7 Tips to Bring Your Retargeting Ad Campaigns to the Next Level

7 Tips to Bring Your Retargeting Ad Campaigns to the Next Level

Retargeting has been gaining popularity over the past decade or so, and for good reason – it can boost ad response by up to 400%!

When a visitor to your site leaves without converting (sign up for your newsletter, make a purchase, etc.), you can continue to engage them even after they’ve moved on. A cookie is placed on the visitor’s computer, and ads for your product or service are then shown on other sites the person visits. This displays your targeted ads in front of those prospects that have already shown some interest and are therefore more likely to pull the trigger and become a paying customer (70% more likely, in fact).

You’ve probably already heard of retargeting, and you may even be using it already. But are you maximizing your efforts? Let’s take a look at some highly effective ways that can help you bring your retargeting campaigns to the next level.

Optimize Your Ads

First and foremost, you want your retargeting ads to be designed in such a way that they get the attention of your audience, promote brand recognition, create a sense of urgency and ultimately get people to click on them.

The ads that perform best in retargeting campaigns contain the following elements:

• Branding
• Compelling Calls to Action
• Personalized Copy

You should also be careful to link your ads to the appropriate landing pages to increase conversion rate. If your targeted prospect spent time looking at a specific product page, don’t link your ads back to your homepage. Bring them right back to the very place they were when they left, and they’ll be much more likely to make the decision to buy.

Create Great Creative

It's incredibly easy to create retargeting ad campaigns that come off as cheap. The last thing you want to do is create a "trick to click" campaign. Personally I stay away from text-based retargeting (and display) ad campaigns entirely.

Our top performing retargeting campaign is our video retargeting campaign, but it works extremely well.

Retargeting campaigns ad campaigns typically serve two purposes: to drive conversions and for brand awareness. Why spend gobs of money buying impressions only to show your potential customers cheap or cheesy ads.

Additionally, if you have invested in a high quality splash landing video, get it the impressions it deserves by creating a retargeting ad campaign on YouTube.

Focus on Your MIV (Most Important Visitors)

Retargeting can be a great tool, but only if you’re going after the appropriate people. Not every visitor to your website is a prospective customer. For instance, a person who visits your “Careers” page is quite different than someone who spends time viewing your available products or services. Be sophisticated about your retargeting efforts by employing what’s known as programmatic site retargeting (PSR).

PSR essentially assigns a score to each visitor based on specified criteria (such as their behavior when visiting your site), and that score lets you know how valuable each visitor is. You’ll end up with a much more scientific approach to targeting your audience in a way that will result in fewer wasted impressions and a higher ROI overall.

Segment Your Audience

Another advanced retargeting tool is segmentation. With one pixel, you can actually separate your target audience into distinct groups or campaigns. This is an excellent tool that can help you provide the most relevant ads to those who are most likely to convert. For instance, let’s say you sell clothing. You can segment your audience by men’s apparel vs. women’s based on which pages each person visited.

Furthermore, you can use segmentation to identify where a prospect is in the buying process. For example, let’s say you sell new appliances and also repair existing ones. You can separate your new customers from repeat ones based on their activity on your website. Visitors to your new parts pages will receive ads relating to a new purchase while those who spent time on your repair page will be shown ads that cater to their specific needs.

Expand Your Horizons

If you’ve only been dabbling with site retargeting thus far, you may be missing out on some pretty cool other types of retargeting, including social, SEO and search. The latter is a particularly exciting new tool that allows you to present targeted ads to your audience based on the keywords they’ve used in their online searches.

This expands your reach much further than just those who have already visited your site, but still allows you to hone in on those prospects that are most relevant.

Try your hand at some different techniques to see which ones get the best results.

Don’t Be Creepy

Seriously. Just don’t. The only retargeting ad campaigns that are allowed to be creepy are the ones for the retargeting ad software itself.

The reason consumers think retargeting ad campaigns are “creepy” is because too many overzealous marketers took the practice too far and began bombarding their audience with ads with the wrong copy. Done the right way, retargeting is a powerful and effective tool for serving your prospects with exactly what they need, when they need it. Your ads should remind and entice, not follow and ambush.

To avoid becoming an internet stalker (and to stay on the good side of the 30% of consumers who view retargeting as a positive practice), stick with one retargeting firm and set limits on how many and how often your ads will be displayed.

Ditch low performing sites

Like most marketing techniques, retargeting costs money. To maximize your spend, you should be regularly measuring and monitoring performance of your campaigns. If you notice a site that is not producing many clicks or conversions, remove it from your list and move on. Your ads will no longer show on these under-performing sites and you’ll save money as a result.

The goal of your retargeting efforts is to grow your business and increase revenue. In order to achieve this goal, sometimes you have to think outside the box and get creative with some of your techniques. These 6 strategies will help you further refine your efforts to improve the performance of your campaigns and boost the success of your business as a whole.