How to Run an Effective Retargeting Campaign

Did you know that very few users who visit a website for the first time make a purchase?

Retargeting helps to bring bounced visitors back to the sales channel, therefore positioning your business for higher sales and a better return on advertising investment.

Here are some tips on how to run a successful retargeting campaign:

Get clear about your retargeting goals

The most successful retargeting campaigns are those that are structured around very specific goals, otherwise, you would not know what is working.

Do you want to generate leads with the campaign? Increase sales? Boost conversions? Everything else in your campaign, including your segmentation, conversion tactics, creative copy and design, and duration of the campaign will depend on your objectives.

Filter and segment your target audience

For best results, you want to conduct highly targeted campaigns to achieve your retargeting goals. Ideally, you should tag all your web pages for retargeting but when it comes to the actual campaign, you need to filter your site visitors and place them in specific segments.

Here’s why segmenting is important. Different people will visit your site for different reasons. Site visitors also have different needs and these will influence their site behaviour. These differences call for specific ads for the various groups of visitors coming to your site.

Segmenting allows you to craft relevant ad creative and to optimize your landing pages to meet the needs of the visitor and to ensure that you do not lose them a second time.

Retargeting platforms such as Google Ads, AdRoll and others have great options that simplify filtering and segmentation. You could segment visitors based on the pages they visit, their position on the conversion funnel, their site behaviour, geographical locations, time of the day, frequency of their site visit etc. depending on the specific goals you have for your campaign.

Retarget based on the phase of the conversion funnel

While you could structure your campaign around any criteria, you really want to leverage the conversion funnel to guide your retargeting plan. The conversion funnel simply espouses the visitor’s journey from the moment they discover your brand to the time they make purchase decisions.

The main goal of retargeting is bringing visitors back into the conversion funnel with the aim of pushing them lower down the funnel where they convert from browsers to buyers.

At the brand awareness stage where a visitor only briefly interacts with your website, say they visit the homepage and then leave, you would want to retarget with the aim of promoting brand awareness and making your brand visible to the visitor as they visit other sites across the web.

At the interest stage, the visitor comes back to your site several times and shows interest in several pages or products. A retargeting campaign would aim to make these products visible to the visitor as they browse other sites just to prompt them to come back to your site.

At the evaluation stage, the visitor shows specific interest in a particular product. Your retargeting campaign would be aimed at influencing the visitor to make positive purchase decisions by highlighting the special features of a product, to give them reason to buy.

Finally, at the purchase stage, the visitor may place a product in the shopping cart but not checkout. A suitable retargeting objective would be to incentivize the visitor to complete the purchase, for example, by offering a discount.

It is common practice to end the campaign after the purchase has been made. However, you could increase sales by cross-marketing related products even after the purchase.

Optimize landing pages and change up creative copy

Landing pages should be optimized to ensure that they speak very specifically to your visitors once you redirect them back to your website.  Optimizing your landing page ensures that visitors are directed to relevant pages that address their specific needs depending on where they are on the conversion journey.

An optimized landing page serves to bring the visitor further down the funnel, where they can convert from browser to buyer. Landing page optimization goes hand in hand with creative copy optimization. For best results, change up your creative copy and design to interest your target audience, especially the non-converting prospects. Do not show the same ad for too long otherwise your prospects will experience ad fatigue.

Spend less on non-converting landing pages

Ideally, your budget should be set at maximum to allow you a wider ad reach and greater impact by serving your ads on more sites. Spend more to retarget those who abandon the shopping i.e. those in the final phase of the conversion funnel or warmer leads who bounce off from conversion pages.

In the same vein, to get bang for your buck in terms of marketing ROI, spend less of your ad budget on non-converting pages such as the home page and information page.

Visitors who are still in the initial stages of the conversion channel bring a lower ROI to your business; you should still retarget them to bring them back to the converting pages but the ad spend on these visitors should be considerably lower.

As you vary your ad budget, so should you vary the duration and frequency of your retargeting ads. Products with a longer conversion funnel may need to have an equally longer retargeting campaign while fast moving products or those on discount require a shorter campaign.

The frequency of your campaign can significantly determine its effectiveness. You do not want to follow your site visitors too frequently as they move from one site to the next—the frequency with which they see your ad should be reasonable and will depend on the segment your visitor belongs.

Analytics will help you determine the most effective frequency to avoid turning off your visitors and reversing any gains you may have made.

Diversify your ad networks, platforms and devices

To optimize your marketing ROI, you might want to allocate your budget to several networks such as Google, Microsoft’s AdCenter and others so your ads can be seen in as many sites as possible.

In addition to diversifying your networks, allocate your budget to target visitors on different platforms including social media, email, and across the Web to ensure greater reach for the ads.

Consumers are accessing websites using different devices, and they are increasingly using mobile. Be sure to segment and retarget your visitors based on the devices they use because the device used to visit a site is an indication of the different needs of the visitors as well as their purchase readiness.

Use a multichannel strategy to optimize results

Your retargeting campaign could be more effective if you combine it with other campaigns such an SEO, social media marketing or email marketing campaigns.

Running parallel campaigns such as an SEO campaign would be helpful in increasing traffic to your website, allowing you to extend your reach. An email marketing campaign ran alongside a retargeting campaign can help in lead nurturing, brand loyalty and conversion optimization.

Making it work

It is not enough to set your campaigns and let the magic happen. It is important to continually test, tweak and transform your campaigns depending on your analytics for optimal results and for effective retargeting in your next campaign.