Retargeting can be confusing. The earliest form of retargeting came in the form of retargeting existing site visitors in which you market to individuals who have visited your site. This is effective because users have already indicated interest to you in what you do/know best – your product or service. This tactic is used to retain the audience/customers you already have. Search retargeting is a newer tactic in which you market to consumers based on the searches they’ve performed on the web. Including competitor products /services. This is effective because, again there is interest in what you’re selling. This tactic is used to acquire new audience members/customers. This post will focus on retargeting existing site visitors. Since it’s been around the longest, people are often expected to  know the ins and outs, but we’ll walk through some helpful tips to make the most of your site retargeting campaign.

Site Retargeting Audience Crafting

When people come to your website they scatter, some travel to a product page, some go to the contact page. Choose to retarget to specific users who have visited your site or based on behavior, just keep in mind the more specific and personalized you can get the higher the chance for conversion. The goal is to judge where visitors are on your site and where they are in the process of conversion, then tailor your message accordingly to get them to complete that action. Figure out how best to move people through the sales funnel.

The most common application of retargeting is to message to lost prospects who are deep enough in the product review and purchase process indicate strong intent:

• Common segments include shopping cart abandonment, product level, and category level.  In each of these areas dynamic ads can be used to show actual products viewed, product recommendations or affinity offers.

Many are missing the opportunity to target those further up in the purchase funnel:

• Target visitors of specific landing pages who did not progress further in the product review or purchase process – Again this route offers the ability to target your ad/message to that specific individual’s experience on your site – relevance wins.

• Store locater is another great place to create a retargeting segment that can be served location specific in store offers or coupon campaigns.

Once someone has converted they are often opted out of display, and advertisers focus on email, email has approximately a 15% open rate.

• Use loyalty retargeting to continue to message to visitors after conversion.

• Target visitors to your site who converted – Those who submitted contact info, a request for info, or bought/ordered something. Use retargeting to upsell or cross-sell relevant products.

Helpful Tips For Your Campaign

1.  An effective retargeting campaign is all about the right ad message with the right ad frequency. Use programmatic buying algorithms, like ours that automatically knows the right ad frequency by looking at the best time of day for conversions and the best performing keywords and  works accordingly.
2. Conversion window – the window of opportunity is fleeting. Be sure you’re targeting visitors in the right time window to ensure the highest chance of conversion. It might be too little too late to retarget that user for a flight to Vegas 4 days after they looked at flights on your site – they could’ve already booked one with a competitor.
3. In order to allow ROI to happen across all segments, you will need to work with a platform that can vary the bidding, vary the ad frequency, vary the message etc.  Marketing to visitors who do not put a product in their cart vs. those who do requires varying strategies, work with someone who can vary each component of the campaign to make ROI happen. This adjustment has to be constant, again this is the beauty of the programmatic algorithms is that this is done automatically.