Today, in this lower attention span era, retargeting in digital marketing is a proven way of converting web visitors into permanent customers. Several online sources reveal that-for most websites, only 2% of web traffic converts on the first visit.

Are you also facing the same challenge?

Do you have sleepless nights due to lesser conversion?

Do web visitors come and leave your site without taking necessary actions?

You have tried different marketing strategies yet failed. But don’t worry, retargeting digital marketing strategy is the solution to your challenging situation.

Research displays that almost all website visitors visit a site but leave without making any purchase. People, in general, prefer to conduct several online research across various platforms before finally buying any product. Interestingly they continue to come back to a site several times during their purchasing process. But this attitude of a consumer hampers the business process of an e-commerce site resulting lower ranking.

So, ‘retargeting’ or as Google now calls it -‘remarketing’ plays a pivotal role in the digital marketing scenario today. This online advertising form is used to target users by an online marketer who has some knowledge of your brand from their initial visit to your website.

What is retargeting in digital marketing?

Retargeting is a paid advertising approach that involves sending ads of your brand to your target clients who have once visited your website. It’s a robust conversion optimization as well as a branding tool.

On a basic level, the idea of designing this advertising instrument is to help the e-commerce sites to reach those users who don’t convert immediately. Thus, using this advertising option, an online marketer makes his brand visible amongst his potential customers. The future consumer of your products sees the retargeted ad, or retargeted email and sooner or later his former desire to purchase the product gets incited.

As we discuss the topic of online retargeting and remarketing advertising, as a digital marketer, you might wonder what remarketing is? What’s the difference between remarketing vs. retargeting and which one would be a better advertising strategy?

Before 2018, the significant difference between the two was – retargeting mainly relied on cookies dropping ads, while remarketing used emails. Remarketing collected a user’s information and then used it later to send them an email.

But now in this current year, Google has been using both remarketing and retargeting interchangeably. Both these two advertising strategies prove to be useful and a combination of both these approaches initiates increased profits.

How does retargeting work

Retargeting advertising strategy involves putting your ads in front of the bounced traffic. This cookie-based technology uses Javascript code and continues to ‘follow’ one’s audience all over the Web but anonymously.

Retargeting in digital marketing is available in more than one form: search retargeting, email retargeting and CRM retargeting. But the most frequently used retargeting advertising is the site-based retargeting.

Site-based retargeting is necessarily the process of providing ads to consumers who visit your website after they leave. Such ads appear on several other websites, keeping your brand prominent amidst your site visitors who bounced with an aim to bring them back permanently.

Among several retargeting ads best practices – its performance is excellent when it works in combination with outbound marketing and inbound marketing. Although there are several digital marketing strategies for driving traffic like the targeted display, AdWords or content marketing, but unfortunately, these strategies don’t help with conversion optimization. On the other hand, retargeting boosts conversions, but it doesn’t drive people to your site. Hence you need to conjoin one or more techniques for increased ROI.

Before you start with your retargeting campaign, understand what the benefits of such online advertising campaign are.

Benefits of retargeting

The greatest benefit of retargeting ads Google is to help an online marketer to create brand awareness.

Given below some of the unique retargeting benefits:

• Boost sales and revenues

One of the significant benefits of retargeting is generating more sales. Retargeting banner ads are integral as a part of your digital marketing strategy. Finding out visitors who showed interest in your product and telling them why your product is unique compared to other similar products in the industry would generate sales and ultimately increase your revenue.

• Best way to pitch potential prospects

Online advertising retargeting is the best way to pitch those potential prospects who came to your site to know about your product. This advertising strategy is better than the traditional cold calling prospects. As these potential customers showed an initial interest in your brand, now you must just remind them or subtly poke them to move forward to the next step. So, with retargeting methods, you are reaching only the interested prospects, rather than nudging members of your entire target audience.

• Gives you knowledge on your conversion percentage

Another benefit of retargeting in digital marketing is that – an online marketer gets a clear insight into the areas where the highest percentage of retargeting conversations are capturing more prospects after they leave the site. These retargeting statistics are vital because you can unravel the secrets of your conversion. Hence, you can then carve out your future roadmap for all your online marketing efforts to maximize results.

How to best use Retargeting in digital marketing

Like any other digital marketing campaign, retargeting should also be used correctly to increase ROI.

Following are some of the best practices of retargeting:

• Audience Segmentation is ideal for successful retargeting campaign

One of the proven methods for successful retargeting in digital marketing is to go for audience segmentation. You must understand that each customer is different in his behavior and purchase decision. Therefore with the process of audience segmentation you will be able to understand audience behavior and tailor make each ad message for users in various stages of the purchase funnel.

According to this method, when a visitor enters the main page of your website, you can target them with creative briefs and provide them with brand awareness. If these visitors proceed to the product page, serve them with more specific ads regarding your products. Audience segmentation hence is the process of allowing you serve relevant and engaging ads to your potential clients.

• Frequency Caps prevents customers’ confusion

Frequency caps method is yet another guaranteed way for carrying out successful retargeting campaign. As the name suggests, it’s a process to restrict the number of times an identified user will see your ads and will prevent potential customers from feeling overwhelmed.

Customers continue to visit their site of interest more than once, but one or two visits to your website don’t mean that they would finally buy your product. Neither these prospects appreciate the idea of your constant follow throughout their web journey. As a digital marketer, you must understand that excessive exposure initiates harmful effects. In turn, there would be a quick decrease in campaign performance. Here frequency cap helps, it’s quite natural for prospects to ignore your ads altogether. Even sometimes potential clients start to have a negative perspective about your brand when you follow them all over the web.

• View-Through Conversion Windows are impressive too

View-through conversions or VTC technique is used to find out the number of converters after a display advertisement or video ad. If there’s a change of conversions within one day of an ad impression it gets reported in AdWords as view-through conversions. According to the functionality of the view-through conversion, it identifies those ads that don’t trigger immediate buying decisions. Nevertheless, these ads influence people to make purchases later.

View-through conversions provide advertisers with richer data around ad performance by considering conversions that occur within a specific window after the user sees an advertisement.

Rounding off

Retargeting is an efficient process of traffic conversion and an apt way to focus advertising on those people who are already familiar with your brand and have shown some amount of interest. That’s why most marketers prefer this advertisement form to receive higher ROI compared to other digital channels. However, one must take care while using retargeting ads. While pitching, a marketer mustn’t annoy their potential clients. Ads should follow the potential customers in an engaging way thereby provoking purchase decision.