You can’t get much more effective than targeting users who have already shown interest in a product with related ads – right?

If executed carefully, the practice of retargeting ads could be a very powerful technique for achieving high conversion rates and bringing back visitors who left your site.
Essentially, retargeting ads reminds users what items they recently viewed on the website they just left. They work in the following way:

1. A visitor comes to your site and leaves without purchasing anything.
2. Your advertising network uses a cookie to track the user’s computer.
3. The user visits a different site which displays ads from that network.
4. The network recognizes the user and shows them an ad for your product.

A recent Advertising.com retargeting campaign that promoted subscriptions for a leading newspaper – generated a conversion rate nearly 10 times that of a run-of-network campaign and it also required 1/20th of the total impressions to achieve nearly the same volume of subscriptions. Another retargeting campaign ran by Advertising.com (driving configurations of a new car) saw 12 times the number of conversions and 23 times the number of information requests as demographic targeting.

If you are seeking to implement retargeting, here are some important things to keep in mind:

• Successful campaigns cannot rely on retargeted ad buys alone.

• Successful retargeting relies on all site traffic – ads, search, e-mail, affiliate marketing,  viral, WOM (Word-of-Mouth), etc.

• Retargeting requires ad network tracking pixels to be set in place. If the objective involves non-conversions a tracking pixel has to be set on the order confirmation page as well.

• Retargeting seems to work well when a purchase involves high levels of research and  consideration.

• Consumer’s buying cycle time frame and the total reach of a network can hinder the outcome of a campaign.

• Cross-marketing can be achieved through retargeting. An example being retargeting of a purchaser of shorts with ads displaying shirts and other clothing accessories.

• Geo-targeting can be layered on top of retargeting, but this can limit the size of the audience being served.

• Networks can include opt-out pages and browsers can be set to restrict third party cookies.

• Depending on networks, they can charge on a per-click basis or by impressions.

Retargeting is becoming a bigger force in online campaigns. Marketers can connect one-to-one with their past visitors with relevant and timely ads by harnessing past click-stream data. Not only can marketers retarget ads to consumers who have dropped out of a shopping cart or left a site without making a purchase, marketers can now sequence which ads are seen first, second, third, etc. Retargeting has become a proven way of engaging site goers enough to return and make a purchase with a site that was previously abandoned.