Let me ask you a question:

How would you feel if 30 people showed up at your jewelry store, left altogether, and made a vague promise that they’d “think about it”?

Frustrated, right?

Being an online entrepreneur is not easy. A lot of times, you deal with people who show a hint of interest in your business but never proceed to take action.

We would all like to think that people follow a straight path to becoming customers. But they are different. They try out many things before they decide to buy. Sometimes, “buying” doesn’t happen!

In real life, most people need to see you several times before they make a buying decision. For example, a first-time visitor checks out your post. A month after, he may see another post of yours shared by one of his Facebook friends. That’s when he decides to check it out and joins your mailing list.

Between brand awareness and the intention to buy, various things can happen.

But you need not worry. I’m here to tell you that you haven’t lost the chance to win them over as customers. The solution? Retargeting.

What is retargeting and why is it important?

Retargeting is a method by which you serve ads to people who’ve had some form of contact with you. It’s possible that people viewed specific pages of your site, placed items to their shopping cart, or opened an email you sent them.

There are two types of retargeting: (1) Pixel-based retargeting and (2) list-based retargeting.

• Pixel-based retargeting: When a person visits your website, you place a snippet of code on their browser. As a result, they see ads when they check out other sites.

• List-based retargeting: When you show ads to people who are already on your email list. You upload a list of select email addresses to include in your retargeting campaign on Facebook or another platform.

Retargeting has such potential that it increases your chances to get conversions. It does this by re-exposing your brand to a familiar audience until they take interest.

I wrote a post the other week. It talks about the “inside out method.” This method entails targeting warm leads first before cold leads. Warm leads are easier to convert. You already established a connection with them and built some level of trust.

Why Should You Consider Retargeting?

Let’s take a closer look at retargeting by the numbers.

1. 3 out of 4 customers notice retargeted ads.

These days, more customers realize that they are being followed by ads that relate to the products they viewed or sites they visited. Is this a good thing or bad thing?

Leadpages conducted a survey on whether people find retargeting ads are creepy or convenient. They gathered the responses of over 2,000 internet users in the US. Results revealed that how customers feel about retargeting ads depends on several factors. Allow me to share them here:

A. How the question was asked

They ran two surveys. The first survey had this question:

What were the results?

• 4% were annoyed and said they wouldn’t click on the ad.
• 5% said that “they wouldn’t think much about it either way.”

Leadpages run the second survey that used a different, “more subtle” wording for the question:

By not specifying what customers’ interests were, their perception of retargeting improved.

The results?

• The people who were annoyed and said they wouldn’t click on the ad went down to 27.9%.
• Individuals who said that “they wouldn’t think much about it either way” went up to 33%.

B. Age

When it comes to age, the survey revealed that 35-44-year-olds were less likely to click on interest-based ads than 25-34-year-olds. This shows that younger generations respond better retargeting and personalized adverts. Another research published by ClickZ supports this.

Here’s the takeaway of the survey:

An advertiser’s tracking methods and people’s perception of privacy affect their opinions about ads.

Be careful not to create an ad that tells them you know what they did or saw. That makes you creepy. Instead, craft retargeting ads that reflect their experience with your brand.

2. Retargeting ads are 76% more likely to get clicks than regular display ads.

Why do retargeting ads garner more clicks? The reason is simple: Regular display ads don’t nurture your audience the same way retargeting ads do. Regular display ads target a cold audience. Again, warm audiences respond better.

Even if you know that retargeting ads get clicked on more, you’d want to maximize that experience. True, click-throughs don’t correlate with conversions. But conversions don’t also happen unless people see your landing page after clicking.

Here are some of the ways to acquire as many clicks as possible:

• Incorporate another CTA in the copy or image of your ad.
• Use eye-catching images.
• Leverage loss aversion in writing your copy.
• Use real photos for social proof ads.
• Split test and improve elements of your ad one at a time.

3. Retargeting ads lead to a 1046% increase in branded search.

People who see retargeting ads have a heightened awareness of your business. As a result, they come back to search for you the next time they want your product or service.

Branded search happens when people do conduct online searches using your brand name. But the thing is, most marketers optimize for non-branded searches more branded searches. While this is true and a good practice, Rand Fishkin of Moz explains why branded searches are extremely important.

He mentions some advantages of focusing on branded searches:

• Rankings and conversions. Optimizing for your brand name positions you high up in search results. It also attracts more qualified leads thus sparking more conversions.
• Search suggest. Branding influences Google’s search suggest function to automatically suggest your business to online searchers.
• Entity-style association. Over time, Google associates your brand name with generic keywords. This impacts search suggest results and related searches.

These benefits are great reasons to work on increasing your branded searches now. Retargeting ads are a solution.

4. 54% of marketers consider social media as the hottest topic in retargeting.

If there’s one place that a lot of individuals spend more time on, that is social media. On social media, people get to express themselves (“selfies”). They get to be in touch with others. These things are part of being human. Not to mention, we have FOMO or the fear of missing out.

AdRoll’s survey revealed that 54% of B2B and B2C marketers are pumped up about retargeting on social media. Why makes them excited?

They realize that running retargeting ads in a space where people are highly engaged gives them better results at a lower cost.

Another reason is that retargeting on social media helps them attract new or cold prospects. That’s on top of bringing back warm prospects. This is an amazing “side benefit” of social retargeting.

Here’s how Facebook retargeting gets you a new audience.

When you run retargeting ads on Facebook, you create a Facebook Custom Audience. It’s a targeting option in the Ads Manager where you import a list of people who’ve read your posts, viewed your products, or signed up for your email list.

Once you create a Custom Audience, you have the option to create a Lookalike Audience. The Lookalike Audiences option lets you target new individuals who share the same qualities with your Custom Audience.

5. If you leverage retargeting along with other channels, you can sell 50% more stuff.

If you use retargeting with another marketing channel, you can potentially increase sales.

This premise is based on the idea that people act after they see your message several times. Say, a retargeting ad that’s shown to someone after he lands on your sales page. Frequent exposure reinforces your message in their minds.

But still, there is no certainty of boosting sales if you retarget everyone in your marketing channel without considering their specific behaviors.

Let me explain…

If you use regular Facebook retargeting, Facebook retargets all your website visitors. Whether they spent more or less time, scrolled down to a certain percentage, it doesn’t matter. They’re all treated the same.

What if I told you about a solution that takes retargeting to the next level? I introduce to you ConnectRetarget. ConnectRetarget helps you retarget specific audiences on Facebook. You get to create a unique audience profile based on:

• Time on site
• Referral source
• Number of visits
• Device used

…And more.

I gained revenue of $25,245 for an ad spend of just €124.

The goal of my ad campaign was to promote a special offer on UpViral. In that campaign, I ran 7 retargeting ads. I used ConnectRetarget on 6 of those ads. One ad simply targeted visitors over the last seven days.

What were the results? The regular ad cost me €219.27 and resulted in 31 sales. The ads I optimized using ConnectRetarget cost me €124 which resulted in 85 sales.

Final Thoughts

I hope that through these 5 stats, you’ll have more reasons to retarget and be able to create better campaigns. Retargeting is a definitive strategy that puts you in front of non-converting visitors and wins them back. What are your thoughts on retargeting? If you tried it before, how was your experience?