Internet Marketing Strategies – Retargeting

Retargeting is one of the hottest trends in Internet Marketing these days but many people are still unsure as to what it actually is or how to use it. Retargeting is a display (banner) ad technique that focuses only on people who have previously visited your website. The objective of internet marketing activities like Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or Pay Per Click Marketing (PPC) is to bring new visitors to your website, retargeting is used to bring those visitors back to your website to complete the conversion process. While your typical banner ad placement depends on the display network you choose to find your target market, retargeting narrows it down to only people who have already visited your website.

Retargeting works by placing a pixel on your website, or certain sections of your website that are triggered when someone visits the page the pixel is on. This adds that visitor to your “Audience” list for which your banner ads will be displayed on websites that your they are viewing. You may be asking “Why not put the pixel on all of your pages to expand your audience list?” Good question! You may only want to target people who have begun the conversion process, for example those who have added items to the cart, or visitors who made it to your “request a quote” page but didn’t fill out the form. You can also break your Retargeting into campaigns for different sections of your site. This way,  if you have many different types of products or services you can serve specified ads to the customers who have visited different sections of your website.

This pixel is then used to track the user through to conversion process and once they have converted they are removed from your audience list. If you’re worried about annoying your audience by bombarding them with ad, you can have your campaign stop showing your ads to people in your audience who do not revisit your site after a specified period of time.

I’m a bit of an Internet Marketing nerd so I am always looking at how different companies are targeting me as a consumer based on my internet activities. If you’re thinking you don’t want to be Retargeted and that it would never work on you, here are two examples of companies that used Retargeting to get me to make purchases in different ways:

The first is a t-shirt company that I visited, but after viewing multiple shirts and even adding a few to the cart, I left the website. The next day those t-shirts in my cart were looking me in the face on my favorite websites which got me right back on the site to complete the purchase.

The second company is a nutritional supplement company that I buy protein and other vitamins from, on occasion. While I had already made the purchases from this company, I started seeing ads specifically about the products I had already bought conveniently around the time that I was about to run out. These ads also came with special offers in order to bring the price down to what I am accustomed to paying for those products. At this point, the convenience of having what I need lined up for me, and made it a pretty simple decision for me to go back and re-purchase through the same company.

Even if you are not convinced that Retargeting can be successful for your company, it doesn’t hurt to start a campaign to begin building out your target audience. This does not cost anything and will jump-start the process if you do decide to use this tactic in the future, especially if your website does not have high volumes of traffic. If you want to learn more about Retargeting and how it can be effectively coupled with your other Internet Marketing activities feel free to contact us today.