98% of e-commerce website visitors do not convert to customers on the first try – retargeting helps bring them back to the same site to complete the transaction.
Have you ever searched for certain products on an e-commerce site without completing the payment process, and then a few days later, you see ads from the same site throughout all the sites and platforms you go to? If so, then you have experienced remarketing.
Remarketing (or retargeting) can help advertisers reach people who visited or showed interested in certain products, and remind these users to come back and take action.
What is retargeting exactly?
Retargeting enables advertisers to target audiences based on their previous behaviors, such as visiting webpages or searching for certain items without completing a sale or action. It is tailor-made for performance-based campaigns.
According to AdRoll, only 2% of online shoppers convert on the first visit to an e-commerce site in general: It’s crucial for advertisers to remarket to those 98% of visitors.
How does retargeting work?
To make retargeting effective, all advertisers need to do is implement a JavaScript tag on the footer of specific webpages. The code generates a list of audiences who visit the site by placing retargeting “cookies” (Non-PPI) in their browsers, which enables advertisers to remarket their potential customers while they visit other sites. Not only can e-commerce sites benefit from retargeting to boost their sales, SMEs, especially B2B businesses, can also use retargeting to bring returning visitors back and generate leads.
Major forms of retargeting
Display (site) retargeting
Marketers can bring customers back to their sites with targeted display ads across multiple ad exchanges, networks and other resources.
Facebook retargeting
To state the obvious, customers spend a lot of time on social media. Facebook enables marketers to retarget Facebook ads (News feed ads and RHS ads) to potential customers who visited their sites previously. Shutterfly posted impressive results from their Facebook testing, reporting that their ROMI increased almost four times with a post-click conversion rate of 9.6% after introducing the FBX Retargeting campaign, five times higher than before.
Search retargeting
Search retargeting can help marketers target audiences with display banner ads based on their previous search engine queries. Unlike display (site) retargeting, the audiences that received retargeted search ads have likely never been to a marketer’s site before.
Why retargeting can improve marketers’ ROMI
Retargeting generates leads and online sales by enforcing brand image among potential customers, and brings them back when they are ready to take action. Since these “window shoppers” already showed interest, it is more cost-efficient for marketers to remarket to them than launch general online advertising campaigns. Retargeting campaigns combine the right audiences, right ads and right places: It is therefore no surprise that it generates high CTR and conversion rates for marketers.
When launching retargeting campaigns, it is recommended that marketers segment their audiences and create different cookie lists. Each group should be targeted with tailor-made retargeting ad creative and make sure it is relevant. It is also better to have a call-to-action or promotion offer on the retargeting ad creative to improve the engagement.
For audiences who already converted, they should be excluded from the retargeting campaign since they are unlikely to make similar purchases in the near future.
Marketers should also assign length of time windows according to the type of products/services they provide. For luxury goods, cars, properties and so on, the retargeting period should be longer since those purchases usually take some time to decide. Comparatively, people trying to book flights or hotels should be retargeted right away at an intensive frequency since these decisions usually are made within a short period of time.
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