Ever been wandering around the Internet and had the feeling that certain ads have been following you everywhere? Well, they are. This is a strategy called “retargeting.” And it’s incredibly effective.
Retargeting is a relatively new and extremely useful tool for shops to bring back visitors who exited the site before completing a purchase. On average, an ecommerce site is lucky to see a conversion rate (the percentage of potential customers that make a purchase) of 1%. So what happens to the other 99% of potential customers who left the site before making a purchase? Before retargeting, there was no cost effective way to reach these people.
In a retargeting campaign, a cookie lets us know who exited the site without purchasing. We then contract a Retargeting Service Provider to place an ad that will be seen only by these people.
So, that ad for the thing you’ve been shopping for that seems to be following you from Facebook to YouTube to Mashable? That’s a retargeted ad. And you know you want to click it.
SHOW ME THE MONEY
Retargeting can dramatically reduce your cost to bring in new customers and/or exponentially increase these customers’ Return On Ad Spend (ROAS). Retargeting lowers your ROAS by only showing ads to previous visitors to your site. The results of the last three retargeting campaigns we’ve run are pretty telling.