How to Use Retargeting Like a Pro

What is Retargeting?

In recent years, retargeting has become such an ingrained part of our online experience. Retargeting is an online advertising strategy aimed at targeting users who have already visited your website, or a specific web page.

This type of advertising is incredibly successful because your retargeting audience is made up of people who already know about your company. As a result, the click-through rate of retargeted emails is 10x higher than average display ads.

Through effective retargeting strategies, you can:

• Increase conversions
• Increase brand awareness
• Improve user engagement

The Two Types of Retargeting

There are essentially two types of retargeting:

• Pixel-based
• List-based

Pixel-Based Retargeting

Pixel-based retargeting allows you to target your ads to anyone who’s visited your website. A code (pixel) is placed on your website. When users visit your site, the pixel installs cookies into the visitors’ browsers, so that you can show ads to these visitors on other sites.

• Benefit: Reach a wider audience, if you have a lot of traffic coming to your site
• Drawback: Pixel-based ads are hard to personalize

List-Based Retargeting

List-based retargeting occurs when you have a list of email addresses or phone numbers. You can display your ad banners to social network users on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

• Benefit: Extremely customizable to match your message to your audience
• Drawback: To make your ads extremely personalized, you’ll need more data on your contacts than just email addresses (such as user interests); also, it’s important that you remove past customers from your list who have had bad experiences with your product/service (or else you’ll face user irritation). Lastly, it’s possible that your contact uses a different email address than the one she/he registered with, meaning your leads are going to waste

Promoting Your Retargeting Campaign

Regardless of which type of retargeting you use, personalization is key. With list-based retargeting, this is easier to manage. On top of this, Google Analytics offers incredible insight into what areas of your site a user has browsed on, which can help sculpt your future ads. For example, if a user visited a page about a particular product, you can exclusively show that user offers related to it. With pixel-based retargeting, you can generate ad segments based on users’ onsite behavior; just keep in mind these users will remain anonymous to you.

Use Google Customer Match

The Google Customer Match tool allows you to show your ads to searchers who use their email address to log into Google, YouTube and Gmail. Using Customer Match, you can find users who have previously searched for a product similar to yours.

Deploy Responsibly

If the retargeting ad you’ve created is relevant to your users, then they won’t be irritated when it chases them across the web. But if their mindset changed, or they already made a conversion, the continual nagging of your ad can lead to a bad user experience and the loss of a customer for life. If you want to enjoy the benefits of the effectiveness of retargeting, you have to know how and when to turn it off or adapt it. This requires a restructuring of your current database, or an improvement on how you track user behaviors on your site.

There is no fool-proof way of fine-tuning retargeting to adapt as users’ actions and mindsets change – at least not yet. But just be conscious of your customers’ journey and make sure you’re doing everything you can to avoid becoming a nuisance online.

Creating Unexpected Opportunities with Retargeting

Retargeting creates a ton of unexpected opportunities for businesses and advertisers to reach their target audiences. The key here is to personalize, while avoiding the common pitfalls associated with following your prospects across the web. Even novice users can take advantage of these types of ads with some proper guidance, which is where we come in.

At OperationROI, we have a team dedicated specifically to creating, managing, and enhancing clients’ retargeting campaigns. Learn more about how we can help you reach your audiences with highly relevant messaging by calling us at 1-888-277-5429 or by filling out our contact form.