Tips to Improve Your Retargeting Ad Campaigns
Retargeting, also known as remarketing, is a powerful form of digital advertising in which audiences (potential customers) are targeted with specific ads based on their behavior online.
In other words, retargeting campaigns turn internet “window shoppers” into real paying customers for your business.
While we as marketers would love to live in a world in which a majority of online visitors became customers, the truth is the buying process is extremely complicated. In fact, roughly 98 percent of your website traffic won’t convert into customers upon first visit.
Whether you’re just getting started or a seasoned expert, these 7 easy retargeting advertising tips will help take your campaigns to the next level.
Understand the buyer journey
Understanding the buyer journey (or buyer cycle) is crucial and applies to all of your retargeting campaigns.
It’s similar to the sales funnel, in that the process begins with more customers at the top in the awareness stage and ends up at the bottom with much fewer people in the conversion stage. Here’s a nifty graph showing this process from McKinsey & Company.
Retargeting is intended to capture more of those consumers as they proceed through the funnel. But if you’re not careful, you can actually damage conversion rates by ignoring the buy cycle.
If you’re considering letting your retargeting ad campaigns roll along on their own: don’t do it.
It’s not just about showing your ad to the wrong person multiple times, which by the way, can be quite annoying to customers.
It’s more about losing all awareness of the performance of your ads. If there’s one thing that marketers need, it’s a detailed understanding of their data and the effectiveness of their marketing initiatives. That means understanding what’s successful and what’s not. Who’s converting on what? Which ad set or ad creatives have the highest ROI?
Improve audience targeting
We’ve talked to lots of brands that start out with targeting anyone and everyone that visits their website in their retargeting campaigns.
Needless to say that approach isn’t always the most effective.
Customers visit to your website for lots of different reasons. They visit different pages. The pages they visit represent different buyer intents. Perhaps they’re not looking to buy your product at all.
The key is to match your custom advertising audiences to those shoppers’ intents.
For example, if you’re an ecommerce brand and someone visits your website shopping for shoes, make sure that you segment those people into a custom audience labeled “shoe shoppers” or “footwear.”
Over the past year at Buffer we’ve created various audiences based on the subject matter our visitors are interested in learning about. We have a custom audience for traffic to all Facebook marketing pages, Instagram marketing, customer experience, case studies, etc.
That allows us to be hyper-focused on what type of content we deliver, which helps to drive down costs.
