What is Remarketing and Should You Try It?

Many small businesses run on a fairly limited marketing budget, so it’s important that each dollar spent on marketing counts. Remarketing can be a powerful marketing tactic when done correctly. However, implementing remarketing may not work for everyone. Exactly what is remarketing, and should you try it?

Definition of remarketing

Remarketing is an online marketing technique that allows advertisers to reach out to visitors who already visited their website. This tactic allows you to re-engage audiences that you already reached and continue to educate them on your product or service. It essentially gives you another opportunity to convert that website visitor to a paying customer and keeps your small business top of mind to that website visitor.

What are the benefits?

There’s been quite a bit written about this topic, but we love the guide by Outbrain. They list the following as benefits of remarketing:

• Make the most of lost website traffic
• Target people who have already visited your site and have shown an interest
• Target audiences who are more likely to convert
• Keep your brand at top of mind by serving ads to interested audiences
• Affordable marketing tactic, available on a range of platforms and channels
• Comes in many ad formats, including display ad, search RLSA, dynamic carousel, and more

When compared to traditional paid advertisements, remarketing ads with retargeting campaigns cost much less to reach the same audience and can be highly cost-effective to online advertisers. The Google Display Network is a popular platform for remarketing campaigns. Here’s a final note on the value of remarketing: 96% of visitors that come to your website are not ready to buy. This means you’re likely only able to persuade 4% of traffic to buy what you’re offering the first time they arrive on your website.

How does it work?

Essentially, for these efforts to work, you need to add a small bit of code, a tag or pixel, to your website so that visitors can get added to your remarketing audiences through browser cookies. You can customize the code for different pages to correspond to more defined categories. While many marketers start with a single tag to start, ideally you should segment your audiences and have different remarketing campaigns for different visitors to better target your audience. For example, if someone visits your home page and leaves, it’s hard to say how engaged that visitor really was in the first place. However, if they visited a service page and then left, you begin to have a glimpse of what their interest is. If they dug deeper and visited a pricing page, a free trial page, etc. you can see that they’re further along in the buying cycle and should be remarketed to accordingly.

What are possible options for remarketing campaigns?

Search Engine Journal did a great write-up on different types of campaigns and how best to put your target audience in “buckets” to get better results. Here are a few types of remarketing campaigns they suggest:

• Price page visitors
• Cart abandoners
• Previous purchasers
• Video viewers
• Facebook/Instagram engagers

Looking at the list above, you can see how the audiences may differ and how, therefore, your remarketing message should differ.

Should you try remarketing?

Remarketing is a fairly straightforward way to re-engage website visitors, but there are a few steps that need to be taken to ensure your campaign is set up for success. If you’re already familiar with how it works and how to set up campaigns, it’s definitely worth doing! If you’re new to remarketing, work with a small business marketing consultant to help you create a campaign for your small business and see how it impacts sales for your company.