Retargeting Your Audience: When, Why, and How to Do It
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Retargeting Your Audience: When, Why, and How to Do It

Advertising plays an important role irrespective of the size of your business, especially if you happen to sell your products or services online. But more often than not people who visit your website for the first time, leave without making any purchases. So how do you bring them back to your website and convert the prospect into a purchase?

This is where retargeting campaigns play a critical role. It allows you to remind your website visitors, even after they have left your website, about the products and services you offer. They can be simple text or visuals that pop up when they visit other websites. It helps the potential customer feel more comfortable with your brand until they return to your website confident enough to make a purchase. While 97% of initial visitors leave websites without purchasing, successful retargeting can convert 43% who will choose your offering over a competitor’s.

Retargeting Your Audience

Retargeting is quite similar to remarketing, as they share the same goal of bringing consumers back to the website, making purchases, and creating a long-lasting relationship. But retargeting and remarketing go about achieving their objective in very different ways. Remarketing usually targets people who have already done business with the company, through email campaigns. But retargeting on the other hand employs paid adverts targeting visitors to the website and social media profiles, who haven’t made a purchase.

To have a successful retargeting campaign, you also need to consider having a robust campaign analytics solution. An agile and scalable solution for campaign tracking, that can provide actionable data to help execute and optimize retargeting campaigns in real-time. And to best recalibrate the campaign efforts, you can leverage an AI-based Marketing Mix Optimization tool. It ingests campaign data in real-time and creates simulated models of marketing scenarios; enabling real-time decision-making while minimizing risks and boosting business.  

How Retargeting Ads Work

Retargeting advertisements employ cookie-based technology that has simple JavaScript code at its heart, attempting to recapture the interest of first-time visitors and bring them back to your website for purchase. All you have to do is place a small piece of code into your website. This code often referred to as a pixel, is invisible to visitors and does not affect the performance of your website. It simply drops an anonymous cookie every time there is a new visitor. Retargeting campaigns can be done executed with the help of Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Facebook Retargeting, and other retargeting platforms.

Retargeting Ads Work

When the new visitor has left your site and is browsing elsewhere, the cookie will connect with your retargeting platform and serve relevant ads to bring them back to the website. This becomes effective because the visitor is already familiar with your brand and retargeting boosts their confidence in your brand; bringing them back to your website, enhancing conversions, and increasing ROI.

When to Use Retargeting Ads

Retargeting is a powerful tool for both branding and for optimizing conversions, but it works best when you know the right time and place to deploy your retargeting campaign. The following some common situations when you need to have an efficient retargeting campaign.

  • Retargeting ads are meant for bringing first-time visitors back to your website and build a long-term relationship for continual business. If your website happens to attract over 100 new customers every month, you need to consider retargeting campaigns.
  • Promoting new products and services to a brand-new audience through retargeting ads is a great way to drive traffic back to your website and optimize conversions.
  • Slow-moving inventory is something every business has to deal with at some point. Retargeting ads are the ideal way to promote these products to potential customers and with minimal effort and on a low budget.
  • Most first-time visitors end up leaving your website without purchasing because they feel unsure about your brand. Retargeting enables you to create brand awareness, make your audience feel comfortable with your brand, and confident in your products.

Where to Place Retargeting Ads

To have a successful retargeting campaign, you need to understand that retargeting ad are not for every platform, but you need multiple marketing channels to ensure that none of those who visit your website are missed out on. This digital age ensures that most people engaging with your business online, have a Facebook profile or similar social media profiles, use browsers such as Google Chrome, and have an email account. Digital engineering analytics can help you understand your target demographic better and enable you to get started with your campaign. Campaign analytics and optimization tools can then help to identify platforms with maximum engagement and conversions, and you can better focus your retargeting efforts and place ads strategically.

re-targeting ads across several channels

You can place retargeting ads across several channels such as social media platforms and search engines, and even carry out email campaigns. After your set-up is complete, cookies of website visitors will be picked up by the tag, you can view the list featuring your target audience and you are good to go. You can even leverage the retargeting tool to generate customized lists, run ad testing, frequency cap testing, custom combination testing, and even bid tests. Placing retargeting ads strategically can help you reconnect with most of the visitors across websites, platforms, and devices.

Risks of Retargeting Ads

Even though retargeting seems like a brilliant option to drive traffic back to your website and boost conversions, there are a few risks associated with this growing trend in employing retargeting campaigns.

They are as follows:

  • Inflating ad costs increasing overall campaign costs.
  • A negative brand image may be created as a result of aggressive marketing.
  • Shared computers become an issue as the cookie attaches itself to a single browser and not the person visiting your website, making the ads visible to other users on the same device.
  • Mis-attribution may occur when the headline is statistics are misleading and you rely on last-click attribution as a measure of success.
  • Privacy concerns are unavoidable because retargeting campaigns are often not in moderation and are so aggressive that potential customers are concerned about data privacy and do not want to engage further with your brand.

These privacy concerns from customers have been escalating over the years, as third-party cookies can track users as they visit varied sites across the web. In the effort to retarget ads and create customer profiles leveraging the cookies, users have been made to feel unsafe when it comes to their private data. As a result, third-party cookies will slowly become obsolete and even giants such as Google have announced last year, that they intend to gradually phase out third-party cookies to offer users a more private and secure browsing experience. 

But there is no reason to get worked up. Cookies aren’t going anywhere for a few more years, and there are always other alternatives to cookie-based retargeting. Device fingerprinting, pixel syncing, and initiatives such as IAB’s DigiTrust will be able to do away with cookies and even pixel syncing, to offer advertisers a chance to deliver personalized content to users using a universal token. All in all, a safer web experience with all the advantages of retargeting.

The rewards for retargeting your audience far outweigh the risks and make it one of the most efficient tools to drive traffic to your website, boost conversions and create long-term relationships with customers based on trust and goodwill.


Yash Bhattacharya

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Yash Bhattacharya

Yash has over 5 years of experience developing thought leadership content both in-house and for clients across industries. Mostly working with giants in the technology...

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