Bringing Them Back: Understanding How Remarketing Ads Work

If optimized, remarketing ads target customers who have interacted with your brand, turning past interest into present conversions.

For the modern business, the most serious obstacle to success is lack of customer engagement. When you lose interest from a person, do you know how to get a customer back? Since 54 percent of web users believe that display ads are not trustworthy (and thus do not click on them), we know that bombarding consumers with banner ads is therefore ineffective. For a campaign to succeed, its ads must specifically appeal to the customers they target. Remarketing is a powerful tool to optimize ads for their intended customers.

Resourceful Remarketing

Remarketing involves gathering data on consumers who have used your website, downloaded your app, or otherwise engaged with your company digitally. You can use this data to deliver customized ads directly to shoppers. This is an effective way to:

• Complete Conversions– Consumers who have added your wares to their shopping carts but never bought them, or began filling out contact sheets but never finished, are primed for conversions. Timely remarketing ads bring them back to complete what they started.
• Spur Additional Sales– If a customer has previously bought your wares, he or she is more likely to return for more. Remarketing reminds past customers that your company exists and alerts them to other products which they may find useful.
• Capture Customers– If a customer visited your site in the past and is now searching for similar products, you can send them ads, increasing the chance that their searches end with your product or service.

As beneficial as remarketing is, not all campaigns use it successfully. The effectiveness of remarketing ads depends on how well they take advantage of customer tracking, cross-channel communications, and incentives.

Customer Tracking

Companies operating remarketing campaigns can use both list and pixel targeting to track customers. Pixel targeting involves attaching a line of code to a user’s device when he or she visits your website or downloads your app. This lets you quickly identify and target large numbers of customers, but offers little potential to customize ads.

In list targeting, customers register their email addresses with your site; you then target ads to social media accounts using those addresses. This lets you customize ads by placing customers on different lists, but it only reaches those who sign up. Customers may also provide different email addresses than those assigned to their social media accounts.

Whether you should use list or pixel targeting depends on how important customized information is for the products you sell. Depending on your budget, it may make sense to use both.

Cross-Channel Communications

Customers are more likely to respond to remarketing ads if they appear on multiple channels. The better you coordinate campaigns across email, social media, search engines, and other platforms, the better customers will remember your brand and associate it with their needs. Your campaigns should also gather customer information from multiple sources, including written content and videos.

Enticing Incentives

Successful campaigns do not just remind customers about your site; they give them a vested interest in coming back. Campaigns are thus most likely to succeed if they provide coupons or other incentives to return.

Other Options

To further optimize remarketing ads, you can:

• Tailor ad sizes to the platforms you use.
• Increase bids on customers who began but did not complete conversions.
• Tag visitors to pages that generate the most leads.
• Direct customers to your educational content in addition to product pages.
• Offer different messages to converting and non-converting customers.

As successful as these tactics can be, no single campaign is right for every company. Scale is committed to helping Little Rock companies optimize their ads and marketing material. For more information on remarketing campaigns, content strategy, and other keys to customer conversions, explore your digital marketing options by calling 501-588-3199 today.