A Step-by-Step Guide to Retargeting Advertising for Beginners

Oleksiy Kuryliak -

What could be better than a customer who already knows your company and is familiar with your products? Retargeting technology helps return users who have already visited your site but haven’t made a purchase. Read on to find out more about what retargeting advertising is and how to use the capabilities of retargeting technology for successful lead generation and effective marketing during the pandemic.

What is Retargeting?

According to statistics, about 70% of users leave the site without buying anything. The purpose of retargeting is to remind the client, through advertising, of the product he is interested in. Such advertising is effective since it is aimed at target (“warm”) customers. In addition, it is cheaper to return an interested user than to attract new customers.

From the technical side, retargeting is a cookie-based technology that allows making your ads ‘follow’ your website’s visitors.  It is part of online advertising, but unlike banner advertising, retargeting is aimed only at an audience that has already visited the site and is familiar with your brand. This way, an advertiser may be sure that the advertising budget is spent only on interested users.

Retargeting vs Remarketing

Retargeting and remarketing are two important elements of a marketing strategy that help to reach out to people that have demonstrated interest in your brand, product, or service.

The difference between retargeting and remarketing is in the online tools and strategies used. Retargeting uses cookies technology to collect information about online visits and place ads in front of the prospects. Remarketing works by collecting users’ email addresses and sending personalized emails to users based on their online activity. For example, it is common to send a remarketing email to remind visitors of the abandoned cards,

Both retargeting and remarketing can be successfully used for sales techniques such as down-selling (offering a discount to promote the buying decision), up-selling (offering additional accessories or matching items to customers that have just made a purchase), and cross-selling (offering a product or service the customer might be interested in view of the purchase made).

While retargeting is effectively managed using Google Adwords and Facebook Ads, remarketing is successfully automated using email automation software.

Types of Retargeting

The most common types of retargeting are:

  • Retargeting after visiting the site. It is used when users visit your site. A cookie will be saved on their computer. The task is to track users’ activity and show banners on the sites that they visit. This is the most popular type of retargeting.
  • Search retargeting. It is great to follow the latest SEO tips and enjoy top placement on SERP. However, if you don’t, search retargeting can help. It works through search keywords that you activate. As soon as the user enters these words in the search bar of the browser, he will see your retargeting banners, regardless of whether he visited your site or not.
  • Social retargeting. This, in fact, is “retargeting” the target audience, which showed interest in the product in the form of “likes”, “retweets” and other social actions. Now the best platform for this type of retargeting is Facebook.
  • Behavioral retargeting. It is similar to search retargeting in that there is no preliminary contact with the audience through the site. Marketers determine the target audience through their previous user behavior: reactions in social networks, searches, and sites visits.
  • Dynamic retargeting. The difference between this and other types is that ads are personalized for each specific visitor.

The Benefits of Using Retargeting

Retargeting is a great way to improve your marketing strategy and get users back to your site and thus increase your revenue.

Top reasons to use retargeting are:

  • The ability to create targeted remarketing lists
  • Wide coverage of the audience of sites and mobile applications, where you can show ads (up to 2 million)
  • Favorable prices due to the ability to configure automatic bids at auctions
  • Ease of creating ads using templates
  • Simple maintenance of statistics on the effectiveness of advertising campaigns on reports of advertising platforms

With the help of retargeting, you can solve the following tasks:

  1. Inspire purchase: retargeting is a way to arouse confidence in a brand’s quality and push users to action;
  2. Stimulate sales: if some related products or services were not ordered immediately, their repeated offer (especially at a discount) may end in a purchase;
  3. Maintain customer loyalty: a reminder of yourself, especially reinforced by some special offer, increases the chances of repeated sales;
  4. Promote brand awareness: many buyers are distrustful of unknown products and companies. Periodic impressions on other resources can contribute to gradual memorization and increased confidence;
  5. Engage in the purchase cycle: with the help of a well-organized series of retargeting ads and with competent segmentation, you can gradually arouse interest in the advertised object.

How to Measure the Effectiveness of Retargeting?

You can use two indicators to measure users’ engagement:

  • click-through conversion (CTC) – a metric showing how many clicks on the ad resulted in the desired action,
  • conversion by views (VTC) – a metric showing how many users converted after seeing the ad even though they did not click on it.

To see how retargeting advertising helps to bring customers to your business, it is necessary to assess it using a chosen lead attribution model.

Conclusion

Retargeting is an effective part of your marketing strategy that helps not only increase your income but also reduce the cost of promotion. While beginners might find it difficult to plan and set up a retargeting campaign, it is important to do this early in the marketing process.

Retargeting will allow you to effectively lead potential customers down the sales funnel rather than waste the advertising budget on targeting unengaged users again and again, which is a common mistake DIY marketers tend to make.