Retargeting should play an important role in your marketing strategy; if it doesn’t, you’re missing a lucrative opportunity.

If you’re uncertain about the best approach or even why you should be proactive with your retargeting, read on. We have some fantastic insights, recommendations and tips to help you maximise this opportunity and make your marketing work harder.

This article focuses on the variety of strategies that you could adopt to make your business more profitable. For a beginner’s guide to retargeting ads, head over to our blog. 

It’s crucial that your set-up is done well—this is fundamental. Your performance will suffer without good quality and quantity of data. Having the correct setup is even more important as browsers are moving away from cookie tracking as a standard. 

Where to start and how to organise yourself 

Everything needs a starting point, and from a retargeting point of view, you may assume this is when a user first interacts with one of your business channels. Of course, you will need this to be the case for retargeting activity. However, it really should start way before this point by working through the requirements and defining objectives. 

Maximising opportunity means understanding how you’d like customers to interact, engage, and ultimately convert. For complex businesses, there may be a myriad of touch points and ways to collect data or opportunities to engage with your audience in different but meaningful ways. For less complex businesses, it might be something as simple as a phone call, abandon basket email, or display or search ad. 

Map out your initial and primary requirements in a document and save it as version one. This will expand as you process through the journey, but it’s useful for revisiting your initial thoughts and priorities.

Often, a flow chart or multiple flows can be useful to define this, but in the absence of this, a Word or Excel document will suffice. The key part of this process is to research all of the important expected/typical journeys a user may take and why they may not complete the expected objective. 

This process will differ by budget, business and industry, so it’s difficult to provide a detailed list that works for every business. But don’t just think about your website or app here; think more holistically, especially when thinking about groups of audiences and how they interact with your business. Important remarketing and retargeting can be achieved across external platforms. See a generic version of this below. 

To achieve this successfully, spend time understanding your business and objectives and, more importantly, how customers interact with you. This will help you define a funnel that coordinates your activity and comms strategy, of which retargeting should play a defined part.

A typical marketing funnel will look something like this. 

Which can be a great tool, however, it is often an outdated approach for modern marketing practices. In principle the purpose of this funnel is still useful, in a basic form it can help visualise activity and help coordinate messaging. However, very few users will interact with your business in a linear way as shown in the funnel above. So in reality or practice, the user journey is now much more complex. So transposing the linear funnel into a user touch point map will be more helpful to identify retargeting audiences and opportunities.  

Defining your audience

Knowing how users interact with your business is one thing, but you also need to know how you can retarget them. Do they already exist in a pre-defined group, or do you need to collate these users somehow to create a new audience that you can target? 

It’s common sense, but you’d be surprised how many people miss this and suffer as a result. So the important question is, who are you retargeting and why? Answering this question will help define how you build your audience, what channels you can use to activate the strategy and what messages you want your audience to receive. A complex business could have hundreds of strands of retargeting activation points across their strategy, hence building out the document.    

Segmenting your users

A common pitfall here is to use audiences haphazardly. An example of this might be using a list of any users who have visited your website in the last 30 days. On the face of it, it seems like a strategy that could add value, and to a degree it will. However, not all users visiting your website will be interested in your services or products, so grouping all users into a retargeting audience may cloud your ability to analyse data to understand who the most valuable users are and prioritise targeting them. Rather than retargeting everybody, look for qualifiers to segment out irrelevant users segment in users who could offer more value to your business. 

Choosing your target audience 

This is partly subjective and partly objective, but having access to a data science department or the ability to analyse data yourself adds significant value here. The best way to achieve this is to analyse sources of data you have access to to understand common attributes that make a segment of high-value users. This may be quite simple or obvious, for example, customers with a high-order value and common data points shared across all or most customers in this segment!

Once identified, you can use these attributes to build audiences segments of users for deeper analysis. For example, you could segment users with orders over £1000. Once you have this segment, further analysis may identify common behaviour to see: 

• What products are purchased
• How users typically interact with your site
• Their journey across the site
• Site & product sections
• Questions they may ask support & chat
• Channels they arrive from
• How many touch points they have before making a purchase 
• etc.    

From this, you can gauge the most important attributes for users with similar behaviour and create retargeting segments for similar users who do not convert. You can also use this analysis to remove barriers that prohibit users from converting. 

A subjective approach to identifying high-value audiences may be less aligned with purchasing data and more hypothetical in nature. An example segment similar to basket dropout, and retargeting users who show interest in your products or services but do not progress further. You could combine this with users who look at a variety of similar products or spend a certain amount of time in a site section. Typically these users will be more engaged with your brand and are at least considering taking the next steps to converting or engaging with you. In theory, at least, these users represent a higher value to your business than somebody who may stick around for a few seconds.

Separately, you may also want to remarket to users who interact with your brand across non-owned channels.  This is a great way to build an audience of users who have shown an interest in your business without visiting your site or other channels (that we know at this stage). An example may be serving iterations of short-form content to users who have watched other videos or engaged in ads in another way. Extending engagement of users who have shown an interest, but are not ready to take action can be a great way to reaffirm brand and engagement to make sure you’re front of mind when they are ready to progress.   

Once you have your audiences identified, you need to create them and sync them to your marketing platforms. Marketing platforms can accept data in many forms but often utilising an analytics platform to create segments, or the creating within the platform are most common. There are 3rd party vendors like Liveramp that can match 1st party data to platforms in order to build a consistent view of audiences to be utilised consistently across platforms. 

If you’re collecting this data on your site, you’ll need to make sure your privacy policy and compliance acceptance are up to date to inform people about how you use their 1st party data. 

