What are re-targeting ads and why should you be using them?

As we’ve all heard before, it takes 6-8 touches to generate a viable sales and while your website might be great at bringing visitors in, only 2% of web traffic converts to a sale the first time. Marketing and sales departments have an abundance of tools at their disposal. Remarketing and retargeting are tools that find a way to reach out to the other 98% of people and get them to convert. Remarketing lets you show ads to people who’ve visited your website and clearly showed interest in your product or service. Because you will be marketing to customers already in the buying cycle, the ROI for this rather inexpensive tool is incredible.
 

Remarketing vs Retargeting

These two terms have been used synonymously to describe the approach and although in a nutshell, they accomplish the same thing, there are some differences. Retargeting refers to the javascript cookie based method of following a user with your ad. Remarketing is Google’s version within AdWords.
 

How does Retargeting Work?

Technically, all that is needed is a JavaScript tag in the footer of your website. This cookie-based technology uses that code to anonymously “follow” your audience all over the web. This in turn creates a list of people that visit your site and allows AdRoll (or other retargeting vendors) to display retargeting ads to your potential customers as they visit other sites. AdRoll works with the largest ad exchanges, making it easier to retarget your customers regardless of where they visit online.

The ads are only targeted for users who have already shown interest in your site but haven’t made a purchase yet. For example, a potential customer visits your website and browses your various pages and products. This potential customer leaves your site without making a purchase and continues surfing the web on different websites. Your ad is displayed on a few of these webpages which draws the customer back to your site where they make a purchase.

Along with the abundance of tools marketers have, there is also a variety of channels and strategies to experience with as well. Retargeting from users who have already visited your website is a great re-engagement and upsell tool. You can now target individuals based on product views, actions taken, how they entered your website through SEO or SEM and any inbound marketing tools. But you can also retarget users for prospecting purposes by adding customers who have not previously interacted with your website. For example, you can target customers who have visited a partner site with similar products. Or you can target customers who have interacted with distributed content in social media.

There are many different ways to approach retargeting campaigns and it’s effectiveness is only limited to your imagination. Retargeting generates greater online sales by keeping your brand in the eyes of your customer at all times. Each touch point and interaction increases your brand image, recognition and traction. Compared to non-retarget display campaigns, retargeting campaigns have significantly higher engagement. In fact, it can boost ad response by an extremely high 400% and only 11% of consumers feel negatively about these ads.
 

What is Remarketing?

While retargeting relies on cookies dropping ads, remarketing usually works via email. It collects user information and uses it to market or remarket to them later via mail or email. Google has a similar version of retargeting campaigns directly inside the AdWords platform under the term “remarketing”.
 

Benefits of Remarketing

Remarketing can be a strategic component of your advertising in many ways:

• Access to people during their busing stage – you have the option to reach people after they’ve interacted with your business at just the right time
• Tailored lists – you can customize your remarketing lists to achieve specific advertising goals
• Large scale reach – you can reach people on your marketing lists across all of their devices
• Efficient pricing – you can create high-performance marketing campaigns with real-time bidding calculations
• Easy ad creation – you can produce multiple text, image and video ads for free with Ad gallery
• Insights into your campaign – you will have reports of how your campaigns are performing and where they are showing up
• Reach your customers during Google search – you can show ads to previous visitors who are actively looking for your business on Google search

Whether you decide to re-target or re-market, everyone who is in the business of selling a product or service should be applying these approaches. Re-targeting will help you turn potential customers into loyal customers.