Jun 5, 2020
Retargeting is a strategy that nearly every successful programmatic marketing campaign needs to be utilizing.
If your website is seeing a lot of traffic but very low conversion, you may want to try this strategy out.
It is uncommon for first-time visitors to convert, which is where retargeting becomes a highly valuable, cost effective way to close the deal.
In fact, average conversions via landing pages are 2.35%.
So how do you capture the attention of the other 97% of users who bounced from your website?
Keep reading to learn how to recapture these users and ultimately increase your ROI.
What is Ad Retargeting?
Before you even begin implementing our steps into your digital marketing strategy, you should know all the ins and outs of what ad retargeting encompasses.
Ad Retargeting is exactly what it sounds like: an online marketing strategy that retargets users who bounced from your website without making a purchase.
How Does Ad Retargeting Work?
With good old cookies, that’s how.
Not chocolate chip cookies (although, that wouldn’t be a terrible way to get the attention of some of your target demographic. Writes that down for later..).
Retargeting utilizes cookies to essentially “follow” your audience around on the web.
By placing a small, unobtrusive piece of code (or pixel) on your site, your ads can be served up to those same users after they leave your site.
The code places this cookie in every new user’s browser, so your retargeting provider knows when to serve up an ad to this user.
Using this method also ensures that your ads are only served to users who previously visited your site.
Retargeting Is The Answer
So, for the users who clicked through to a client’s homepage but didn’t make a purchase, didn’t look into available auto inventory, or didn’t look up how to contact the company -programmatic retargeting is the answer.
Say a user clicks through to an auto dealer’s homepage, absorbs enough necessary information about the brand, and leaves without looking into the dealer’s inventory.
Since it’s already known that this user is interested in the brand, it’s beneficial to retarget them to a page of the website that brings them further down the conversion funnel (i.e. the inventory page).
This can work particularly well when paired with a separate set of incentive-based ads aimed directly at previous website visitors, as it may further entice them to engage and make a meaningful conversion.
In this particular example, an ad with a call-to-action could be something related to a certain percentage off the MSRP of a vehicle for new customers.
By linking this ad set to the inventory page, users who are already familiar with the brand will be much more likely to convert (i.e. visiting the contact page, calling the dealership, visiting the dealership, etc.).
Ad-Frequency
Another imperative aspect of a programmatic retargeting strategy to keep in mind is the frequency of which the ads are served.
While spamming users with ads could certainly hurt a brand’s image, it may take more than one ad to entice a user to come back to your website.
If you’ve ever shopped on Amazon, you’re likely very familiar with their retargeting strategy.
You may even be able to ignore that 120-pack of Yoohoo you were looking at if you only see the ad one more time.
However, if it keeps appearing, you may just decide that you really should treat yourself to 120 Yoohoos.
According to Social Media Today, the ideal frequency rate is from one to four ads per day per user, depending on the campaign and industry, and anything above this will typically result in a diminished conversion rate.
So while it’s essential to capture the user’s attention, the line between optimal and annoying needs to be clearly defined.
Is Ad Retargeting Effective?
Retargeting is extremely effective.
It helps increase conversion rates and keeps your brand top-of-mind in situations where a user could be shopping around for other brands.
Web users who are retargeted are more likely to convert by 43%!
When it comes down to it, it’s really all about getting into the mind of the user, and if properly executed, it can be one easy way to increase your client’s ROI.
3 Steps For A Successful Programmatic Advertising Campaign
With the variety of constantly-evolving targeting options programmatic advertising companies are utilizing:
Geo-Fencing
Behavioral
Site Retargeting
Whitelisting
3rd Party Data Targeting
Event Targeting
Addressable Geo-Fencing
Cart Abandonment Retargeting
the list goes on – just figuring out how to set your campaign can seem like a daunting task.
However, there are a few fundamental aspects that will ensure your campaign crushes it for your client!
1. Place The Campaign Pixel
This may seem obvious, but we cannot understate the importance of placing the campaign pixel on your client’s website!
Not only does this allow us to Site Retarget people who have engaged with their website – which leads to people coming back to your website 3x as often – but this also allows us to track campaign engagement in much greater detail than just clicks.
Where the pixel placement process used to be a bear – we previously had to place individual conversion pixels only on the specific pages we wanted to track.
YIKES .
We can now set up your conversion tracking internally once the pixel is placed on all pages of the site.
This means we can track how many people saw the campaign’s ads and then visited key pages on your client’s website, like the Contact Us or Locations page.
Perhaps even more intriguing, for applicable e-commerce websites, we can retarget only people who have an item in their cart but haven’t checked out yet!
2. Provide A List of Competitors
There are several different ways in which we can get your client’s ads in front of their competitors’ customers.
You may already be familiar with Geo-Fencing, where we can build a digital fence around a competitor’s physical storefront and retarget anyone who enters that fence with your client’s ads, and then track how many people actually visit your client’s storefront.
BTW – in 2018, people who saw our Geo-Fencing ads were on average 175% more likely to actually visit our client’s locations!
But did you know we can also serve ads to people who have searched for your competitors across the web, and even people who have searched for your competitors’ websites?
And with our integration with some of the industry’s top Data Providers, we can even serve ads to people who have been identified as a customer of several National Brands!
3. Provide All Necessary Creatives
This may also sound obvious, but one of the most common hindrances we see comes from only running one or two ad sizes.
By providing each of our recommended ad sizes (300×250, 320×50, 728×90, 160×600, 300×600 and 300×500), as well as a .mp4 for Pre-Roll, your campaign will be set up to knock it out of the park right from the get-go!
This will allow us to analyze performance data on each ad size and format, and then optimize accordingly by maximizing your top-performers!
Conclusion
Ad Retargeting is one of the best ways to ensure your programmatic campaigns see incredible success.
By following these simple steps and understanding the importance of programmatic ad retargeting, you can ensure your clients’ campaigns grow to the moon!
