Retargeting (Or Remarketing if you’re Google, but let’s not get into that debate) is such a powerful online marketing strategy when compared with other methods.
You’re not aiming your brand or message at the whole internet, you’re targeting a very specific demographic – the people who have visited your site but not only that, interacted with it in a certain way, perhaps filled out a contact form and didn’t click submit, or placed some items in the basket and didn’t complete the purchase.
You can be very specific and strategic with your approach whilst being in control of the budget as you go.
The online retail market expands at a rapid pace year-on-year and with that, so does the competition. You can’t rely on just having an awesome product and letting it sell itself through traditional methods, they might find you, but they also have access to every competitor you have in the whole world.
Customers are being overwhelmed with different options being put right in front of them, so you’ve got to have a plan, understand your prospects and target them intelligently to remind them that you’re here and they want to buy from YOU not someone else.
Here are my best pieces of advice from my tried and tested (and tested and tested and tested some more) ways of optimising your retargeting campaigns.
1 – Don’t Break The Rules!
Depending on the networks you’re using, you’ll have to adjust your creative to be compliant with their guidelines, this can have a big impact on your exposure.
For example, Facebook doesn’t like text on your images and your headline should only have 25 characters and the description 30, if you don’t adhere to this it will really affect your reach.
Also ensure that you’ve got all of the most popular ad sizes created, if you only have one or a few of these then you’re limiting where your ad can be placed online.
Get these covered:
- Web – 300×250, 728×90, 160×600, 320×50, 970×250, 300×600
- Facebook – 1200×628
- Instagram – 1080×1080 or 1200×628
Key Takeaway: Make sure you are compliant with the networks ad guidelines for maximum exposure and make sure you’ve got all sizes covered.
2 – Be Consistent With Your Ads & Landing Pages
If you’ve only got one ad running, what does it relate to? An offer? A specific product?
Send them directly to the offer or product page.
Make sure that they can convert immediately or within 1 or 2 clicks max!
It’s also good practice to create some ad groups and target visitors to different pages of your site and tailor the creative to suit them.
If they abandoned the cart, why not win them back with an offer like a discount code and send them back to the checkout?
Key Takeaway: Create ads relevant to the page you want them to go to, and make sure they can convert quickly from that page! The more clicks they have to do, the more likely they will drop off during the journey.
3 – Know When To Stop
It’s really easy to get carried away with retargeting and want to reach as many people as possible, which is great for brand awareness… But be careful, you don’t want to annoy people with ad overload and invade their browsing, that’s not going to do you any favours in the long run when it comes to turning their click into ROI.
Think smart about how often you’d like to place your brand in front of them and if there are particular times of day that would be better suited to serving ads.
You can add a frequency cap in AdRoll to adjust this and limit the number of times an ad is served over a period of time, and you can adjust it any time throughout your campaign so you can keep testing what is and isn’t working.
Also, as equally as – if not more important, is to learn when to stop serving ads altogether.
Are you still advertising to users who have converted? If you are… STOP.
They’ve already purchased from you, they don’t want to see it again and is likely to come across as too aggressive, not to mention the wasted budget too.
You can add a burn pixel to a post-transaction page to remove them from your pool of targeted users.
Key Takeaway: Put a frequency cap on your ads so that you don’t come across as too aggressive and use a burn pixel on a confirmation or thank you page after a transaction to stop serving them ads after they’ve converted.
In Summary:
There are a lot of retargeting tips and tricks out there and endless strategies you can employ, but these pieces of advice if implemented effectively will help set your campaign off to a good start by helping to manage your budget, so you can focus it on the real prospects, maximising your exposure across the web and placing your customers exactly where you need them on your site.
