Retargeting ads are an excellent tactic for creating sales touch points and increasing brand awareness.  

Why is Retargeting Important?

Think of retargeting as sales persistence.

Any good salesperson knows that you usually don’t get prospects on one touch.  It takes follow-up and persistence to build brand awareness, persuade people and catch them when they’re ready to make a buying decision.

In digital marketing, we often see campaigns that take 20 or more touches to close the deal.

Retargeting is a way to automate some of those touches.  Ads attach to a person’s browser, which keeps your brand in front of them as they surf the web or browse social media.

How Does Retargeting Work?

Retargeting “cookies” a person’s browser, which means a snippet of code is put on that adds them to the list based on what content they visit.

When you visit a website then realize an ad is “following” you around the internet, it’s retargeting.

Your ads are managed on Google Adwords, Bing, Facebook and the other advertising platforms.  Alternatively, all of it can be managed on the Marketing 360® marketing software platform.

What is a Retargeting Audience?

A retargeting audience is a list that has a particular ad campaign delivered to them.  The content visited triggers the ad campaign.

For example, say a shopper looks at a particular product page on your ecommerce site.  The system adds them to a list for a campaign selling that very product.  If they don’t buy, an ad for the product appears as they browse online.  It runs for a specific number of displays over a given time period.

Or say they visit a product category.  You can create a list that dynamically shows all the products in that category in a series of ads.

You can, of course create a general ad for anyone who visited any part of your website.  Use demographics like gender, age, or location to show banners on the display network.

Lists can be set-up for first-time visitors, returning visitors, people who completed a particular goal, or people who completed a transaction.  Naturally, your ads are designed to communicate to each particular audience.  This gives you the chance to tailor highly personalized messages for each audience.

Will Retargeting Ads “Creep” My Audience Out?

Some business owners worry that having their ads follow leads around will seem obtrusive – even creepy.  They also worry about ad fatigue, where people tire of and ignore ads they see too frequently.

These concerns are unfounded.  Data shows that retargeting ads actually fatigue at half the rate of other display ads.  Also, you can rotate multiple display ads to increase their usefulness and interest.

By now, consumers are used to – and even expect – to see retargeting ads when they shop online.  It’s an accepted and necessary type of advertising.

Are Retargeting Ads Effective?

Yes!  The process of retargeting – like most sales persistence – pays off.  In fact, data shows that conversion rates actually increase the more times users see the ads:

Source: Wordstream

Online consumers are distracted and busy.  Your retargeting ads are a reminder to finish what they started while keeping your brand in mind as they consider their options.

If you rely solely on first-visits to your website to convert, you ignore human nature and typical online behavior.  You have to stay with them to get the sale.

Is Retargeting Helpful for Brand Awareness?

Yes.  In fact, creating a general audience for brand awareness is one of the most important goals of retargeting.

Here is a common scenario:

1. A website does a good job of optimizing their non-branded paid search an organic campaigns.  Decent traffic comes into the website.
2. The traffic does not convert.
3. Visitors leave, forget about the business, and never come back.

The problem is that search result page text ads (from paid or organic rankings), with limited character space, no logos or visuals, don’t make effective brand advertisements.  They get visitors to your website, but if they don’t convert on that visit, you lose them.

Retargeting serves as more than a way to put direct-response ads in front of prospects.  The banner ads you run can have creative, branded visuals that are the most effective content at getting people to remember you.

What you’ll see is an increase in direct traffic and brand-name searches back to your website.  For example, at Marketing 360®, we now see that one of our top performing organic keywords is our brand name:  Marketing 360.  The increase in search on our brand name coincides with running our retargeting campaigns.

In other words, it’s not just a specific audience responding to our direct-response retargeting ads that drives value.  It’s keeping our brand in front of people who previously visited us.  At some point, they realize they want to take another step to engage with us, so they search on our name or put our url in directly.  This is very targeted, valuable traffic that our competition can never out-rank us for.

For many smaller businesses, retargeting is central to their online brand marketing.  It increases the value of all the traffic you drive to your website by keeping your brand in front of prospects who would otherwise forget about you.

In fact, you often get visibility and awareness without having to pay for clicks.  Just having your ads display to your audience – which costs nothing – increases brand awareness.

Again, you can’t underestimate the power of sales persistence and multiple touches.  Retargeting is effective at maintaining the awareness you need to bring prospects in and get the best opportunity to convert them.