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Retargeting Ads: What’s The Secret Sauce?

When you retarget, or remarket, you’re delivering your Google or Facebook ads to users who have already visited your website. The goal is to remind your potential customers that you exist and to move them closer to buying from you.

Why should you implement retargeting? Because most visitors need a little encouragement before paying money for anything, and almost no one converts on their first visit.

Here are some of our secrets for successful retargeting.

Secret No. 1: Positioning

Retargeting isn’t about spamming your prospects with ads; that will only repel them. You need to be strategic with ad timing and placement.

If you know who your target customers are, it should be relatively easy to find the sites they normally visit and their general online behavior. Then you can use that knowledge to position your ads strategically, and you’ll be surprised by the ROI from the campaign.

Secret No. 2: Controlling Where Your Ads Appear

In a retargeting campaign, you want to prevent your ads from showing on sites that could cause a negative association with your brand.

To stop your ads from appearing on specific sites, use the Site Category Options feature in AdWords.

Secret No. 3: Relevance

Relevance is the principle that makes retargeting so effective and popular.

Instead of showing the same ads to everyone, you can use the information you’ve collected on them to deliver a more personalized message.

Cookies and similar tools help you get to know your prospects better. Of course, you need to be non-intrusive (and display a clear privacy policy) to implement retargeting successfully.

Secret No. 4: Rotate Your Ads

No retargeting campaign can convert 100 percent of the audience. So, after some time, you’ll have a set of people who did not convert; the good news is they’re still prime candidates for a new retargeting campaign.

Yes, you will need to create new ads–or risk “banner blindness.” This means people are so used to seeing your banners that they just blend in with the rest of the internet content. As you can imagine, this is bad for conversions.

Secret No. 5: Variation

The main goal of retargeting may be to remind visitors about the items they searched for in the past. But variation separates your retargeting campaign from the competition.

Don’t show the same items over and over again; recommend more items from your catalog to attract buyers to return to your site. Complementary items or other items in the same category get customers more excited about buying something.

Secret No. 6: Delivery

Delivery is not just about the content of the ad but also about its appeal. Limit the number of animations and colors you use and make your ads appear seamless, regardless of where you place them.

And consider the landing page: There’s no point in doing a retargeting campaign if you’re going to direct customers to the homepage instead of the product page.

Build a landing page that will personalize the buyer’s experience to grow your conversion rate to a whole new level.

If you want to learn about more ways to successfully run a retargeting campaign, visit our homepage.