What Is ReTargeting and How Does It Work?

How ReTargeting works, its high level uses, mitigating its concerns.

Imagine being able to show your display advertisements solely to people who have shown interest in your brand.  This is exactly what ReTargeting does.  By having your banner ads follow your users throughout the internet, ReTargeting aims to:

• Increase your brand awareness
• Retain your website’s visitors
• Drive users throughout your conversion funnel

The key beauty to this technology is that it really is only serving banner ads to people who have shown at least some amount of engagement in your brand.  This makes ReTargeting a smarter spend than most other display ad campaigns as it focuses on your brand’s engaged userbase.  Even if other campaigns are demographically targeted, your brand’s ads will be much more memorable to your users if they are being ReTargeted.

A few concerns can arise, however, when your banner ads start following your site’s visitors.

• How do ReTargeted campaigns know who your visitors are?
• Will the ads overbear your users?

The absolute truth is that there is NEVER any transfer of personally identifiable data.  ReTargeting works by having you place one line of code on your site.  When a user visits your site, this single line of code drops a cookie onto the user’s computer, which starts the ReTargeting process and has your ads follow your visitors around the web.  Additionally, companies like ReTargeter follow best practices to make sure that your users never get inundated with your banner ads.

Some high-level ways to utilize this technology:

• In conjunction with any outbound email marketing that you may do, ReTargeting campaigns can place cookies on any user who opens your emails, effectively beginning the ReTargeting process for them.
• Additionally, there is a huge value in utilizing ReTargeting to encourage your users to convert throughout your freemium product’s funnel by displaying banners with different CTAs to people who have converted throughout different stages of your funnel.
• Lastly, you can target the people who have visited a specific product’s page on your site, and target them with ads to encourage them to learn more and purchase your product.  This is great for any company that sees a high amount of shopping cart abandonment for any of their particular products.

The value of advertising to your users via ReTargeting is definitely huge for building brand awareness, retaining visitors, battling shopping cart abandonment, and driving users throughout your conversion funnel.  With all of these benefits being set from ReTargeting, you can be sure that this form of hypertargeting  will deliver a tremendous ROI.