Have you ever visited a website, and then the next day, while browsing online, you saw an ad for the very same website? That was no accident. Maybe you’ve visited a brand’s website you’re considering buying from, added items to your cart, but didn’t complete the checkout process? Then the next day, while browsing online, you got served an ad featuring the products you left in the cart? Congratulations, you were “retargeted.”
Let’s get into it. What is remarketing exactly?
Remarketing, also known as retargeting, has been a very common and popular strategy within the larger digital marketing playbook over the last decade or so where marketers serve ads to users who have visited their website, a specific web page or in some cases even a landing page and have or have not taken a specific action. It’s an effective way to target people who have already shown some interest in your business or brand but need a little nudge to complete specific action.
Because you are targeting past visitors or existing customers, it’s called “re”-marketing. Think of it as a second chance to convert, up-sell, or retain shoppers/customers using online ads or campaigns. You can execute remarketing in different ways and with different ad platforms, but the process is typically the same no matter which platform you end up choosing.
Remarketing vs Retargeting: Know the difference!
While the words ‘retargeting’ and ‘remarketing’ can be used interchangeably, it’s important to understand some key differences.
When it comes to retargeting vs. remarketing, the main difference is in the strategy used to execute the desired goal. Retargeting is mostly about serving ads to potential customers based on cookies while remarketing is usually based on email. Remarketing works by collecting the information of users and creating lists, which are used later to send sales emails.
Retargeting and remarketing are both effective methods in their own right. We’re big fans of combining both strategies which may give you the strongest way to boost your digital marketing activity with users that have already expressed purchase intent and improve your bottom line.
But first a quick word about behavioral retargeting
Over the last couple of years, you’ve probably been hearing about “behavioral retargeting”. It’s really not that different but actually another (longer!) way of saying “retargeting”. Behavioral retargeting is when you target online customers based on their past online behavior, like which web pages they visited, how long they spent on each page, even which links they clicked on during multiple sessions. Retargeting is much the same, as it involves remarketing to people who have visited a certain page or clicked a certain link, or any other action you define.
Today, digital marketing – and remarketing – is all about the customer’s interests and behaviors. After all, these are the best way for marketers to determine what their customers are really looking for and capture their mindshare.
Consumers Digest understands this digital behavior well. And as Apple rolled out iOS 14, it’s clear to all digital brands that we are shifting towards a cookieless future being dubbed zero-party data. So what may have worked to get you here, will likely not work the same way it has been to get you where you’re going. If you want to compete in a cookieless future, your brand needs to double down on collecting its own data about user behavior taking place on its own digital properties.
This is where our trust badge can help your brand uniquely identify which content, offers, ads, so on and so forth actually lead to conversion behavior throughout the different stages of your buyer’s journey. We highly recommend displaying the trust badge in the images of your retargeting ads to nudge buyers back into your checkout flow to complete purchases. We’ve also seen a strong correlation between conversion behavior and trust signals in remarketing emails – merchants have found the most success placing the trust badge on product images in those emails as well as showcasing the badge in the footer of those same emails. Buyers perceive badges in these areas as awards as well as SSL certificates. Both instances cement trust between buyers & brands they’re considering purchasing from.
Let’s look at an example of remarketing in action
In this fictional example, Josh visits the “Things In My Home” eCommerce site, his favorite digital brand. While he’s browsing, he looks at a particular pair of shoes, but doesn’t purchase them. Later, Josh visits another website – his favorite sports news site. But Things In My Home is running a remarketing campaign via an ad network that works with this sports news site. Josh sees an ad by Things In My Home featuring the same or similar pair of shoes to the ones he was looking at just a couple of hours earlier. Josh totally forgot about the shoes he was considering buying earlier, but now his wheels are turning again.
The aim of the retargeting ad is to remind Josh about those shoes he was interested in, and maybe by seeing the ad, he will be convinced to click and make the purchase he didn’t make previously, turning his initial intent into a completed sales conversion.
It sounds simple but how does remarketing work?
The good news: It’s not difficult to set up a remarketing campaign for your website. It requires pixel installation.
