Leverage Retargeting Tactics for Your Small Business        wvf_logo_high-res

What is Retargeting?

Ever despair of all those people who only visit one page of your website and then leave, never getting to a single other page detailing your product or service? What about those visitors who view your product pages but never make it to the shopping cart or, most frustrating of all, abandon their cart. Obviously these folks are prime prospects but how do you turn them into customers?

As a consumer and web browser, you’ve no doubt experienced the following every time you’re online: “Hey, there’s that cool pair of shoes I checked out yesterday on Zappos. Hmm. Why am I seeing it today during my search for weekend getaways?” Zappos has tracked you through cookies and served you a customized ad.

Retargeting is remarketing to these people to convert them to buyers or to complete some other desired action (such as agree to a trial offer, contact you for professional services or even download your content.) Retargeting works by keeping track of website visitors in order to serve up ads to them wherever they go on the internet. According to AdRoll, generally only 2% of shoppers convert on the first visit to an online store. Retargeting campaigns allows you to target the other 98% to bring them further down into your sales funnel. 

As an entrepreneur and consumer, you may feel uncomfortable about retargeting. You may even think it is invasive. However, it is such a powerful marketing tool for your business you ignore it at your peril.  Retargeting enables you to reconnect with strong prospects and/or increase your brand awareness. Step up your game by learning showing you how to reach these prospects with your ads even when they visit other sites.

Let’s briefly look at six major retargeting methods:

  • Site retargeting: Serve people ads based on their viewing and shopping behavior on your site. You place ads wherever these prospects go—Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, etc.
  • Email retargeting: This should be your most frequent method of remarketing. Email platforms capture the contact data of those on your mailing list who open your messages and even tracks what content they perused. Re-engage them with a special offer in a follow-up email. 
  • Static vs. dynamic retargeting. When you use the same ad to the same audience for the duration of your campaign, you’re utilizing static retargeting. If you personalize every ad by featuring the products (or content) they just viewed on your site, that’s dynamic retargeting.
  • Mobile retargeting (which is also called cross-device retargeting) allows you to remarket to those who visit your website on their desktop or laptops with ads served on their mobile devices.
  • Search retargeting captures a user’s keyword searches on your site and serves up an ad based on those searches. Less effective is search retargeting on an external site since chances are these users have never visited your site. However, if your goal is building brand awareness, go for it.
  • CRM retargeting: Combining the data (e.g., name and email address) in your customer relationship marketing (CRM) system with the customer’s cookie data allows you to retarget them wherever they go on the web.

Quick overview of what you need to start a retarget campaign

We’re keeping this simple because most of you are not professional digital marketers or webmasters—but all of you can bring an expert to the table to get you started.

  • Place a piece of JavaScript code (called a tracking tag) into your web pages’ source code. This tag enables a cookie to be placed in the browser of all visitors
    to your site. (Note: A cookie does not capture personal information on your visitors.)
  • You then have the capability of tracking new visitors to your site as well as regular visitors.
  • Once you hit at least 250 users within a seven-day period, you’re ready to launch a retargeting campaign.

Mobile devices: Currently, mobile retargeting is not as widespread as desktop retargeting because mobile devices don’t allow third-party cookies.. 

So how do I retarget to mobile device users (phones and tablets) if cookies are not allowed?

Retargeting platforms capture non-personal but useful information like a mobile users location, IP provider (not email address), type of device, etc. and make correlations (best guesses) as to the profile of the user. This is called probabilistic matching. Its accuracy has been measured at 60% plus. This type of matching
gives you a wider retargeting pool.

When you use personally identifying information like login information from Facebook and Twitter accounts or your CRM system which houses your customers’ email addresses or customer ID numbers, then you have the benefit of deterministic matching—which is more accurate than probabilistic matching. However, the targeting pool is smaller because this type of matching relies on login information.