Retargeting Ads 101: All You Need to Know

As a digital entrepreneur, running a successful business or offering quality services or products isn’t enough. Your business needs to receive the required amount of traffic that helps you earn a digital reputation. But even after acquiring an online status, there are times when website visits do not equal conversions. Is that something your establishment has been experiencing lately?

Reports suggest that the average conversion rate for any website is not more than approximately 3%. So does that mean the remaining 97% of traffic is valueless? The answer is a simple no; they are important in some way or the other. Coming back to the conversion rate: is there any method to increase the conversion rate of your website?

There are reasons why your website visits don’t equal conversions. Most people who visit your website don’t intend to purchase. They might hesitate to make the final step toward the purchase. That means you must do something so your audience remembers you and returns to your website. That is where the concept of retargeting campaigns comes to the forefront.

An Overview of Retargeting Ads

So, what is a retargeting ad? Retargeting is a digital marketing tactic that displays ads to your prospects/customers after they leave your website without purchasing. With this method, your company can keep in touch with prospective buyers eager to purchase from your brand.

Retargeting offers an incredible opportunity of targeting customers who have already visited your products or services. It is like a second chance for your brand to attract potential customers who have shown an interest in your services/products.

With retargeting ads, businesses use users’ viewing history and target users to show the same ads. The prime purpose of these ads is to improve ROI. So, are remarketing and retargeting the same?

Retargeting vs. Remarketing: What’s The Difference?

Remarketing and retargeting are similar because they help businesses accomplish the same objectives. However, there are a few differences. But first, let’s narrate the similarities:

• Both target audiences who have earlier visited the website and know about your brand.
• Both these methods engage & target individuals who are eager to make a purchase.
• They aim to build a long-lasting connection with customers via recognition and brand awareness.

The differences between remarketing and retargeting lie in the tactics implemented for accomplishing the goals.

Retargeting uses paid ads to target audiences who have earlier visited the website or the business’s social media platforms. On the other hand, remarketing campaigns use the email addresses of customers to send personalized emails. These individuals are the ones who have interacted with your brand earlier.

The Prime Objective of Retargeting

After knowing what is retargeting ad, here are the core goals of retargeting campaigns are below:

• Conversion
  With conversion campaigns, businesses attract visitors who are familiar with your brand’s services or products. These visitors have not yet bought something from you earlier. So, a business uses the ad to direct these users to the landing page and boost conversion.
• Awareness
  Awareness campaigns help inform visitors about product features & other announcements. This approach is a less targeted one as it aims to attract visitors who have not yet interacted with the brand.

How Can Retargeting Ads Benefit Your Business?

Did you know around 92% of users who visit your website do not come with an intention to purchase? While they may take an interest in your services or products, they are not ready to convert. With retargeting ads, your business, thus, reaps the following benefits:

1. Turn Existing Audiences into Loyal Customers

People who have already visited your store or made a purchase are likely to return. With retargeting, your prospective customers will visit faster. A solid user experience combined with retargeting ads helps you earn repeat customers.

2. Learn More About Your Warm Leads

Retargeting is a powerful method that helps you find people who want to invest in your service/product. And if they have earlier shown interest in the products, they are not the general public but warm leads.

3. Improve Brand Awareness

Retargeting accelerates the process of attracting customers by targeting those who already have an impression of your business. Continual reminders will help you attract them, which leads to improved brand awareness.

4. Better Brand Interaction

This type of digital marketing strategy helps you know who your target audience is. Instead of making assumptions concerning the target demographic, you can be familiar with the interested audience via web statistics.

After you understand your target audience, you can customize your ads accordingly. What’s better is that you can also speak directly to them to understand their requirements. So, it improves your brand interactions with prospects.

5. Improved ROI

No doubt, retargeting is an advanced marketing process that lets you spend money on warm leads. It eliminates the cumbersome process of generating growth from cold leads. In fact, it also helps you invest in warm leads that are eager to purchase your products.

That makes your job of marketing seamless because these leads are aware of your brand and products/services. That way, you can reduce the marketing budget and get improved ROI.

Types of Retargeting Ads: Outlining 10 Most Significant Ones

With so many types, leveraging retargeting ads has become one of the most effective ways of targeting audiences. Here are the top ways how you can use these ads and attract potential buyers:

1. Cross-Channel Ads

Cross-channel retargeting assists you in displaying retargeting ads around different platforms to deliver platform-based ad content. No doubt, users want to see & interact with specified types of content based on the social network.

So, leveraging platform-specific retargeting ads improves the effectiveness of the campaign. Displaying these ads across different platforms (your retargeting audience uses) helps increase brand awareness. Besides, it offers your audience an opportunity to convert.

2. Dynamic Ads

With dynamic retargeting ads, you can use pixel data to showcase the most relevant products or services to the users. You can implement these hyper-personalized ads based on their previous actions. For instance, suppose a user visited your website and viewed a particular product. You can use the ad displaying the same product to encourage them to return to the website and continue shopping.

