5 Ways Remarketing Can Benefit Your Business

When done correctly, remarketing lets you tastefully follow up with your target audience and create valuable touchpoints to turn passive site visitors into real customers.

Time and again, our team has seen remarketing efforts produce impressive results for our clients. When done right, it can be a highly effective method for boosting sales and growing your customer base.

Not sure how it works? Pretend you’re walking around a shopping mall.

In the window, you see a nice sweater that catches your eye. You check out the price tag. You feel the fabric. But you’re not sure you’re ready to lay your credit card down.

You decide to keep walking around. As you’re heading towards the exit, you pass by the sweater again. You’ve had some time to think about it since you saw it the first time, and you decide to buy.

That’s essentially how remarketing works, except online.

Below, we break down what you need to know to use remarketing effectively, with help from HawkSEM Senior Paid Social Manager Jordan Flask.

Whether you’re new to remarketing or just need a refresher on what it looks like in today’s digital landscape, this is your go-to guide.

What is remarketing?

Remarketing is a method of re-engaging with potential or existing customers by connecting your product or service with people who have already visited your site or mobile app.

“Remarketing is basically re-engaging people who’ve already interacted with your brand,” explains Flask.

“Like sending an email to someone who left something in their cart or targeting past customers with a special offer. It’s all about bringing warm leads back and turning interest into action.”

Remarketing vs. retargeting

Some marketers use the term “remarketing” interchangeably with “retargeting.” While the terms can be used interchangeably, they have slightly different meanings.

Retargeting is more about leveraging online ads as a way to target those who have interacted with your website without making a purchase.

Put another way, remarketing is typically based on email campaign lists and CRM data. Retargeting, on the other hand, is based on pixel data, most often from unknown potential customers.

Remarketing can be done using search ad platforms like Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising as well as social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Google and Microsoft also offer remarketing lists for search ads, or RLSAs. (We’ll dig more into the types below.)

These vary from traditional remarketing, since they require users to be actively searching Google with the campaign keywords you’re bidding on.

Further reading: Remarketing vs Retargeting: Are They the Same or Different?

What are the types of remarketing?

There are multiple types of remarketing you can explore. These include:

• Paid search or PPC – This type of remarketing is featured in the ad results on search engine results pages (SERPs) that link to a landing page. In Google Ads, these are the RLSAs we mentioned above.
• Display – Similar to PPC marketing, display remarketing ads follow users via visual ads on third-party websites. Display remarketing generally sees higher conversion rates than other types.
• Email – This type of email marketing involves sending email missives to those who have signed up for your list, abandoned their shopping carts on a product page, or have completed a purchase in the past and may be interested in a similar or complementary product.
• Video – No surprise here: video remarketing works similarly to display, just with a video-based ad on a platform such as YouTube.
• Social media – This type of social media marketing targets your audience via social advertising platforms such as Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, and the like.
• Dynamic – Dynamic remarketing may offer the most personalized ads of the bunch.

How remarketing has evolved

In the last few years, big-name tech brands have made some changes affecting user privacy, and remarketing and retargeting ads as a result.

Between Google’s plan to phase out third-party cookies on Chrome (which they’ve since scrapped for the time being) and data tracking updates from Apple and Android, marketers have had to get creative when it comes to pinpointing who to target with these marketing efforts.

“I’d say one of the biggest changes is the cost,” Flask says.

“Competition has really ramped up in recent years as more advertisers jump onto social platforms, especially with AI making it easier to create and scale campaigns. It’s made remarketing more competitive and often more expensive than it used to be.”

The good news: There are things online advertising pros can do to mitigate whatever changes may be on the horizon.

These include:

• Verifying your domain and leveraging Facebook’s aggregated event measurement tool
• Implementing the Facebook Conversions API and server-side tracking solutions
• Pivoting your strategies by reviewing placement data and comparing attributions in Google Analytics

Still, a remarketing strategy can be a highly effective tool for multiple industries and verticals — not just ecommerce.

As Mailchimp explains, your audience often needs to feel like they know you first. With that in mind, here are just a few ways remarketing can benefit your business.

Further reading: Retail SEO: 6 Pro Tips to Create a Winning Strategy (+ Costs)

With the magic of remarketing, you can stay top of mind. (Image: Unsplash)

Top 5 remarketing benefits

Years of experience have taught us that remarketing is certainly worth a spot in your multi-prong digital marketing strategy. Below, we lay out just a few reasons why.

1. It keeps you top of mind

As frustrating as it can be, there are plenty of reasons why people navigate to your website without converting — through no fault of your own.

Maybe they got distracted, were just casually browsing their options, or wanted to take their time before making a decision.

With the magic of remarketing, you can remind people about their past interest through these targeted ads, particularly if they’re searching for similar offerings again.

