Suppose a shopper enters your store, looks around, asks about merchandise, and then leaves without purchasing anything.
Imagine that a sales rep follows the customer down the street while repeating the benefits of the merchandise, then follows the customer home and periodically mentions the store and its products.
That may sound strange, impractical, and intrusive – even a little creepy. But that’s essentially what retargeting – also called remarketing – does online. Retargeting allows you to advertise to website visitors after they leave your website in an attempt persuade them to return to the site or be converted into a sales lead.
In addition to website visitors, retargeting can also reach web users who have not visited your website but are using your keywords, social media audiences, and contacts in your marketing automation and/or customer relationship management systems.
Retargeting can increase sales by keeping your brand front and center and bringing “window shoppers” back when they’re ready to buy. The ads reach customers and prospects who may be already familiar with products, keep your brand relevant, and continue to build awareness through repeated exposure. The remarketing ads can target customers based on where they are in the sales funnel and how engaged they are.
Although retargeting may seem technically challenging, implementation can be surprisingly simple with the help of the appropriate vendor who can handle its technical aspects, allowing marketers to focus on strategy and branding. The various outfits have different specialties, and platforms are available to meet the wide-ranging needs of organizations whatever their size or niche.
Different Types of Retargeting
Here’s a summary of the major retargeting forms.
Pixel-based ads, the most common type of retargeting, are displayed to visitors after they’ve left your site, through the use of cookies.
Search retargeting displays ads to people who have not visited your site but have used your targeted keywords on search engines.
SEM/SEO retargeting uses the search terms and actions taken when the visitor lands on your site. You can target ads based on keywords or tags.
List-based ads target your existing contacts. Marketers upload their contact list to Facebook, Twitter or other platform where ads appear to people on the list.
Email retargeting reaches people from email campaigns based on their email actions. For example, different ads can be displayed to people who opened an email, who clicked through to the website from the email, who didn’t open email, or who shared the email on social media.
Social retargeting tracks users on social media and serves them ads based on how they consume content, such as what they read and share.
Retargeting Best Practices
Google Analytics can indicate the best retargeting strategy for your brand by showing how most people access your site, be it through organic search, social media or email newsletter.
A clear call to action can tell customers their next step, such as subscribing to a blog or newsletter, downloading an ebook, registering for an event or registering for a free consultation.
Showing an ad or series of ads to a retargeted prospect seven to 12 times over a 30-day period attains maximum engagement. Swamping a website visitor with ads after a single visit is best avoided. A frequency cap can limit the maximum number of ads a user will see.
Different products warrant different time windows. People seeking travel arrangements should be retargeted immediately; those shopping for luxury goods should be retargeted later.
Retargeting is most effective if you segment your visitors. For instance, advertise shoes to people who viewed shoes. Segmenting also enables marketers to place different offers before people based on the type of web page they visited. If they visit the homepage, general branding and awareness may be the best approach. If they visit a content download page, you can advertise that content.
A/B testing can show which ads work best. Colors, call to actions, copy and other features can be tested to optimize ad performance.
Bottom Line: Retargeting, also known as remarketing, can be a fruitful strategy for marketing to customers in the sales pipeline, especially website visitors who have left your site without being converted. Most importantly, vendors can handle the technical features, so marketers can concentrate on branding and strategy.
Other Articles
A Beginner’s Guide to Retargeting Ads
HubSpot
An Introduction to Retargeting: What Is It and How Does It Work?
Business 2 Community
An In-Depth Comparison of Remarketing and Retargeting Services
KissMetrics
William J. Comcowich founded and served as CEO of CyberAlert LLC, the predecessor of Glean.info. He is currently serving as Interim CEO and member of the Board of Directors. Glean.info provides customized media monitoring, media measurement and analytics solutions across all types of traditional and social media.
Not only did you perfectly summarize what retargeting is, but you did a great job of listing some suggestions here on how to retarget successfully. Very helpful article.