3. Email Ads

Want to re-engage leads who have already opened your emails? Email retargeting strategies can help you. These ads help improve the success of your email campaigns. You must add retargeting code to the email signature (or even HTML). That allows you to target, nurture, and re-engage existing leads, thereby turning them into customers. You can drive sales from the existing customer base too.

4. Google Ads

With a myriad of tools offered by Google ads, brands get a chance to reach and reestablish their connection to website visitors, customers, and leads. Such tools display different types of ads that retarget your audience. Some of them include the following:

• Text Ads
• Dynamic Ads
• Image Ads
• Video Ads
• Product Shopping Ads And More

5. Account-Based Retargeting

This type of retargeting ad provides value, especially to businesses that are not well-established. But note that getting in with the right and most valuable accounts is quite competitive. So, you need to be ahead of your competition to use this type of targeting method.

5. Custom Retargeting for Brand Loyalty

Does advertising to existing customers make sense? Well, to some extent, it does. How about advertising offers for add-ons, freemium, or discounts? These types of ads help increase the lifetime value of your current customers. The main objective here is to offer additional or new value to what your customers already have.

7. Buyer Persona Retargeting

To achieve an improved ROI from paid ads, your targeting method has to be on-point. Remember one thing: the secret is everything about quality, not quantity. That means if you target your buyer persona, it might lead to improved traffic. But ensure that you have a detailed persona in the first place.

8. Targeting Users by Stage in Sales Funnel

This type of targeting lets you create distinct ads for every stage in the funnel. In turn, it ensures that you craft the appropriate content accordingly. The sales funnel comprises these three stages:

• TOFU or Top-of-the-funnel: Users visiting pages related to general information (perhaps the blog section) instead of specific products. A solid retargeting ad would be, ideally, one that’s similar to your content.
• MOFU or Middle-of-the-funnel: People visiting pages related to the product. So, it is best to run a retargeting campaign with relevant offers.
• BOFU or Bottom-of-the-funnel: Users visiting the pages related to a product (on the pricing page or consultation page). It usually indicates they were about to make a purchase. You may use retargeting to send visitors to the landing page and offer a free consultation or demo.

9. Contextual Retargeting

Contextual retargeting encompasses exchanging pixels between websites relevant to the visitor and targeting one another’s websites. Take the example of a local hotel website and an airline website that target each other’s audience depending on the destination booked or searched.

10. Engagement Retargeting

The next and last type of retargeting is engagement retargeting. This type works great with businesses that offer channels of engagement, such as:

• Flash games
• Videos
• Rich media

The Best Comprehensive Guide to Improving Retargeting Ad Campaign

Do Not Use the Same Campaigns for New & Retargeting Audiences

First things first, separating the retargeting audiences from the new ones will be more impactful. So, if your business generates a sale, you can figure out whether it came from a new prospect or someone in the funnel.

Leveraging the Power of Descriptive Naming Conventions

How about adopting a naming convention for ad groups? Simply put, it will help you understand what exactly you are looking for.

Separate Ad Groups for Separate Retargeting Audiences

With the naming convention, identifying the specified type of retargeting audience becomes simple. As soon as the naming conventions are in place, you may use filters to track the CPA for various retargeting audiences.

Stop Delivery to Underperforming Audiences

Do you want to make some adjustments to the email retargeting? You may stop retargeting the email audience and optimize the ad group by implementing new creatives.

Click-Through Conversions Rather Than View-Through Conversions

Click-through conversions are the ones triggered as soon as someone clicks the ad and converts. On the other hand, view-through conversions are the ones triggered after someone sees the ad and does not click on it. But then, they come to the site & converted.

To get a clear picture of the chances of retargeting ads, you need to check how many conversions are “view” and how many are “click.”

Monitor the Retargeting Spend Over Time

You may optimize the campaigns when you understand your current CPA for various audiences on a single ad platform. Note that you may create new campaigns to drive the cost down. Lowering the retargeting ads’ CPA does not guarantee they are worth investing in. But they increase the likelihood of being substantial over time.

Adjust Prospect Acquisition & Retargeting Spend to Find The Ad Budget

One thing that remains undermined while optimizing the retargeting ad spends is overspending. Spending too much on retargeting indicates a higher CPA. So, how about moving money from retargeting into new customer acquisition? You can lower the frequency of serving retargeting ads to the same prospects. That way, you may increase new prospects in the funnel.

Following these tips will help you turn retargeting from a financial liability into a proven driver of purchases & revenue.

A Concluding Thought

Ever since its inception, retargeting choices have changed dramatically. But what has become more sophisticated are the retargeting methods and customers’ expectations from brands. So, staying updated on industry changes and refraining from retargeting mistakes are pivotal for contemporary-world businesses. Also, you need to understand how retargeting strategies affect your business.

Comprehending these aspects will help you evaluate the needful. You may use the above tips to amplify the retargeting strategies for an improved conversion rate.