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Buzzword Breakdown: Retargeting

September 30, 2015
What is retargeting?

What is retargeting?

Whether you’re an online retailer or a B2B tech company – the customer journey is becoming far more complex than the simple - search, site browse, and convert. The reality is that on average, only 2% of visitors convert the first time they visit your site.

Retargeting is a form of online advertising that tackles this issue by helping brands monitor people who visit their website, and target the 98% of visitors who don’t convert right away.  

How does retargeting work?

Retargeting works by placing a line of code, also known as a pixel, on your website. This pixel tags users who visit your website with a cookie and collects data about them, for example, the amount of time spent on a site and which pages were visited.  The information from the cookie allows you to then serve ads to those users when they visit other sites. As a result, retargeting allows you to keep your brand top-of-mind among users who have previously engaged with it but didn’t convert.

Retargeting Best Practices

Frequency cap. Bombarding your audience over and over tends to lead to decreased engagement with an ad, and at worst, overexposure can lead to a negative association with your brand. Industry best practices place the frequency cap at 3. 

Burn Pixel. The same way in which consumers don't want to see the same retargeted ad 50 times, they don't want to continue seeing ads after they have converted, such as making a purchase. An easy solution to this is using a burn pixel, which untags viewers as recipients of your ad once they have made a purchase.

Segment Appropriately. Strategically set your retargeting message based on how your target audience will be interacting with your content. The retargeting message for a visitor to a home page may be for general company awareness, whereas the message for someone visiting a specific product page or catalog may be a much more conversion focused retargeting message.

Make your creatives count. Even if someone has visited your site before, a good creative is what's needed to continually pique their interest in the path to conversion. The best performing retargeting creative also has a clear call-to-action and usually promotes a specific offer.

A/B test. This is best practice for all types of advertising, and will help you better measure your campaign's success and plan for future retargeting campaigns.

 

Breakdown More Buzzwords:

 - Cross-device targeting

 - Ad blocking