Objectives and measurement

Once you have a good view of your audiences, and the list of your requirements and customer touch points, you’ll be in a good position to define your objectives and how you need to measure them to gauge success. This won’t always mean transaction and revenue. 

Work through your requirements list (all of the touch points so you can better communicate with your audience) and apply an objective or an action that can be measured. I’ve provided a few examples below. 

1. Drop out on ‘x’ page of the website = add user to ‘x’ audience group
   1. Send audience group email template 1.
      1. Measure open rate
      2. Measure click rate  
         
2. User visited ‘x’ product page but did not add to basket = add user to ‘x’ product audience.
   1. Sync audience to ads platform & retargeting campaigns
      1. Measure impressions / delivery
      2. Measure CTR vs other campaigns
3. User visited contact or live chat but didn’t complete communication = add user to re-contact list
   1. Send email / text to re-engage.
      1. Did the communications have a successful conclusion?
      2. Have satisfaction scores improved over time?
         
4. User has engaged with social ad = add user to engagement audience
   1. Utilise audience in retargeting campaigns on the same platform with specific ad message iterations.
      1. Measure re-engagement & message version engagement rates
      2. Optimise messaging for future prospecting campaigns
   2. Add user to engagement audience via analytics
      1. Sync to other Google ads platforms
      2. Retarget audiences on other platforms 

The objectives and their measurements are almost endless and specific to your needs, so unfortunately you’ll need to define these yourself. But hopefully the above provides a little inspiration and maybe a few ideas to get started. 

Once you have your objectives defined, you’ll need to double check you collect the data in a way that is satisfactory, and determine the primary source of data, and secondary is necessary.  For example, if you’re measuring ad messaging iterations for retargeting audiences on Meta, you’ll probably want to use Meta as the primary source of data. But there may be secondary requirements to check on site performance via GA or another analytics provider.  

Defining your strategy and maximise creative impact

At this stage you should have a pretty good view of your strategy, or at least the structure should be starting to develop into a coherent plan.  From here it’s just a process of building out and filling in the details.

If your business is reliant on one platform or marketing channel for success, it makes most sense to prioritise the requirements you’ve mapped out for this platform and evaluate how this fits within your campaign plan.    

The next thing you now need to focus on is understanding the intent of the audience and what messages they are most likely to be receptive to. Think carefully about this as this can often determine whether the whole objective is successful.

Imagine you’ve been shopping for a new pair of running trainers. You’ve done quite a lot of research and visited a website a few times over several days or weeks when trying to decide the best option for you; finally deciding that the Under Armour brand is for you. If you have generic trainer creative, or worse, a fashion trainer or generic footwear creative. The user is much less likely to re-engage with your ad over a handful of tailored creative options.  

During this journey you users could have been added to a variety of segments at various stages, then retargeted on platforms at various points of their journey. If you’re going to the effort to map this out, it makes most sense to market to them with the most relevant message at the most relevant time.

Using the Under Armour example above, when you perceive your audience has chosen a brand or trainer but not yet purchased, you could serve an instant ad experience on Meta with relevant products from the feed, an inspiration video or running / training exercises, and concise copy detailing benefits of the product and a shop now with discount code or free delivery; for example.

The same audience may also exist in other platforms e.g., Google Ads, where a specific campaign serves a product listing ad (PLA) and bids more aggressively when the audience is in search, especially for those brand / trainers keyword queries. 

A separate campaign may target them on Youtube with relevant brand / running creative (possibly the same as Meta) and PLA ads, and after they’ve made a purchase, the user could then be added into another audience and served other Under Armour branded running gear, assuming they may have a preference for the Under Armour brand. The last segment exists as a separate requirement in the document. Obviously this can get complicated, hence the documentation and process above.  

The only other consideration is how you manage the audiences, how frequently you want to market to them and when they should be removed from the audience groups.  Obviously you don’t want to pay to market to users who aren’t interested or worse, have already purchased the trainer you’ve just advertised to them. 

Maintaining audiences should be carefully considered, and finding the sweet spot will be different for your business than any of your competitors, not that you can see their set up. So focus on the objectives and start small. You can always build out more complex audiences and comms strategies as you progress. When you get a grip on the audiences you have built, you can create rules to control how users move in and out of groups based on perceived value. 

Activation channels and testing

If you’ve come this far, you should have a list of retargeting requirements and consumer touch points, a list of audiences and details of the audience criteria, and plan for ad copy and creative messaging iterations for each requirement and audience. You’re pretty much ready to go.  The final step is building this activity into your campaign plan and allocating budgets and mapping the objectives into targets to measure efficiency. 

Once you have the campaign plan and lines of activity you can build the campaigns within the selected platforms, making sure you only apply the required audiences and creatives for each line of activity. 

This may sound daunting at first, but start small with clearly defined requirements and objectives and as you test and learn, your plans will grow. Remember to revisit the version one document in six months to see how far you’ve progressed. 

Other useful tips for successful remarketing campaigns

• Build meaningful UTM parameters for your marketing activity. This will help you better define audiences and measure in analytics. 
• Get creative with creative, not everybody will respond to the same cues. Subtle changes can make the difference. You can apply different UTMs here as well. 
• Don’t be too specific when defining and building your audiences to start with. Unless you generate huge volumes of traffic to your site, you will likely put a lot of time and effort into creating audiences that won’t be large enough to serve.
• Prioritise areas you think will have the largest lift on conversion rate or ATV (average transaction value).
• You can also combine this with A/B testing landing pages and ad creatives.

If you need help defining your audiences and pulling together a remarketing plan, we’re here to help. Our paid ad managers have decades of experience crafting retargeting campaigns for businesses across multiple industries.