This means that when your brand creates a campaign with a particular ad network, let’s say facebook, the network will provide you with a small piece of code (called a pixel tag) to add to your website. Every time a new user visits your site, the code will drop an anonymous browser cookie and the user will be added to your retargeting list. When the same user visits another site that hosts display or native ads from your the same provider in your ad network, the system will serve your ad to this particular user. This will occur as long as you have an active campaign running.
The bad news: Google’s move to shut down the use of third-party cookies will impact the ability of marketers to execute remarketing campaigns to targeted users. That’s why it is important to advertise on platforms based on the use of first-party data that allows tracking. Although the move to a cookieless world has been somewhat delayed, it is still important to start planning now for tools and tactics that will allow you to remarket to targeted users in the future.
What do marketing pixel tags look like?
Pixel tags are those small pieces of code on a webpage that enable websites to place cookies. Cookies are ‘crumbs’ left by website visitors. Every visitor has a unique yet anonymous ID, so their website activity can be tracked by their trail of cookies. In remarketing, the ad server can access the visitor’s ID and save it to the relevant remarketing lists.
Below is an example of Facebook retargeting pixel code:
What is a remarketing list?
Pretty much exactly what it sounds like. A remarketing list is a list of website visitors who perform a certain action on your digital properties. For example, a “Sales Page” remarketing list comprises all the visitors to your sales page(s) over a specified period. As the visitor lands on your sales page, their cookie is added to the remarketing list.
In this instance, your brand can remarket only to the list of people who visited that particular sales page.
You can create all sorts of remarketing lists, and tailor your ad messages to each list. You might find that adding trust badges near CTAs to the specific pages you want to target or in the remarketing ads provides a boost in conversion behavior.
The benefits to intelligent remarketing are astounding:
- Your brand can capitalize on lost website traffic
- Convert intent into completed purchases. Your brand can target users who have already visited your site and shown interest in your offering
- Target audiences who are more likely to convert
- Keep your brand at top of mind by strategically showing ads to interested audiences
- Affordable marketing tactic available on a range of platforms and channels
- There is no one size fits all. Remarketing is suitable for every industry and vertical
- Comes in many ad formats, including display ad, search RLSA, dynamic carousel and more
- For e-commerce brands – dynamic retargeting enables marketers to serve personalized ads for different users based on products or services they viewed on your website
Your website may be attracting lots of traffic, but not all traffic is high intent traffic. Unsurprisingly, the average conversion rate for first-time visitors is low. According to research on ecommerce sites, the conversion rate is just 2.86 percent. What does this mean? Although you’re getting traffic, you’re not converting much of it into sales. Remarketing is your best option to capitalize on all that lost traffic. And if you want to push your efforts over the top, add trust signals to enhance what’s already working. Sometimes a strategically placed trust badge in retargeting/remarketing ads can nudge intent over the sales finish line so to speak.
Insider tip: One of the best strategies to convert shoppers into buyers using remarketing ads is to offer special deals that were not available on the first visit to your site. Sometimes this is a discount code or coupon. It doesn’t have to be a race to the bottom financially but any type of offer or incentive to entice the customer to purchase is effective the second time around.
When should you use remarketing?
When does remarketing make sense and when does it not? That’s a great question – and a tricky one. Some marketers use the “always on” tactic, meaning they constantly run remarketing campaigns for all users who visit their website but don’t convert (ie. don’t make a purchase, or complete a form, or download an asset).
It’s not a bad tactic but depending where your brand is positioned, many marketers opt for a more advanced and personalized approach to remarketing. Doing this enables brands to focus their remarketing campaigns according to predefined criteria. For example, you may want to drive traffic only to certain pages. If this is the goal, brands can run remarketing campaigns for visitors who land on specific pages. In this example, maybe you want to drive users to the homepage or a particular product page, or maybe you only want to target users who visit your website at a certain time of day or year (for example, during a special sales period or seasonal holiday). Reality is, you can get as granular as you like but the strategy you choose really depends on your overall goals you want to execute and what you’ve got going on at a given time.
