What’s so special about Retargeting?
Retargeting is a powerful digital-marketing technique. Cookie based, it uses Javascript to anonymously ‘follow’ your audience all over the web. Did you know that for most websites, only 2% of web traffic converts on the first visit? Retargeting is a tool designed to help companies reach the 98% of users who don’t convert right away.
You place an unobtrusive piece of code or pixel on your website, and every time a new visitor comes, the code drops an anonymous browser cookie. Later, when your ‘cookied’ visitors leave your website and browse the web, the cookie will let your retargeting provider know when to serve, and which ads, to these prospects.
Retargeting has become a popular marketing technique because it enables money to be spent only on those users who are familiar with the brand or have shown interest in it. Hence, there is a higher chance of conversion, and therefore greater ROI.
Want to create a successful retargeting campaign? Follow this list of 6 best practices to ensure greater brand enhancement and higher profits:
- Limit ad frequency
The last thing a marketer wants is to annoy the audience. Overexposure of your brand doesn’t only turn off consumers, but also creates “banner blindness” to the point which tarnishes your brand.
Having a frequency cap in place limits the number of times a visitor sees your ad over a period of time. This prevents customers from feeling overwhelmed. You can try for around 18 ads per month per user, but it’s important to strike the perfect balance. Showing too many ads can create negative associates, whereas fewer ads can lead to low impressions.
- Place burn code
Many a time, you may find that even after making a purchase, you are still being shown the product’s ad. It’s time to use the burn code, which is essentially a piece of code placed in your post-transaction page that ‘uncookies’ users who have made purchase. This way, marketers don’t annoy customers unnecessarily and more importantly, they save valuable dollars by not wasting impressions on already-converted individuals.
- Precision targeting
By retargeting, you can focus only on those users who make it to your consideration list. You have the flexibility of placing your ads and you can target users based on demography, purchase history, lifestyle and other factors; thus increasing relevancy and offering greater opportunities of higher ROI.
When you target you ads this way, you shoot the ads only to the most genuine prospects, and that too without wasting impressions. Targeting not only improves relevancy of your retargeting campaigns by placing the right ads in front of the right people, it lowers your costs too.
- Audience segmentation
Segment your users based on different purchase stages. How? Place different retargeting codes on various pages of your website and then shoot customized ads based on the level of engagement. For example, for a visitor on the main page, you can send ads to increase brand awareness. Similarly, you can target a user who is on the product page with more specific ads that talk about products, features, prices, etc. Audience segmentation ensures you are serving relevant and engaging ads to people in different zones of engagement.
- One vendor retargeting
Don’t make the mistake of running retarget campaigns with multiple providers. In such a scenario, you may end paying more dollars as each provider will be bidding for the same spots on the same websites, thus decreasing your chance of gaining impressions.
- Rotating creatives + A/B testing
By running the same set of ads for months on end, you decrease the chances of conversion. No user will pique anything from old ads. So it’s imperative to keep rotating your advertisements frequently to remain fresh, relevant, and entice users.
You can use simple A/B tests. They provide the data with which one can design campaign ads that are high-performing. Instead of relying on what you think will work, you can run tests for measurable and actionable results. Perform A/B testing on your creatives. That will help you determine the optimal combination of ad copy, calls to action, and graphics.