Retargeting is an online marketing strategy that involves serving customers on other websites with advertisements based on their prior browsing history on a company’s website. This powerful strategy helps online business owners to re-engage their customers who have interacted with their brand in the past. In this article, you will learn about the retargeting strategy, how it works, and some of the tools that are available to you for implementing the powerful strategy.
What is Retargeting?
Retargeting, which is also referred to as remarketing, is a method of online advertising that enables you to present your brand to the bounced traffic after they have left your website. In general, only 2 percent of visitors to any website convert during their first visit. Retargeting can be considered a tool that is designed to help your brand reach the 98 percent of visitors who do not convert when they visit your site for the first time. As such, the goal of a retargeting campaign is to encourage prospective past visitors to your website who did not take any action on their initial visit.
How Does Retargeting Work?
Retargeting, a cookie-based technology, makes use of a simple Javascript code that helps you to anonymously ‘follow’ your target audience all over the World Wide Web. You have to place a small piece of code (also called a pixel) inconspicuously on your website. It does not affect the performance of your website in any manner whatsoever. Every time a new user visits your site, the code drops a browser cookie. When these cookied visitors search the Web, later on, the cookie will alert your retargeting provider to serve ads at the right time.
Retargeting is very effective because the focus is on people who already know your brand and have shown some interest recently. Most businesses that employ this strategy enjoy a higher ROI on their marketing spending. This powerful branding and conversion ratio optimization tool works best when used as part of your organization’s larger digital marketing strategy, which involves demand generation. AdWords, content marketing, and targeted display drive traffic, but they are not helpful in optimizing conversion rates. On the other hand, retargeting helps improve conversion rates but doesn’t drive traffic to your site.
Types of Retargeting
Search retargeting is the first thing that most marketers think about when working on a retargeting strategy. However, highly effective marketers explore other retargeting strategies. Some of the more effective types of retargeting you can consider are:
1. Dynamic Retargeting Ads
This is a very powerful ad type, and it uses pixel data to display the most relevant products and ads to users based on their activities on your website. For instance, you can employ dynamic retargeting ads to show the visitors to your website the products they have viewed when they were on your site. This might encourage them to come back to your site and buy your product. Both Google and Facebook enable you to create such hyper-personalized ads.
In order to set up dynamic retargeting ads on Facebook, the Facebook pixel has to be installed on all pages of your website. This allows you to track the visitors and their activities on your website. Furthermore, the pixel helps you with measuring cross-device conversions, creating custom website audiences, and designing dynamic ads.
2. Behavioural Retargeting
Behavioural retargeting focuses on people who visited your site and didn’t convert but showed interest in your products or services. This means that you can reach out to these potential customers even though they have left your website and encourage them to come back and buy your product or service. Specifically, this strategy is very useful when someone visiting your website shows interest but abandons the shopping cart and quits.
Whenever someone uses your website, a cookie is created. Using this cookie, you can find out which pages they visited, which products they bought or showed interest in buying, and what passwords they used. This means you can track the user and follow up with an email later, provided you have the user’s email ID.
3. Customer List Retargeting
Research shows that 54 percent of customers who abandon the shopping cart on your eCommerce site are actually saying that they will buy the same product when they see a discount. Create a list of the users who abandon the shopping cart and get back to them via an effective customer list retargeting tool.
A customer list retargeting tool helps you create lists by specifying rules for users who visit your website’s homepage, category page, product or offer page, members’ page, product or service bought page, or abandon the shopping cart. Then it helps you to automatically place personalized ads related to the products, services, or offers they were interested in on your site.
Different Retargeting Tools
Having discussed what retargeting is, how it works, and the different types of retargeting, here is a list of retargeting tools that you can use to increase customer engagement:
1. HockeyCurve
The marketing technology company, HockeyCurve, provides end-to-end solutions which make use of big data to segment users as well as create high-intent dynamic product ads so that you can improve the return on your ad spend. HockeyCurve’s products include:
- Pixel: for dynamic product ads
- Ad Server: for quickly deploying ads
- Recommendations: using AI and ML to make recommendations
- Publisherplex: for increasing publisher revenue
2. AdRoll
AdRoll provides eCommerce brands with a single platform that helps them easily place social media and display ads and launch email campaigns to engage existing customers, attract new customers, and grow their revenue. The tool tracks user behaviour in real-time and helps you save time and resources by launching campaigns across more than 500 platforms right from one place.
3. Google Ads
If your goal is to drive more visitors to your website or apps, Google Ads is the best platform for you. Advertisers bid to post brief ads, product or service offerings, or videos on this platform to attract web users. Google Ads works on a pay-per-click pricing model. It puts your brand in front of your target audience when they search for similar businesses on Google Search as well as on Maps.
4. Facebook and Instagram Retargeting
The retargeting tool offered by Facebook is Custom Audiences. Creating and placing a Facebook pixel on your product landing pages helps you use Custom Audiences for retargeting Facebook users. After setting up a Facebook pixel on your site, you can create a custom audience for Instagram retargeting. The goal of Facebook and Instagram retargeting is to drive traffic to your website and apps and encourage engagement.
5. WunderKind
WunderKind offers two products:
- Multichannel Marketing Solution for retailers, publishers, and travel businesses
- WKND Ads Solution for publishers and advertisers
WunderKind’s solutions are tools that help businesses launch retargeting campaigns based on customer behaviour on their websites and apps.
6. Fixel
Fixel, an AI-based retargeting tool, analyzes user interactions on your site in real-time to help you create valuable audiences. As soon as you add the Fixel snippet to your website, its AI modelling starts running (in less than 5 minutes). You also don’t have to do any tweaking. Fixel builds segmented audiences based on their engagement on your website for your preferred platforms. This helps you focus more on high-value users.
7. Criteo
Criteo, an advertising company, provides the dynamic retargeting tool, The Commerce Media Platform. It enables you to build, scale, and activate your audience. Criteo’s display advertising product helps you generate interactive banner advertisements based on the browsing behaviour and preferences of each customer. The company operates the solution on a PPC/CPC basis.
Conclusion
Retargeting is a great marketing strategy that businesses of all kinds and sizes can make use of. Retargeting tools help you generate leads, nurture leads, and even upsell or resell to your existing customers. Each retargeting tool mentioned above is helpful in its own way, but the right tool for your case will depend on the type of remarketing campaign you are planning to run. The capability of each retargeting tool has been briefly mentioned in the blog so that you can choose one that suits your needs and gather more information.
