Did you know that the vast majority of your website traffic is simply not ready to buy when they read about your products or services online? Somewhere between 1% and 2% of visitors are actually ready at the moment they visit your website. That means that up to 99% of all your traffic is not going to make a purchase from your e-commerce site or complete a contact form for your services.

That is a pretty depressing statistic, but in this article, I will reveal how you can bring back those prospects and get them to convert. We do that using a technology called retargeting.

How much traffic are you losing

 

Retargeting 101: How Retargeting Works

The way retargeting works is by placing a cookie on the browser of every visitor that comes to your site. A cookie is just a small file that is stored on your prospect’s computer, and in this case, it allows you to display specific ads to those visitors as they surf around on other websites.

Let’s say I come to your website today and I read all about your products and services. But I don’t have time to buy right now, because I have to take my daughter to daycare and get on with my day, so I leave your website.

Later that night, I have some time, so I sit down to surf around online. At that very moment, you could be retargeting specifically, using the cookie and a retargeting advertising platform. So it’s extremely targeted advertising, but it is not very complicated.

One platform I highly recommend is AdRoll, which we use, because it is very easy to set up. You just add a snippet of code to your website, similar to adding Google Analytics. Once the code is on your site, your website visitors will get that cookie and will start seeing your banner ads as they surf around the web.

 

Retargeting in Action

In order to make retargeting as effective as possible, it’s important to put segments in place, so you show super-targeted ads to different types of website visitors.

Let’s say you have an e-commerce website and a lot of people are abandoning the shopping experience without completing the checkout. In that case, what you can do is target everyone who adds something to the shopping cart but does not complete the purchase. These are highly qualified prospects who obviously wanted what you have to offer, but for whatever reason they did not buy. With a retargeting campaign, you can target just those folks. When they click on your ad, they will come back to your site to complete the purchase.

If you run a services business (like a moving company, marketing agency, law firm, etc), you may want to target people who visit a specific page, or maybe multiple pages, of your website. They seem interested based on their browsing behavior, but they are among the 99% who are not ready to contact you right now. After they leave your site, you can display ads to them on other sites and bring them back to complete your contact form or give you a call.

Those are a couple of examples of how retargeting works. Now let’s look at the key benefits for your business.

 

Benefit #1. Follow-Up

Retargeting allows you to follow up with your best prospects – it’s similar to using email follow-up, except with retargeting, you’re following up by displaying banner ads on other websites your prospects are visiting. Whether your prospects are going to Facebook to catch up with their friends, checking a news site, or following their favorite sports site, you can display your banner ad to them. You know they are interested in what you have to offer because they have already visited your website.

 

Benefit #2. Precision Targeting

In retargeting, you are not simply using a shotgun approach to spray ads all over the Internet. You are only displaying ads to people who have already expressed interest by meeting the criteria you choose, such as visiting a specific page or adding something to a shopping cart. Targeted advertising lets you focus on your best prospects.

 

Benefit #3. Increasing Your Marketing Reach

If you are currently advertising online, perhaps on Google AdWords, Bing, Yahoo or Facebook, right now you already have a certain reach. Retargeting actually expands your reach. You will get onto even more websites, exposing people to your brand and your website in new places.

Advertising on many of the top premium websites requires a very big media buy, which means a big budget. But when you use a retargeting platform like AdRoll, you will be able to tap into those sites at a major discount because you are only showing ads to a small, targeted segment of each website’s traffic. And that’s how, with retargeting, you can show your banner ads on premium news websites for very affordable rates – and this can help you project an impressive brand image to your prospects.

 

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