Retargeting, also known as remarketing, is an extremely useful tool in digital advertising as it put your brand in front of your potential customers after they have left you ads – persuading them with frequencies to reconsider your offer when they need it.
Did you know that 98% of your ad visitors leave without taking an action, or that 49% of people will visit your site 2-4 times before ever making a purchase?
Whether you’re just starting or a digital veteran, check these 5 easy retargeting tips to take your ad campaigns up a notch!
Tip #1: Understand the buyer journey
Understanding the buyer journey is critical and important to all of your retargeting campaigns. Similarly to the sales funnel, the journey begins with more customers at the top of the pyramid and ends up with much fewer people at the bottom of the conversion stage.
Retargeting is designed to capture more of those customers as the funnel narrows. But if left unmonitored, marketer can actually damage their conversion rates if they ignore the journey.
If you’re considering letting your retargeting ad campaigns go on their own: just don’t do it.
It’s not just about showing your content to the wrong person multiple times, which of course, can be quite irritating (let’s be honest).
It’s more about losing the awareness of your data. If there’s one thing that you need, it’s a detailed understanding of your data and the effectiveness of their marketing objectives. That means whether it is successful or not. Is it converting? Which creative or copy has the highest ROI?
Tip #2: Customized Audience Targeting
Typically, brands start targeting anyone and everyone that visits their website in their retargeting campaigns. While that is a good way to start, it could be MORE effective.
Customers visit your website for lots of different reasons. They visit different pages. The pages they visit represent their different intents. Perhaps, they were looking for job vacancy and not looking to buy your product at all!
The goal is to match your custom advertising audiences to those customers’ behaviour.
For example, if you’re an online fashion brand and someone visits your website shopping for a dress, make sure that you segment those visitors into a custom audience labelled “Dress buyer” or “Woman Dress.”
In Beta Social, we built multiple custom audiences to measure traffic for all Facebook marketing pages, Instagram marketing, website, etc. This made us to be hyper-relevant on what type of content we produce, which helps to lower the costs.
Tip #3: Experiment with A/B Testing
The concept of the A/B test in digital advertising is very simple: pit two ads against each other to compete for a winner. Most importantly, for a true A/B test, only one aspect of any ad must be different.
This is will give you a very clear idea of what it is you are hoping to achieve with your test. The main goal of A/B testing is to eliminate guessing. Simply testing random ad sets won’t cut it, you’re still guessing—pitting two guesses against each other.
If you want to know what kind of ad visual, ad copy, and targeting options are going to perform best, put several out there, and let your audience show you which one(s) they will engage with most!
At Beta Social, we did a test on our client from the Wellness industry: we ran the same creative on two different placements; Messenger Ad and Carousel Ad. It turns out that the Messenger ad placement received 30% higher lead conversion! Likely due to the personalized placement that works well for the industry.
Tip #4: Monitor your advertising frequency!
For those who are new, the ad frequency metric shows you the amount of times each of your ads have been seen by a unique user - so an ad frequency of two means that each user who has seen your ad has seen it an average of two times.
As the frequency increases, the cost per acquisition naturally increases, because if customers are continually seeing ads and not taking action, then they're either not the right audience or they’re being turned off by the number of times they’re seeing your ad.
Make sure to implement some sort of ad frequency limit on your campaigns. Usually, Beta Social implements a frequency limit of three. If the audience starts seeing the ad more than twice, we’ll either pause it or change up the ad creative.
Tip #5: Set up simple sequential ad campaigns
When setting up sequential ad campaigns, you’re taking a very large audience and converting them into a smaller, higher quality audience.
For example, imagine a small-to-medium sized ecommerce brand that sells tour packages. You can start by promoting a video ad that has performed well organically.
Give it some time, the views of that video will slowly start to pile up. Then, you can create a custom audience based on people who have watched 3 seconds, 10 seconds, 50%, 75%, or even 100% of the video and target them with an ad that makes sense sequentially.