Behavioural Retargeting

What is Retargeting?

Behavioral retargeting, which is also known as behavioral remarketing or simply as retargeting, is a form of online advertising by which ads are targeted to consumers based on their previous Internet actions. In its most basic form, retargeting serves ads to people more frequently after they have left an advertiser's website. This is great because it allows advertisers to reconnect with potential customers who left their website without completing the desired conversion. Studies have shown that a company needs to have seven different contacts with a customer (on average) before they make a purchase, which makes retargeting highly effective.

Sounds Complicated?

Both you and your advertisers already know that not every click you send their way is going to result in a conversion. By using retargeting, you now have an effective way to bring those strongly interested visitors back to the advertiser's website for another conversion attempt. This is best done with a separate campaign that uses a stronger pitch or perhaps even one that offers a discounted price after some period of time. The possibilities are endless, but the important thing to note is that these visitors are very valuable to your advertisers. They will be willing to pay a much higher CPM rate to bring them back to their web site and this is something that you could be doing quite easily with all of your advertisers to increase profits!

Usage Example

First, we need to have a clear picture of what the advertiser does. They are a manufacturing company that creates custom office furniture. Every month they are running campaigns for their office desks, file cabinets, boardroom tables and more on your web site which is a treasure trove of information for business owners. This tells us something very important: the advertiser has multiple distinct categories of products that should be broken into multiple segments for retargeting.

1. Log in to your AdvertPro or AdvertServe account
2. Go to the Code Wizard
3. Click on the Retargeting Code option in the navigation menu on the left and then click on the HTML link beneath it.
4. Select that you want to Create a Segment
5. Enter a name for your segment. In this case we would probably name our segments ACME: Office Desks, ACME: File Cabinents, and so on.
6. In most cases you can keep the randomly generate alias, but sometimes it can be helpful to use category or product codes from the advertiser.
7. Next you might want to adjust the timeout, which defines how long after a visitor has been to an advertisers web site (without having revisited) that they will remain tagged for retargeting
8. Finally you can press the Generate Code button

Repeat this process for each segment you need to create and provide the codes to your advertiser for them to place on the appropriate pages of their web sites.

But wait, we forgot something very important! You also want to create two more segments for their shopping cart and for their order confirmation page. This will allow you to retarget visitors that put something in their shopping cart but did not follow through and actually complete a purchase.

Once the retargeting code has been placed on your advertisers web site you can set up campaigns to target them. When creating a new campaign, click on the Visitor Retargeting section to expand it.

There are several things that you see here. First you can define a range of time that you want to retarget visitors based on how long ago it was that they visited the advertiser's web site. Next you can both target and block segments that they might have been tagged with. For example, we might want to retarget visitors that put something in their shopping cart but did not complete a purchase. How would we do that? Obviously we need to target the shopping cart segment, but we also need to block the order confirmation segment because we do not want to continue retargeting visitors that already completed a purchase.

Final Thoughts

As you have learned, retargeting is a wonderful tool that will help you provide better ROI to your advertisers and increase your profits at the same time. It is so easy and practical to do that there is no excuse for not implementing it with all of your advertisers. Have questions or more ideas about how you can use retargeting effectively? Please post a comment and let us know.