Getting traffic to your website is hard.
You need to:
- Understand your audience;
- Understand the platform you're advertising on;
- Craft offers that solve their problems;
- And develop creative materials that will help you stand out from the crowd.
And even after you do all this work, there’s still one small problem….
Not everyone is ready to buy when they land on your web page.
On average, 96% of people will leave your website and never return again.
So at any given moment, only 4% of users are ready to convert.
If you don’t have a plan to retain those people, then you’re losing out on a lot of money.
Now, luckily, there’s a strategy that allows you to bring those users back.
That strategy is called retargeting.
What is Retargeting?
Have you ever wanted to buy something online and then abandoned your cart? That’s completely normal when you’re shopping online.
Most of the time, we're not even looking to buy anything. We just want to see the options that are out there.
Now, have you noticed that depending on the website you use, the minute you leave, you start seeing ads of the exact same product you were looking at, all over the place?
You're scrolling Facebook, and all of a sudden it pops up on your newsfeed.
You’re on Instagram story, and the next story that shows up is the product.
You're browsing the web at random and see it once again on the side of a website.
These ads start following you around!
Most of these ads don't disappear overnight either.
You’ll keep seeing them for a couple of weeks until you either buy or they disappear.
In a nutshell, that's retargeting.
You are showing display ads to people that have already visited your website.
In a sense, you’re following them around the internet.
Now, doing something like this may sound like rocket science, but it’s quite easy.
All you need to do is place a small (and safe) piece of code on your website.
Visitors won’t even notice it, and it doesn’t affect your site in any way either.
This code drops a cookie on the visitor's web browser, and once they start using the internet, your retargeting provider will know which ads to show them.
Why do retargeting?
Now you might be skeptical of “following people” around the web.
We know this sounds weird and “stalkerish” in a sense.
And if they didn’t buy in the first place, why would they want to buy after we keep “chasing” them?
Here’s why retargeting works and why you should do it:
You’re reaching out to warm prospects: When advertising, it’s always hard to convert cold traffic. You’re reaching out people out of the blue to collect their contact information. In a way, that’s like cold-calling on the internet (and everybody hates cold calls!) However, have you ever noticed how it’s much easier to contact people who have already shown some level of interest in what you have to offer? Think about referral leads. Talking to them is always easy. Now, imagine the same scenario on the internet. In this case, it’s the people who already visited your website, so when you set up retargeting ads, you're reaching out to prospects who interacted with you before.
It increases brand awareness: there’s an age-old saying that goes something like this: it takes seven points of contact for someone to build enough trust for people to work with you. And retargeting is a way to do just that. While your prospects might not buy the first or second time, if they have a genuine interest in what you offer and see your messages enough times, they’ll eventually want to reach out and learn more about you.
You get valuable feedback: Once you set up your ads install analytics, you’ll have tons of data that will help you understand your prospects and make better decisions in your business. It’ll serve as a roadmap for future campaigns and allow you to know which messages work best and how many points of contact are required to generate a lead.
It costs less: When advertising to cold traffic, you spend a ton of money to get people to come to your website, and most of them leave. That means you paid for a single interaction and have no more chances to reach out to them again. Retargeting is the perfect solution to this problem. Sure, you could have paid for one interaction, but now you can keep up with the “lost lead,” and they’ll keep seeing your message. To make things even better, you can pay when that person clicks your retargeting ad. That way, you’ll only spend money when they enter your website again.
The psychology of retargeting
When it comes to creating a great at the most important thing is the strategy.
You need to know what goes on in the minds of your prospects before, during, and after they interact with your ad.
The cool thing about retargeting is that, unlike most advertising, where you can’t assume that people already know you, people who see a retargeted ad know precisely who you are.
While showing your ads again to people who landed on your website may work. The magic of this method is being able to personalize your ads based on the pages they visited and the actions they took.
Here are the strategies we think work best with this method:
Behavior-Based Retargeting:
The reason why most people abandon a web page is that they didn't find what they were looking for. The most common challenge is segmenting people who are most likely to buy and visited your website. If they went on your site and didn’t engage, then they probably won’t buy anything from you.
However, if they skimmed your website and clicked on other pages, that’s a sign that they were interested in learning more about what you had to offer. They just need a little nudge and are very likely to convert if we advertise to them again.
Page Segmentation Retargeting:
When someone lands on a page and stays there for a while, they know what they’re looking for. The question is whether you can fulfill their needs or not. As a real estate agent, you probably have separate pages with each service that you offer. The people who use those services tend to have a similar point of view. The beauty of retargeting is that you can show your ads to all these people who think alike.
If you offer multiple services, we recommend you create a different retargeting ad for each one. That way you can group users based on what they’re looking to buy and personalize your message according to their needs.
Best Retargeting Platforms
While there are plenty of platforms that you can advertise on here are the three we recommend you start out with:
Google Display Retargeting: your ads will show on websites that are part of the display network. As your prospect is browsing the web, they can come across your ad on a site they are using.
Facebook: Although there are many ways to advertise on focus, we recommend you only focus on advertising in the newsfeed. That’s usually where people’s attention is at the most on the platform. So as someone is scrolling through Facebook, they’ll see your retargeted ad right in front of them
Instagram: Similar to Facebook, we only recommend you advertise in the stories section. People who are browsing their Instagram newsfeed are quick to ignore your ad. The great thing about stories is that it takes up your whole screen when it shows up. Users are also really concentrated and engaged with them too.
Retargeting Best Practices
Always keep testing: The foundation of direct response is that you always keep testing and optimizing your ads. The most common problem is that agents try to implement retargeting ads and only run them a couple of times. When they don't get the results they were expecting, they're quick to give up.
Just know that when times get tough, with enough testing, you can turn things around. Here are the things we recommend you test on every ad:
- Headlines
- Body copy
- Offers
- Design
Combine multiple channels: They say that one is the most dangerous number in business and we think the same thing about retargeting ads. While you want to test, optimize, and extract the most out of any given platform, never restrict yourself to just one. We've given you three different examples you can try out. Combining multiple channels is also great for brand awareness. If people are senior ads on websites and social media, you slowly becoming a part of their daily lives and positioning yourself as a person of trust and authority.
Don’t annoy people: While we tell people to spread their message across multiple platforms, we're not advocating you to bombard them either. There's a limit to how much an ad will work. It's no coincidence that you see different ads on TV, radio, etc. all the time. That’s because if you keep saying the same thing over and over again for too long, people will either get bored or downright annoyed. Therefore, try not to show your message more than 10 times to the same person.
Conclusion
And there you have it…
I'm sure you’ve wondered how difficult it must be to copy what the “big companies” do.
But as you can see, it’s a relatively easy process if you have the basics down.
When you retarget and have ads following your customers around, at a certain point, they’re bound to give in.
The first step is to either segment people based on their behavior or the pages they visited (or both).
Then, we recommend you focus on the top 3 retargeting platforms (Facebook, Google, and Instagram) since these will be the ones where you’ll get the most traction.
And finally, if you follow the best practices we’ve laid out, you should be able to get a better return on your ad spend, while attracting higher quality leads as well.
