Imagine being able to follow an online visitor after they leave your site to ensure that your brand is still visible to them irrespective of where else they go while browsing online. This is what re-targeting is all about. Essentially you embed a JavaScript tag at the bottom of your site so that if a visitor comes across your site online while browsing for purchase options but abandons your site, you are still able to display your brand messages on other sites they visit. The JavaScript tag creates a list of visitors to your site and places retargeting cookies in their browser to enable your brand messaging to follow them.

Re-targeting is a powerful way to keep your brand visible to potential buyers so that they will remember and come back to you when they are ready to make the purchase because your brand name remains top of mind as a result of being seen so many times. Research backs this fact with the high click through rates and conversions that have positively affected many brands’ bottom lines as a result.

Ideally you need to be able to segment your re-targeting based on what viewers were reading on your site before they abandoned their journey. For instance, if you are a travel site and someone specifically searches of budget hotels in Phuket, then you only re-target with that specific information so that it will serve as a reminder of what they wanted in the first place while also connecting it with your brand.

The timeliness of re-targeting also matters. Depending on what they were searching for, you could either adopt an immediate or periodical re-targeting strategy. People looking for consumer items or travel bookings for instance should be re-targeted immediately while luxury items could be re-targeted less frequently and possibly a little later.

As few as 2% of online shoppers become conversions on your site immediately – re-targeting is all about how to get the balance 98% back to your site and thereby converted into buyers. Let them move on from your site and go on to visit other sites because re-targeting allows you to go with them and stay with them until they are ready to buy and will be able to remember you when they do so. 

Don’t wait for your competitors to re-target your audiences by being present on your site – implement a re-targeting strategy for your marketing content online and stay ahead in the game.