If you run a business you are well aware that advertising, in many different forms, plays a crucial role in driving traffic to your website. But just getting eyes on your site isn’t enough—the ultimate goal is to make customers out of your site visitors.
However, not every website user is ready to fill out a contact form or make a purchase when they first find your business online. In fact, a whopping 97% of first-time website visitors will leave without taking action, and nearly 49% of consumers visit a website 2-4 times before actually making a purchase.
So how do you get all these site users to come back and actually turn into customers? By running successful retargeting campaigns!
What Is Retargeting?
Retargeting is a paid advertising strategy that involves putting your ads in front of people who have visited your website after they’ve clicked away and visited other websites to try and remind them of your products and services and get them to return to your site.
Retargeting campaigns can be done with the help of Google Ads, Facebook retargeting, AdRoll, and other retargeting advertising platforms. This type of advertising campaign has rapidly become a vital tool to (re)connect with customers and increase sales and customer loyalty. It’s also a lot more cost-effective than other types of advertising!
How Retargeting Works
From a technical standpoint, a small piece of code called a pixel is added to the HTML of your website. When someone visits your website, this information is stored by the user’s web browser, enabling the browser to remember that the user spent time on your site. Marketing teams can then utilize this data to serve ads for your site and your products to the user again and again on websites, social media platforms, and apps they use.
From a consumer’s perspective, it just may seem like a specific company or product is following them around from site to site or app to app. Say you were looking at a jacket on a clothing store’s website one evening, but you ultimately decide not to purchase it right then. You click out of the site and close your laptop.
A few hours later, you open your laptop back up to read some local news stories and scroll through your Facebook feed. While on the local news site, you happen to notice a banner ad for the clothing store you were browsing earlier, and when you’re checking Facebook, there’s an ad for the specific jacket you were looking at!
Encouragingly, 89% of Internet users have either a positive or neutral reaction to being retargeted, so it could be just the thing to get people returning to your site and becoming a proper customer!
Who Does Retargeting Work For?
Any business and every business can benefit from retargeting campaigns! Successful retargeting campaigns are used by brick-and-mortar stores, residential service providers such as roofing, painting, and gutter companies, real estate agencies, restaurants, universities, medical service providers, and more.
But it doesn’t stop there! Whether your company is B2B or works directly with individual consumers, whether you sell services or physical products, a retargeting campaign can turn site visitors into proper customers.
How Could You Use Retargeting Campaigns?
The best-performing retargeting ads have clear call-to-actions and promote offers that will get people back to your site and taking the plunge with your company. Additionally, retargeting is most effective if you segment your site visitors and tailor your retargeting ads to each group of site users.
First and foremost, a retargeting campaign can be focused on keeping your brand top-of-mind for potential customers who visited your site but weren’t ready to purchase or fill out a contact form. Most people need to feel like they know a brand before they want to purchase your product or service, and seeing ads for your company as they use other websites and apps will help.
Other, more specific ads can be used in retargeting campaigns to try and bring back site visitors who didn’t yet convert to customers. Creating retargeting ads that showcase your bestselling items, for example, can help convert more visitors into customers and increase Return on Investment (ROI) for your ads.
And while retargeting is massively beneficial for turning site visitors into actual customers, campaigns can be used to get current customers to come back to your site, as well! If your company is launching a new product or service, it may be a good idea to launch campaigns that target people who’ve already invested in your brand so they could consider investing again for whatever product or service is brand new.
It could also be helpful to create campaigns around slow-moving inventory or infrequently purchased services. Retargeting ads are low-budget, low-effort ways to showcase surplus products or services that aren’t taking off the way you’d hoped, and the ads can be presented to potential and current customers alike!
And while retargeting is great for businesses that focus on making sales directly to consumers through their websites, it is also just as effective for businesses whose main online goals are to generate new leads via Contact Pages or Free Estimates. Instead of creating ad campaigns around specific products or sales, you simply focus on keeping your brand top-of-mind and getting past website users to come back to fill out your contact or free estimate form.
All that said, retargeting site visitors immediately is not always the best practice, depending on what goods or services your company offers. Different products or services warrant different retargeting time windows. For example, people shopping for clothing items or other reasonably priced goods could be retargeted immediately; people looking into building an in-ground swimming pool or making similarly large purchases should be retargeted later, to keep your company in mind as they think about investing their money.
Why Should You Use Retargeting?
Utilizing multiple marketing strategies is always recommended, as you’re ensuring as many current and potential customers as possible are seeing what your company can offer. According to Google, using retargeting campaigns in combination with your other advertising strategies can help you sell 50% more than you would without them. That’s precisely the success you’d hope for when it comes to using a new marketing strategy!
To create truly effective retargeting campaigns that drive real results for your business, you need a team of marketing professionals behind you. TOTAL Advertising is a proud partner with AdRoll, the leading ad retargeting platform, and together we can produce successful retargeting campaigns for you. The experts at TOTAL Advertising can help you design eye-catching and intriguing ads and tailor retargeting campaigns to precisely the site users you are trying to reach, and AdRoll can help us launch them across the web. Contact us today to learn more about how retargeting campaigns can work for your marketing strategy.
