How to Use Advert Retargeting to Raise Brand Awareness and Conversions
As a user, do you wonder why you might visit a site once, and then start seeing adverts for that company or the products it sells? The technique is called retargeting. It is a common method used by businesses to help boost sales and remind users who visited a site. Simply put, the ad tracking code on a website follows you around the net, and places suitable reminder adverts.
As a business you can use retargeting to nudge prospects or potential customers to come back, and get in touch or make a sale. Since many visitors are only browsing or researching your company or products, retargeting can provide a timely reminder them as they go about their browsing, and can raise the usual 2% response rate through gentle persuasion, rather than more aggressive techniques that some marketers use.
While most businesses use adverts directly to retarget customers, the technique can also be applied through email lists, so when a user is on Facebook or other social media, the retargeting service can identify them and place an advert to remind them, if they use the same email address for social media.
How to retarget your customers
If you are looking to raise brand or company awareness, or boost sales of a product, retargeting can help with both tasks through the use of specific types of advert.
The Art of Awareness Retargeting
Awareness campaigns can use various messages to get visitors back to your site, to sign up or buy something to enter your sales funnel. These are for people who have likely only visited your site once, and you have no detailed information about them.
General messages that make a positive impression of your brand, without overtly trying to sell can have an impact, highlight what your company does, what it sells, and the business benefits or the problems that they solve, can all help make an impression.
Make A Sale Through Retargeting
For retargeting for conversion, you may have more detail about the customer from a previous sign-up, an abandoned shopping cart or previous purchase. This information allows you to provide them with a more specific retail offer or advert to get them back in your store and to make a purchase.
If their last visit to your site was for footwear or business stationary, the new retargeting advert will direct them straight to those products or a specific item, rather than leaving them uncertain at the front page of your store.
If your business model will find it more useful to gain more data about these people, you might try a softer approach such as signing the up to a free trial, an ebook or other offer to get the information from them, all while they are going about their usual browsing on other sites.
How to create a retargeting campaign
Your business needs to use the right advertising campaign that target where your users are. In most cases, this will be through Google, but could also focus on Facebook or LinkedIn, or another social media network.
Since most people use Google or Facebook, you can use this AppInstitute example as a thorough guide. Whatever ad service you are using, log in to the company’s advertising account and follow the basic instructions to create the campaign, identify the audience you wish to track and set the parameters of the advertising campaign.
You will need to add a snippet of JavaScript code to create the tracker on your site or pages. Advanced users can apply some Google (or other) Analytics information to refine the remarketing effort further, by better defining the audience, such as one local to your business.
How to create the best retargeting campaign
Segmentation is key when it comes to marketing your adverts to the right audience. As a best practice, you will want to focus on those who spend some time on your site before moving away. Discounting anyone who spends just a few seconds looking at your home page will ensure the retargeting campaign focuses on those who took more than a passing interest.
Once you’ve got a customer on-board, you will want to prevent them from seeing the same retargeting messages, to avoid annoying them. To do so, you can use a burn code which removes their details from the retargeting campaign, see the AppInstitute piece for more details on this.
Finally, keeping the campaign focused by reducing the adverts over time to prevent customers from feeling harassed or seeing the same advert everywhere they go will be a key part of a strategy. Using a range of different adverts will prevent that feeling of deja vu and can help highlight different brand areas, features or products.
In Summary
Retargeting is a fine-tuned advertising campaign technique that can help get people back on your site or using your services. It needs to be carefully managed to prevent turning customers off, but can help track down people who are interesting in your products and engage them wherever else they go on the net.