How to Effectively Execute A Remarketing Strategy

2022.10.17 09:37 PM By Joshua Taddeo, Principal Consultant
executing marketing strategy meeting

retargeting strategy is an essential piece of your media plan. With retargeting, you can deliver online ads to a user based on their previous intent-based actions on the web. It’s an important tactic for moving users down the funnel to conversion or another desired action. To create a really successful retargeting strategy, you’ll want to include remarketing as part of your multi-step media plan that uses different channels and messaging to achieve your campaign goals. We’ll cover what remarketing is and how to develop a strategy to get more out of your ad campaigns. 

What is Remarketing

Remarketing is the process of targeting customers that already visited your site or showed interest in your products. These visitors browse your website but don’t follow through with converting. Remarketing is a digital marketing strategy that provides you with the opportunity to bring these leads back to your website and turn them into conversions. With remarketing, you can retarget your ads for different types of conversions. But converting doesn’t always mean sales.

For example, you can remarket to people for other convertible actions, like subscribing to an email list or filling out a form for an event. Remarketing helps you get your audience’s interest back no matter where they are in the conversion funnel. You can create personalized pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaigns or emails that get your audience to come back to your page and consider converting.

Paid Social Media Remarketing Strategy

Social media platforms offer a variety of retargeting options. We’ve listed them below to help you design your paid social retargeting campaign.

Facebook & Instagram retargeting

Here’s how you can run remarketing on Facebook and Instagram:

  • Contact list: Uses data from your CRM system or customer contact list to connect with these customers on Facebook or Instagram.
  • Website visitors: Inserts the Facebook pixel (similar to the JavaScript code mentioned earlier) to create a custom audience based on people who have visited your site. The website traffic data can be used to show people ads for things they’ve demonstrated interest in on your website.
  • App users: Use the Facebook pixel to target people who use your app to inspire them to return to a game or view items they may be interested in purchasing.
  • Dynamic Ads. They can be used to promote products to people who have already expressed interest in your website or app. You just need to upload your product catalog to Facebook or Instagram and set up the campaign once. It will work continuously to find the right people for each product and remind them of items they viewed but didn’t buy.
research and planning for remarketing

Twitter retargeting

Here are ways to retarget on Twitter: 

  • Lists. They can be used to target relevant influencers based on emails of current customers or Twitter names.
  • Web. Target people that have visited your site using the Twitter website tag or Twitter’s Official Partner Program.
  • Mobile apps. Reach groups of people that have taken action inside your mobile app, such as an install or sign up, using conversion tracking.

LinkedIn retargeting

LinkedIn is perfect for B2B companies looking to target other businesses, especially with specific job titles, industries, and even company sizes. They offer website retargeting, allowing you to segment website visitors based on pages they visit on your site. It tailors the ad content to the visitor you wish to reactivate. It also assists in helping to convert more prospects by guiding them along the buyer journey.

remarketing

YouTube retargeting

YouTube is the second largest search engine and allows advertisers to perform video remarketing. It reaches viewers based on their past interactions with your videos, TrueView ads, or YouTube channel.

Pinterest retargeting

Pinterest is perfect for shoppers who love to use Pinterest for visual ideas such as home decor, clothing, kitchen, and more. They offer engagement retargeting, and it reaches pinners who have interacted with your Pinterest campaigns in the past with personalized content. You can create an audience based on pin clicks, comments, saves, close-ups, or based on their interest in a specific pin.

Examples of Effective Retargeting Strategies

Retargeting ads have many uses, from helping you advertise to people who have previously visited your website but haven’t yet made a purchase to helping you increase sales from returning customers. They are an effective way to keep leads, as well as potential and existing customers, interested in your products so you can maximize your marketing efforts. Here are some examples of retargeting: 

Kelly Blue Book

The KBB is a service that keeps track of the prices of various vehicles in various conditions as an aid for those looking to purchase a new or used vehicle. When users click on the KBB site, they can browse categories of cars, specific vehicles within the category, and specific aspects of the vehicle to read about their quality and reviews. KBB harvests this data and will run targeted ads on Twitter and Facebook later, promoting specific concerns about specific vehicles to the users known to be interested in those specific topics. 

implementing a retargeting strategy

Expedia

As one of many global travel agencies, Expedia wants to capture as much traffic as they can from those people looking for travel accommodations. Whenever you check their site, they’re recording information about your intent, including destination and time frame. In particular, they like to retarget people looking for last-minute tickets and will find deals to extend to those people. Do a little browsing and leave, and you’re fairly certain to see deals for your getaway show up on Facebook within the week.

Spotify

By using traditional display remarketing, Spotify gets to reach people who browse other websites across the globe. Furthermore, the platform includes promotions during their remarketing. When customers click the CTA button, they get the three free months of Spotify Premium. It’s a compelling offer for regular users who have not upgraded to the premium plan. What’s more, the free trial lowers the burden that comes with paying for the Spotify premium plan.

Remarketing Best Practices

Now let’s review some best practices for testing and improving your remarketing performance.

Invest in Audience Segmentation

For remarketing campaigns with significant audience sizes, it’s helpful to segment your audience. Segmenting your audience allows your team to create hyper-targeted campaigns for specific users, which can make your ads stand out. As an example, if your company operates globally, you may segment your audience by location. Now, you can create personalized ads that highlight the user’s location, as well as address location-specific concerns or unique selling points (USPs). For instance, maybe you offer free international delivery.

