The Truth Behind Ad Retargeting & 6 Tips for More Conversions
- By Frank Morrison
- July 5, 2021
- 10:00 am
- No Comments
Retargeting, a technique used commonly by digital marketers, gives you the ability to increase your customers base and make more sales.
Retargeted advertisements are shown to people who are either visited your site or customers of yours. When marketers use this tactic, they get better results and more conversion, given that approximately 65% of online shoppers notice these ads.
On top of that, 25% of them enjoy seeing retargeted ads.
Let’s learn more about retargeting and how can you take advantage of this underused form of advertising.
The benefits of Retargeting
More Brand Exposure
What retargeting essentially does is it puts advertisements in front of visitors, who interacted with your website before, but haven’t made the purchase.
When they see the ads, they are reminded of your products, which means they are more likely to make a purchase, given that they are already familiar with your brand.
The bottom line is, retargeting is a great way to build brand trust and authority.
Targeting A Specific Audience
As we stated before, retargeted ads are shown to those who either browsed through your website or purchased something from you previously.
In other words, the audience the ad is going to reach will be smaller and more specific, thus increasing the probability of converting.
Additionally, unlike regular display or text-based ad campaigns, you have the ability to set specifics and fine-tune the settings even more.
It Is Considered Underused
According to 99Firms, 46 percent of digital marketers view Retargeting as the most underused advertising strategy, and Pew Research Center has found that 47% of consumers would be just fine with sacrificing their privacy for a better deal.
To put it in another way, if you retarget, success and a high ROI is guaranteed.
Cross-selling Capabilities
Cross-selling is when is a product similar to the one you’re about to gets recommended to you at the checkout page. E-commerce businesses and webshops utilize this strategy quite often, to make more sales and increase their revenue.
You can incorporate cross-selling as well by creating ads around products that are similar to the ones your customer bought.
Sidenote: if you’d like to know what it takes to build a Shopify store in less than 30 minutes from scratch, check out this walk-through guide.
The 6 Tips for Retargeting
Avoid Displaying Too Many Ads
When it comes to showing advertisements, you shouldn’t go overboard. After all, you don’t want your targeted visitors to see the same ads over and over again.
Set up frequency limits and prevent your potential audience and buyers from being overloaded with ads.
Test and Experiment
One of the biggest advantages of retargeting and digital advertising, in general, is the fact that it allows you to track enormous amounts of data – especially if you are using Google Ads.
You’ll have the opportunity to discover what you’re doing right, what went wrong, and what can you do the improve the efficiency of your advertising campaigns.
Then, you can use that data to create multiple versions and variations of those campaigns and test them to see which one is going to be most effective and drive better results.
Design Outstanding Banner Ads
If you are relying primarily on visual ads, you have to make them attentive and visually applying, to be effective and produce positive long-term results.
Otherwise, people will just simply look the other way and not click on those advertisements.
Make sure you utilize high-resolution imagery, engaging visuals, and text that’s compelling and encourages visitors to make a purchase.
Understand Who Are You Trying to Retarget
Before doing anything, you must identify who exactly are the ones you’re about the retarget and why you want to retarget them.
The visitors who were already looking at your products and those who just discovered your website have different intentions and they’re in a different stage of your funnel.
You have to put them into groups and segments and create ad campaigns for each specific segment.
Be Aware of The Costs and Consider Making Higher Bids
The cost of a retargeted ad campaign can fluctuate based on the keywords you’re trying to target, the audience you have, and the niche you’re in.
That means you have to determine how much are you willing to spend and create a budget, which can be either a daily budget or an overall amount.
Calculating the return on investment (ROI) and the period the ad is going to run are also important factors to consider, and that brings us to our next and last suggestion, creating a schedule.
Set Up A Schedule
We mentioned why you shouldn’t overwhelm your visitors with ads and why you need to have a budget – having a schedule is as equally important as those two.
A timeframe set for your ad campaigns will simplify the process of retargeting and help you along the way.
Figure out which ad campaigns will you launch, when will you launch them, and how long will they run.
