What is remarketing?

Remarketing is exactly what is sounds like – the ability to market your products again to people who have previously visited your website. When people who have visited your site browse other sites on the web, you can re-target them with customised adverts.  

How does remarketing work?

When someone visits your website, a file called a ‘cookie’ is created, which stores information about their visit. This information can then be used to retarget specific visitors with online advertising later.

Remarketing adverts can be shown to highly specific groups, depending on your objectives. For example, you could show ads just to people who didn’t complete a purchase, or just to people who viewed a specific page.

Who should use remarketing?

Remarketing can be a useful online marketing tactic for many types of businesses. It may be useful for your business if you would like to increase brand awareness, retarget customers who abandoned their purchase or remain fresh in the minds of prospects.

Types of remarketing

There’s an increasing number of ways to use remarketing online including:

Dynamic remarketing

Through dynamic remarketing, you can show specific adverts based on that person’s behaviour on your site, e.g. the particular products they viewed.

Social media remarketing

Social media remarketing works in exactly the same way as remarketing elsewhere, except the advertisements are shown on social media and you have access to different ad formats. For instance you could run a Facebook offer or encourage prospects to ‘like’ your Facebook page using Facebook remarketing.

Mobile remarketing

Remarketing works on mobiles too, you can choose to target visitors to your mobile website on adverts within apps.

How effective is remarketing?

Remarketing can be incredibly effective – you are only advertising to people who have already visited your website and are therefore more likely to be interested in what you have to offer. Research has found that customers shown remarketing adverts are 70% more likely to complete a purchase.  

Remarketing can work especially well for products and services that have a long customer decision journey, for example high value items or services that require extensive research before purchase. In these situations, remarketing can help you stay fresh in the prospects mind throughout the route to purchase.

Despite its effectiveness, you can have too much of a good thing. As you may have noticed when particular adverts are following you around the web – remarketing can be annoying. For that reason it’s important to ensure your adverts have frequency caps, and the same visitors aren’t incessantly being targeted.

Getting started with remarketing

If you’re already using Google display advertising or Adwords, retargeting can be added to your existing account. If you’d like help getting started with online advertising, please get in touch.

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