The old saying, “You never get a second chance to make a first impression”, isn’t as true for internet marketing as it is for other forms of communications. With print, television and radio ads, marketers are only guaranteed one chance to make an impression on a viewer. Internet marketing, on the other hand, has a feature called “retargeting” that allows advertisers to show ads specifically to people who have already visited their site. Retargeting is a valuable tool for increasing display ad revenue. In essence, it gives marketers a second chance to make a first impression, since ads for the business will show up, even when the user visits another site. These eight stats show just how powerful retargeting is internet marketing.
Besides the effect on PPC ads, retargeting has a significant effect on brand awareness and search activity. A comScore study that evaluated various marketing strategies to measure the average lift in brand-related search activity found that retargeting had the highest lift in trademark search behavior at 1,046 percent.
In another comScore study, retargeting was found be the most effective method of getting prospects to return to a website. The effect was much higher than people would normally assume. Retargeting prospects resulted in a 726 percent lift in site visitation within four weeks of initial ad exposure.
The same is true for retargeting online shoppers. Retargeting (coupled with other forms of marketing) brings back 26 percent of the 72 percent of ecommerce shoppers abandon their shopping carts before making a purchase. Without retargeting, just 8% of customers return to purchase the product.
According to data cited by CMO, retargeting can boost ad response up to 400 percent.
Digiday reported that the average click-through rate for display ads is 0.07 percent, and the average click-through for retargeted ads is about 0.7 percent.
There’s a lot of simple of ways to view the benefits of retargeting. According to a case study from Criteo, visitors who are retargeted with display ads are 70 percent more likely to convert.
Data from one retargeting app found that retargeted ad campaigns show engagement rates 2.5 to 3 times higher than untargeted ad campaigns among the same customer base.
A study from DataXu found that across various sectors and industries, retargeting can lead to 147 percent higher conversion rates. The combined techniques were most effective for customer service industries, with a 128 percent increase in conversions, and financial services, with a 147 percent improvement.
Retargeting is one of the rare occasions when something works the way we think it should. The ability to reach customers who already showed an interest in a site or product is a good way to increase sales. Best of all, retargeting has now come to social media platforms like Twitter. This means marketers can target people who visited their website with social media ads, which can will increase fans of the brand and the effectiveness of future social media marketing campaigns. Simply put, Business owners and marketers need to start using retargeting. Sometimes, it’s the second impression that matters the most.