What is Retargeting and Why Should You Care?

The vast majority of visitors to your e-commerce site do not purchase the first time. Retargeting is a strategy you use to get them coming back.

After all, they were at least interested enough to visit your site, so that means there’s a good chance they’d like to buy from you later on down the line.

Have you ever noticed how, as you visit many websites, you see the same ad over and over again? It seems a bit strange that you get the same ad, considering that sometimes you are on websites that the ad does not fit the theme of at all.

That’s retargeting in action.

How Does Retargeting Work?

From the web development company’s perspective, all they do is place a small piece of code on your website. The nice thing about it is that your visitors never notice, and it does not negatively or positively impact your site’s performance.

When people visit your website, your visitors download a cookie. That cookie contains information which tells the website they visit to serve your ads to them.

When Should You Use It?

Retargeting is powerfully helpful to your website, but don’t view it as the end-all-be-all solution for helping your site sell more. It works best as a part of an overall internet marketing campaign.

Your conversions will increase. But your brand strength will grow too, as people will see your site’s name and logo as they browse the web.

Some Tips to Get the Most out of Retargeting

Use frequency caps – As people see your ad more and more across the web, they become blind to it, or even irritated with it. Frequency caps reduce how often they see your ad, so they don’t get overly annoyed by seeing your company.
Don’t show your ad to visitors who have already purchased – Burn code is a small code snippet that performs this function. It gives you a better chance of keeping the customer because you won’t be pestering them with ads after they’ve already bought from you.
Audience segmentation – Based on how engaged each user is with your website, you show them a different ad. All you have to do is place different retargeting code snippets on different areas of your website.
Rotate your ads – Retargeter ran a study that showed clickthrough rates decrease by nearly 50% if you run the same set of ads for 5 months. You should have several ads that change every 2-3 months or so.