There is a compelling case for retargeting ads and this article will explain exactly why every business with a website needs to implement retargeting in my opinion.

When I started out as a business consultant, I learned that there were just 4 ways to grow a business:

• increase the number of customers of the type you want to have
• increase the number of times that customers come back
• increase the average value of each sale
• increase the effectiveness of each process in the business

Retargeting has the potential to impinge on all 4 ways to grow a business but, more specifically, it brings customers and prospects back into the business.

But let’s look a little closer at the true benefits of retargeting…

The Benefits of Retargeting

In overall terms, retargeting reduces the RISK of doing business online.  Let me explain why I say this.

Getting traffic to your site costs money:

• either you have to create content (and get it ranked in the search engines) to drive organic or (as it is sometimes referred to as) ‘free’ traffic (- it is not free because someone had to spend valuable time creating the content and time is money!)
• you paid for the click
• or someone referred  the visitor to your site and you may have to pay for that referral to incentivise further referrals.

The sad fact is that most of that traffic will visit your website and leave it and never return – some say that this figure is 98% on average – but it all depends on the source and quality of the traffic and the ability of the page you send them to convert the traffic e.g. if your traffic is going to a squeeze page with a compelling free offer you may convert 50% of the traffic or more if your traffic is targeted.

Nevertheless, for most websites let’s assume that 98% of visitors that visit the average website leave without taking action and never return.   That’s a massive waste of traffic.

This is why top marketers try to persuade their website visitors to optin to their list by making a compelling free offer – once on their list it enables them to send emails and bring them back to whatever web page they wish.

Even this strategy is far from efficient as much depends on your email reaching your recipients inbox, then them opening it and then clicking on your link.  With the amount of emails flying around the internet, email clicks are expensive assets to accumulate and require a degree of marketing and copywriting skill to capitalise upon.

Retargeting enables the website owner to ‘capture’ 100% of unique visitors to their website and gives us the ability to follow up with those visitors via paid retargeting ads.

This is truly beneficial as these website visitors are HIGHLY targeted – they have already shown an interest in your website and what you have to offer.

It’s a well known fact that most potential buyers will not buy on their first visit but require 4-8 ‘touches’ or contacts before they know, like and trust you enough to buy.

Retargeting ads enable you to follow-up efficiently with these potential buyers and convert them into buyers and sales revenue (which is the whole point of the exercise).

The important point to realise is that you can easily monitor the cost of your advertising versus the sales return from that spend and also tune your advertising to improve your return so you can be sure that you are getting a good return on your investment.

Perfect Audience (a well-known retargeting company) reckon that they create $10 of sales revenue for every $1 spent on retargeting ads – that’s a 1000% return.

If that is true, can your business (or mine for that matter) really afford NOT to do retargeting?

I think that that claim is at least worth investigating, don’t you?

How Retargeting Ads Work

 

This simple diagram explains simply how retargeting works. You prospects visit your website, a cookie is added to their browser automatically, they leave your website without taking action, they then see your adverts wherever they go on the internet.  When they click on your retargeting advert they are sent back to whatever web page you wish.

You can also segment your retargeting lists.  For example, if they visited your website, opted in but did not buy your paid offer, you would not want to send them back to your optin page again.  Your ad would need to take them back to your paid offer – you can segment your retargeting lists and set up your campaign so that only visitors who did not optin are sent back to your optin page and those that did optin are set to your paid offer.

This can get quite sophisticated if you have a long sales funnel!

How To Implement Retargeting

You can implement retargeting for your business in a number of ways:

• sign up with Facebook, Adroll or Perfect Audience and follow their online training
• buy a third-party training programme – this what I did
• hire someone else to implement this for you if you have no inclination to get technical.

It is my intention to provide a retargeting ads service to any business that wants to set this up – please contact me if you would like a free intial consultation and quotation.