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Retargeting

Definition

What is retargeting?

In digital marketing, retargeting is the process of serving ads to prospects who have already shown interest in what you have to offer.

If you want a more in-depth understanding of this topic, check out the FAQ section below:

Question #1: How do I identify prospects for retargeting?

As we have seen in the previous section, retargeting involves serving ads to prospects who have demonstrated an interest in whatever it is you are selling. This means you can identify prospects for retargeting by taking a look at:

  • The people who visit and interact with your website
  • The people who have previously interacted with one of your ads
  • The people who have already purchased something from you before
  • The people who have engaged with your posts on social media
  • The people who have abandoned their carts on your online store
  • Anyone else who has performed a trackable action that signifies interest in your products, services, or content

Question #2: What are the benefits of retargeting?

The main benefits of retargeting are as follows:

  1. It allows you to pitch to prospects who are more likely to convert. There is a big chance that someone who has checked your website or clicked on one of your ads is more interested in what you have to say or sell than someone who could not even be bothered to do so.
  2. It allows you to convert undecided prospects. It is very rare for a prospect to be ready to make a purchase the first time they come across your brand, hence the saying ‘the money is in the follow up’. Well, retargeting is essentially just you following up with your prospects in the form of digital ads.
  3. It allows you to better tailor your marketing messages. You already know what each prospect wants based on things such as the pages they visited on your website or the ads of yours that they clicked. All you have to do is send them marketing messages that are more aligned with what they are looking for to up your chances of successfully converting them.

For example, if you run a fitness supplements shop and a prospect clicked on an ad for whey protein and also browsed the whey protein section of your website, then they must be interested in whey protein, and sending them whey protein-related retargeted ads are more likely to get them to buy from you.

Question #3: What are the disadvantages of retargeting?

The biggest disadvantages of retargeting are as follows:

  1. It limits your reach. Again, retargeting only cares about prospects who have already shown interest in whatever it is you have to say or sell. It offers no way of reaching new prospects who might also be interested in your products, services, and content.
  2. It is not 100% accurate. Not everyone who clicks on your ads or visits your website is actually interested in what you have to offer. There is a possibility that some of them simply misclicked or misunderstood what your brand is all about.

Question #4: What is the difference between retargeting and creating a lookalike audience?

The main difference between retargeting and creating a lookalike audience is their primary purpose.

Retargeting, as we have seen in the previous sections, involves pitching to people who have already shown interest in what you are selling.

In contrast, creating a lookalike audience involves finding prospects who might be interested in what you are selling based on the interests and buying habits of your existing customers—which digital advertising platforms such as Google Ads and Facebook for Business let you do automatically as long as you have a big enough existing audience.

Let us take a closer look at how it works:

  1. You start by building a large enough customer base. The actual number would vary from platform to platform. Some require 1,000 people; others require more.
  2. Once you have your customer base, simply use the create-a-lookalike-audience feature of your chosen digital advertising platform and the system will handle the rest. It will search its database for people who share the same interests and have the same buying habits—among other things—like the people in your existing database.
  3. Once the search is done, your chosen digital advertising platform will automatically create a separate lookalike audience for you, which you can use for all your future digital advertising campaigns on the platform.