In 2020, most conversions do not happen on the first click. It is the sessions from return traffic that have the highest conversion rate and this is because the path that leads a user to conversion requires multiple steps and interactions with our site. This is why it is essential to have a structured retargeting strategy that can intercept the user at the right place and time…but without overdoing it.
Here’s what to do and what to avoid for retargeting that converts.
- Takeaways for effective retargeting
Retargeting: what it is and how it works
Retargeting, or remarketing, is a form of online marketing that relies on serving advertisements to an audience that has visited or performed actions on our website (or other proprietary touchpoints).
Over the years, advertising platforms have found increasingly effective profiling techniques that allow advertisers to create audience segments from user behavior that will become target audiences for targeted and personalized advertising messages.
What do we mean when we talk about retargeting?
To fully understand how retargeting can become an asset to our business, whatever its nature, we need to consider the concept of the customer journey.
Within the journey that takes a person from the informational stage (which often begins with an explicit search on a search engine, marketplace or other platforms such as YouTube) to the purchase stage, there is a time when the user will have visited our website, read an article on our blog, interacted with one of our social media posts or watched a video on our YouTube channel.
In all these cases, advertising platforms such as Facebook Ads and Google Ads will be able to store not only the fact that the user has visited our website but also what actions he or she has performed on it.
Here it is important to emphasize the presence of properly implemented tracking structure that can capture the right information about users’ onsite actions on our website.
This information will become the basis for the remarketing strategy that will have as its primary objective to guide the user within a path that has as its end point the purchase of the product or service promoted by my website.
Why is retargeting important?
The importance of retargeting within our digital marketing strategy is based on the assumption that, in the vast majority of cases, the target users of our campaigns do not achieve a conversion upon first interaction with our website.
In other words, the conversion path is almost never linear, but it is a layered and heterogeneous path in terms of the way the advertising message is used and the moments in the funnel when we manage to intercept the user. The importance of retargeting lies precisely in the possibility of intercepting the user who has already interacted with our touchpoints at moments other than the explicit product search stages.
Retargeting or remarketing?
Before getting into how to retarget effectively, it is necessary to clear the field of terminological ambiguity. In 2020 we have become accustomed to using the terms retargeting and remarketing as synonyms, but in reality these two terms refer to distinct activities that nevertheless have a common basis: they are marketing activities directed at users who in one way or another have already come into contact with our business.
The difference between these two activities, however, lies in the fact that remarketing refers to marketing action based on sending emails to addresses in our contact database while retargeting refers to advertising activity based on cookies that record users’ interactions with websites, social networks or other touchpoints.
A “strategic” difference that has become increasingly thinner in recent years when through major advertising platforms it has become possible to create audience segments from email lists making the distinction between the two activities less clear.
Behavioral retargeting and audience segments
Whether it is Facebook ads or Display banners, one of the most relevant aspects of retargeting is the ability to tailor our advertising messages based on the behaviors enacted by users on our site.
Let’s take the case of an e-commerce store that sells clothing products. The segmentations of the audience visiting my site could be diversified:
- on the basis of actions such as button clicks, additions to cart, purchase initiation
- on the basis of dwell time on specific pages of the website
- on the basis of days since the last recorded visit
The architecture of retargeting will be built, in other words, on assumptions made from the users’ behavior on the site that will serve to personalize the advertising message with the goal of attracting the user back to my site and driving them to the final conversion.
For example, still taking our clothing e-commerce, we could think of a campaign that as a target audience has users who have added a product to their cart in the last 7 days and have never purchased a product.
On this audience we could activate a retargeting campaign on both social channels and Google’s Display network with the goal of incentivizing purchase by offering a special discount dedicated to the first purchase.
We could even think about giving additional value to this promotion by assigning a higher discount than the discounts that might already be available on the website (e.g., a percentage discount on newsletter subscription).
Of course, we could also launch our campaigns with dedicated discounting on a cold audience (prospecting), which, however, would have a lower potential for effectiveness than our retargeting campaign. This is because in the case of our custom audience we have a very strong interest indicator compared to an audience that has never heard of our brand or products.
How to do Retargeting on Facebook and Google Ads
From the above, we have talked specifically about two elements that are central to any retargeting strategy: the website and the audience segments. However, there is a third element that we could consider the condition of possibility for any retargeting activity: advertising channels.
Indeed, each of our retargeting possibilities will be dictated by the channels we have chosen, which determine:
- the way in which we manage tracking on our website
- the ways in which we can create audience segments
- the ways in which we can create campaigns and the advertising placements that each platform allows us to preside over
Before going into the main channels on which to do retargeting, it is necessary to make a clarification. As we have said any retargeting activity is strongly linked to a user’s behaviors on our website. This means that, in our strategy, we will have to prioritize our audience architecture, our segmentations, and the levers that might work in driving the user to the next step in the funnel.
