What is Retargeting ... and How & Why it Works - Mick Gibson video
What is Retargeting?
Retargeting is the process of showing ads to past visitors of your website, so you can get them to return and do business with you.
You can put a little snippet of code on your website that tags every visitor’s browser. You can then bid to show an ad to any of these people when they are visiting other websites.
Retargeting uses browser cookies to store tags. Once your retargeting code snippet is live, you are adding a little note in every browser’s cookie. Third party ad networks manage these cookies.
The most basic retargeting tactic is to serve ads to people who have visited your homepage, but who haven’t yet become customers. To do this, you would put a retargeting tag on your homepage to build a ‘visitor audience’, and then target these people with ads that offer an incentive or an extra reason for them to buy your product or service. In this film, our friend from "Down Under" Mick Gibson speaks about retargeting:
How Retargeting Works?
You can set up a retargeting campaign in three steps:
Step 1: Place a Retargeting Tag on Your Website
This tag anonymously identifies every person that visits your site. It puts a little note inside a cookie on each of their browsers that says, “the person using this browser has been to your website.”
Step 2: Wait for Your Tag to Build an Audience List
Once live, your retargeting tag will start anonymously tracking every browser that visits your site. The longer your tag stays on your site, and the more pages it is on, the bigger your audience list will become.
Step 3: Launch a New Ad Campaign that Targets Your Audience List
Now that you’ve created your audience list, you can launch your retargeting campaign. While building this campaign, you can choose to target this audience, just like you would choose specific keywords or placements.
Once your campaign is live, you can usually display as many as 20 ads per audience member per month. If you are running a retargeting campaign with a single ad network, (for example AdWords) you can usually display about 5-10 ads per audience member per month.
For example, you have 1,000 visitors per month to your website. With retargeting you can serve 20,000 ads per month to all past visitors across multiple networks.
You can also build your audience list over time. Using the same site with 1,000 visitors per month as an example, after six months, your audience will contain 6,000 people. This means you can serve 120,000 banner ads per month.
Why Retargeting Works?
Very often, many of your lost customers are still interested in your product. Only a couple percent of visitors will purchase a product on their first visit to an online store. With retargeting, you can bring these lost customers back cost effectively.
With retargeting, you can also keep your product top of mind so that when someone is ready to make a purchase, they will remember your store or website.
Retargeting generates sales in two ways. Most noticeably, people will click on your retargeting ads and then purchase something. These clicks are simple to track, and in many cases, the ROI on these clicks will be greater than your costs.
Secondly, retargeting generates brand awareness and view-through conversions. Brand awareness is more difficult to track, but as a starting point, you can look at the amount of direct traffic that goes to your site after you launch a retargeting campaign. Even better, many ad networks let you track ‘view-through conversions’, which reflects someone who has seen your ad and then makes a purchase without clicking on the ad. Typically, this is someone who sees your ad, then types your web address into their browser. Many people simply do not click on banner ads, so it’s important to track view-through conversions with any retargeting campaign.
Like any online marketing tool, there are many different ways to make retargeting campaigns successful. The goal of this eBook is to share specific tactics that you can use to generate immediate new sales and revenue, regardless of how big your site is and regardless of your vertical. Every website can generate immediate revenue with retargeting if used in the right way.
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