Retargeting Advertising 101 and How it Could Help Your Business

An average website has a bounce rate of 60-70% but what if you had an opportunity to convert some of those prospects into actual customers? I’m not talking about lowering your bounce rate, though you should be working on that. I’m talking about an advertising tactic that can help you target those prospects who are part of the 60-70% bounce rate. Retargeting advertising, also known as remarketing, is a great way for you to reach out to warm prospects that already interacted with your company, usually through your website.

How Does it Work?

Let’s say that you’re a clothing retailer who does a majority of their sales through online channels. You could set up a retargeting campaign that focuses only on prospects who viewed a specific product (perhaps one with a high profit margin) but never bought it. When that prospect leaves your website, they will go on to visit other websites such as news sites, blogs, Facebook, etc.

Through advertising networks, you can place a display ad or banner in front of that specific prospect as they browse their favourite websites. Your display ad will be a gentle reminder of the product they recently saw and will help create awareness around your company.

The great thing about retargeting advertising is that you’re spending your dollars reaching out to people who are already familiar with your brand and products. If you set up your campaigns correctly, you could even be talking to prospects who were very close to completing a purchase but stopped for whatever reason. These could be prospects who added products into their shopping carts but never completed the checkout or prospects who spent quite a bit of time reading through a specific product page but never added the product to their cart.

It’s Easy to Setup and Very Flexible

By being able to narrow down to such specific actions, you could create ad campaigns that not only convert very well but are easy to setup. If you have used Adwords or Facebook Advertising, you probably felt that your campaigns needed to be a bit broad to be effective within those networks. Retargeting removes this restriction and forces you to think about situations where prospects could have become customers but didn’t.

Retargeting advertising does have one drawback though. If you don’t have enough traffic coming to your website, then it doesn’t really work. Since you’re only targeting existing website visitors, you won’t be really moving the needle when it comes to overall website traffic.

I would highly recommend looking at some of the case studies provided by Adroll or Retargeter. These are two of the most popular retargeting companies today and they both have an amazing list of customers. Their case studies will provide ideas and tips on how you could use retargeting with your business.

Think about how retargeting could help you increase your sales and give it a try. Companies like Adroll and Retargeter have made it quite cost effective to get started.  AdWords also has an integrated retargeting platform.

How have you played around with retargeting advertising? If so, what was your experience? Let me know in the comments.

Tagged cart abandonment, Display Advertising, Retargeting