If you have run any form of pay per click campaigns for your business, the only thing that matters is,
RETURN ON INVESTMENT (ROI)
How much I earn for every dollar spent? It's the burning question and every marketer dreams it to be positive.
However, it’s not so straight forward. There are dozens of parameters influencing your campaign and to get everything right is a huge challenge even for experienced marketers.
You have to keep testing, tweaking, split testing your ads until you find the right combination along with few strategies.
Retargeting is one such strategy that can be very powerful and if put to use in the right way, can do wonders for your ad campaigns.
So, what exactly is retargeting?
In simple terms, advertising to someone who already knows a bit about your product or service by visiting your website once.
It's a widely proven concept in marketing that an average customer needs to be shown or explained about your product or service at least 7 times before they make a decision to buy.
Also, it is also proven that the average conversion rate of a website visitor to buyer hovers around 1 to 3%.
This means the remaining 97% to 99% of traffic to your website is an absolute waste.
Yes, the same traffic you spent all your time, money and efforts for.
Retargeting solves this by displaying targeted ads to the remaining 97% to 99% who would want to know more about what you offer.
Retargeting is not just another marketing hype. It’s a proven strategy used by thousands of businesses across all sizes and streams.
There is also a psychological science behind it. Our brain generally responds to things that we can make connections to. It’s called “Recency Effect”.
Imagine you have never seen a car before, your friend buys it and comes to visit you. You see the car say “Wow!! Looks cool”
Suddenly on the same day, you see the same car 5 times more on the road and wonder how you missed it all these days.
That’s called recency effect and retargeting is based on this behavior of our brain.
Why Retargeting is important for any online business?
Compared to traditional offline stores or offices, where a customer or client can actually visit and know about the product or service, it’s difficult to build that trust and rapport online.
That’s why it’s important to show your product or service on their faces more than once to build that trust and brand awareness.
How Retargeting works?
The way it works is quite straightforward.
You need to insert a retargeting pixel on your website.
So, whenever a visitor comes to the site, the pixel drops a cookie on the browser.
This cookie allows targeting the visitor when he browses other sites and displays your ads. Simple.
Although no personal information is tracked or shared, it is good to mention on your website that you use cookies and use the data for marketing and promotion.
Types of Retargeting
Although site retargeting is the most traditional way of doing this, new methods have evolved in recent times,
- Email Retargeting:
If email marketing is an effective way of promotion, email retargeting takes it to a whole new level.
How it works is if your subscriber opens or clicks a link from your website but doesn't take any other action or proceed further in your marketing funnel, you can keep in touch with them by displaying retargeted ads.
- Contextual Retargeting:
An extremely powerful retargeting strategy by partnering with similar businesses and websites.
It works by exchanging the retargeting pixel codes between highly relevant sites with similar audience and interests.
For example, travel and a hotel booking can exchange pixels as the target audience are the same.
Another example would be a tire replacement and an auto repair shop.
- Link Retargeting:
As the name suggests, it helps to serve ads to visitors who have clicked on a specific link that you can share anywhere.
The link can be shortened and a pixel can be added to it with various tools like bitly, rebrandly, pixelme, etc.
- Push Notifications:
Not a traditional form of ad targeting, push notifications are an excellent way to notify your website visitors via notifications in the browser.
Visitors have to accept to get the notifications, therefore it is important to provide a consistent flow of valuable content in your website.
Push Crew, Push Alert, and One Signal are some of the well-known tools to enable push notifications in your website.
Conclusion
Wrapping up, Retargeting is an extremely efficient strategy to make the most of your efforts to bring in traffic to your website.
When used in the right way, it can drastically bring down your costs on paid ads and marketing campaigns.