Have you ever noticed an online ad from a website you recently visited? If you have, you’re not alone.
Advertisers often target people who visited their website in the past. It’s called remarketing (or sometimes retargeting).
Remarketing can be a highly effective marketing strategy when you consider that the average click-through rate for retargeted display ads is 10x higher than regular display ads.
In this article, we’ll go over what exactly remarketing is, how you can do it, some of its benefits, and some tips to get started:
What is Remarketing?
Remarketing is targeting leads who have already shown some interest in your product. This could mean they’ve visited your website before or they went as far as putting something in their shopping cart and abandoned it at checkout.
Whatever the case, remarketing is for those leads who haven’t converted yet—which are usually many. Most consumers don’t convert the first time they interact with you as a brand, after all.
And you’ll never know exactly why they didn’t. Perhaps they got distracted or maybe they just weren’t ready to commit.
But one thing is for sure: People who have already shown some interest are more likely to convert than those who haven’t shown any at all.
How to Do Remarketing
Remarketing usually involves running ads. They could be display, native, search, or social media ads that you pay for with the help of ad platforms like Google and Facebook.
These ad platforms leverage user’s browsing information (through cookie trackers) to place your ads where they’ll perform best.
And what’s especially nice about them is that you don’t even have to pay for an ad placement until somebody clicks on the ad. That’s why it’s called pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.
Here’s an example remarketing ad scenario: John looks at a bike you’re selling online. He ends up leaving your website before ordering because he gets distracted. You run a remarketing campaign to have an ad for the bike appear on different sites within your ad platform’s ad network. And the ads are only shown to users who previously visited your site. John sees the ad for the bike on another site the next day, and this time he’s ready to buy so he clicks on the ad and orders.
And that’s the beauty of remarketing! You get to reach customers who were close to buying but didn’t, which is far more effective than targeting random users.
Benefits of Remarketing
Now here’s a more complete list of all the benefits you can look forward to when running a remarketing campaign:
- Capitalize on lost traffic—Remarketing helps you not let leads fall through the cracks. By targeting lost web traffic, you expand your pool of potential buyers and increase sales.
- Get higher conversion rates—Just because someone clicks on an ad doesn’t mean they’ll convert and turn into a customer. But with retargeting ads, you dramatically increase the chances that they do. This helps you drop your ad spend to make your ad campaigns more cost-efficient.
- Create more personalized ads—Remarketing ads can be customized to tailor to people familiar with your product. For example, instead of running a generic ad, offer a special promotion or first-order special. This could be just what you need to lure in someone who’s been on the edge.
- Increase brand awareness—Sometimes shoppers need multiple visual cues and reminders before a brand sticks in their head. With remarketing ads, you can do just that. Get your brand name in front of eyes that have seen it before multiple times and eventually, they’ll remember you.
Final Tips for Remarketing
Now that you know how remarketing works and the benefits that it brings, here are a few final tips to help you get started with remarketing on an ad platform like Google Ads:
- Keep a remarketing list. This is a list of visitors to your website that performed certain actions. For example, you might keep a list of users who visited your product page. Then you can target only those visitors in a remarketing campaign.
- Analyze which devices work best. Users respond to ads differently depending on the device. So run your ads on the best-performing devices to be most strategic.
- Don’t overdo it. If you retarget a lead too many times, it might negatively impact their impression of you. They could get annoyed with the constant bombardment of your ads and not want to do business with you as a result.
Well, there you have it! The value of remarketing and how to get started in a nutshell. If you want to learn more, explore the different remarketing features that ad platforms offer. You’ll be surprised at just how much you can fine-tune your remarketing campaigns!
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