Retargeting, also known as remarketing, helps you keep your brand in front of bounced traffic after they leave your website. It gives you the chance to re-engage with the dozens, hundreds and perhaps thousands of people who visit your website every day but failed to take a desired action, such as signing up to an offer or making a purchase.
For most websites, only 2% of web traffic converts on the first visit. Retargeting is a tool designed to help companies reach the 98% of users who don’t convert right away and re-engaging them.
Retargeting works by keeping track of people who come to your website and then displaying your custom retargeting ads to them when they visit other websites on the Internet.
When someone fails to convert, your online ads are then repeatedly displayed to this visitor when he or she visits other websites within your retargeting vendor’s networks. The visitor has no idea that they are specifically being targeted so it is great for branding and encourages visitors to come back to your site to take action.
By using retargeting you could potentially be putting sales back on the table for an extraordinary return on investment.
How Does Retargeting Work?
Retargeting is a cookie-based technology that uses simple a Javascript code to anonymously ‘follow’ your audience all over the web.
Here’s how it works: you place a small, unobtrusive piece of code on your website (this code is sometimes referred to as a retargeting pixel). The code, or pixel, is unnoticeable to your site visitors and won’t affect your site’s performance. Every time a new visitor comes to your site, the code drops an anonymous browser cookie. Later, when your cookied visitors browse the web, the cookie will let your retargeting provider know when to serve ads, ensuring that your ads are served only to people who have previously visited your site.
Most marketers who use retargeting see a higher ROI than from most other digital channels as it targets users that are already familiar with your brand or what you have to offer and have already demonstrated an interest so are more likely to convert.
When to Use Retargeting
Retargeting is a powerful branding and conversion optimization tool, but it works best if it’s part of a larger online strategy.
Strategies involving content marketing, AdWords, Facebook ads and targeted display are great for driving traffic, with retargeting to maximise conversions work best.
Retargeting tends to work best with your other content marketing strategies. You can get an increase in conversions with this technique, but you aren’t going to increase traffic to your site with retargeting alone. It’s best to use other marketing tools that are already working for you to drive traffic to your site and then incorporate retargeting to increase your conversions.
Benefit of Retargeting in Brief
In marketing it is a widely accepted truth that it is easier to sell to someone that has bought from you before. They are familiar with you and maybe even like you or your service/product so you don’t have to get past the “I don’t know you” barrier.
Retargeting takes a different slant on this.
You know anyone that falls into your retargeting net is a potential customer. They are there because they expressed some form of interest by visiting your site and (if you have more sophisticated targeting in place) performing certain actions. As they visit Facebook or other sites displaying your banner ads it builds familiarity (and even credibility) as they see you all over the place.
Retargeting really has broad appeal since every business has “almost customers” who browse without taking any action. With a little effort, a little creativity perhaps, you can get these people off the fence and into your pocket.