There are rules for retargeting you must follow. It’s not like you can pay your way to success.
.Retargeting is the next best thing after sliced bread, the wheel, and the fire. Ok, you can add “The Internet” too.
Retargeting is so good, so profitable, and so awesome that it almost hurts to “not” deploy a campaign when you could. Larry Kim, the founder of WordStream and Mobilemonkey, wrote about a few surprising benefits of retargeting in 2014.
What was surprising then is no longer surprising now. What’s surprising is the numerous businesses that don’t use retargeting when they could and should.
Consider this:
According to an Infographic by Wishpond that reveals a few retargeting statistics,
- A website visitor who’s retargeted with a display ad is 70% more likely to convert.
- More than 72% of online shoppers abandon shopping carts. Only 8% of them ever return to complete their purchase. (retargeting is the only way to get those people back, and retargeting helps bring at least 26% of those lost customers back).
- A ComScore study reveals that retargeting ads led to a whopping, wait for it, +1046% increase in branded search (a sign of more brand awareness and recall).
- Retargeting leads to a 147% higher conversion rate over time.
As Ben Plomion of Convinceandconvert writes, Retargeting is now mainstream, it’s hot, and the dedicated spend for retargeting is now growing larger than ever.
There’s a reason why: If you do it right, retargeting is almost always profitable. There’s just no mistaking the fact that retargeting helps bring your average CPC down, gets you more customers, boost your brand, and gets you more conversions.
Regardless of what kind of digital marketing you do, retargeting should be a part of your marketing mix.
While you are at it, here are a few cardinal rules for retargeting that you shouldn’t ever miss:
Have a Strategy in place
If you’d just pick a couple of banners and think that you’d win with retargeting, you won’t. Just like you’d have a plan in place before you start doing content marketing or paid advertising, think of how Retargeting adds value to your complete marketing plan.
Don’t mistake retargeting to be a standalone channel (like most people do with SEO or PPC).
Retargeting works great when it’s used as another channel along with the rest of the effort you’d put in for digital marketing.
Let’s say you get about 1000 visitors a day to your blog. Your PPC campaigns add another 200-300 visitors to your landing pages and/or websites.
When you add retargeting to the mix now, those 1200-1300 people visiting your web properties each month make for a great starting point for your retargeting campaigns.
Define Your audience Right
You’d need the aforementioned plan to answer this question right. Plus, the answer is different for every business.
- A small business with a contact form might want to retarget everyone who visits the “contact us” page.
- An online business that sells services would want to retarget anyone who visits their “services page” or even a particular “service”.
- Bloggers would want to launch retargeting campaigns to their regular blog readers.
- Ecommerce store owners would want to target all those shoppers who “abandoned” their “shopping carts”.
- Businesses can use retargeting for cross-selling or up-selling too.
The possibilities are limitless. Who are you going to retarget?
Build an Audience From the Start
You might or might not actually launch a retargeting campaign right away. However, building an audience off visitors to your landing pages, websites, etc., is a no-brainer.
You are directly spending money with PPC advertising or putting in the effort (which is still money in terms of opportunity cost and time) indirectly with content marketing, blogging, social media and email marketing.
After all the hard work (and money, or both), you wouldn’t want to let go of smart ways to “retarget” these visitors and turn them into potential customers.
Watch this video to learn how to Build retargeting Audiences on Adroll and make it work with WordPress:
Since retargeting audiences take time to build, a few simple steps will ensure that you’d build specific audiences whether or not you’d chose to launch campaigns.
Use Special Landing Pages for Retargeting
If you are using landing pages at all, you are doing better than 90% of advertisers or businesses all over the world.
If you’d like to go one notch up and make your marketing count, use specially designed landing pages for your retargeting campaigns:
For instance, let’s say you were promoting a simple $500 gift card. Also, assume that I am using Google Adwords to run this campaign.
When you run the campaign long enough, you’d get data to help determine whether version A works better or Version B.
For the audience that’ll build on this landing page — that is, for all the visitors of this landing page, I’d launch a retargeting campaign on the Google Display Network.
This time, however, this is how the landing page will look like:
Note that this is a variation of the main landing pages, and it’s custom-built knowing that the targeted visitors have already visited the page.
Make Special Offers
Your ads and Landing pages used for retargeting might have:
- An acknowledgement that it’s a returning visitor, with something like, “Welcome Back, We’ve Been Waiting For You” or “Glad to have you back”
- Actually name your returning visitor like: “Hey John, God knows You’ve been Missed”
- Make a special offer. “Your are special. Get 30% Off, Exclusive for you”
Why, you ask? Because if you want your visitors to come back, you got to have something more than your original offer was about.
Run the Campaigns Long Enough To Get Data
Too many campaigns die early. You’d need to gather as much data as possible to gather enough of a sample size to help make the right decisions (see point below). You’d also need enough time to experiment, test campaigns, test out ads, and test out landing pages. You’d need to let the campaign run for a while to allow for impressions, clicks, and conversions.
This is also one of the reasons why you’d always start with a low budget (per day) to allow for this period of time that your retargeting campaign runs.
If you are not ready to spend, don’t start the campaign.
Make Data-based Decisions
Is the offer you are making good enough? Is the campaign working for you? Are the landing pages converting well? How are the ads performing? What changes should you make to optimize your retargeting campaigns?
The answers to those questions have nothing to do with what you “think”. The only thing that matters is what is the data telling you?
- Out of the two banner ads on Google Display Network, which one performed better?
- Out of the two versions of your landing page, which one converts more, and with what degree of confidence?
- How do you determine which of your Sendroll email campaigns (by Adroll) are clicked open more? If you can determine the winner, why did it win?
Make notes of what the data tells you. As you go along, make changes and introduce new champions (ads, landing pages, subject lines) to make your retargeting work for you.
How are your retargeting campaigns going? Tell me all about it.