Targeting your ads to a specific target audience saves money and provides high ROMI = return on marketing investment. But what is retargeting?

Let’s start from the general definition. Retargeting is a form of marketing in which you target users who have previously visited your website using web-based ads aimed specifically at them. In order to be able to serve ads to people who have visited your site, it is necessary to place a cookie on the user’s browser when he visits your site. Retargeting allows that you can target users with ads who have showed interested in your product or service.

Besides the conventional definition, today retargeting includes much more, as we are about to see below.

Search Retargeting With search retargeting you can show display ads to people who have searched in the recent past for your target keywords.

Site Retargeting With site retargeting you can show display ads to people who have recently visited your website.  Social Retargeting  With social media networks, the words targeting and retargeting are often used interchangeably. There are numerous targeting and retargeting options in the leading social networks.

 Did you know that if you have a person’s email address or phone number, you can use this to show ads to people (retarget) in VK, Odnoklassniki and Facebook? Unfortunately, Twitter and Linkedin do not provide the possibility yet to target users with ads based on email address or phone number.

This provides a huge opportunity to target exactly the people you want to reach. Let’s look at some actual cases below.

REAL CASE A: Hotel chain looking to convert previous customers to regular customers

A hotel chain collected, among other information, the email addresses and phone numbers of people who stayed at the hotel. Based on the sales reporting and market research implemented, the rebooking rates were extremely low, due to low brand recognition. At the same time, the past customers were giving high ratings for satisfaction and general impression of the stay.

The hotel decided to retarget ads to the past customers based on their email address and phone number in VK and Facebook. The idea of the ads was to remind people that they stayed in the hotel and offer a value-added deal to the past customers. This resulted in a vast increase of re-bookings and the company decided to implement a continuous retargeting campaign for all past customers.

REAL CASE B: Business association sending a mass mailing to its CRM database

A business association sent a mass mailing invitation for an event to its CRM database of 10,000 contacts who have signed up to receive information. The opening rate of the mass mailing was pretty good, close to 20%, but sign-up rates for the event were low. Based on the email statistics, the business association could see the email addresses of persons who opened the email. People who opened and read the information can be considered to be potentially interested. What did the business association do to obtain more sign ups for the upcoming event?

The business association took the email addresses of people who opened the email and retargeted exactly these same people in social networks (VK, Odnoklassniki, Facebook) with relevant ads on the same event. This resulted in filling most of the event seats via the retargeting campaign.

Conclusions  High precision retargeting is an extremely effective way of converting potential clients to paying customers! Don’t waste your money – target and retarget your online ad campaign and achieve a high return on marketing investment.