When to Use Retargeting in Your Marketing

Retargeting is also known as remarketing. It’s a form of targeted advertising where you as the advertiser have the ability to market to consumers based on their previous web browsing activity.

Retargeting helps you keep in front of traffic that came to your site, but left without converting. Most marketing campaigns get a lot of clicks, but only a small amount of conversions.

By utilizing retargeting, you now have the ability to “follow” the visitors who clicked on your website or landing page, but didn’t convert into a lead.

You’ve probably been retargeted yourself. For many, they experience it while shopping online at any of the major ecommerce websites.

Think about a time when you visited amazon.com, ebay or similar website and viewed a product for sale. If you’re like me, you may have decided to hold off and shop around a little bit.

Further down your web surfing experience, you may have seen an ad for that same exact product on a different website in attempt to get you back to complete the purchase.

That’s a retargeting ad being shown specifically to you based on your previous internet activity.

How all of this works is based on a cookie, or pixel, being planted on your web browser. This provides the ability to retarget any prospect that’s visited any specific webpage.

Fortunately, there are a handful of companies out there that make this a very easy process to implement.

Setting up a retargeting campaign can be done in just a few easy steps:

Create Your Retargeting Account

Choose a retargeting ad network to get started. If you’re already working with any sort of display ad network or marketing company, ask if they offer retargeting.

To jump into retargeting on your own, take a pick from one of the following agencies that focus on this in particular:

• Adroll
• Retargeter
• Perfect Audience
• Google AdWords Remarketing
• SiteScout Self-Serve Advertising Platform

I have personally used Adroll found it to be very user friendly and simple to set up.

Adroll can reach 95% of all websites on the internet, including Facebook.

For a more advanced platform to run retargeting ads with, look into using a Real Time Bidding advertising platform such as SiteScout.com. It’s a bit more complex than the set-it-and-forget-it platforms like Adroll and Retargeter, but can help you narrow your scope down even further with your campaigns.

Add The Retargeting Code (pixel) to Your Website

Once you’ve figured out which company to manage your retargeting campaign, the next step is to put the retargeting pixel on each webpage you want to track visits from.

To keep it simple, place the pixel on every page of your website. If you’re a tech guru, place this pixel in the HTML file of each page. If you’re like most of us, reach out to your webmaster and ask them to add the pixel to each page for you.

Once this pixel is planted on your web pages, everyone who visits will automatically be added to your retargeting list.

Below is an example of Adrolls pixel that is to be planted on your website. (Your pixel will be different depending on which provider you choose for your campaign.)

Create Your Banner Ads

The following are the most common ad sizes you need for banner ads throughout the internet. Create one ad in each of the following sizes so that your ad can be shown on all types of different websites to your audience.

(Don’t sweat this. You can create the same ad in multiple sizes and that’s perfect.)

• Square: 250x250 pixels
• Leaderboard: 728x90 pixels
• Medium Rectangle: 300x250 Pixels
• Wide Skyscraper: 160x600 pixels

A few things to keep in mind while creating your banner ads:

Create a powerful Call-to-Action

See our Call-to-Action section for more info on creating powerful and magnetic call-to-action headlines.

Include your logo on the banner ad

This is your opportunity to increase brand recognition with your audience. If they have already visited your webpage, make it obvious for them to know whose ad they’re seeing.

Ad Scent

Keep the ad-scent in your banner ad along the same lines of the page they visited on your website.

For example, if they visited a refinance webpage on your site, we don’t want to take them to a purchase based ad. We want to be showing them ads that are relevant to the web page they originally visited. Check out our guide for more information about ad-scent.

Setup “Conversion Tracking” pixels on your Retargeting Campaign

As with all marketing, tracking results is crucial to determining the successes attributed to the campaign.

Alongside the retargeting pixel needing to be installed on your website, all of the mentioned retargeting platforms also offer a tracking pixel to track “conversions” of your retargeting campaign.

What this will do is simply track the amount of clicks to your banner ad, then it will track the amount of clicks that turned into conversions (leads) as a result of this retargeting campaign.

To accomplish this, the conversion tracking pixel will need to be placed on the thank you page (also known as the confirmation page) that consumers are directed to once completing your landing page or website form.

If you’d like, you can also use Google Analytics and Google Goals (within Google Analytics) to track conversions instead of using the retargeting platforms’ tracking. To get more info about Google Analytics and Google Goals, check out our guide for that.

Launch Your Campaign!

Once you’ve implemented the steps outlined prior, you’ll be ready to launch your retargeting campaign. Keep in mind, this isn’t a traffic driving campaign, rather, one that’ll help you keep your brand in front of consumers and bring lost opportunities back to life.

With retargeting, you can’t expect immediate results. Retargeting has a snowball effect when it comes to generating positive outcomes. At first, your list of consumers to retarget to will be small.

As time goes on, the list will grow larger and larger, increasing the amount of consumers your ads are shown to.

The more people on your list, the more your ads will be seen, and the more opportunities you’ll have to convert clicks that slipped away into qualified leads.