Have you ever felt you were losing out on converting those visiting your website? You might be right. Approximately 96% of visitors that come to your website are not ready to make a purchase 1.
That is a large number of opportunities that could be passing you by. Fortunately, if your strategic marketing plan is in place, and your strategies incorporate retargeting, you can bring those lost visitors back.
What is Retargeting?
Retargeting is a marketing technique that has been around for a few years now, but has generally picked up steam with e-commerce sites. Retargeting is essentially a form of audience collection. By placing some simple JavaScript code on your website on all of the pages you would like to track, you can collect a list of people who have recently visited your website (so long as the page(s) visited has the retargeting JavaScript code embedded). This code follows a visitor’s journey across your website, knowing what pages were visited and which products were viewed.
When a potential customer leaves your website, the JavaScript code informs your digital ad networks, like Google AdWords or Facebook, that these visitors need to start seeing your ads. This trigger serves ads almost instantaneously across those digital ad networks to a built-in audience! This is a great way to convert those who were either on the fence or unsure and convince them to review the offer they saw moments ago.
Integrating Retargeting Into Your Marketing Plan
Several digital ad networks support retargeting, which is important to consider when formulating integrated marketing communications plans. These include social media channels such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Pinterest. It also includes programmatic marketing platforms such as connected TV outlets, as well as connected radio like Spotify, or Pandora. Incorporating retargeting ads on these platforms means your audience will see or hear your ads if they are on another website, scrolling through their Instagram feed, listening to Spotify, or even watching ESPN. The combination of how to reach these visitors are almost endless.
There are so many benefits to incorporating retargeting into your overall marketing strategy. We spoke to a few above but let’s recap quickly:
- Retargeting captures an audience that already has shown interest in your services or products and keeps them top of mind.
- It can track the most important KPIs to your business:
- How many conversions were received from re-visitor?
- Did the re-visitor browse any more products or pages after their purchase?
- How much time did the re-visitor spend on the site, pages, products?
- It helps improve conversions on those pages and services you want your visitors to see.
Limitations to Consider
Of course with all things, there are a few limitations to consider when deciding on retargeting as part of your strategic marketing plan and these include:
- Since this tactic only targets visitors of your website, your audience is narrowed.
- If your website does not have very many visitors, to begin with, this can be problematic in terms of the number of conversions you hope to achieve.
- Retargeting ads expire once the visitor has been absent from your site for more than 30-days. Meaning, if they have not come back within that 30-day window, they will no longer be in that group of people seeing your ads, and the potential for them to convert is lost.
- If you are not web savvy, it can become a complicated, and time-consuming, process to place the specific retargeting JavaScript code on so many pages.
Retargeting provides your business with incredible opportunities to target your specific audience. It offers your business another chance at a first impression and to convert the re-visitor. Finally, it creates an opportunity to enhance your brand, products, and key messages to those who have already shown an interest in your company. With the multitude of options in which your business can effectively leverage retargeting, it is sure to be an integral part of your overall digital marketing strategy. If you would like more information on retargeting or other digital marketing tactics to help your business grow, contact us today!
Want to learn more about how you can take advantage of retargeting through data-driven programmatic advertising? Consider registering for our Keynotes education series!
