Over the past few months, I’ve spent some time describing Facebook ads and how these can effectively reach a very specific target audience. But what about the people who visit your page from a Facebook ad, and never take action? This is actually quite common – I recently ran a Facebook campaign for someone that resulted in 546 clicks to their website (in fact a specific page on their website that sold the product being advertised). Yet, they didn’t sell a single one of the products. With Facebook, you can add a “retargeting pixel” (a small piece of JavaScript code) to your website, so that Facebook knows you’ve visited the website, and can then serve you additional advertising from the same company in the future). But those ads are limited to Facebook – what about when someone is just browsing the Internet?
Let’s say you need some new cooking pans, so you visit Cookware4All.com but you can’t quite find what you’re looking for, so you keep browsing. Over the next couple days you start noticing Cookware4All ads everywhere you go online. Did this small cookware website suddenly find a Fortune 500 marketing budget or get a deal on Shark Tank? No. They are employing a strategy called retargeting. Amazon, of course, is a master at retargeting, But did you know that your business can also use retargeting to increase your sales?
The average website has a conversion rate of roughly 2.3% (people who actually complete an action). That means 97.7% of the visitors to your website will leave without buying your product or filling out your form and you have no way of knowing who they are or getting back to them.
Many visitors, especially brand new ones, aren’t quite ready to take action. They’re early in the sales cycle, just browsing, or want to check out your competitors first. Here is an example:
This is a screen capture of the CNN site. I had been looking at post cards on the GotPrint website, so the next time I went to CNN, I saw this ad for post cards. GotPrint also sells posters, flyers and other print materials, but the ad specifically retargeted me for post cards, because that is what I had been researching.
With retargeting ads, you only target users that have visited your site and already had an experience with your brand. You can choose to target users that went to a specific part of your site, or open it up to your whole site, but either way you are guaranteeing that you only spend ad dollars on people who have previously visited your site. Normal display media (including Facebook ads) tend to target users in the first stages of the buying funnel. By using retargeting, you can increase the number of those visitors that return later and eventually convert.
Retargeting involves placing retargeting pixel on either (a) certain sections of your site or (b) across your entire site (your web designer or Internet marketing firm will need access to your files to do this for you). As visitors visit the pages you have the pixel on they are added to what is called an “audience.” This audience is cookied (a small text file is added to their browser). Then, as they visit other sites in the display networks (like Adroll, Retargeter, or FetchBack) you are running retargeting ads on, they are shown your ads. The network with the largest reach is the Google Display Network and luckily, it’s also the easiest way to get started retargeting without large budget commitments. Google calls their platform remarketing just to confuse you more, but the principles are the same. A campaign can be set up right in the Google Adwords platform.
Retargeting is most effective if you segment your visitors (people who looked at aprons vs.pans) and tailor the retargeting ads shown to each group, or not retarget them at all (people who completed a purchase.) Different products might warrant different retargeting time windows. For example, expensive products might have a longer time frame before someone completes a purchase.
Now, the catch. Unfortunately, the process for creating these campaigns is not very intuitive or user friendly. Retargeting demands unique banner ads, custom landing pages, and ongoing optimization. This is something for which many companies do not have the time or technical expertise, and it makes sense to hire someone who has more experience. You can’t simply use the graphics or existing web pages and expect results – it requires some work. But the results can improve your conversions 4 times! Remember that Facebook ad I talked about at the beginning of this article? If you combined that with a retargeting campaign, then those 546 visitors would be shown your ads on other websites for the next couple of weeks as they browsed the Internet, and many of them would end up purchasing.
Here’s the good news – while this does require a marketing budget and it does require some work – WebStores Ltd. can do this for you. Give us a call today at 877-924-1414 and find out how easy it is to get started on your retargeting campaign.
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