Introduction To Web Remarketing

Picture this: you’re walking through a physical store and you stop to examine a bright purple shirt. You pick it up, check the price, then put it back on the rack without buying it. Now imagine it’s the next day and you’re sitting on a park bench reading a book. As you flip the page to a new chapter, a photo of the exact same purple shirt you’d decided not to buy falls out of the book and onto your lap! Beneath the photo the words, “Did you forget something?” are scrawled in bright red ink.

Creepy? Maybe. A compelling reminder to go back to the store and buy the shirt? Absolutely. This is a (terrifying) example of what retargeting might look like in the real world. Of course, it doesn’t exist in the real world. Retargeting (also called “remarketing”) is a digital tactic. It’s a way for website owners to reach out to visitors who’ve been to their sites and left. What’s more mind-boggling is this is just one aspect of it.

Read on to know more and in detail about Web Remarketing!

What Is Digital Remarketing?

Retargeting or Remarketing is a digital marketing tactic that allows businesses to show ads to consumers who’ve previously visited their website. Quite simple, right?

Let’s say you love shoes, so you visit your favorite website in the entire world — Zappos. You browse the site for a while and linger on a pair of gorgeous boots, then leave without buying anything. Later in the day, you find yourself reading an article on your local paper’s website. Lo and behold — a huge ad appears featuring images of those elegant shoes you were looking at earlier. Freaked out, you navigate to your GMail inbox and, oh my goodness, there’s another ad for those very same boots!

You glance nervously over your shoulder as you navigate to your favorite social media platform to see what everyone’s up to and that’s when you see it, right there in the center of your feed, the very same boots! What can you do other than buy them, no?

That is remarketing in action. It may seem like magic but like most things involving digital marketing, it’s all about technology. Before we get into the how and why of Web Remarketing, let’s look at when and where it all started.
 

 Web Remarketing — A Brief History

Remarketing is a relatively new marketing tactic, at least when you consider the entire history of marketing which goes back hundreds (maybe even thousands) of years.

The term remarketing evolved from the concept of “retargeting” which was a way for website owners to reach out to users who visited their website and moved on with or without buying something (or otherwise interacting).

Here’s a short history of how remarketing started, with dates and everything!
 

• 1994

  A guy named Lou Montulli invented the third-party cookie while working for Netscape (one of the first Internet browsers). Montulli was a 23-year-old engineer, information that adds nothing to this timeline but we think it’s pretty impressive. We’ll get into why cookies are important in a minute but for now, all you need to know is that remarketing technology doesn’t work without them.

• 1998

  Doubleclick, an advertising platform subsequently acquired by Google, introduces a retargeting feature to their advertisers.

• 2010

  Google introduced their version of retargeting to Google Ads (it was called “Adwords” back then). They renamed it “remarketing” and the name stuck. At first, the feature was only available on the Google display network but it was later rolled out to the search network. They subsequently launched remarketing on YouTube in 2013.

• 2013

  Facebook joins the retargeting party, launching FBX targeting in 2013.

Today: Remarketing/retargeting is now the norm for digital marketers, with most advertising and social media platforms incorporating remarketing into their targeting capabilities.
 

How Does Web Remarketing Work?

Remember those cookies we mentioned earlier? Well, we’re not talking about baked goodies. Digital cookies are small snippets of code (also called “pixels”) that ad networks and platforms like Facebook drop onto a user’s browser so that the ad serving software can identify the specific browser as having visited a website.

These are referred to as third-party cookies because they’re generated by the ad network or social media platform or whoever is powering the behind-the-scenes remarketing technology. These are not to be confused with first-party cookies (a pixel that’s set by the publisher/ website owner’s server).

If you want to remarket to your website visitors, you need to do the following:
 

• Add tracking code (the pixel) from the ad server to your website’s code. This code is provided by the ad or social network and looks like this:

 

• Create a campaign on Facebook, Google, or with an ad network and launch your ads.

• If the pixel is installed correctly, it will “fire” when a user visits the webpage where you installed the code. This triggers the code to leave an anonymous cookie in your browser and adds the user to a remarketing list.

• When the user visits another website that hosts ads from the ad network or visits their social media feed, the ad server will serve up an ad to that user.

While remarketing describes one specific digital marketing tactic, e.g., showing ads to users who’ve been to your website, there are a few different types of remarketing that advertisers use, as follows:
 

• Audience remarketing

  shows ads to users based on their browsing history. It adds the user to a list that tends to be broad (e.g., people who’ve been to your home page). The ads shown to these broad audiences are also comparatively broad. You can set up more complex audiences based on other criteria like specific pages people have visited and customize ads based on this.

• Transactional retargeting

  shows ads based on user shopping actions such as adding items to a shopping cart or making a purchase (e.g., remember the purple shirt?) A transactional remarketing ad might show up as an email that says, “Did you forget something?” with a graphic of the shirt. Oh yes, we have made more than one purchase based on this tactic!

• Search remarketing

  shows ads to users based on keywords they’ve searched for on search engines or websites. In this scenario, a rug manufacturer might show ads to a user who searched for “bathroom rugs” or “area rugs” on a search engine like Google or Bing.

Although this must all be super-interesting, we’re sure you must be asking yourself why we need Web Remarketing?
 

Why Do We Need Remarketing?

Remarketing helps businesses create more targeted, relevant campaigns that get better results than standard campaigns because profiling done is so specific to the user. Consumers benefit from remarketing because they get ads for products and services that are meaningful to them. #Personalized

Since the ads are based on past interests and behaviors, they tend to be useful and less annoying than broader ads. It’s the difference between blanketing a TV station with a generic prescription drug ad and receiving a coupon for a pair of shoes you’ve already been planning to buy.

It’s tough out there, folks. The global average cart abandonment rate for Ecommerce websites is 77% but the silver lining is that 44% out of those cart abandonment emails are opened (and nearly 30% of clicks result in a purchase). Retargeting just makes good sense (or cents?).

Anyway, here’s where remarketing is headed...  

The Future Of Web Retargeting

 
Retargeting has a big problem. Third-party cookies — the technology that enables retargeting — are slowly dying. There are many reasons for this but the main one is new consumer privacy laws. Firefox and Safari browsers now block third-party cookies by default. Google initially planned to block third-party cookies but they couldn’t, since their entire revenue model depends on cookies, they’ve delayed this move for at least a year.

Chrome is the dominant consumer browser with over 60% market share, so once Google begins blocking third-party cookies, retargeting as we know it, will need to change. Word on the street is that advertisers will be moving towards using first-party data, including cookies, to create personalized messaging and ads for their existing users and customers. The death of the third-party cookie will likely make retargeting more difficult and less effective, forcing businesses to rely more on first-party data to market to their customers. #RIPCookies
 

To Sum Up

It is now believed that it takes up to 7 to 10 interactions or messages from a brand for consumers to notice them and engage with them. It takes a lot more to convert them. Retargeting becomes every marketer’s best aid here. With remarketing, you’re able to be wherever your audience is and remind them about your brand if they seem even remotely interested in it. #KeepRemarketing