What is remarketing?

Did you ever shop or browse online and afterwards see ads for the web shop you visited and specific products you looked at?

If so, you know a little bit about remarketing and about how it can be used to create conversion, brand awareness and upselling.

Any business can grow conversions and sales by implementing a good retargeting campaign. Reengage customers and prospective customers with remarketing ads, social media, email, and much more.

How does retargeting work in reality

Today, several systems have specialized in collecting data from your web shop or website. In attempt to avoid making this article too technical, you’ll instead get a simple description of how retargeting works.

Very concretely, you insert a piece of code, which could also be referred to as a pixel on your website, which automatically places an anonymous cookie tracker (memory) in visitors’ browsers, when they visit your website. This means that their browsers now remember that they visited your homepage, and depending on your setup, this cookie may also contain what they saw on that website.

  1. The customer visits your web shop / your website
  2. The customer looks at a product in your web shop <-> This product is shown via banners on other websites with your logo, product image, and CTA to buy in your web shop

Why use remarketing?

Remarketing is a powerful tool for increasing brand loyalty and knowledge among new and existing customers / prospective customers. With remarketing, you can choose to run constant brand ads targeted to visiting your website, your YouTube channel, your Facebook page, users that have used your app, etc.

In the context of campaigns or new products, you can replace your brand ads with product remarketing and influence prospective customers through the purchasing process. With an online purchasing behavior, where users often compare prices and seek information etc. at various sites, your product ads may end up securing a conversion in your particular shop.

With remarketing, you only pay for clicks on your ads. This means that you can get quite a bit of exposure, which is actually free, and you will get views and ensure brand familiarity through your remarketing lists.

Remarketing on all online channels

By now, the sky is pretty much the limit. We have remarketing on practically every channel. We can do remarketing on Google Display, meaning we can show banners to the users as they keep surfing around the internet. We can do remarketing on search, i.e. only show a text ad if the user has already dropped by. YouTube is also in the loop, offering remarketing. We can peg our Facebook advertising to it, and as something new, LinkedIn now also offers remarketing on their platform.

We can also tailor our emails to it, when we have permission, so user behavior can help direct the content in the mail, for instance by us sending an offer about product categories or services they have shown an interest in.

Frequency limitation

Remarketing is often considered a stalking of prospective customers and something that affects your target audience or your brand negatively. This can, in fact, be the case, if you bombard your target groups mercilessly with marketing.

With frequency limitation, it is possible to limit the number of times a campaign, ad grouping, or ad is shown to a user. This limitation can be set to limiting by the day, week, or month, and you can always control how many times your ads are shown.

This means that you can avoid overexposure of your brand / product ads and influencing your audience negatively.

As a default, a frequency limitation of 2-3 daily views per user in a campaign is suggested. Of course, this number can be revised according to collected data or desire.

Conclusion

Most websites have a conversion rate of about 1-2%, and the remaining could be defined as “lost” visitors. Retargeting targets the 98% lost visitors that didn’t convert in the first try. You should consider retargeting a supplemental tool to your online marketing. If you have created a reasonable volume of visitors to your web shop or website, you should take full advantage of it. A good retargeting campaign will ensure an increased conversion rate and increased sales for your business.

Written by Kenneth Hogrefe