Retargeting your web site visitors.
So you are doing really well with your SEO – your are getting lots of traffic but there’s a problem; only 5 in every 100 visitors makes contact by either enquiring of your services or buying from you. In fact you are doing very well if you get this sort of conversion rate, the industry average is 2-3% depending on the type of business you have.
Have you ever wondered what happens to the 95% plus percent who never make contact? After all they had some interest in you thats why they were at your website. Wouldn’t it be great if we could follow then around the web and remind them to revisit us? This is what we mean by retargeting.
Of course some left without making contact because you may not have been relevant to their search – but many may have left because they were shopping around or that life intervened – nature called or they went for lunch or whatever. The chances of them returning even if you were relevant are small; Unless of course we retarget them.
A retargeting example
Here’s a simple example: Yesterday I visited one of our customers’ sites. They are in luxury travel. Later in the day I visited other sites – one was Tripadviser another was a product comparison website. In both cases as I browsed these sites little ads popped up reminding me to revisit the travel site. Of course you need to be a bit careful about this ‘electronic stalking’ so it doesn’t become counterproductive, but just imagine if I was actually on their site looking for a luxury villa holiday in the algarve; I later went to tripadviser and their banner popped up offering a £100 discount voucher I could get by clicking back to their site. This would be a highly relevant way of using retargeting and also highly effective.
Different ways to retarget
In the above example the retargeting was was carried our through Google. Its what Google refer to as remarketing and is an option when you use their Adwords pay per click service – you have the option of having ads appear elsewhere on the web rather than just at the Google search results page. The ads get triggered on the host site after someone has visited your website via a PPC ad to remind them to return.
Of course this only works if you use Google PPC but there are many options now to do this retargeting when people visit your site via any means – through natural search, direct traffic as well as PPC traffic. The technologies to do this used to be the domain of larger companies but over the past couple of years many low cost technologies have become available to allow this natural retargeting to happen; and it can be very effective.
How does it work?
You simply place a bit of code (provided by the technology provider you use ) which appears on your webpages. You can then track these visitors across the web (via cookies) and your technology provider makes sure your ads get displayed to relevant ex visitors at relevant times to bring them back. This is done by real time bidding (RTB) where the provider bids for ad space in real time and if the price is right your ad gets displayed.
Tracking people who are interested in you as they browse the web – and bringing them back to your site for the right reason and the the right time -is becoming an essential component in the digital marketing mix of all businesses and we now have the technologies to do this cost effectively.
There’s a list of the technology providers who provide this sort of service here…..
http://retargeting-companies.findthebest-sw.com/
We are working with a couple of them right now and I’ll keep you posted about our experiences.