2. It ups your chances of converting a lead

If someone found their way to your site or app and was exposed to your brand, you’ve already overcome the big business hurdle of connecting with your audience.

Through remarketing, you can increase your chances of turning that warm lead into a closed deal. It offers that nudge they need to further pursue what they were looking for from you in the first place.

Not only do these ad types remind users about you, but they can be programmed to take the user directly back to the page they bounced from.

If they last visited your pricing page, for example, then the remarketing ad can route them back there once they click.

The result: a seamless experience that tees them up to convert.

3. It allows you to hyper-focus your ads

One big benefit of remarketing ads is how they directly target those who have taken various actions to express interest in a specific product or service.

“I think the biggest benefit is the control it gives you over your audience,” says Flask.

“You can specifically target people who’ve already engaged with your website or brand (especially those further down the marketing funnel) so you’re reaching people most likely to take the actions you want and hit your goals.”

According to Google, you can create various remarketing lists that apply to specific cases, such as those who added something to their cart but didn’t check out.

After all, who doesn’t love scoring a good old-fashioned deal? You can create remarketing ads that offer a special discount to a segment of users who have completed certain interactions with you.

This way, the prospect has even more incentive to return to your site.

By targeting people who have already shown interest in what you have to offer (making them more qualified), you spend less than you would if you were starting from scratch and casting a wider net. (Image: Unsplash)

4. It lets you leverage mobile and video

Another thing that sets remarketing apart: reach. With these ad types, you’re not just limited to the web. You can reach people browsing more than 2 million websites and apps via multiple devices.

Consider targeting past website visitors on YouTube (or people who have watched your videos on YouTube) with video or display ads as they watch other videos or browse other sites.

You can also use things like text and images in your remarketing ads themselves on the Google Display Network. You can implement these strategies across Facebook, too.

5. It can save you money

Cha-ching! That’s the sound of saving money with remarketing ads.

Retargeting is cost-effective because these audience members are often more likely to convert. As a result, they provide a higher return on investment (ROI) compared to prospecting audiences.

That said, because the audience pools are way smaller, it can drive up the CPM (cost per mille, where you pay a certain price for every 1,000 impressions), which can make them a more expensive audience.

For example, cost per click (CPC) rates when retargeting on Facebook are usually higher. However, it’s usually worth the extra cost per click because conversion rates are so strong.

It makes sense: By targeting people who have already shown interest in what you have to offer (making them more qualified), you spend less than you would if you were starting from scratch and casting a wider net.

Get started with remarketing

Now that you know all the advantages of using remarketing, you can start making this digital marketing tactic work for you.

To remarket on Google, you first need to create a remarketing audience and then choose a support campaign type: display or search.

For display remarketing, you need to choose a marketing objective or goal, such as increased brand awareness, consideration, or conversions. From there, you can create an ad group.

Expand the “Audiences” area of “People: who you want to reach.” Then, select the remarketing lists you want to target under the “Remarketing” audience.

For search ad campaigns, the process is similar. You manage the target audience of your ad by selecting your remarketing campaign, then adding your remarketing audience list to the ad groups you choose.

From there, you can choose your audience targeting setting for the selected ad groups.

Pro tip: If you don’t have a remarketing list created, you can use the retargeting audiences Google Ads automatically creates for you.

For paid search remarketing on Microsoft Advertising’s Bing search engine, start by placing a Universal Event Tracking (UET) tag across your site. You can then create remarketing lists based on user activity and visited pages.

Similarly to Google, you associate your remarketing lists with ad groups, then optimize to fit your Bing audience accordingly.

What to avoid when it comes to remarketing

Ready to go all in on remarketing? Just make sure you’ve covered all your bases first — and worked to avoid common drawbacks.

“One thing to watch out for is having too small an audience,” explains Flask.

“It can drive up frequency, which usually lowers engagement and conversion rates. It’s important to keep adding new people to your remarketing pool so it’s always growing and staying fresh.”

She adds that a potential drawback is that it may not align with your specific marketing goal.

“The main drawback is if your goal is brand awareness and reaching new audiences,” Flask says.

“Remarketing focuses on people who already know your brand, so it’s not the best choice for spreading the word to unfamiliar users. For that, targeting cold prospecting audiences is a better approach.”

Pro tip: Flask says it’s important to keep testing new remarketing audiences. If your initial list is too narrow, don’t give up on remarketing altogether. Rather, focus on building your customer base through brand awareness. “Once you have a broader audience,” she says, “come back to remarketing to get the most out of it.”

The takeaway

People understand that ads are just part of the package when it comes to being online.

By meeting interested users at the right time with the right messaging, you can turn that reminder into a click.

That can lead to a conversion, which will, ideally, become a happy customer and brand evangelist down the line.

See how HawkSEM can put remarketing to work for your company by requesting a consultation.

This article has been updated and was originally published in October 2019.