I have been into services business (MaxMind Solution) for more than 2 years and retargeting potential customers or follow up old and new clients have always resulted in great business.

You are leaving a lot of money on the table if you aren’t using Retargeting. Case Studies shows more than 50% increase in sales occurs via retargeting and conversion on sales are 2x to 3x than the site’s general conversion rate.

builtwith remarketing stats
Builtwith Remarketing Stats

How Does Retargeting Work?

Unlike other keyword or filter base ads, retargeting ads are served to those who have already visited your website and engaged with your content.

Retargeting works, when you add a tracking code on your website, whenever a visitor visits your site, the tracking code drop an anonymous cookie in their browser. Later whenever these visitors browse the web, this cookie will let retargeting provider know when to show ads and ensures that your ad is served to only those who have visited your site previously.

Retargeting process flow

Retargeting is pretty much effective as it focuses your advertisements to only audience who are already familiar with your brand. Most of the brands use remarketing to get higher ROI than other campaigns. I take Amazon as an example of remarketing.

Amazon at it’s best at Remarketing

When it comes to remarketing, Amazon is best in the business. They don’t just follow up abandoned cart customer with Emails; they always track our activity on the store and display related products in recommendations, more items to consider etc.

Amazon native ads (by their associate program) work perfectly as remarketing, as I just searched for smart watch on Amazon and later a third party website that was using amazon native ads, was showing me smart watches later.

Amazon search remarketing
Amazon Site Search
amazon remarketing ads on third party website
Third party site ads

One can also use native ads as a monetization method for money sites.

From Where to Start Retargeting

Starting your first retargeting campaign can be a bit confusing as you have to setup tracking code or pixel, tracking conversions, testing different ads etc. There are many different options available for retargeting, to take start with one you have to decide your goal first.

What your Goals are for Retargeting?

As I said before, type or way of your retargeting campaign depends on your goals. These two major goals one should consider while retargeting.

Branding and Awareness

Branding and awareness campaigns are useful when it comes to retarget or engage your website visitors into your latest products, events, offers etc. Companies with higher budget only use branding as goal in retargeting as most of the time click through rate is lower in branding campaigns.

Conversion

Mostly Conversion is used as an ultimate goal for retargeting campaigns. Conversion based campaigns are so useful and can be monetized with your whole funnel or in any part of your marketing funnel. As per different retargeting options, many different conversions goals can be achieved.

Ways of Retargeting

There are majorly two ways to do retargeting, and these two can be manipulated further. Each of them works slightly different from another and has their own benefits based on their campaign goals.

Both Google AdWords and Facebook offer variety of options for retargeting, which I’ll discuss in detail with case study later on.

With Google AdWords, we can target ads to people with keywords, interests, demographics, emails (Gmail), remarketing list, similar audiences to your emails list and remarketing list.

Google AdWords Retargeting

Facebook too offers variety of options for retargeting your previous customers, website visitors (those too who performed specific actions), app downloaders, and those who engaged with your content before on Facebook page.

Facebook Retargeting ways

Tracking code or Pixel based Retargeting

This is the most common type of retargeting which is also referred to as Remarketing and is done by placing a piece of code on your website. When someone visits your website, it leaves a cookie on their web browser. When they leave your site and surf the web, the cookie notifies your retargeting platform to serve the ads to this visitor who has been on your website before.

List or contact based Retargeting

This type of retargeting campaign works with Facebook, Twitter and Google AdWords, but on Google AdWords it only works with Gmail. In list retargeting on Facebook, you have to upload a list of Emails in your custom audience and then the network identifies those emails and shows your ad to those specific accounts against those Emails.

On Facebook, It can also work with following parameters too.

Facebook Retargeting Options

As on Facebook, it works best with emails. For emails, you need a large list of Emails to make it work perfectly else low audience will cost you high. Further, you can also use these emails to create Look A Like audience on Facebook.

7 Responses

  1. Hello, Mr. Waleed!

    Thank you so much for this blog post. I have bookmarked this blog post and looking forward to digging in to learn something about retargeting.

    We met at the WordPress meetup in Lahore. Do you remember?

    All the best for your next blog posts, though!

    1. Yes, I did remember about you Hassaan, Inaam told me about your work too 😉
      Great to see you there and good to know you liked my work.
      Thank you 🙂

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