Syed Balkhi — July 13, 2018 Not many users who visit your website will make a purchase the first time. In fact, on average shoppers make 9 visits to a retailer’s site before deciding to buy. You need to get those users to come back to your site repeatedly in order to increase your conversions and that’s where retargeting comes in.
Retargeting is a pixel you add to your site that “follows” users who have previously visited and left without converting and shows them a targeted ad to reel them back in. Users who are retargeted are 70 percent more likely to convert. Retargeting is not just a banner ad on a website, it’s a highly-specific ad targeted to just the right users.
Retargeting is all about the details; if you’ve started retargeting but aren’t seeing any results from it, you might have rushed through the setup and missed some key elements.
Here are four retargeting mistakes you might be making and how to fix them.
1. Bombarding users with ads.
Don’t you think it would be irritating if everywhere you went you were being followed and had the same ad shoved in your face over and over again? That’s how your customers feel if you’re overloading them with too many ads.
You want to entice users to return to your site, you don’t want to annoy them. So while retargeting can be very successful, if you bombard users with too many ads, the effectiveness will be drastically reduced.
To avoid making this mistake and being spammy to your users, use frequency caps to restrict the number of times an ad is displayed to someone online. This will increase user engagement, maintain your brand’s trustworthiness and you won’t risk ticking off your customers and leads.
2. Not segmenting your audience.
Imagine you bought something from a website and then you’re shown a ton of ads for that product you literally just bought, that’s annoying. If you don’t segment your audience by who’s never purchased vs. who has purchased or by people who pay full price vs. people who only buy sale prices, your retargeting efforts will go to waste.
One tactic is to use burn pixels to avoid displaying ads to users who have already purchased from your website. You don’t want to lose a happy customer by showing them too many ads that aren’t relevant to them. On the other hand, if someone has purchased a product from you, you can target them with a specific ad to upsell to them or encourage re-ordering.
You should also segment your ads based on interest and intent. Retargeting allows you to show users ads based on their personal interests and also based on particular pages they’ve viewed on your site. This is especially important if your online shop sells a wide variety of products. A customer who visits your women’s footwear page multiple times should not be retargeted with an ad for men’s ties for example because you’ll miss out on your chance to sell them those shoes they’re clearly interested in.
3. Not switching up your ads.
If you’re showing users the exact same ad constantly, your ads are eventually going to fade into the internet background and your users will become blind to them. Consumers will get bored easily if an ad never changes and over time click-through rates will decrease. So you need to switch up your ads to keep them fresh.
Run a variety of different ads to keep users engaged, even simply switching up the photos you use can really help. It’s also important to use different ads across different platforms to keep users on their toes.
4. No ad or landing page customization.
Not only do you need to segment your audience but you need customized ads for each segment too. Different people respond to different messages so you need ads that will speak to each of your different audiences. You’re missing out on a lot of opportunities to convert if you’re not customizing your ads for different users, occasions and holidays.
Customize ads for moms who want back to school deals, for instance, the point of retargeting is to make it as relevant to your users as possible in order to convince them to return to you and buy.
You need to customize your landing pages as well. It doesn’t make any sense for a user to click on a customized ad promoting a holiday sale, only to have it lead them to a generic landing page. It will confuse customers and lead to loss of sales so make sure to customize your landing page to your retargeting ads.
Many marketers feel that retargeting is one of the most underused marketing strategies and it’s definitely one that you should take advantage of. Now that you know not just what mistakes you’re making but how to fix them too, you’ll be able to recapture the attention of users that you would have lost before.
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