Retargeting Strategies that Work

First off, what is retargeting? Retargeting allows you to re-engage a user that has shown interest in your brand or product. Ads are shown to people who have visited or engaged with the brand’s website or social media channels. Retargeting is an essential part of your digital marketing strategy, as it’s an important tactic for moving users down your funnel.

How does retargeting work? In order to target previous website visitors with retargeting ads, you need to use a ‘pixel’ or ‘tag,’ which is code you insert in the back end of your website. For example, when someone visiting your site with a Facebook account activates this code, you’re able to serve ads to them.

These codes record the following information and send it back to Google and social media networks:

  • What a customer was searching for or interested in buying

  • Whether they simply browsed, put items into their shopping cart and didn’t complete the purchase, or made a purchase

Types of Retargeting

Site Retargeting: A basic strategy that is easy to implement with any campaign. You can leverage site retargeting by placing a pixel on a landing page to create an audience of users who have visited or interacted with that page (i.e. users who added items to their cart but did not purchase). We suggest tailoring your retargeting messaging to act as a follow-up — this helps keep your brand top of mind!

Engagement Retargeting: This strategy allows you to create a pool of users who spend a certain amount of time on a website, are engaged on a brand's social media platforms, or other similar actions. Engagement Retargeting is a lot like Site Retargeting in the sense that it allows you to deliver messaging based on a series of actions taken on a website, landing page or social page. 

View Retargeting: If your marketing plan includes awareness tactics, View Retargeting is a valuable strategy as it allows you to build audiences that have viewed 25-100% of your content. You then can deliver your next message to these specific users based on how much they engaged with your awareness video content. 

List-Based Retargeting: By using a list of your existing customers or visitors who have provided you with their email address, you are able to target advertising to consumers who are already familiar with your brand.

Click Retargeting: This allows you to build an audience based on users who have clicked on an ad. Typically, a click from a user is a great indicator of interest in the brand. You then have the ability to re-engage these users with another message and a strong CTA. 

Dynamic Retargeting: This strategy is a useful play for eCom brands. It allows you to serve ads to a user featuring the most recent product page they’ve visited. This strategy is different from standard retargeting where generic ads are served to users who have visited your site. Standard retargeting ads remind the user of your brand message, while a dynamic retargeting ad reminds the user of the exact item they were looking at. This strategy can be successful since users have already shown interest in the brand and specific products.

Test, Test, Test

Retargeting is typically used to support conversion campaigns since it is intended to move customers through the marketing journey. But don’t be afraid to experiment with it! We like to test out a couple different retargeting strategies at a time — for example, targeting a specific customer list (i.e. 60 Day Purchasers) and 90 Day FB/IG Engagement. This tactic helps to further engage your audiences and provides them with offers or messaging that can drive interest towards brand loyalty and increased engagement.

We see that most businesses choose a specific channel for their retargeting efforts, such as Facebook, Google or Display. But we suggest mixing up your retargeting channels — afterall, consumers aren’t on just one channel! It’s essential to reach consumers where they are — this means spreading your campaigns across various channels, especially mobile devices.

We also need to remember that there are no straight lines when it comes to the success of your retargeting strategies — how you initially thought about your product and how people use it will change daily. The key is to ‘fail fast’, meaning, learn from what worked and what didn’t and keep improving your product and business model! 

Wrapping Up

Getting potential customers to your website and maintaining their interest isn’t easy. In fact, we’ve learned that over half of the visitors leave a site immediately after finding it and carts are more frequently abandoned than they are purchased (almost 70% based on data collected by the Baymard Institute). 

Whatever your strategy may be, there are many approaches to retargeting and each will provide valuable insights and methods to engage your audience. Get in touch with our team if you’d like to learn more about our retargeting strategies and how we ensure that potential customers have more than one chance to learn about your brand!