The Power of Retargeting

retargeting
Retargeting

Statistically, only 2 percent of visitors who click an ad on your website will purchase anything during their first visit to the site. The majority of online business owners typically consider the other 98 percent the bleak reality of doing business on the internet. But there are ways that you can rise above the trend and get those sales pouring into your company.

In fact, using a strategy called retargeting can help some businesses boost their sales exponentially.

Retargeting is a marketing strategy that involves targeting previous no-sale traffic to your site with ads that are relevant to their recent browsing history. Imagine being able to run ads for specific products that are based on a potential customer’s browsing history and showing the customer deals and promotions directly related to items that he or she is looking for online.

Retargeting works by placing an anonymous cookie in the visitor’s browser when they visit your site. Each visitor has a unique identity on your network from that point forward and, each time they begin a new browsing session thereafter, the visitor is shown a series of ads for your product – even if they haven’t been to your website during that particular browsing session.

If you’re worried about over-saturating your audience, frequency capping can be put in place to limit the number of times your ad displays in a 24-hour period.

By employing retargeting in your marketing budget, you’ll be ahead of the curve. A recent study by SEMPO and Advertise.com indicates that nearly half of all specialized marketing professionals feel that retargeting is perhaps the most under-utilized form of online marketing out there today.

While your competitors are scrambling to bring in more business, you’ll be attracting repeat customers to your site with very little effort. The strategy works particularly well for purchases that require a higher level of research and consideration since, theoretically, consumers will be pondering these purchases for a longer period of time and for more browsing sessions than a simple purchase.

Many brands are now offering a form of retargeting, and if you’re looking for this service, consider contacting Collective Media, AOL or Fetchback. Fetchback in particular focuses exclusively on retargeting and can drastically increase your ROI by keeping your brand in front of previous visitors to your site and reminding them of all your business has to offer.

Image: Cliff1066

Chris Birk

Chris Birk is a former newspaper and magazine writer who now works for a pair of Inc. 500 companies, including military home-buying hub VA Mortgage Center.com. He also teaches at a private Midwestern university. Follow him on Twitter.