7 Retargeting Best Practices

Retargeting is a crucial ecommerce marketing strategy for direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands. Retargeting not only helps companies bring back the whopping 90% of website visitors who leave without purchasing, but it also provides personalized advertising experiences that increase return on investment (ROI) and improve conversion rates. 

Advertisers find success with retargeting indecisive shoppers and bringing them back to complete purchases. You can find success with retargeting across a broad network of platforms and devices, including social media, video, native and display. Retargeting can also serve as an attention conquest tool that you can use to ensure loyalty by denying competing brands the ability to get their message in front of your customers. However you choose to use it, a comprehensive retargeting strategy is necessary to deliver the best results.

Whether you’re a retargeting newcomer or want to optimize your retargeting campaigns, you’ve come to the right place. Here are seven best practices that’ll help you make the most of your retargeting strategy efforts.

1. Know Your Audience

Retargeting campaigns help you sustain relationships with people who interacted with your brand and products in the past. Make sure your retargeting strategy accounts for different stages of the customer buying cycle and uses customer interactions with specific products to serve relevant ads. Armed with this information, you can focus on specific audience segments to show relevant products and promotions. Focusing and personalizing retargeting ads lowers your cost-per-click and increases success.

2. Use Dynamic Display Ads To Capture Audience Attention

Dynamic display ads help retargeting efforts by customizing ads to show the products and images that viewers previously engaged with on your website. These display ads remind people to come back for products that interest them. They can also recommend related products and accessories. Dynamic ads provide product visibility across the internet and encourage people to buy more in each order and repeatedly come back to place more orders. This type of advertising also pushes users who abandoned online shopping carts to complete their purchase.

3. Retargeting Existing Customers

It’s common for email lists to lose responsiveness over time as new visitors join, and old ones stop engaging. It’s difficult to overcome this type of churn through continued drip campaigns, so retargeting provides an opportunity to reconnect. If your customers become unresponsive and haven’t purchased in a while, then treat them as candidates for a retargeting effort. Showing product-oriented retargeting ads to existing customers may convince them to come back to buy new products, or you may even upsell some.

4. Develop Quality and Engaging Creative

Use personalization, localization, and multivariate testing to show different advertisements to each audience you target. Testing can determine which strategies you need to leverage at higher volume and which strategies need optimization before scaling. As a best practice, always highlight your logo and branding on your ads to enhance brand recognition.

5. Avoid Ad Fatigue and Brand Blindness

Ad fatigue happens when a user is exposed to an ad or group of ads so often that they actively tune them out. A simple way to prevent this is by setting a frequency cap on your ads. For example, you can set an ad frequency at 15-25 times in a month. Be mindful of customers who haven’t visited your website in a while, and decrease ad frequency specifically for them. 

Remember to rotate your ads, too — a good rule of thumb is to have at least three unique versions of the same ad. 

6. Retarget Based on Facebook Page Engagement with Form-Based Ads

Retargeting people who engage with your company’s Facebook page is an excellent way of connecting with people who actively use Facebook and are interested in your products or brand. Form-based ads allow for the collection of lead information like email addresses. Collecting emails can enable additional marketing and relationship-building opportunities at a much lower cost. Lead-generation ads present an intuitive, natural-looking form directly within the Facebook app, where users are more likely to feel the trust to fill out the form.

7. Optimize For Best Results

Make sure to place your tracking pixels on all pages on your website. User behavior in between arrival and checkout provides insight into the visitors' interest level and the types of products that grab their attention. Successful placement will ensure retargeting efforts are focused on actionable audiences and not wasted on low-quality visitors. Burn lists using your pixels make your ad spend efficient as well. You can create lists of users that reach the order confirmation page in order to stop retargeting users who recently made a purchase. However, remember to move them into new campaigns with different messaging to resell, upsell, or encourage referrals and social engagement.

Now that you're aware of these best practices, check out AdRoll's retargeting tool.

For more on how to create a behavioral and retargeting strategy:

Last updated on June 17th, 2022.