Give Your Advertising a Second Chance - The Devil is in the Details
(Page 3 of 4 )
If you’re going to use any form of retargeting, there are a number of points you need to keep in mind. First, think about your potential customers’ past behavior. If you want to inspire a conversion, you need to retarget based on what they’ve shown an interest in.
Also, keep in mind how long it takes the average consumer to decide to purchase your type of product. For example, if it takes them three weeks to reach a decision, you want to retarget your potential customer again and again throughout that period. In fact, retargeting is considered to be more effective when the length of the sales cycle is significant; remember that when you’re thinking about whether to use retargeting at all.
As things stand now, there isn’t quite enough traffic based on retargeting alone to carry an entire advertising campaign. Retargeting can deliver impressive numbers for a lower cost, but at least one company that offers the service advises users to figure retargeting as no more than 10 percent of their advertising strategy.
Remember that retargeting and behavioral targeting aren’t the same thing. They aren’t interchangeable. They do both utilize user cookies, though, so if a site visitor deletes or refuses to accept cookies, he or she won’t be exposed to your retargeted advertising.
Retargeting does call for pixels to be placed on your web site so that web surfer behavior can be monitored and surfers can be tracked when they leave your site. While a single pixel may not slow down the load time of your site, multiple pixels may, especially if one of your servers can’t handle the load.
Like other forms of advertising, retargeting requires you to create a well-thought-out plan for it to work. You need to think like a customer to puzzle out, based on their past actions, their next moves and future intentions. You need to know what is motivating them, and pitch to that.
Remember what I said earlier about using a variety of display ads to follow web surfers around? Well, since you don’t have any way of knowing exactly where they will go when they leave your site, you need a full selection of ads available in all sizes so they can fit wherever a surfer goes on the network: banner ads, skyscrapers, islands, the whole nine yards.
Next: So What do the Numbers Say? >>
More Website Marketing Articles
More By Terri Wells
