- Reading time: 2 mins
- Topics:
- Marketing Strategy
- Search Marketing
Have you ever been scrolling through products on Amazon only to leave the page without purchasing the item you were interested in? According to CMO. by Adobe, “online shopping retail sales are predicted to grow steadily to $370 billion in 2017, up from $231 billion in 2012.”
There’s a good chance you’ve bought something online before, but if you’re the kind of person who likes to browse and abandon your search without purchasing anything, you may have come in contact with retargeting advertisements.
Retargeting advertisements can remind shoppers of the existence of a product or service, encouraging users who abandon their shopping carts to come back and finish the purchase. These ads can be found Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, mobile apps, and many other websites throughout the internet.
Retargeting ads are created based on your past web history. When you visit a website, your browser picks up a cookie, which tracks how you shop. When you leave, the ads activate, showing up in ad space on other websites you visit, or even on Facebook. Perhaps you’ve seen one of these while scrolling through Facebook and wondered how the platform knew you were just browsing on a certain site — that’s all thanks to retargeting ads.
There are a number of different targeting options when you set up remarketing audiences. Targeting based on time spent on a website, which pages a user visited, and audience interests are all common advertising approaches used by marketing professionals. You can even layer remarketing targeting so that your ad appears in front of users who have met very specific criteria.
Retargeting ads tend to perform much better than regular banner ads, and they usually have higher click-through rates and conversions. This is because retargeting ads are engaging with an audience that already has a general interest in your product or service, compared to normal banner ads, which typically use targeting methods that are not as direct (i.e. contextual targeting and keyword targeting). Ultimately, the goal of remarketing advertising is to reconnect with users and entice them to complete their purchase.
