8 best practices to launch ultra-effective retargeting campaigns

23
February
2022
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8
min
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You may have already set up programmatic advertising campaigns to drive traffic to your website.

But do you make sure that you convert the audience that only visited your pages, thanks to an effective retargeting strategy? 

Retargeting is often seen by marketers as an intrusive, “push” advertising method. However, it’s possible to launch clever retargeting campaigns, by applying the best practices of Smart Retargeting

“Retargeting is a particularly important topic for Gamned!. We take great care to avoid overloading prospects with messages that could potentially have the opposite effect to the one we intended. The key for us is to be regularly present during the user’s web browsing without being intrusive. I tend to prefer 10 conversions from prospects that weren’t overloaded with banners to 15 conversions that flooded them with banners.” - François Madelin - Head of Customer Success


In this article, discover 8 of those best practices, and launch truly effective campaigns that will convert your audience while maintaining your brand image.


Best practice #1: Segment your audience according to its navigation

In order to adopt a retargeting strategy adapted to your visitors’ profile, make sure you segment your audience according to their navigation on your website. 

To do so, you need to create the finest possible (while still sufficiently large) audience segments, based on several criteria: 

  • Which pages have these audiences visited?
  • How often did these visits take place?
  • How recent are they?

First, you’ll be able to segment this audience according to whether they are… 

  • Cold prospects: those who only visited your homepage
  • Warm prospects: those who visited your category pages
  • Hot prospects: those who visited your product pages
  • High engaged prospects: those who abandoned your conversion tunnel

Then, add to those segments notions of frequency and recency of visits. For instance, a cold prospect who has visited your homepage several times, the last visit being an hour ago, will deserve to be treated as a highly engaged prospect.

Also don’t forget to exclude the users you have already converted, to address only your “useful targets” in your remarketing campaign. Moreover, if it’s relevant to your industry (for instance, in the cosmetics or consumer goods industry), you can consider retargeting these buyers a few months later, to offer them to buy their products again.

This super-segmented targeting method will help you set up a personalized marketing strategy for each type of audience - which will boost your click-through rates and conversion rates.


Best practice #2: Script your messages according to your audience segments

Once your segmentation and targeting have been finely tuned, it’s time to script the messages you send to your potential customers. 

The idea is to diversify these messages according to how engaged your targets are towards your brand. Doing so, you focus as much as possible on the targets that are the most ready to be converted. 

Thus, depending on your segment, you can opt for a rather generic message (for your coldest prospects), or for a message that is personalized as finely as possible (for your engaged and highly engaged prospects).


Best practice #3: Use DCO on the targets that are the most likely to be converted

DCO, which stands for Dynamic Content Optimization, is a tool that enables you to automatically create dynamic, ultra-personalized banners depending on the browsing profile of your targets.

To maximize your ads’ effectiveness, deploy this tool on retargeting campaigns that target your most engaged audiences. As they are the ones that are most likely to convert, they deserve highly-personalized advertising messages.

For example, DCO can help you automatically include the last product a visitor looked at on your website in one of your banners. Thus, you broadcast a highly personalized and attractive banner. 

Note that, to deploy DCO, you will need to set up a product feed on your website. To do so, you can use tools such as Lengow, Channable, Appvizer or Productsup.


Best practice #4: Control your campaigns’ capping

One of the major cons often associated with retargeting is its tendency, when it is poorly controlled, to over-address the target-audience of the campaign. Advertisers are afraid that their campaign will be pushed too much to their audiences, creating weariness towards the brand.

That’s why it’s essential to monitor the repetition of your message (its capping) by audience segment, to end up with the right advertising pressure. By doing so, you’ll also get the best possible return on investment.

Also beware of multiple displays of the same ad on the same page: these can be very intrusive. Therefore, think about defining a capping in terms of maximum number of impressions per user and per minute.

Best practice #5: Deploy your advertising budget wisely

The more your targeting segment is engaged towards your brand, the more it’s relevant to deploy an important budget on it. Indeed, those are the segments that are most likely to convert, thus generating more additional revenue. 

That’s why it’s important to set your advertising campaign’s budgets according to this target engagement, to streamline your media buying

Best practice #6: Make sure your advertising environment is brandsafe

You surely want your retargeting ads to be broadcasted in web locations that are in line with your brand image. To do so, don’t forget to set up block lists, which allow you to exclude certain types of websites from your campaign’s framework.

Best practice #7: Think multi-device 

If this is not your first digital marketing campaign, you may already know that 71% of the buying journey is initiated on mobile devices, and that desktop, mobile and tablet are all involved in 2 out of 3 online buying journeys. 

These figures should motivate you to make sure… 

  • Your website and landing pages are responsive, i.e. that they adapt perfectly to all screen sizes, whatever the device they’re being visited upon
  • Your conversion path is mobile-friendly, and guarantees a good transformation rate

In short, a mobile-friendly environment is crucial to reach an increasingly mobile audience!

Also, be careful to orchestrate your retargeting plan depending on your broadcasting environment, and on the ability to track your visitors in such environments. Use a browser cookie on desktop and webmobile. 

Retargeting can also be made on in-app audiences using the appropriate tools (an SDK, Google, Amazon or Facebook).


Best practice #8: Measure your retargeting ad campaigns performance to optimize it

The last, but not the least key to success for your retargeting campaigns is measuring the performance of your advertising strategy. Not only will this regular reporting allow you to monitor the impact of your media investment - it will also help you identify optimization avenues to better manage your campaigns.

So make sure you set up the right key metrics to analyze your retargeting campaign performance. In a traditional remarketing campaign, you’ll focus on… 

  • The volume of purchases made (or leads generated) on the site: don’t forget to deduct your budget, to obtain an acquisition cost.
  • The qualification of those purchases, by analyzing the average basket, and comparing it to that of other methods, or of your website as a whole.
  • The ROI of your campaign: on this particular point, be careful to monitor the rate of new customers generated by the campaigns, to ensure that they are fulfilling their conquest goal.

When conducting these measurements, remember to exclude users who have been converted by your retargeting strategy to avoid overpressuring the customer, with a message that would become obsolete. 

Finally, make sure you regularly do A/B testing, to measure your incremental conversion rate.

Want to launch Smart Retargeting campaigns, which apply all these best practices, with the support of a programmatic advertising specialist? Contact Gamned! now, and put your campaign in the hands of experts.

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