Digital Media News

4 Reasons to Add Display Retargeting to Every Media Buy

Written by Ryan Costello | May 5, 2016 2:30:00 PM

When you're investing in media advertisements for your company, then your aim will to be deliver the perfect creative to display to the ideal customer, at the most appropriate time. Unfortunately, even if your media buying strategy has been honed to perfection, it's worth noting that people might still leave your sales funnel mid-purchase. Sometimes, an abandoned conversion occurs because a consumer doesn't have their credit card handy, whereas other times, it happens because someone simply gets distracted.

The vulnerable nature of the conversion process is one of the reasons why display retargeting has emerged as a crucial tactic for many digital marketers. This strategy can increase the impact of various other marketing efforts, increasing brand awareness, driving customers through the sales funnel, and strengthening brand recall. Following, we'll cover just four reasons why display retargeting should be added to every one of your media purchases.

1. Retargeting Offers A Second Chance Conversion

Perhaps the most powerful benefit of retargeting as a concept, is that it only addresses people who have already visited one of your landing pages or websites. This means that you're reaching out to people who have already been exposed to your brand, as well as your service or product. Most of the time, these visitors are far more likely to be persuaded by continued marketing efforts.

The majority of most website traffic is made up of one-time visitors that would otherwise have gotten away after seeing your media purchase for the first time. Retargeting allows you to continue your marketing efforts towards those visitors, and get them back into the conversion funnel. Think of a PPC campaign for instance - once someone clicks on your ad, you pay for that click and get one chance of converting your visitor. However, with retargeting, that high-value customer can be retargeted with subsequent ads.

2. Retargeting Broadens Your Marketing Reach

If you're already using programmatic advertising or other marketing solutions online, then you'll have a certain degree of reach towards the people you're trying to address. Retargeting will help to expand that reach even further and potentially introduce you to a greater audience, who have already shown some measure of interest in your brand. You'll even find that your creative shows up on more websites, exposing people to your brand in new places.

Most advertising efforts on top-ranking or premium websites require a huge media buy, which means dealing with a very large budget. However, if you make use of a retargeting platform, you will be able to tap into those websites because you're only showing your adverts to a very small and targeted segment of their traffic.

3. Retargeting Optimizing Segments Within Campaigns

Because the keyword lists that are used to drive search retargeting can be adjusted instantly at any time within a campaign, it's easier to make sure that the segments within search retargeting can be tuned for the best possible performance according to budgetary requirements.

The initial campaign data can show which keywords are performing best, and which aren't delivering much to your campaign, so that you can tune up your strategy as you go. In other words, you can easily remove poorly-performing keywords, and add keywords that are similar to those performing well. You can also avoid buying media in areas where your target audience don't appear as often as you might have originally assumed.

4. Retargeting Sells More to Converted Visitors

Finally, display retargeting doesn't have to stop with convincing previously distracted customers to return to your website and make a purchase. You can also place a retargeting pixel onto thank you and conversion pages to build an audience of high-value users. If you collect a segmented audience of people who have converted before, and you can offer them compelling value, then there's a good chance they might convert again.

Audience lists that are made up of converted users are generally used for exclusion from unnecessary marketing, as people assume targeting already converted consumers wastes ad spend. However, if this information is used in a creative way, such as to up-sell, cross-sell, or offer insights into complementary services and products, then you can get even more value from your retargeting campaigns.