Retargeting Advertising

What is Retargeting?

Retargeting has come a long way in the last few years. Originally seen as a super complex and expensive tactic available only to big businesses, retargeting has recently become a must-have advertising tactic for all businesses. More importantly, it’s now affordable and learnable for even the newest entrepreneur.

So what is it? Retargeting is the act of advertising to consumers based on their previous actions or behavior. Ever visited a site to learn about a certain product or brand, and suddenly you notice images of that product or brand following you all over the web? Yup, that’s retargeting. And it’s proven to work like a charm!

How Does it Work?

There are several types of retargeting, which we’ll discuss in detail later. But the most basic form is basic site visitor retargeting and it works as follows. You take a retargeting “pixel” which is simply a bit of code that you copy and paste from your retargeting provider, and paste it on your site. From that point forward, any visitor to your site gets “cookied” as a site visitor. Your retargeting provider relies on major internet ad networks to continuously show your ad to those “cookied” visitors around the web. Essentially, rather than focusing on “cold traffic”, which never converts very well, you’re now focusing on bringing back “warm traffic” or repeat visitors who are already familiar with your brand and more likely to become customers.

Why Retargeting?

Retargeting has proven to be one of the most effective forms of paid advertising available. Site visitors who were retargeted via display ads are 70 percent more likely to convert on your site. The click-through rate (CTR) on display ads is a whopping 10X higher with retargeting. The results in remedying cart abandonment are impressive as well. A majority of first-time visitors are likely to abandon your checkout page and, usually, less than 10 percent of them will return later. With retargeting, you can increase the percentage of those cart “returnees” to over 25 percent! This explains why around 50 percent of all major brands have set aside specific budgets just for retargeting.