Supplement: 5 Lessons Learned in Site Retargeting

In the past, we’ve talked a lot about digital advertising’s close cousin - remarketing. Some in the digital marketing realm may refer to this as website retargeting, but they’re both essentially the same thing. This type of digital advertising has the ability to appear in front of customers when they visit other sites on the Internet. They are triggered by a variety of different actions that a customer may make with your website. For instance, you may see remarketing ads if you’ve viewed a specific product on a website, or if you’ve place an item in your “shopping cart” but abandoned the transaction. All this being said, we stumbled across the Software Advice blog where we found an interesting article by Derek Singleton a couple days ago, and we thought it’d be the perfect opportunity to teach you some more! Before we start - If you’re still confused as to what a “remarketing advertisement” actually is, we urge you to take a look at some online examples of remarketing.

Before I begin, I must say that their article was extremely detailed. We won’t have enough time to cover its entirety or go into depth about their lessons learned. In fact, we’ll only cover numbers 2-4, so you can skip ahead to that point now.

Lesson 2 - Focus on Campaign Settings to Dial in Returns

This section talks about one of the first steps in setting up a remarketing campaign. It requires setting the schedule, timing, duration, rotation, impression count, and geographic area in which your ads will run. Derek provides some really sound advice here. His fourth bullet was of particular interest to me, mainly because it talks about the negative effect of ad fatigue. It’s important to understand that customers get tired of seeing your ad everywhere they go on the Internet. We’d like to add to his point by saying that it’s essential to change the copy and design of your advertisement often. By often, we mean about every two months or so. (I’d suggest every month for regular display ads that provide an offer.)

Lesson 3 - Segment Your Audience Into Targeted Pools

If you’re a woman, do you want to see an ad about wallets? In case you’ve forgotten, you don’t. That’s why you need to be relevant to your customer. You shouldn’t show every visitor the same offer and ad copy after they’ve left your site. Be highly specific to what parts of the website they’ve visited. I’ve seen some great examples of remarketing that have used the exact product I’ve viewed in their ad. For instance, if you’re looking at a specific wallet or purse, you may want to use that specific product in your ad. Trust me, the customer was looking at it for a reason. Don’t take your customers’ interest graph for granted.

Lesson 4 - Test at Least Four Offers in Disciplined Way

You’re running ads for a reason, right? They might be to increase brand awareness, increase traffic to your website, or increase sales of a particular product. Those are all great reasons. Be sure to take all of that data and do something with it. Over at Noggin, we believe in testing specific areas based off of the data gained in specific time periods. When you change the copy, design, offer, or layout of your ad, you should keep note of when the change took place. In a few months, you can analyze what types of copy or other creative attribute lead to the highest click-through-rate and conversion rate. Derek recommends that you should acquire a good amount of clicks or impressions before changing your ads.