In another scenario, your team may segment your audience to target users in different stages of the buying funnel. Users that spend a long time on the page receive purchase-focused ads, while users with a shorter time on a page get information-focused ads. With segmentation, you have dozens of options that you can use in your campaign.

Employ Omnichannel Targeting

Omnichannel targeting relates to the ability to attract and maintain consumers’ attention on the many devices they use. In essence, it is done by monitoring ever-changing consumer behavior and capitalizing on it. The goal is to engage customers with highly relevant and targeted messages on desktop, mobile apps, mobile web, and tablets. However, this may be easier said than done. 


There are many technological barriers involved in cross-device and cross-channel targeting. Tracking behavioral patterns across devices can be tricky, at best. Making use of intelligent targeting and ad-tech solutions can assist in maintaining the information that has led to both interest and potential purchases. 70% of retail industry senior executives have already adopted omnichannel strategies as a method to link consumer behavior with company websites, mobile devices, and social media platforms to create a seamless customer shopping experience. Have you?

Personalize Targeted Campaigns

If you launch and leave your campaign with the same copy, images, or video, you can bet that users will grow tired of your ads. That doesn’t translate to leads or revenue for your business, which is why you need to keep your ads fresh.

A few ways to make your ads exciting and new for users include:

  • Updating your ad copy on a routine basis
  • Changing your ad images (if advertising on the display network) regularly
  • Updating your ad videos

Depending on your ad strategy and audience, you may also decrease the membership duration of your audience. For example, you may limit membership to 365 days for members that showed high interest in your company or 30 days for users that demonstrated low interest.

audience targeting

Measure Results and Track Performance

Conversion tracking for remarketing is set up in the same way as standard AdWords campaigns; however, you should be aware that if you choose to import goals or e-commerce tracking from Analytics to be tracked as conversions in AdWords, they will not track View-through-conversions. This is limiting because remarketing tends to contribute to a strong level of View-through-conversions, and there will be no visibility of this if you choose to import goals or e-commerce tracking from Google Analytics to be tracked as AdWords conversions. Due to this, we recommend using a standard AdWords conversion tracking code for conversion tracking with remarketing.

A remarketing campaign, like any other advertising campaign, requires proactive management. Launching and leaving your campaigns can result in lackluster performance and results, which doesn’t help your business. For the best results, your team should check-in and review your campaign every week. As a part of these check-ins, you want to look at key data points, like your cost-per-click (CPC), number of impressions, CTR, and number of conversions. It’s also helpful to look at your cost-per-conversion because it’s an excellent way to demonstrate the value of your campaign to business leaders.

It’s also critical to look for trends, especially at the start of your campaign. You may notice, for example, that your ads earn dozens of clicks from mobile devices but zero conversions. In response, you exclude mobile devices from your ad campaign. While it may become challenging, it’s beneficial if your team comes away from each check-in with actionable recommendations for improving your campaign. Every detail, big or small, can influence the success of your remarketing campaign.

Perform Creative Testing

A must-follow remarketing best practice revolves around A/B testing. With A/B testing, your company experiments with different versions of ad copy, design, targeting, and more. You can use A/B testing for remarketing, as well as outside the advertising sphere. For example, if you launched a new contact page on your site, you could A/B test its design. Companies want to use A/B testing because it provides your team with the chance to improve your ads and their performance. Plus, you can learn valuable information about your audience, like what motivates them to act on your ad.

If you decide to A/B test, it’s essential for your company to test one change at a time. Testing multiple updates at once can result in a false positive, which doesn’t help your team when it comes to determining why a campaign, ad group, or ad performed well.

For example, if your team updates your ad copy and targeting, you won’t know whether your refined targeting or revised copy generated the changes you saw, like an increase in clicks or click-through rate (CTR).

That’s why it’s essential to test one change at a time.

If you have a large remarketing audience, your business can often determine the impact of a change fast. In comparison, a smaller audience will require additional time due to its size. No matter your audience size, it’s critical for your team to make changes and assessments with data.

creating a retargeting strategy plan

Apply Frequency Capping

This is possibly the most fundamental of all remarketing best practices. It’s the difference between lightly reminding audiences about your brand and stalking them until they hate you. You can find it in the Settings tab of your campaign, and you can set it at the campaign, ad group, or ad level. Choose whether to set it on monthly, weekly, or daily limits. When deciding what level to set your frequency capping at, you should consider how many remarketing campaigns you have or how many ad groups there are within your remarketing campaign if you only have one campaign.

Assuming you have multiple campaigns, I’d recommend around two impressions per week, per campaign. This means that if you have five campaigns and a user is a member of at least one list in all the campaigns, the maximum exposure they would receive is 14 impressions per week. This is quite high, but the likelihood is that not all users will be on a list within each campaign, so the average frequency will be less.

Once your campaigns have been running a while and you have significant data, you should review the reach and frequency data within the Dimensions tab. Here you can see how often visitors are served one of your remarketing ads and assess whether you think it’s too often and whether your frequency capping needs adjusting.

Is Your Remarketing Working?

With these seven remarketing best practices, your business can get the most from your remarketing campaign. Whether you’re looking to generate leads, revenue, or awareness, a remarketing campaign can help. If you need professional assistance with developing, launching, and managing your remarketing strategy, Universal Creative Solutions can help. We offer strategy consulting and marketing consulting to help you develop a clear plan on how to improve the effectiveness of your ads and bring in more high-quality leads. Schedule a consultation call with us today