12 Tips for the Retargeter
Hundreds of thousands of brands around the world use Retargeting as part of their media mix these days, leveraging display networks, social networks to bring people back to their website and complete a form, make a purchase or covert to become lead. The Retargeter in your marketing department is the hero as it just works and very effectively, we see conversion rates for retargeting line items from 2% on the bottom up to 5% at the top end. And it makes sense, the user already knows the site, they have scoured your site already and familiar with your offering etc. The question is how can the Retargeter get these people to convert quicker?
We thought we’d share some of our insider tips for the Retargeter to improve your Retargeting Strategy or Line Items. So here we go.
1. Don’t forget Prospecting Campaigns
Probably the most important underlying point here is you can’t neglect your prospecting campaigns. You need to have a steady instream of prospecting campaigns running, ideally across all mediums ie Display, Search and Social, both paid and organic. Retargeting Campaigns wont work if there isn’t a good volume of people to retarget.
2. Diversify your Retargeting Media Mix
We believe in taking a multi-pronged approach to your retargeting strategy. Yes, use the major display networks and social networks, but diversify your media mix. For example when the Retargeter is booking a campaign with us, we’ll leverage our own publishers supply across Gourmet Ads, Healthy Ads, House Ads as well as layer on all of the Appnexus supply which includes major supply like GDN and Major Publishers from around the web as well as thousands of businesses like ours that allow us to retarget them using the Appnexus Cookie. The key is to diversify.
3. Don’t limit the URLs you run on
Since we begin running retargeting back in 2008, we’ve learned that limiting domains doesn’t necessary help conversions. We often get Retargeters asking us to block a range of domains as part of their campaigns, but the fact is that users on the internet are diverse as ever. Compare this to a prospecting campaign when we firmly believe in blocking domains we just don’t see the difference for a Retargeting campaign.
4. Create ever type of creative possible
The is a key mistake of the average Retargeter. They simply provide say 4 creatives and here lies the problem. Ever website is different, and as I said earlier the internet is diverse as the population, so its essential to create every single possible IAB Size ads for your campaign and I don’t just mean display advertising creative. Make sure you create at least one video creative and a range of native ads to support your retargeting campaign.
5. Advertising Creative for every Product or Service
An experienced Retargeter knows that relevancy is the key to performance and smashing goals. So, we recommend developing advertising creative for each product or service. Ten different products, then ten different sets of advertising creative. This will also mean that you’ll need 10 different segments or if you can parse in a unique identifier for each product into one retargeting segment that will work too. So basically, if someone is looking at Product 1 they will only be retargeted for Product 1 and see ads for Product 1.
6. Use a Delayed Retargeting Pixel or Segment
We started implementing this retargeting technique recently and have been getting great results. The key hear is to not loading a segment on every page load for every user, but rather delaying the load time ( you’ll probally need some technical help her to deploy a delayed segment).
Here is how it works, using Java Script we delay loading the pixel on a user for 10 or 15 seconds after they have been on a page. This way, we are hoping that we are only reaching a much more engaged user. We also avoid the folks that bounce ie they visit the site briefly and then leave. Whilst this technique for a Retargeter might significantly reduce the number of people in that segment, they are arguably more likely to convert than bounced user. You can always do both i.e. have the segment that always fires and compare this to the delayed segment so see the difference.
7. Ensure a Viewability Metric
As a Retargeter ourselves, we’ve found that Viewability greatly impacts performance. In some cases 10 times more likely to convert. It makes sense right ads that are visual seen by end users are more likely to click on them compared to ads that are not Viewable. We like setting the targeting metric of 78% Viewability in our algorithm as finds that’s a good level of Scale vs Viewability and we end up in reporting seeing Viewability around 82-84% which provides solid results in terms of clicks and conversions. If you are not working with a platform that leverages Viewability as part of both Retargeting and Prospecting Campaigns, then make the switch today you likely have high levels of impressions going to waste.
8. Implement an Impression Capping Strategy
No doubt as a Retargeter you’ve seen the articles about visiting an ecommerce site looking at product, then buying it offline and continuing to see the bag for the next 4 weeks as you browse the internet. Lets get real, prospective buyers churn, so there needs to be a point where you stop retargeting them. So we recommend the following campaign capping for all Retargeting Campaigns ;
- 1 Ad per page load
- 3 ads per 24 hours (sometimes referred to as 3/24 on media plans)
- 45 ads per life-time (approx. 2 weeks)
You can always implement different retargeting capping where you go heavy up for say 3 days (when the buyer is in the buying mode) then drop them into a strategy above like
- 3 Ad Per page load
- 15 ads per 24 hours (sometimes referred to as 15/24 on media plans)
- 45 ads per 3 days
9. Avoid Retargeting Visitors to the Homepage
Similar to the point above about using a delayed retargeting pixel. You really want to concentrate on relevancy and most homepages are broad in design and content.
10. Ensure Your Ad Creative has a strong Call to Action
We talked about relevancy in using Creatives above, but there needs to be a strong Call to Action to entice people to click on your ads. Think of Call to Action phrases like ;
- Download Now
- Buy Now
- Free Delivery
- Get Started
- Join Now
11. Dedicated Landing Pages
Success Retargeters will make sure that creative being advertisers clicks through to a relevant Landing Page. I use the term Landing Page broadly, meaning it could be a form, information page or a product page. But think about the user journey. If the person clicks on the ad will the page you take then to allow them to transact on it without navigating to another page?
12. Run Long Term Retargeting Campaigns
Retargeting requires patience and we recommend setting up 2 or 3 retargeting campaigns with different strategies all with long term dates like 12 months from now. This way the campaign will start running and on our platform, we apply machine learning and data science to optimize delivery towards conversions. These sort of optimization algorithms take time and ongoing data being fed into them for the optimal performance.
Learn more about Retargeting
If you’d like learn more about Gourmet Ads Retargeting Campaigns and how we can help your brand drive clicks and conversion, then please start by downloading our Media Kit below.
