If you checked out an item on a website and then saw it on your Facebook newsfeed later, it’s not a coincidence – you are on the receiving end of online retargeting.
Retargeting, referred to as remarketing by Google, is a form of online advertising that can help reinforce your brand to bounced traffic after they leave your page. For US-based websites, only an average of 3% of leads converts on their first visit. Retargeting works to help brands reach out to the 97% of web traffic that does not convert right away.
Here’s How It Works
On a Saturday, you visited a website that offers luxury leather items and checked out a calfskin wallet. You checked the same design in other available colors, but as you were about to check out, you remembered an important chore that you had to finish. You left the website and turned off your data connection.
One week later, on a Friday, as you were scrolling through Facebook, you see an ad that looks quite familiar: it’s the calfskin wallet you were checking out the week before! It was only then that you recalled being in the final stages of your online shopping, and finally bought the wallet.
The Basics of Retargeting
Online display retargeting can be either pixel-based or list-based.
Pixel-based retargeting, the more common of the two, involves re-displaying your material to anonymous site visitors. When a lead visits your website, an unobtrusive piece of JavaScript, or a pixel, left on their browser makes their browser “cookied.” Immediately after a person (a potential lead) leaves your site to surf the web, that cookie alerts retargeting platforms to serve ads based on the pages the lead visited on your website.
List-based retargeting, meanwhile, works when you already have an existing database of clients or prospects. You upload the list of their email addresses to a retargeting platform, usually on social media sites such as Facebook, and serve retargeting ads to them. According to a study, retargeting on Facebook increases ad clicks by 70% every year as click-through rates increase by 160%.
Retargeting is a viable way to catch your customers at the right point in the shopping journey as well as keep your products on top of their minds. If you want to learn more about setting up a remarketing campaign for your website or on Facebook, get in touch with us here at Sievers Creative. We will walk you through the process of creating a retargeting campaign, set your strategy up, as well as measure its success.
Let us help you set up your online or Facebook retargeting strategy. Contact us today!