With this in mind, advertising channels must serve us in designing our strategy:
- at the level of tracking, properly monitoring the events needed to build our audiences
- at the level of campaign architecture and placements, carefully choosing which channels to preside over and their weight within our advertising ecosystem
That is why we will now proceed with an overview of the two main, and most used, advertising platforms for doing retargeting; Facebook Ads and Google Ads.
Retargeting on Facebook
In the “Audiences” section of the ad account Facebook provides 2 origins for creating custom audiences:
- proprietary origins such as our website or Customer Database
- native origins: Facebook and Instagram and our audience activity on these social networks
Segments based on proprietary origins
Through the Facebook Pixel we can monitor user activity on our website, or on our app and create custom events on which to base our audiences.
Within the Facebook retargeting campaign we could diversify into 3 separate adset audiences created from specific events in the conversion funnel such as:
- the display of a product in my catalog
- the addition of a product to the shopping cart
- the start of the checkout path to complete the final transaction
As we can see, we are talking about 3 events that signal 3 different behaviors and therefore will have as target audiences people who are at different moments of the purchase path.
When creating the campaign we will therefore have to take this diversity into account, on the one hand by preventing overlapping audiences – effectively excluding the more general audience from the more specific audience – and on the other hand by diversifying our advertising message based on the moment in which the potential customer is located.
In addition, based on our goals (such as generating new customers), we might also choose to exclude the audience created from users who have already made a purchase on our website, and this audience can be created from the event tracked with the Pixel or from the customer database at our disposal.
It would be a different matter if our goal was to generate repeat purchases on users who have already purchased our product or service. In this case we could leverage our audience, or our customer list to create remarketing campaigns on this specific audience.
The importance of working on audience segments is particularly evident during seasonal promotional events, such as sales or Black Friday. In these cases, one of the most reckless strategies might be to promote on a cold audience a discount that, because of the time in which it is proposed and with respect to the audience to which it is proposed, would not really represent a lever capable of generating purchases. This is because our message would be indistinguishable from that of other competitors who at that same time on that same user, or group of users, are performing the same advertising action with the same marketing levers.
Different is the case if we choose to target our campaigns on a sufficiently large audience of already-customers who therefore have passed the brand awareness stage and could be more easily convinced (i.e., at a lower acquisition cost) than an audience that has never had some interaction with our business.
Segments based on Facebook’s native sources
In addition to proprietary external sources, Facebook also makes native sources available by allowing advertisers to build audience segments from interactions with content posted on Facebook pages or Instagram profiles.
Similar to proprietary sources, the significant aspect lies in the ability to propose promotional content to an audience that has already interacted with the content in my editorial plan; by viewing a video, commenting or adding a reaction to one of my posts.
However, it is worth noting an important difference. A user who views a product, adds it to the shopping cart or even initiates the checkout process is telling us something very strong with respect to his or her predisposition to purchase our product and thus the moment, advanced, of the funnel he or she is in.
A user, on the other hand, who interacts with content posted on social is saying something decidedly weaker because his reaction or comment might refer not to the product being promoted or shown in the video but to the content itself.
The user may have liked because he likes what he sees but not because he is interested in buying what he sees.
This means that audiences created from interactions with published content can be an important resource in identifying users who already know our brand, who are therefore at the beginning of the funnel and have already passed the Awareness step.
Not only that, because the type of content the user has interacted with can be leveraged to create more specific audience segments on which to convey vertical advertising messages on a given product category by selecting only certain content and not others.
This in turn can be functional to create increasingly specific advertisements based on insights provided by user interactions with content in our editorial plan (e.g., subject, copy, communication levers, etc.).
Remarketing on Google Ads
Many of the logics for creating retargeting and remarketing campaigns discussed for Facebook are obviously applicable for Google Ads as well.
However, as mentioned above, the choice of advertising platforms also determines the possible advertising actions we can put in place.
Google Ads or Google Analytics for creating audience segments.
A first major difference is the sources that Google provides for the creation of audience segments. In fact, if in the case of Facebook the audience tracking and management system is unique, the Facebook Pixel, in the case of Google we have two possible ways: use Google Analytics and import into Google Ads our conversion events and audience segments or set everything up at the advertising account level by directly implementing the tag within the site without going through Google Analytics.
Both solutions have pros and cons in both audience management and conversion event management.
Indeed, if Google Analytics allows for the creation of audience segments profiled at the level of on-site behavior, excluding, for example, sessions with a low time spent on the site, Google Ads provides information on view-through conversions, i.e., conversions that occurred after our Display ads gained an impression.
Fortunately, one option does not exclude the other, and our advice is to use both audience creation systems.
The different advertising placements of Google Ads.
A general feature of Google Ads is the diversity of ad placements that you can preside over. This heterogeneity translates into the possibility of intercepting the user at different moments of his web experience and, specifically when we talk about remarketing on Google Ads, into the possibility of intercepting the potential customer at different moments of his customer journey.
