Advice: 6 tips for retargeting campaigns

Many ad networks, including ExoClick, offer retargeting or behavioural targeting, but what exactly is it? How does it work? What are the differences between positive, negative and personalized retargeting? How can you maximize the effectiveness of your retargeting campaigns? Read on…

What is retargeting?
Retargeting enables you to target specific users who have already shown some interest in your product or brand via one of your digital ads. It is generally said that only 2% of potential buyers will actually complete their purchase on the first visit. Retargeting brings the remaining 98% back.

This creates a greater opportunity for generating sales by keeping your brand visible and bringing high value users back to your site when they are ready to buy. Every time your customer sees your retargeted ads, your brand gains more recognition. The high click-through rates and increased conversions that are common with retargeting campaigns highlight the value of good branding and repeated exposure.

How does retargeting work?
Technically, all you need to do is place a small invisible tag in the footer of your site on the page you want to retarget. This tag will place a transparent cookie with each visting user, allowing the ad network to retarget these potential customers when they browse other websites.

What are the differences between positive, negative and personalized retargeting?
Positive and negative retargeting allow you to target or on the contrary, exclude users who have reached specific steps within your website. Personalized retargeting is useful for when you are selling different products, one way of increasing the effectiveness of retargeting even further is to use different display ads for the product that a user has shown interested in.

Here are 6 tips to help you maximize the effectivness of your retargeting campaigns?

1. Less is more
If you repeatedly retarget an ad at a consumer it can annoy them, making them less likely to convert. So think about timings for retargeting the same consumer in a strategic way, for example, say a consumer clicked on your ad mid-month but didn’t buy, maybe they are waiting until the end of the month when they get paid, so remind them of your product 2 days before pay day, then on the last day of the month (pay day) retarget them again to drive that sale. Of course your strategy will depend on your product and the consumer you are aiming for, but try to put yourself in the consumers position and you will enjoy a much higher ROI.

2. Tempting discounts
Try retargeting consumers that clicked on your ad but didn’t convert with a discount offer as an extra push to buy second time around.

3. Don’t double sell
Have you ever made a purchase online only to find you’re still being flooded with ads for the same product? By continuing to serve ads to customers that you have already converted you are wasting money and annoying your converted customers.

4. Do double sell
However, if you have a range of accesories that can be used with the product you have sold to a consumer, this gives you another window of opportunity to up sell to the same converted consumer.

5. Be brutal
Not every site performs well, so collect data on the sites you are targeting over a certain time period and analyse them, if they aren’t converting for you be brutal and add the site as a negative target so your ads will no longer show here. By cleaning up your target site list at least once a month, it will help lower your overall cost per conversion.

6. Never assume anything
Instead of relying on what you think will work, test, measure and optimize based on results. Testing can provide you with the data you need to run retargeting campaigns with high performance results.

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Giles Hirst