Everything You Need to Know About Retargeting

Let's talk digital marketing strategy, and more importantly, why your business should have one. Whether you're a savvy digital user or you identify as technologically challenged, it's always helpful to think about how to allocate your advertising budget and reach your target audience online. If you're new to the world of digital marketing or want to use your marketing dollars more efficiently, the first thing you should think about is retargeting. When implemented properly, it is a foundational piece of any marketing plan.

What is retargeting?

You probably already know the answer, you just may not realize it. You may have been browsing Amazon looking at a banana slicer or just reading the reviews, and then the next day, you're checking the weather and – BOOM – there's an ad for a banana slicer! How did they know? Is the banana industry collecting intel? Not exactly. What's happening there is called retargeting, and it lets you serve ads directly to people who have visited your website.

Retargeting, also known as remarketing, is one of the easiest and most effective ways to keep your brand and product in front of the right people. For the sake of this conversation, the right people are defined pretty clearly – people who are so interested in your product that they have visited your website. Unfortunately, 98% of people abandon ship before completing the Call To Action (CTA) or making a purchase. Before the 2000s, you just crossed your fingers and whispered a prayer to the web-gods that those people came back. Since then, we've developed a much more effective approach.

Enter retargeting, which works by placing a snippet of code called a pixel on a page of your website. Every time a new visitor comes to your site, the pixel inserts an anonymous browser cookie. This cookie serves as an anonymous flag that indicates which web pages a user has visited. Later, when your visitors are on other sites that allow ads, the cookie on their browser allows you to "follow" them around with your own ads. There are also other forms of this that can help you target people browsing similar products or services, and you can also include mobile browsing.

You might be concerned that targeted ads feel creepy, thereby affecting the image of your business, but the majority of people actually think it's cool. In fact, 89% of people feel positive or neutral about online ads. Essentially, by visiting your website, your customers are telling you what they want. By retargeting them, you're keeping up with them and providing an unobtrusive reminder to pick up where they left off.

Does it work?

So people don't mind being retargeted, but does it work and is it worth including in your advertising budget? The data firmly supports that retargeting works: The average click-through rate of a retargeted ad is 10 times higher than that of a traditional non-targeted ad.

Exposing potential customers to these ads has a number of direct benefits for your business, including increased brand awareness and conversions. According to Digital Information World, retargeted ads increase searches for your brand by 1046% and site visits by 726% after one month of exposure. And once these people make it back to your website, they're 70% more likely to make a purchase or complete the CTA. With Enterprise Automated Retargeting, your ads will be displayed across social media, localized your target market, and allows you to put your message in front of the right audience, over and over again.

Making the case for automation

Now, the hard part can be figuring out how to begin this highly technical process. You can go down the rabbit hole, learning all there is to know about retargeting, but digital marketing is a dynamic industry and keeping up with changing technology is time consuming. For those of you who don't make a living with this knowledge, it's easier to pass off the work to a qualified expert like Adwerx.

We have the experience and expertise to help you build your marketing plan with a variety of digital advertising solutions. Our unique approach allows us to tailor a customized advertising program to your needs. For each of our Enterprise partners, we create a custom platform which includes a dashboard for transparency and control. The process is automated, so you can focus on what's important. We even tune into your data feed so your ads are automatically created and accessible through your portal. We're not kidding when we say that our services are brilliantly simple.

To view the original article, visit the Adwerx blog.