3min read

They are Everywhere! The Power of Retargeting

by Article by Remington Begg Remington Begg | September 15, 2017 at 10:58 AM

Do you ever get the feeling you’re being watched?

Don’t worry it’s not me. Then again, maybe it is.

I’m talking about how when you are shopping for a new pair of shoes on Zappos, or maybe anything in the world on Amazon, and the items you were just looking at start popping up all over the internet. You are now being stalked by that new pair of workout shoes!

This is called Ad Retargeting. It’s a powerful way to show people relevant information based on their interests and websites they visit.

From a user’s perspective it can be a little creepy, but from a business owner and marketer’s point of view, it’s a great way to stay in front of your website visitors.

For example, let’s say someone came to your site and wanted to buy swim camps and fins. They added these items to their online shopping cart but never followed through on the purchase. Maybe the phone rang and they got distracted. Perhaps a meteorite fell on their car, or maybe they just wanted to save the items in their cart to purchase later.

Once they leave your site, the odds of them coming back to complete the action drops enormously. This is called your Abandoned Cart Rate.

As a business owner, you want to bring those people back to your site. One of the best ways to do this is serve them retargeting ads of the same items they added to their cart, or web pages they spent the most time on.

There are several ways to do this. Platforms like Google Display Network, Facebook and Adroll all let you create retargeting campaigns that will show people relevant ads for a certain amount of time.

Setting up campaigns that serve people ads for individual products can be a tedious process. What if you have 50 products in your online store, you’re going to possibly want 50 different retargeting campaigns? Each campaign will need multiple versions of each ad to prevent staleness. Then there’s all the different ad sizes you need to create – up to 10. You could easily end up with 20-30 ads per product.

That’s a pretty big undertaking!

The best solution is to hire marketing experts that have the tools and experience to build out these campaigns for you. Agencies like Impulse Creative will strategize with you, create the ad art, set up the tracking codes, build out the campaigns, and write the copy that will bring people back to their abandoned shopping carts. Maybe not those poor souls whose cars were hit by the random meteorite, they might still be a little preoccupied.

Retargeting: no one is actually watching you, no one is personally stalking you. It’s just a little bit of code and some creative marketing that helps serve ads people actually care about.

Want to implement retargeting for your site?

I know you do...I’ve been watching!