World First, one of the UK’s leading foreign exchange services, was experiencing a problem. They wanted to expand, but their customers had a notoriously lengthy lead time. They needed to speed up the buyer’s cycle and help usher their customer’s towards actual conversions.
Retargeting was their solution. Working with a data-driven ad agency, World First was able to decrease their cost-per-acquisition (CPA) by 99%.
So what is retargeting marketing, anyway? We’re going to investigate, to show you how you can use this powerful trend to boost your company’s productivity and profit margins.
What Is Retargeting?
Retargeting is just what it sounds like. It means advertising to those who have already visited your website or have otherwise interacted with your brand before.
This is basically the opposite of all your advertising efforts to bring visitors to your site in the first place. Retargeting uses a completely different marketing strategy for a totally different audience. Obviously, this results in unique benefits you can only get with retargeting.
Retargeting is effective, as well. It can boost clickthrough rate (CTR) by 1000% on display ads, as an example.
How Does Retargeting Work?
Retargeted ads use cookies to track your site visitors and follow them, invisibly, as they browse the web. First, a piece of code on your website called a “pixel” is downloaded to site visitors as a cookie. Then, the cookie is with them wherever they browse.
As they visit other sites, your pixel is detected by advertising services like Google Adsense. These services can then display your retargeted ads on other websites to anyone who has visited your site before.
To clarify, these ads will only be displayed to those who have visited your site and received your pixel cookie. Therefore, you can customise these ads to specifically appeal to previous visitors.
11 Reasons You Should Be Retargeting Website Visitors
As we said, retargeting is very different than your other ad campaigns with unique benefits of its own. Here are the 10 most important benefits you get from retargeting website visitors.
1. Returning Visitors Have a Higher Conversion Rate
According to Google, 97% of first-time site visitors don’t convert. In other words, only 3% of your advertising efforts to bring people to your website are profitable.
Unless you follow up on these efforts by retargeting, that is. After all, you can’t retarget unless visitors come to you in the first place, right?
Still, retargeting these visitors after they leave is vital to your marketing success. Otherwise, 97% of your efforts to attract web traffic are literally a waste of time.
2. Retargeting Conversion Rates Increase Over Time
In most campaigns, the more times an ad is viewed, the lower the clickthrough rate gets. The opposite is true in retargeting campaigns: clickthrough rates increase over time.
A big reason for this is the low conversion rate of first-time visitors. Many who click ads that aren’t retargeted are clicking your site for the first time.
97% of these leave without purchasing. For this audience, seeing your ad more times doesn’t help.
Besides, when your ad is new, people are clicking it on purpose. But those who click your ad after ignoring it several times before are most likely clicking it on accident.
However, retargeted audiences are different. They’ve already started looking into your website.
Those who don’t click your repeated ads may just be procrastinating on finishing what they started. If you remind them enough times, many of them will come around and finally make that purchase they’ve been putting off.
3. Retargeting Isn’t As Creepy As Some Might Make It Seem
Remarketing doesn’t have to be creepy. There are ways to tailor your remarketing campaigns to make them more organic.
Capping the ad frequency is one way to fine-tune your retargeting ads. This helps prevent your audience from over-exposure.
You can also segment your audience in a variety of ways to make sure they’re not seeing the same ad over and over.
4. Facebook and Google Display Network Offer the Best Reach
Where should you spend your time, money, energy, and resources? Google Display Network and Facebook offer the greatest reach for your remarketing campaigns. as of this moment.
Google Display Network reaches 90% of Internet users worldwide. Many internet users see GDN ads daily. GDN displays more than a trillion ads to over 1 billion users each month. Facebook, on the other hand, has more than 1.4 billion users. Over a billion Facebook users log in every single day.
5. Retargeting Is Incredibly Powerful for Brand Building
It’s difficult to generate enthusiasm using only text ads and organic search.
Remarketing ads are a fantastic way to develop brand awareness. There’s so much more creativity in an image ad that will help your audience relate to your brand.
