5 Undisputed Ways To Optimize Your Retargeting Campaigns

There's nothing more disheartening than seeing a potential buyer explore your website, click add to cart, but then jump off for no reason. It happens. Now, retargeting works, but to make interested buyers hit the "check out" button, you have to optimize your retargeting campaigns properly.

As I said, retargeting works, but it has an equal opportunity to succeed or fail depending on the tactics used to create, execute, and follow-up on the campaign.

You can create and deliver specific messaging related to a buyer's previous actions like cart abandonment, a past purchase, or simply a landing page visit with retargeting.

According to ReadyCloud, visitors are 70% likelier to convert when clicking on retargeting ads.

The stat above is excellent news, but lead conversion will not happen without a highly optimized retargeting campaign.

In today's article, I will share proven techniques on how to optimize your retargeting campaign successfully.

How To Optimize Successful Retargeting Campaigns

In this post, I define a successful retargeting campaign as one in which a visitor becomes a customer within the campaign's timeframe. Here are five things to do to optimize your retargeting campaigns:

1. Modify The Retargeting Campaign To Related Products

The goal of retargeting campaigns is to follow potential buyers until they convert to buy a product or service. Keeping users as customers means modifying the offer to solve their problem.

For example, suppose a customer just purchased an iPhone 11 Pro Max. In that case, they don't need to see another iPhone ad following them around.

Promoting the same product can cause buyer remorse at the feature or functionality level or make buyers believe they could get the product for a lower price if they had waited a little longer. Now, if they see a compatible Apple Watch or AirPods promoted, they will be much more likely to convert.

According to a dynamic retargeting product beta-study by Google:

Beta clients across multiple verticals reported a 2x increase in conversion rates and 60% reduction in CPA, on average, when they added dynamic ads to their remarketing campaigns.

This study proves the relevance of product suggestions among the customers that converted.

2. Stop Asking The Same Question

Customers get annoyed by sales because the salespeople throw the same offer, but no new information.

Keeping a current customer on a retargeting campaign without an updated offer means one of two things about your business: 

• You don't know your customers; or
• You don't care about your customers at all.

You must have flawless customer service associated with a purchase during the first few weeks. Make sure your customers know and feel how much you value their business by not making irrelevant offers.

3. Brand Relationship Is Vital

Your brand must maintain a level of preference in platforms where it promotes itself.

When a successful retargeting campaign ends, it is essential to evaluate whether the customer’s opportunity can be increased or whether another platform would have better success.

Retargeting is a fairly automatic process; the purchase history must make sense to the user, even if on a subconscious level.

4. Retargeting Specific URL Visits

Many things can go wrong with retargeting, and many digital marketers still continuously commit these mistakes.

Marketers boost Facebook or Google Ads and run a retargeting campaign based on website visits in the past 90 days. While that's acceptable, I don't see it as the best strategy.

Retargeting based on specific URL visits works better. It's one of the best retargeting methods.

So how do you do it? There are two platforms I recommend: Google and Facebook.

For this example, I choose Facebook Ads since it's one of the most popular platforms to run retargeting campaigns. I also find much greater success on Facebook over display ads on Google Ads.

5. Lead Gen Ads Based On Page Engagement

This strategy might be your best bet if you aren't getting results with website-based retargeting campaigns.

Facebook has a new lead generation form called "Instant Form," which I think is very powerful.

According to Facebook,

An Instant Form is the form used in a lead generation campaign to obtain information from the people you reach via your ads. Using an Instant Form allows you to collect contact information from people who may be interested in your business or service without requiring those people to leave Facebook or Instagram.

Facebook's Instant Form is one of the smartest, natural-looking forms you can create.

3 Important Questions To Ask To Optimize Failed Retargeting Campaigns

I define retargeting failure as a campaign that failed to convert the user to a customer in the campaign's allotted time.

Here are three questions to ask yourself to fix a retargeting campaign that failed.

1. Did I Scare Users Away By How Long I Ran My Campaign?

Like the successful retargeting campaign that continuously followed users around with an identical product, blasting users who show interest in your offer will not turn them into paying customers.

If anything, they will go to a competitor for the product you could have provided them.

To avoid this remarketing mistake, do the following:

• Enable frequency capping on all campaigns.
• The length of campaigns must fall within industry standards. It can range from one to three months, with up to three ad views per day.

However, there will always be exceptions to every rule. Each retargeting campaign should be strategically put together with a clear goal to capture a customer and the sensitivity to advertising in your industry.

2. Did You Destroy User Experience With A Senseless Platform?

This happens a lot!

While browsing on our favorite website, a completely irrelevant ad shows up out of nowhere.

It breaks our engagement of the website, and it makes us question what the advertiser is thinking. Customers don't want to see fast food ads while browsing a weight loss website.

Even if the user showed a little interest in the product being advertised, it makes no sense to follow them onto non-relevant platforms.

3. Are You Targeting Users That Can Convert, Or Spread Word Of Mouth?

One of the biggest puzzles advertisers try to solve in their retargeting campaigns is filtering unnecessary impressions like users who are not likely to convert.

The danger of retargeting is that the default includes all IPs (Internet Protocol Address) that engage with your brand. That does not include those who are willing to spend instead of usual bystanders.

There is an inherent income disparity in the Internet population. Even though most buyers are on the Internet, a premium product likely only cares about those in specific income brackets or age brackets.

Remember that retargeting is behavior-based, but someone who wants the latest MacBook may not be able to afford it. Blasting a student with ads who wants their first meaningful laptop is a waste of spend.

Targeting users looking to spend on their next laptop with a purchase window of 1 to months is a significant target.

And those are the undisputed ways on how to optimize your retargeting campaigns!

Check out the recommended resource section below to learn more about retargeting optimization. 

So what do you think about this article? Are you ready to optimize your retargeting campaigns?

Leave a comment below, and let's discuss.

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