Retargeting is a great way to stay engaged with your user base and ensures that when they are ready to perform a positive action on your site, whether it be a sale or sign up, your brand has a high chance of being top of their mind.

The average shopper consults over 10 sources prior to purchasing a product which is double what it was a year ago. These sources include competitors, review sites and of course your own website.  Getting a targeted message to that user as they browse the web will maximise the chances of converting the user into a customer.

Best Practice for Retargeting

As with any form of marketing, there are ways of doing retargeting well and ways of doing it poorly.  Following a few of these simple tips can help to ensure your retargeting campaign is successful:

1. Segment your audience – If a user has been browsing a certain product category on your website, show them an ad which is related to that category.   Whilst this method will involve more creative setup, the highly targeted ads will increase conversion rates

2. Provide an incentive to come back – The user left your website for a reason the first time around.  It could have been that they were just researching or might have been put off by a higher than expected price.  In any case, if you can provide an incentive for them to return such as a money off voucher, free shipping etc this is likely to invoke a positive reaction from them.

3. Ensure the ads are well branded – the user will already be aware of your brand so make sure this is prominent on the ad itself.  The brand recognition will reassure the user that your brand is a trustworthy one.

4. Don’t over or under serve ads  - Too many ads shown to the user will annoy them, too few might lead to losing the sale.  Try to aim for 15-20 ad impressions shown to each user per retargeting campaign.

5. Don’t target existing customers - Make sure those users who have already bought from, or signed up to your website are left out of the retargeting mix.  You don’t need to reach these again for now and it can burn cash if you do.  Creating an exclusion to those who have visited the ‘thank you’ page from the retargeting campaign is an easy way of maximising ROI.

Retargeting Case Study

Living Streets – a national charity that stands are for the rights of pedestrians were looking to generate sign ups to The Great British Walking Challenge, an event in May 2012 which encourages people throughout Britain to take to the streets and log how many miles they can walk.

We set up a retargeting campaign which focussed on driving as many sign ups as possible.  The focus was on users who had been to the Great British Walking Page but had not yet completed the sign up process, then displaying an ad to them across sites on the Google network asking them to come back and complete their registration.

The Results

The retargeting campaign was by far and away the most successful medium for driving sign ups to the challenge, converting users at 8.2%.  The next highest conversion medium was users coming direct to site which converted at 2.3%.