What Is Retargeting?

Heard of Retargeting but don’t know what it is?

Have you heard of the term Retargeting but aren’t quite sure what it actually means? Retargeting has been around for a while in the online marketing world, but it has gained in popularity over the last few years.

There’s a very good reason for that too, retargeting converts very well compared to other kinds of online marketing campaigns.

We have been running retargeting campaigns for quite a while now on a few different platforms which I will explain below.

The click through rate and conversion rates are much better than normal display ad campaigns as you are specifically targeting people you know have already visited certain pages on your website.

Retargeting vs.Remarketing

Retargeting is usually a term used to describe display banner ads that are served to users who have visited your website.

Remarketing is basically the same thing but usually there is email involved – for example the personalised emails Amazon sends you after visiting their website if you already have an Amazon account.

Remarketing is also used to target people who have abandoned a shopping cart with items already in it. You’ve most likely had one of these kinds of emails, reminding you to go back and complete your purchase a few days after putting it in your cart and leaving.

Just to make things confusing, Google refers to its retargeting tools as remarketing tools.

How Retargeting works

There are a few different ways to set up retargeting/remarketing campaigns, some ways are a bit more tricky than others. Basically you need some retargeting JavaScript code to be added to your web pages.

Then once users visit your website or certain pages on your site, a tracking cookie is placed on their computer. This tracking cookie allows the retargeting advertising platforms to identify you and then serve you ads based on what websites/web pages you have previously visited.

You can get quite granular with retargeting, for example having specific retargeting code on each product page. This allows you to then follow people around the Internet with ads showing the exact product they looked at on your site.

You can also target certain sections of your website, or all of your websites traffic – but this way isn’t exactly ideal.

Retargeting also allows you to filter out users who have successfully made a purchase on your website, or completed another conversion goal.

Different Types of Retargeting

There are a number of different retargeting platforms available, I’ll explain the ones that we use and have had great results with. The most well known platforms on the market currently are AdRoll and Perfect Audience.

You can also retarget with Google AdWords and you can create remarketing audience lists in Google Analytics that then can be used by AdWords campaigns.

Using Google Analytics Remarketing Lists

This is one of the easiest ways to setup retargeting. You just need a Google Analytics account that is linked to your Google AdWords account to be able to take advantage of Analytics Remarketing Audiences.

Doing it this way saves you having to add different code to each page or section of your whole site like you would with AdWords remarketing code. You will need to be using the version of the Analytics tracking code that has display network support.

You will also need to add some information to your privacy policy page to let users know you are tracking them.

Then you can simply create an audience from either all of your traffic, a specific section of your site, specific pages, users who have completed certain goals, or create a custom segment of users who have met a set of criteria that you define.

A custom segment could consist of anyone who visited a number of different pages on your website that center around the same topic.

There are also many other ways to refine your audiences, you can choose demographics, technologies(device, browser etc), behavior and traffic source.

You also have the option to choose how long users are a member of the audience list after they initially visit your site.

Remarketing with Google AdWords

The easiest way to do retargeting using Google AdWords is to set up display campaigns that target remarketing audiences you have already created in your linked Google Anaytics account.

Or you can create remarketing lists in AdWords, doing it this way you then have to add the remarketing tag code to the pages on your site you are wanting to use.

These are the ways you can use remarketing in AdWords:

Remarketing with Display Network ad campaigns – Shows banner ads to your website visitors as they surf the web.

Remarketing lists for search ads – Shows ads to site visitors when they search on Google.

Dynamic Remarketing(only works if you have a Google Merchant Center account) – Show dynamically created ads to your sites visitors, generated by your Merchant Center account.

Remarketing for mobile apps – Reach users who have visited certain sections of your app.

Retargeting with AdRoll

AdRoll is a fantastic retargeting platform, they have their own display network and you can also run news feed, mobile or right hand column ads on Facebook all through the one interface.

To get started with AdRoll you just need to sign up for the free trial, then add their tracking code to all pages on your site. Then it starts creating an audience from all of your website visitors.

You can create segments of your website traffic of which particular pages people have visited, then target those segments with specific ad campaigns.

You can also create URL based conversion points so you can track your success and improve on it. You can also filter out users who have already converted by not targeting users who have visited your order success or other conversion pages.

There is a full list of AdRoll’s features here.

We have had a lot of success with AdRoll and can highly recommend it as a retargeting platform for your business. It has an intuitive interface and very useful and easy to understand analytics.

Why you need Retargeting

Lets face it, retargeting and remarketing convert better than normal non-retargeted advertising campaigns. If you really want to maximise your ROI you should seriously give retargeting a go.

We have the technology to be able to remind people who did not buy your product at first to come back to your website and make that purchase. It just makes sense to take advantage of this to market your business.

If you are already running online campaigns or not it is well worth your while giving retargeting a try.

We can set up and run retargeting campaigns for you, feel free to enquire below.