What Is Retargeting?

Have you ever visited a website, later you start seeing banners for that website displayed on all other sites you visit?

That’s remarketing — or Retargeting. People use those words interchangeably. This was a question i was asked in one of the interviews i went for while i was searching for a job. Hope the image above explains it better.

Now let’s define Retargeted marketing.
This is a cookie-based technology used to displays custom advertisements to visitors who leave a site (an online store) without purchasing or performing another desired action.

HOW DOES RETARGETING WORK?

Retargeting is a cookie-based technology that uses simple  Javascript code to anonymously ‘follow’ your audience all over the Web.

Here’s how it works: you place a small piece of code on your website (this code is sometimes referred to as a 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.

For instance:

Considering you wanted to buy a shirt on Kongas’ website Konga places a small, unobtrusive piece of code on its website (sometimes called pixel). This code will not be noticeable to you. The moment you visit the site, the code drops an anonymous browser cookie on your phone or laptop.

Whenever, you browse any other website, you will be targeted with kongas’ Advert on other websites. This pixel technology then makes you interested in wanting to buy something else from Konga. If it interest you, you click such products availed to you by the site and from there you can buy.

This is a wonderful way of getting your business back in front of your customers’ eyes. No matter where they go after they’ve visited your website, they surely will see what you are dealing with.

The two main goals for retargeting ads

It is to drive/maintain awareness or to drive conversions. Adding this strategy to your marketing arsenal gives you the space to create direct, unique, and personalized ads. The ads that will produce the high click-through rates that you can not imagine.

Here are a few web advertising stats to keep in mind :

• 71% of consumers prefer ads tailored to their interests and shopping habits
• Consumers are twice as likely to click on an ad for unknown product or brand if it’s personalized
• 44% of respondents to this study were willing to give up personal info (e.g. name and email address) in order to receive more personalized ads.

How is it measured?

Retargeted marketing takes cognizance to both click-though, and view-through conversions. When you work with an agency they will report both to you, as well as a total, and you will have to decide how you want to navigate the performance formula.

Click-through conversions is the conversions that happen as a direct result of someone clicking a retargeting ad they were served.

View-through conversions would be like assists. They are conversions that are attributed to another channel (on last click attribution tracking) but these conversions were at one point served a retargeting ad.

WHEN DOES IT WORK?

For organizations like e-commerce stores, retargeting is a powerful branding and conversion tool, that can be used to optimize your digital marketing brands.

Strategies involving content marketing, AdWords, and targeted display are great for driving traffic, but they don’t help with conversion optimization. Conversely, retargeting can help increase conversions, but it can’t drive people to your site. Your best chance of success is using one or more tools to drive traffic and retargeting to get the most out of that traffic.

Let’s look at it this way—a lot of people on your site won’t convert on their first visit. Maybe 97% aren’t going to buy on their first visit, so there is need to be with them on every website they visit and make sure they come back into the funnel at the right stage.

The key with remarketing when you’re doing a campaign is to show your lead something different. If someone comes to your homepage and they don’t convert, when you do a remarketing campaign, do you think you should send them back to your homepage? No!

It is better to send your lead to a unique page they haven’t seen before.

Here are just a few bigger challenges to keep in mind:

1. It is a channel
   Retargeting demands unique banner ads, custom landing pages, and ongoing optimization. So unless you have the time to truly research, learn, build-out, and measure another channel, you might want to hold off on retargeting. Like every other marketing opportunity out there, you can lose money if you don’t put the time in.
2.  Banners should be creative
   Banner ads  have huge potential effects on retargeting. It needs to catchy and trigger a memory of their last visit. Logos and brand names are still important, but retargeting ads are an opportunity to push your creative messaging. This avails you the opportunity to tell a story to a visitor which they see and interact with on your site.
3. Too much retargeting can work against you
   Retargeting specialists believe that having a user see 7 to 12 of your ads in the course of a 30-day period is ideal, but seeing the same ad every time, or seeing more than that can have a negative effect.  It has been observed that many of visitors wish to see less of us on their favorite sites. There is a thin line between targeting users, and bombarding them, so tread lightly.
4. It is a commitmentIt demands attention and effective after it is up and running for some time. First off, your audience grows larger, which only works to your benefit. Secondly, retargeting specialists agree that three months of seeing about a dozen ad impressions is more effective than just one month. There is a lot of power in staying front of mind. So for those of you all excited about retargeting possibilities, just remember it could take a few months to find your retargeting groove.

Read also Social media marketing and it importance

FINAL THOUGHT

Earn your site visitors and potential customers’ trust by making them comfortable with you, then get them back to the site, educate them more through blog posts, webinars, training materials, e-mail follow-up sequences, and then ask them to buy.

In the case of digital marketing, retargeting is a commitment. It sometimes take a few months to see any ROI. Hence, you’ll probably have to test and tweak your messaging continuously. Please remember to share

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