Where can you target potential customers?
Like we’ve covered a bit in the paragraphs above, there are a number of different platforms and channels that you can use for remarketing. Which ones you should use completely depends on what resonates most with your target audience(s). Not all channels will produce the same results so it’s important to understand that before allocating budget and pressing the go button:
- Simple display remarketing: The most simple and popular type of remarketing. Brands show ads to users on other sites after they have visited yours on display ad networks like Google, Yahoo and Bing.
- Native remarketing: Marketers can re-engage their website visitors with valuable content, recommended across premium publishers in native ad placements.
- Search remarketing: Remarketing lists for search ads , also known as (RLSA), is a feature that lets you customize your search ad campaigns for people who have previously visited your site.
- Social media remarketing: Show your retargeting ads to people on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc after they’ve visited your website.
Remarketing is a great way to increase ROI on your ad spend. If your budget is limited, or if you already feel you’ve paid enough for that first click, you can experiment and fine tune your approach for remarketing purposes.
Pro tip: Dig into your data and find out which devices, OS and even geo locations bring you the highest conversion rate. Create remarketing campaigns according to these segments, and see how they perform. You may well be able to reduce your costs and increase your conversion rate, at the same time.
The reason why visitors to your website didn’t convert is something you can never really know for sure. Maybe they became distracted and simply left. Maybe they didn’t like the offer. Maybe the offer was outside of their budget range. Maybe they are just browsing now, but plan to purchase in a few months. Whatever the reason, retargeting/remarketing is a great way to keep your business or brand at the front of their minds. Keep giving them reminders and reasons to come back. Eventually, they might! Then you’ll be on your way to generating more leads, conversions and sales for your business.
What about Apple’s iOS changes? How should you navigate all that?
In early 2021, Apple’s crackdown on in-app tracking seemed to upended the digital advertising industry and crippled advertisers’ ability to know whether their mobile ads were working. It not only forced brands to look elsewhere to spend their dollars, it forced everyone to get more creative as well.
But in the 18 months since Apple’s changes went into effect, it’s clear to media buyers that brands are dealing with an attribution problem, not necessarily an advertising one. In other words, the effectiveness of advertising hasn’t gone away as a result of it being harder to track people. But it has become more difficult to know how effective those ads are.
For many advertisers, digital advertising boiled down to be a tool exclusively for conversion at one point. Per media buyers, metrics like brand awareness, brand lift or audience growth were factored into the bigger picture of advertising success. The changes pushed the industry to take a more holistic approach. Not only diversifying media spend, but also making room in their reporting for a broader set of KPIs, including metrics like brand lift and brand awareness, to get a better understanding of a customer’s journey. As you might imagine, this too has affected a brand’s ability to effectively retarget/remarket.
So where do we go from here and how do marketers navigate where we’re at? Think of the era we’re in now as having moved back towards impressionism vs. realism, where the constraints have forced brands to focus on the whole target rather than all the nuances of the detail you were able to capture previously.
In order to overcome these obstacles facing the industry, brands are racing to find first-party data (even more popularly referred to as zero-party data lately) and other creative solutions. We all know that more data privacy measures are slated for the near future because the internet is shifting towards making the necessary privacy changes we’ve always been striving to have.
The bottom line: Consider all of your remarketing costs
Remarketing is an effective and cost-efficient way to attract customers that may have already demonstrated purchase intent. This is mainly due to the fact that it’s a marketing strategy targeting people who have a higher likelihood of conversion in your offer to start with. With the right targeting and budgeting, you can achieve strong results. Pairing this strategy with trust signals can push your efforts over the top and boost conversion rates even higher.
Remarketing typically works on a cost-per-click (CPC) model, as well as CPM (cost per impression) and CPA (cost per acquisition). This gives you the control to manage your spend and adjust your bids according to the specific remarketing list or campaign.
Hopefully you’re feeling more confident about remarketing & retargeting. Feel free to get in touch with us if you’d like to learn more about how other brands have achieved sales success using strategically placed trust badges to raise their conversion game!
