Getting Customers Back to Your Website with Retargeting Ads

The internet represents the greatest marketing opportunity on earth. Simply put, no other platform can reach even a fraction of the audience that can be found on the web each day. No matter what you’re trying to sell, digital marketing can work for you.

But here’s the thing-you aren’t the only one trying to take advantage of this massive opportunity. Competition is everywhere on the web, so you need a carefully designed strategy to run successful campaigns and reach your target markets

In this post, we’d like to discuss one of the most powerful digital marketing tools available: retargeting ads. When used correctly, retargeting ads can help you capture potential leads that would have been otherwise lost by bringing people back to your website.

What are Retargeting Ads?

To understand how retargeting ads work, let’s walk through a quick example…

• You have a website and you use paid ads to drive traffic to that site (Google Ads, Facebook ads, etc.)
• When someone clicks on one of your ads, they land on a designated page on your site and hopefully take the desired action. You may want them to make a purchase, join your mailing list or simply fill out a form for more information.
• Only a small percentage of visitors are going to take one of those desired actions while the rest will just leave. Despite paying for the click that brought them to your site, you will have lost that lead forever.

…or maybe not. With the help of retargeting ads, you can pursue those visitors who landed on your site but left without taking action. Using a tracking pixel or cookie, it is possible to display retargeting ads to those visitors for a period of time after they have left your site. This will give you a chance to bring them back and hopefully get the conversion going that you missed out on the first time around.

Persistent Marketing Pays Off

It takes time to introduce customers to your brand. If their visit to your site was the first time they have been exposed to your products or services, it’s unlikely that they will convert right away. You need trust to close a deal, and it’s hard to trust a business that you’ve just met. Nurturing those potential customers can go a long way toward turning them into actual customers.

This is why it’s so important to stay in touch. That first visit to your site introduced them to your brand. Then, when they see a retargeting ad, they’ll be reminded of what you offer and may come back for a second look.

Build a Detailed Campaign

One approach to retargeting ads would be to simply show generic ads to anyone who has landed on any page of your website in the past. Unfortunately, that method probably isn’t going to yield the best results possible.

Instead, you’ll want to be more specific in your retargeting efforts. Build a detailed campaign that shows specific retargeting ads to visitors based on the pages they explored while on your site. Let’s expand our example from above to bring this approach into focus…

• The website you run sells outdoor equipment for activities like camping, hiking, fishing and so on.
• A visitor comes to your site to look at fishing poles, but doesn’t make a purchase and moves on.
• You can use a focused retargeting campaign to show them ads that highlight your best deals on fishing poles or direct them to an informational page on how to pick the right fishing pole.

It’s easy to see how this approach would be more effective than simply displaying a generic brand advertisement. Specifically targeting the type of item they have already shown interest in is going to dramatically improve engagement and ROI.

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