Setting Up Retargeted Ads in Google
Google has its advertising platform, Google Ads (formerly known as Google AdWords), which offers remarketing services as well.
These are the ways you remarket with Google Ads:
standard remarketing: showing simple ads to previous web visitors when they are browsing around.
dynamic retargeting: showing previous visitors the products and services they’ve looked at on your site.
remarketing lists: showing ads to previous visitors when they search for what they want to buy after they left your website.
video remarketing: showing ads to those who checked out your YouTube channel, when they are on YouTube or browsing elsewhere.
customer list remarketing: uploading a list of information you’ve collected about customers. When they’re signed into Google or using services provided by Google, you can show them ads across different channels and platforms.
The cost of retargeting on Google varies by keyword and the industry you’re in. WebFX says the average cost of remarketing is google is $0.66 – $1.23 per click. Keywords in law, finance, and the insurance industry tend to be the most expensive.
Other factors can also have an impact on the costs such as the amount you’re willing to bid, the audience you’re targeting, the ad schedule you set, and so forth.
Next, we’ll discuss how to create a responsive display ad in Google Ads.
Head over to ads.google.com and click on “Start now”.
Then you’ll be taken to your dashboard, where you’ll have to set the goal of your ad campaign.
You chose your objective, now you’ll need to figure out what kind of advertisement campaign do you want to launch. That can be:
a traditional text ad that appears in search results
a responsive display ad (we chose this as an example)
a shopping campaign
a video ad
an automated smart ad
a discovery ad that shows up across different platforms
After that, you’ll have to type in your website’s URL, enable conversion tracking and name your campaign.
Here, you can select the locations your ad is going to target, the languages your ad is going to be displayed in, and you have the option to configure additional settings such as dynamic ads, which enables retargeting.
Set the budget and the bidding settings, then click on “Next”.
This is the ad creation dashboard, which enables you to customize your ad. It also gives you an estimate of how well your ad is going to perform.
The review section shows you the details of your ad campaign. If everything is set and done, click on “Publish campaign”.
And, that’s it – your ad campaign is up and running.
Platforms to check out (apart from Google Ads and Facebook)
Retargeter
Retargeter offers custom retargeting solutions and clients services, for B2B, B2C, and Agencies.
The products you theta have available are these:
Site Retargeting
CRM retargeting: uploading a customer database and showing ads to the contacts
Search retargeting
Contextual targeting: utilizing contextually relevant inventory to drive traffic
Audience targeting: setting up a target audience based on demographics, behavior, intent-based data, and more
Look-alike modeling: combining online and offline data to create custom audiences
Aside from that, they provide features such as advanced segmentation, programmatic ads, and more.
Adroll
An e-commerce marketing & advertising platform that’s trusted by 22 000 brands.
They have marketing solutions such as cart recovery, customer loyalty programs, and of course, retargeting.
There are only two plans, Starter of Growth – the former starting from $0 a month and the latter from $19 a month.
The free version comes with Adroll branding, and surprisingly, it gives access to most features.
Criteo
Criteo describes itself as a commerce media platform. It is a well-known platform that had its own controversies in the past.
It promotes a multi-channel advertising strategy that includes dynamic retargeting, contextual targeting, and omnichannel marketing.
When it comes to pricing, they don’t have any specifics. What they do is ask for information regarding your business, and after you signed up., they will create a customized plan for your company.
SharpSpring Ads
SharpSpring Ads, formerly known as Perfect Audience, is an all-in-one retargeting solution.
Here are the channels where you can retarget with SharpSpring Ads:
Web
Facebook
Shopify
Dynamic
Cross-device
Mobile
Twitter
To get started, all you have to do is sign up for a free account.
Conclusion
Retargeting is something that integrates into your digital marketing strategy pretty well.
We showed you statistics, the tools you should consider using, and the process of creating these campaigns. Now it’s up to you to absorb the information and take advantage of it.
If you choose to use retargeting and include it in your advertising approach, don’t be surprised if you see an increase in conversions, sales, customers, and visitors coming to your site.
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