Catching the ones that got away: How retargeting can help boost conversions

You want every visitor to fall in love with your site and complete a transaction. But this kind of love, like the offline variety, is hard to find. With conversion rates hovering around two to three per cent, about 97% or so of your visitors are abandoning you. Ouch!

While this can be depressing news for etailers and entrepreneurs, fortunately, tools like retargeting can help improve your conversions. Some experts consider retargeting one of the most underutilized tools in online marketing.

What is retargeting?

Sometimes called remarketing or remessaging, retargeting delivers highly relevant ads based on a visitor’s past site or search behaviour.

How does site retargeting work?

Your most valuable prospects are, of course, the ones who have recently visited your site. Their purchase intent is high and they know you. Retargeting gives you additional opportunities to pitch your message to these potentially profitable prospects.

Let’s say a visitor to AcmeDishwashers.com has abandoned a transaction. With site retargeting, the etailer places an anonymous cookie on the visitor’s browser. As the ex-visitor navigates to other websites, ads for Acme dishwashers appear on these sites. Today’s technology even allows the etailer to customize the ad’s frequency of appearance, message, and creative elements.

What about search retargeting?

While site retargeting focuses on visitors who’ve been to your site, with search retargeting you’re after new prospects. Most probably, they don’t know about you.

When a prospect enters keywords that are important to you into a major search engine, search retargeting allows you to display ads to the prospect. And as in site retargeting, your message can be customized to increase its relevance on the sites the prospects visits.

Improving your conversions

Because retargeting gives you multiple chances to present and customize your message to prospects with purchase intent, you:

• Maximize the number of return visits to your site (CTR), and increase conversions;
• Improve significantly your campaign’s ROI since return visitors are more likely to buy;
• Reduce your cost per click (CPC).

With these kinds of benefits, it’s easy to see why you should include retargeting as part of your online marketing strategy.