What is retargeting?
No matter how effective your online marketing efforts, only a few percent of the people that reach your site will be ready to buy immediately. The vast majority of them will leave, wasting your marketing budget and limiting the number of people that you can reach.
Luckily, there is a way to change that.
With the help of retargeting, you can re-engage those visitors and provide yourself with more than one opportunity of converting them into customers.Let’s explore what is retargeting, what’s the difference of remarketing vs retargeting, and how does retargeting work below.
How Does Retargeting Work?
The process behind retargeting is surprisingly straightforward, although the technology itself is incredibly effective.
By placing a cookie on your site, it marks every visitor of your site, allowing you to re-engage these visitors wherever your retargeting services provider can show them ads.
When you mark your site’s visitors, you can be sure that the ads will be shown only to them and maximize the relevance and cost-effectiveness of your ad campaigns.
What’s more, since these visitors are already somewhat familiar with your brand and have taken the time to visit your site before, they will be much more likely to respond positively to your ads, greatly increasing your chances of success.
This way, instead of having to rely on a single opportunity to convert your site’s visitors, you can engage them on multiple occasions, familiarizing them with your offer, emphasizing different features, or even trying out different ways of presenting the same information.
Another application of retargeting is using search retargeting. Although a lot of marketers don’t know what is search retargeting, if used effectively, it can provide great opportunities to target users who have already expressed interest.
Basically, search retargeting allows to target users who have typed in a particular query in Google with the help of display ads, which can be incredibly effective if they didn’t find a solution they were looking for during their initial search.
Why is Retargeting so Effective?
There are many opportunities for attracting new leads for your business, so what makes retargeting such an important part of online marketing and why does it work so well?
Well, the main reason is simple: it will always be easier to convert someone that you can interact with multiple times compared to someone you only get a chance to promote to once.
With retargeting ads on Facebook or Google, you are engaging people who have already visited your site and have expressed at least some interest in what you have to offer. A well-placed retargeting ad that drives your point home or introduces them to additional benefits may be all it takes to turn a significant part of that once-lost traffic into loyal customers.
As we already discussed, only a fraction of your site’s visitors will be ready to buy during their first visit, but if you can interact with them on multiple occasions, those numbers can improve significantly.
And since you already know that the person you are reaching showed interest, the ROI for your retargeting campaigns can be huge compared to when you promote your offers to audiences with whom you haven’t interacted before.
What Goals Should You Have for Retargeting?
Although the possibilities of retargeting ads on Google and other platforms are huge, there is one factor that you need to consider – since it involves re-engaging the people who visit your site, you will always be limited by the number of visitors that you have.
So, even though you can promote your offers to the same people multiple times, you need to ensure that the campaigns remain worth it to you in terms of the ROI that you’re bringing back.
That’s why you must set clear and calculated goals for your retargeting campaigns.
So what are retargeting ads goals that you could set?
Well, there are two main goals that you can center your campaigns around:
1. Building awareness
2. Driving conversions
The best retargeting ads must have a clearly established purpose, so let’s explore the possible applications for both below.
If you’re a newer business and are trying to carve out a place in your market, you may have a difficult time converting traffic on the first visit to your site. By running awareness retargeting campaigns, you can familiarize your audience with your brand, your product offerings, and your main advantages, giving you a better chance of making the sale in the future.
With conversion ads, you are mostly targeting those users who you believe are almost ready to buy. Even though they may not have committed to making a purchase yet, they are familiar with your brand and your offer, and may just need a reminder or another good pitch to convert.Your retargeting conversion rate will largely depend on your ability to figure out which goal to pick for a specific situation and how well you can execute the campaign.
Best Practices for Using Retargeting
Creating a successful retargeting campaign without prior experience can seem like a daunting task, and it can be challenging – there are numerous aspects that you’ll need to consider if you want it to reach its goals and be profitable.
However, there are some best practices that you can follow if you want to increase your chances of success.
One of the most important things that you must do is segmenting your audience – retargeting offers advanced possibilities to personalize your campaigns based on the specific actions that were performed by your site’s visitors such as the products that they viewed and the pages that they visited.
Developing personalized ads will help you ensure that you don’t waste ad spend by showing ads that are not relevant or too generic.
Another crucial aspect is adding a conversion pixel to your site and eliminating those visitors that make a purchase, as you don’t want to waste your advertising budget on people who have already been converted.
Finally, even though you want to keep your company on the mind of your prospects, you can’t overdo it, or you’ll end up annoying them and driving them away.At Storygize, we use retargeting to its full potential to help boost the effectiveness of our native advertising campaigns. If you’d like some help in setting up a retargeting campaign that’s right for your business and delivers the results that you want, call us at +1 (866) 786-7944 or schedule a call you here and we’ll help you find the best way to move forward and grow your business.