While working on an SEO research project for a client, I came across an incredible example of retargeting and wanted to quickly blog about retargeting in general, and why Home Deport really gets it.
What is Retargeting?
If you haven’t had and experience with retargeting, I wanted to quickly review the basics on how retargeting works.
- First, an individual visits your website and a small piece of tracking code (a cookie) is stored in their browser so that you can advertise to them later.
- Then, as that user browses the Web, ads can be shown to them.
Why Retargeting/Remarketing?
When implemented correctly, ads can be super targeted to users, making them more relevant and higher-converting.
Home Depot Gets Retargeting
Here’s an example of retargeting which I experience recently.
First, I went to the Home Depot website (here’s a link to the page) and was looking at a door which they are selling. This is what the page looks like:
While on the page, Home Depot placed a cookie in my browser which helped them remember that I visited their website and even better, this specifici product page (the door above).
About 20 minutes later, I was checking my facebook account and what did I see?
Pretty impressive, ehhh? Home Depot managed to serve an extremely relevant ad (the exact door which I was looking at) on facebook with 30 minutes of me being on their website. As a marketer, I’m impressed by the level of detail and thought put into to this campaign and imagine that it’s a great performing campaign.
Retargeting Recap
Whether retargeting with the level of detail of Home Deport, or simply trying to drive previous website visitors back to your site. Retargeting and remarkating can be a great way to expand your brand reach and increase conversions. Retargeting works best when:
- Ads are timely: Based on your conversion goals, what time periods are best to run the ads. In the Home Depot example above, they will likely aggresively market to me for a week or so and, if I do’t convert, will likely stop. If your product buying cycle is longer though, you may want to extend the length of these ads
- Ads are relevant: Don’t just serve the same ad to every website visitor! What pages did they view, what interactions did they make? Based on that, what’s the right ad to show? For home depot, they knew I viewed and customized the above doors and then fed that into the ad. They could have just showed me an ad which said, “Shop at Home Depot”, but that wouldn’t have received nearly the attention from me.
Contact us if you’d like a little help setting up a retargeting campaign for your business.
Hello Rick. Could a “retargeting ad” style campaign be created where the retargeted item is not a product but an additional article or blog post that is related to the actual page a visitor happened upon one’s website?
Hi Ald,
Yes you can. Products are just one way retargeting is used. If you wanted to run an ad for an article or page, based on another article or page visited, it works the same way.
How is this accomplished? Through post tags?