How retargeting can drive traffic to your website

Website traffic. You need it and you’re willing to pay for it.

Here’s how a little thing called retargeting can drive traffic to your website.

What Retargeting Is

So, have you ever been minding your own business, surfing the Internet instead of working, and you start to notice the same ad keeps popping up on different sites? And that the ad is quite similar to the stuff you’ve been looking at? Let me give you a for example.

For example. I like to read a certain Disneyland fan website (yes, I’m that person), and I’ve noticed that, after I spend some time on the site, as I go about my day, ads for Disneyland hotels will suddenly start appearing on whatever sites I’m looking at, even if those sites have nothing to do with Disneyland.

This is retargeting. And yeah, when you first start to notice it, it’s kinda creepy.

Retargeting looks a bit like this, according to retargeting service AdRoll:

As you can see, retargeting tracks people who have already expressed an interest in your site. Hence the “re” part of “retargeting.”

Here’s a real world example. While researching retargeting, I visited the AdRoll site. The next day, while looking at a completely unrelated site, I saw this ad:

And later that day, this sponsored Tweet showed up on my Twitter timeline:

“We’re #retargeting you!” Creepy, dude. But effective.

If you want to know the nuts and bolts of how it actually works, I suggest you check out this great post by the Moz Blog titled “Retargeting: What It Is & How To Use It.” It uses phrases like “burn pixel,” which I can’t even begin to wrap my head around.

So Why Retargeting?

Retargeting has a pretty impressive success rate, which is why it gets used, and why you want to consider using it to (re)drive traffic to your site. How impressive is the success rate? Peep this statistic, provided by the Bizo blog:

“In a comScore study, retargeting proved to be the most effective method of driving prospects back to a website. Retargeting prospects resulted in a 726% lift in site visitation within four weeks of initial ad exposure.”

Creepy or not, retargeting works. I mean, 726% lift in site visitation? Ridiculous.

Finding a Retargeting Network

Earlier I mentioned the retargeting network AdRoll. Other retargeting networks include ReTargeter and Chango.

There are benefits and drawbacks to using each of these platforms. Again, the Moz Blog has done the heavy lifting, writing a detailed comparison of retargeting networks.

I suggest you contact each of these networks yourself, though, and find out what they can do for your specific business.

Be Prepared to Spend Some Ca$h

It’s hard to tell you exactly how much reatrgeting will cost you, because it really depends on the package you want. But in the above-mentioned post by the Moz Blog, phrases like “packages start at $500” and “you have to spend around 10K” get used. So yeah.

Retargeting isn’t cheap. If it’s something you really want to do, though, I will again suggest giving AdRoll, ReTargeter and Chango each a call, getting quotes, and comparison shopping.

Have you used retargeting to drive traffic to your website? Did you find it to be successful? Sound off in the comments.