Great brand awareness leads to brand loyalty. Using retargeting ads lets you work with colours and images, as well as text, to appeal to your customer’s emotional centres as well as logic.
You’ll be raking in conversions before you know it!
6. Retargeting Improves CRO
Marketing funnels don’t translate well to Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO). For one thing, the buyer’s cycle isn’t nearly as straightforward as it used to be. Marketing funnels are more of a leftover of the desktop era.
Your users can enter into your sales funnel at any stage. This makes it challenging to know how your sales funnel is functioning.
With remarketing and some of the powerful new ad technologies, you can even cut out sections of the funnel altogether!
7. Both GDN and Facebook Have A Quality Score
Creating killer ads can be a double-edged sword. Great ads make people click. But each click costs money.
Creating an ad campaign designed for people not to click is counter-intuitive, though.
The Google Display Network, for every 0.1% increase in clickthrough rate results in a 20% decrease in cost-per-click! The same is true in reverse – decreases in CTR = increased CPC, which sucks.
On Facebook, Quality Score plays an even greater part! Every 1% increase in engagement on a sponsored post reduces the Cost Per Engagement by 5%.
This makes retargeting ads a bit of a gamble.
Aiming for low CTRs isn’t an effective marketing strategy.
Instead, take what you know about Quality Score and make the most engaging ads that target the right people. They’ll have a higher conversion rate while still costing you less.
8. Search Ads Have The Highest Conversion Rate (But Not By Much)
Search ads have the highest conversion rates for a number of reasons, namely the specific intent of a search engine. Several years ago, display ads barely existed. Thanks to remarketing and other advances ad targeting, they convert almost as well as search ads, and even better than search ads, in some industries.
Past browsing history is an incredibly powerful predictor of future behaviour. You’re often targeting the same Google users. You’re just reaching them at a different time.
9. Retargeting Clicks Are Inexpensive
Search ads can be very expensive in highly competitive niches. Social remarketing and display ad clicks are significantly less expensive.
You’ll most likely have a higher rate of conversions with search ads, but the CPC will also be far greater. If the conversion rate is negated by higher CPC, it’s possible that remarketing ads could deliver higher ROI.
10. Display and Social Aren’t The Only Form Of Retargeting
Display and social aren’t the only kinds of remarketing. Remarketing Lists for Search Ads, or RLSA, combine the search queries with contextual cues like location, device used, and time of search. These insights are then combined with browsing history, which is a very powerful combination.
RLSA campaigns can have as much as 200% CTRs, 50% lower CPCs, and twice the number of regular search campaigns!
11. Retargeting On Facebook & Twitter Makes Retargeting 10-100x More Powerful
Remarketing is particularly powerful when it’s combined with audience segmentation. Just because someone’s interested in your products, it doesn’t mean they fit your ideal demographic. Only around 2-4% of your remarketing pool will convert to leads and sales, on average.
Segmenting your audience will greatly increase these numbers.
Social media is incredibly powerful for audience segmentation. Remarketing campaigns lets you use thousands of social media targeting options along with purchase history.
This is currently only available on Twitter and Facebook’s ad platforms, but it’s so successful it’s bound to catch on in other networks.
How To Stop Retargeting
Clear your browser data
Options are different for different browsers, but generally you can get there by finding the History or Privacy tabs. However, note that this will remove all the history, including saved passwords and frequently visited sites. So before cleaning your browser history, make sure to bookmark pages you want to save and visit later.
Disable/reset cookies
You can also set your browser not to accept third-party cookies but then you may have trouble accessing websites that require you to sign in. So the best option here would be setting your browser to delete cookies every time you end your browsing session. Here’s how to manage cookies’ settings on your browser: Chrome, Firefox, Safari.
Are You Looking For Retargeting Services?
As business owners and digital marketers, we need to take advantage of every resource at our disposal. Retargeting is one of the most powerful you’re likely to find. If you’re ready to find out how retargeting marketing can boost your business, contact us today to schedule an appointment!
