Ad Retargeting is set to Change the Dynamics of Digital Marketing

While browsing the Internet, of late you must have noticed ads and banners on websites seem to reflect your latest online shopping patterns. Things you may have bought, or looked up, keep appearing on random ad spaces gawking at you to wrap up your unfinished business on that shopping site.

Return of the Living Dead

According to an estimate, for most websites, only 3-5% of the actual traffic results in conversions. Retargeting is a great idea to keep flashing your brand to the bounced traffic of your website. Besides, a good percentage of visitors visit retail online stores and window shop. Retargeting ensures you keep nudging this section into tempting them to buy what they wanted, but could not for whatever reasons. Retargeting acts as a reminder as well as a ploy in equal measures, but more importantly it is a great marketing and branding tactic.

Cookie Crunch

Every time visitors arrive on a website, the website leaves a cookie on the visitors' computer. When these visitors move on and browse other websites on the Internet, this cookie serves them ads reminding them of the websites and product they had browsed before.

Hey! Its Working

Retargeting works as it does not require brand establishment. The visitor is already familiar with your brand. The ROI in such a marketing tactic is higher because the visitor is already familiar with your brand/website.

For online retail stores, retargeting delivers even better results. Users are known to abandon their shopping midway due to below par browsing experience, unclear interface, faulty transaction processes, etc. While, improving your website design and navigation is definitely necessary in this case, post-redesign, it is totally worth retargeting these visitors with items from their carts which they never went ahead with. Repeated exposure of your website or visitors' favorite product will attract a considerable traction. This is the basic principle of which retargeting works. Hence, despite skepticism, it has been judiciously successful so far.

A Word of Caution

While retargeting is a fantastic idea with a high ROI possibility, there are certain things marketers need to be watchful about. There's a limit to how much you can retarget. If a user isn't coming back after 4 or 5 impressions, be assured, he/she isn't coming back at all. Your brand takes a hit if you continue pestering the user over unwanted stuff. Similarly, make sure the cookie dropping code is astute enough to eliminate converted users. Nothing will piss off a user more than having to be coaxed to buy things he/she has already bought before.

If done right, retargeting is a powerful conversion technique that can boost a brand's ROI by notches. The focus on ROI will increase as digital marketing gets allotted separate niche budgets and becomes more and more mainstream. Hence, the focus of marketing will be centered on ROI and user conversions more than anything else. In such a scenario, marketing tactics like retargeting will gain more tug amongst marketers. Retargeting is definitely set to change the fabric of digital marketing as we know it now, since it narrows down conversion possibilities to definite conversion prospects.