The vast majority of people who visit a website leave without buying anything. The marketing rule of seven states that it takes an average of seven interactions with a brand before a customer converts.
That’s where ad retargeting comes in. Retargeting helps you stay in front of potential customers, reminding them of your brand and encouraging them to come back and convert.
What is Retargeting?
Retargeting is a type of paid advertising in which ads are shown to people who have previously visited your website or are already familiar with your brand on social media networks.
The goal of retargeting is to engage with people who are interested in your business and eventually bring them back to your site to become customers.
Let’s say a user lands on your site after finding you through Google. They browse a few pages before eventually leaving the site.
With retargeting, you can create campaigns that display ads to this user. Depending on the retargeting platform you are using, these ads appear across different web properties.
The Benefits of Retargeting to Businesses
The most significant benefits retargeting can bring to your business are:
More Sales - The most direct benefit of retargeting for your business is higher sales. No matter what industry you operate in, the vast majority of your website visitors will not convert into sales on the first visit.
Improved Ad Performance - Retargeting ads are one of the most effective types of ad campaigns. They tend to have notably higher conversion rates than other ad types because the prospects are warmed up, having already engaged with your business.
Higher ROI - With better conversion rates, retargeting ads also leads to a higher return on investment (ROI) for your campaigns, as you can get more out of your marketing spend.
Faster Buyer’s Journey - Retargeting helps reduce the time it takes to move people through your digital marketing funnel. Additionally, with retargeting, you can send highly relevant ads to people based on their current stage of the buyer’s journey.
How Does Retargeting Work?
Here is a quick overview of how retargeting works:
- Visitors enter your website from multiple sources (Google search, paid ads, social networks, direct visits, etc.)
- The vast majority of them leave your website without taking an important action.
- By adding the proper tracking code on your website, advertising platforms (like Facebook and Google) can associate website visits with user accounts on their platforms.
- Through retargeting campaigns, you can segment and target your audience with ads.
- As a result, many of them will return to your website, and some will convert.
How to Get Started With Retargeting
Now that you understand how retargeting works let’s see how you can use it for your business.
1. Choose Your Retargeting Platforms
There are several retargeting platforms, each with unique features and audience reach. Your choice depends on where your customers spend their time and what type of ads you want to run.
Facebook Ads Retargeting - Facebook offers one of the most powerful retargeting options, thanks to its massive user base and detailed audience insights. It provides a variety of visually engaging ad formats, making it easier to capture attention and drive conversions.
To retarget on Facebook, you need to create a Custom Audience—a list of past visitors who interacted with your site. You can build this audience using:
Google Ads Retargeting - Google Ads is another essential retargeting platform, offering access to a vast audience across websites, YouTube, and mobile apps.
With Google, you can retarget visitors using:
- Display Retargeting Ads: These appear across millions of websites in the Google Display Network.
- Google Shopping Retargeting: If you run an e-commerce store, you can re-engage past visitors with dynamic product ads.
AdRoll - is a third-party retargeting service that allows you to manage campaigns across multiple platforms, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and over 30 other networks.
2. Setup Your Pixels
To retarget, you first need a record of the people who interacted with your business. The most common way to gather this data is to use a pixel.
The pixel is a tracking code installed in your website's backend. This code uses small pieces of data known as cookies to remember the users who visit your site.
Cookies are stored on a person’s web browser. As the person views other websites, the cookies notify the retargeting platform.
With pixel-based retargeting, you display your ads to anonymous people, as you do not have the person’s name or contact details.
3. Create Retargeting Lists
Another way to retarget your visitors is to use a retargeting list. With a retargeting list, you build a list of specific people to target in a campaign.
For example, you could export a list of the email addresses of your previous customers from your CRM.
You can then upload this list to a retargeting platform like Google or Facebook to use as the audience for a campaign.
4. Design Retargeting Ads
The next step is to create your retargeting ads, which are broadly categorized into static or dynamic types.
Static Retargeting Ads - Static retargeting ads function like traditional online ads. You design an ad that is shown to everyone you target in the campaign.
Static ads work well if you want detailed control over your ad creative as you get to determine exactly what your audience will see.
Dynamic Retargeting Ads - Dynamic retargeting ads automatically generate ad creatives to show to each individual. The retargeting platform analyzes the person’s behavior and interests to determine what creative elements are most likely to achieve the campaign goal.
Some of the details that can impact what ad is shown include products the user has viewed, the pages they’ve visited, and their past orders.
An example of dynamic ads is Facebook Dynamic Product Ads. With these ads, you sync your eCommerce catalog to your Facebook page and advertising account. As people view your products, the Facebook Pixel will track which products users visit.
Google also has dynamic ads for eCommerce products. After you sync your product feed to Google Merchant Center, you can dynamically retarget previous visitors with shopping ads.
Retargeting Best Practices
Here are some best practices you can follow when building retargeting campaigns.
1. Segment Your Audience
Segmenting your audience is a great way to get highly-targeted ads in front of your customers.
As you start to attract visitors to your site, you can create audience segments for groups of people who performed specific actions on your site.
For instance, a group of people that viewed products in a particular category. Or a segment of people that spent more than 10 minutes on your site.
You can also segment buyers from non-buyers. This will keep you from sending repeated messaging to people that have already.
There isn’t really a limit to how detailed you can get with your audience segments.
If you want to create a segment for customers that have spent over $200 and have viewed five products in the past week, you can
By targeting a refined selection of people with your ads, you are able to serve something that is more meaningful.
2. Don't Over-Advertise
While you want to stay at the top of your customers’ minds, you don’t want to overdo it with retargeting ads.
Too much marketing can easily alienate some people.
You can ensure that your audience is only receiving an appropriate amount of retargeting ads by setting a limit, or frequency cap on the number of times someone is retargeted.
Some retargeting platforms such as Google have this functionality built into the platform. With it, you can set limits for the number of times a user is exposed to your ads over the course of a day, week, or month.
3. Optimize Your Ad Creatives
The messaging and visuals in your ads are important for getting users to click back to your site.
You want to use the insights you have on your customers to create ads that connect with them.
You can further optimize your retargeting ads by testing different ad creatives to see what works best with your customers.
4. Get Specific With Your Ads And Landing Pages
When running a retargeting campaign, it is a good practice to show users ads and content directly related to that they’ve already viewed.
For instance, if someone looked at five items in your shoe collection, that person is probably interested in shoes and would respond well to such an ad.
You want to apply this concept to your landing pages as well. By giving users a relevant experience, you can help move them further down your funnel.
Furthermore, your landing pages should align with your ad creative. This congruence leads to better results as customers get an experience that matches their expectations.
Retargeting Vs. Remarketing
While retargeting and remarketing are often used interchangeably, they are not the same, as there are some distinctions between them.
Retargeting and remarketing are similar in that they both involve putting your brand back in front of your target customers.
Retargeting uses paid advertisements to re-engage users. People are generally more responsive after having recently visited your site.
Remarketing usually involves using email to reconnect with past audiences.
For example, you could send previous customers remarketing messages to show deals and promotions related to past purchases or announce new offerings related to the items they are most interested in.
Conclusion
Retargeting is a great way to get people back to your site and convert. It’s a highly effective digital marketing channel suitable for all kinds of businesses and products.
As a rule of thumb, you should always have retargeting campaigns running, even if you don’t use any other paid advertising channel.
In addition, retargeting campaigns have lower customer acquisition costs (CAC) than any other form of advertising.
