing you money.
  • Because each person leaves a video once they advance, frequency stays low and creative lasts, so the campaign can run untouched.
Glossary

Terms worth knowing.

Middle of funnel
The warm audience that already knows who you are, such as people who watched your videos, visited your site or became leads.
Custom audience
A saved group of people in Meta Ads Manager, built from sources like site visits, page engagement and uploaded lead lists, that you can target with ads.
Frequency
How many times the same person has seen your ad. High frequency tires out the audience and makes performance drop.
Ad fatigue
The decline in ad results after the same people see the same creative too many times, forcing you to reshoot new ads.
Video sequence
An ordered set of ads where each video is shown only to people who watched a set share of the previous one.
The Script

Word for word.

Read-along

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So now let's get into the actual strategy itself. Now, there's a few different platforms and a few different ways that you can do this. For simplicity's sake, in this video, I'm going to focus on Meta, Facebook, Instagram.
I'm going to show you how you can set this up for literally $5 a day, okay? So you can do this entire thing that I'm showing you here for $5 a day. Now, more realistically, if you wanted to do this correctly, if you have a large enough audience, this might be closer to $20 or $50 a day, but this is something that we have set up and we have running in the background.
Essentially, Since the inception of our business. Okay.
So this is what you're going to do. I'm going to show you the high level strategy of what it looks like. And then I'm going to actually break down what videos you're going to want to create.
So the high level strategy is going to be this. You're going to create a pool of people right here. And this is going to be known as your middle of funnel or your warm audience.
Okay. And these are people that have no light. They already understand a little bit about what you do.
So these are people that they've watched your videos before. They've gone on YouTube. They landed on your sales page.
So we can say website visitors are inside of here. You can say engaged with your pages are inside of here, leads. You can send stuff like sales calls back from your CRM.
These are all people that already have a basic understanding of what it is that you do and they've heard your name before. Now, there's a different strategy you can do where you're putting this, what's known as top of funnel to a colder audience. But I always recommend starting with the warmer audience first because this is where you can squeeze out a lot of money really quickly, right?
And typically we like to see different campaigns for bringing people that are told. strangers into this middle of funnel right and a great way to do that is organic content so you can make organic content or ads to bring people to know who you are for the first time and then you use this middle of funnel campaign to warm them up to convince them to get on a sales call to speak with you right it's way easier if i just draw this little spectrum real quick let's say that this person's total cold and this person's a client right it's going to be and and this is middle of funnel so they know who you are so we'll put warm it's going to be way easier and cost you way less money to take people from warm to client than it is going to be to take people from cold the client.
Okay. So that's why we always start with a warm audience first. So over time, you're going to create this middle of funnel audience.
Now on Facebook or Instagram, you can literally create a specific audience. We call it middle of funnel that combines all these things together. So website visitors, people that engage with Instagram, people that engage with your Facebook leads that have come in from our CRM calls that have come from our CRM.
They're all sent to this one custom audience, right? So you're putting this on Facebook because this is who we're specifically going to be running the ads to. So as soon as somebody touches us for the first time, in a non you know kind of Don't be sick about it.
As soon as somebody touches us for the first time, we want to start the brainwashing campaign because we're trying to condense those main four things into the shortest time frame possible. Trust, know what we do, pain and desires. So the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to create this audience and then we're going to create a strategy where we're showing them very specific videos.
I'm going to talk about here in a second in a sequential order, in a sequential order. I can't stress this enough. We're not just throwing 700 videos of them at the same time.
We want them to follow a storyline. Okay. So they're going to watch video number one, video number two, video number three, video number four, video number five.
And what we're doing is they watch video number one, and the people that watch 50 % of video number one are going to see video number two. People that watch 50 % of video number two are going to see video number three. People that watch 50 % of video number three are going to see video number four.
People watch 50 % of video number four are going to see video number five. You get the idea. In our campaign, I think we have 14 videos.
So you can understand. You can really blow this up. I'm going to talk about what videos to do where.
But what this will allow you to do is, first of all, you can set it and forget it. And what I mean by that is if you've ever run ads on Facebook, you always have to be careful of what is known as frequency. And I'm trying not to get too in the weeds here, but I think this is helpful.
And frequency essentially states that how many times has the same person seen your ad? And so if you just put all of these and you target this group right here, what's going to happen is that these people are just going to see all these ads at the same time. It's not going to follow sequential order, so it's not going to make sense.
And then they're just going to keep on seeing. the ad over and over and over and over and over and over again. And eventually your ads are going to fatigue and you're going to have to reshoot new ads, right?
Instead, if you just make it so that after they see the first ad, only the people that have seen the first one, see the second one, you prevent that fatigue because after they've seen the second one, they're never going to see the second one again. And now they're going to go on to the third one. After this is the third one, they're never going to see the third one again.
And now they're going to go on to the fourth one. Okay. So that's why we want to, we care a lot about doing it in this 50 % order because we want to make sure that we're not wasting ad spend.
Another important thing about the city. percent order is it kind of self -selects who you want to consume your content who you want to potentially get a sales call with so if people are watching three seconds of a video and they see your face and they scroll right past it that's probably not somebody that is ready to work with you anyway and so and the other thing is in the first three seconds in the first few videos if we're explaining who we help what it is and what we do well that person scrolls past it before the 50 mark well then it's very likely they're not your ideal avatar anyway and so we don't want to be spending the money from these these ads with these people that aren't qualified.
So that's why we like 50%. I see some people talk about like three seconds or whatever. I think that's a terrible idea.
You could literally sneeze and watch three seconds of an Instagram reel. So we want to keep it 50%. If you want me and my team to install any of these systems in your business done for you, make sure you go down below and book a free revenue system diagnostic call.
We're going to get on a call, identify your biggest bottleneck and show you exactly what we would do to solve it there live. The best news is we offer offer every single client a no questions asked money back guarantee.
The Hook

The bait, then the rug-pull.

Ravi Abuvala lays out the retargeting system his business has run in the background since day one. It costs about $5 a day on Meta, and its trick is showing a numbered series of videos where each one is earned by watching half of the last.

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