Why you can’t afford to skip retargeting
Statistically speaking, only 2.8% of people who land on your website are ready to enquire about your services, or a listing. To put that into perspective, if 1,000 people visit your website, only 28 of them will fill out and submit an enquiry form. The other 970 will wander around for a while, then leave.
This wouldn’t be a problem if they made their way back your site when they were ready to take the plunge — but that could be weeks (or even months) down the track, and your website is just one in a long list of tabs they’ve opened. Sadly, humans don’t have the memory of elephants.
Luckily, savvy advertisers have came up with a way to make sure the people visiting your website don’t forget about what you’re offering: retargeting ads. Or, as Google calls them, ‘reminder ads’.
Before we get too ahead of ourselves, allow us to paint a picture. It’ll help — promise.
Retargeting in the real world
Imagine you’re thinking about a new car. You meander through the dealership, and a little racing green sports car catches your eye. You read the specs, sit down in the driver’s seat and adjust the rearview mirror. Yep — you look good. But you’re not quite ready to buy yet, so you leave.
On your way home, you spot that same convertible driving in the lane next to you. The next day, it’s in your parking lot at work. Then it’s parked on your street.
This is what retargeting would look like in real life. You showed some interest in the convertible, so the dealer is making sure you see it again and again.
Retargeting online
How retargeting online works is:
- someone visits your website, or clicks on one of your Facebook or Instagram ads
- they leave your website without submitting an enquiry
- they continue to browse the web and social media
- another of your ads appears
- they click it, go to your website and enquire about what you’re advertising.
Retargeting has become a buzzword for a reason. Quite simply, it works — across all industries.
Here’s what it could do for your agency:
- Create brand recognition
Potential vendors usually do quite a bit of research before deciding who to sell their home with. Retargeting ads for your agents or agency can help build recognition and trust in your brand — making them more likely to purchase from you.
Advertisers call this brand affinity — and it dramatically impacts how likely your audience is to actually click on your ad, which brings us to… - Save you ad spend
Every time someone sees one of your ads, it costs you (or your vendors) money. Don’t worry, it’s only a few cents — but it does stack up. If they don’t click on your ad, it’s money down the drain.
People are 3 times more likely to click on a retargeting ad than a regular ad — meaning they’re much cheaper to run. You’re targeting to an audience that has already shown an interest in what you’re advertising — so it makes sense. - Create less ad fatigue
Ad fatigue happens when your audience becomes overly familiar with your ads, gets bored of them, and stops paying attention. You know, like those Rugs-a-Million closing down sale ads.
Well, it happens with digital advertising too. Users sign in to Facebook an average of 13.8 times per day. If they see the same ad each time, they’re probably going to get sick of seeing it.
The risk of fatiguing your audience is halved if you use retargeting in your marketing strategy, because your audience is continually seeing fresh ads (even if they are for the same thing). - Keep your offering front of mind
What it all comes down to is this: the average human’s attention span is less than eight seconds. (The exact number of seconds is contended, but you get the gist). Retargeting provides a mechanism for repetition, which helps your message and your brand to be remembered.
If you keep seeing the same message, and it’s relevant to you, you’re more likely to remember it.
That’s all well and good, but how does it actually do that?
The nuts and bolts of retargeting
Retargeting is possible because of something called a pixel. A pixel drops an anonymous, undetectable cookie in to a website visitor’s browser. This cookie leaves a trail of crumbs all over the web — notifying retargeting platforms that they should show this person more of your ads, because they’ve shown an interest in what you’re offering.
If you’re serious about harnessing the power of retargeting, you need to be using two types of pixel: the Google Ads tag and the Facebook pixel. That means you can target ads to people across both social media and the two million websites on the Google Display Network.
For example, you can target ads to people who interact with (like, comment or share) one of your Instagram or Facebook posts. When they click one of your ads, they’ll be taken to your website — where the Facebook pixel drops an anonymous, undetectable cookie in to their browser. This tells Facebook to keep showing them more of your ads across social media.
And, because they’ve come to your website (effectively ‘interacting’ with your website), the Google Ads tag is activated. Don’t be fooled by the name — it’s a pixel, too. This one tells websites across the Google Display Network to show more of your ads to website visitors.
However, if you want to get the most bang for your marketing buck, there’s still two more things you’ll need to do:
- Segment your audience
Your audience are a diverse bunch. The same ads won’t appeal to all of them. That’s why, when you create your ads, you need to segment your audience (a fancy word for dividing people up into groups based on defined criteria) and target your ads to specific types of buyers and sellers, based on their demographics, online behaviour, language, etc. But don’t stop there — it’s really a two-step process.
Retargeting gives you the opportunity to fine-tune your ad placements even further, ensuring greater relevancy and increasing ad performance. You can segment your retargeting audience based on the particular page they visited or action they took on your website.
That unobtrusive piece of JavaScript (or ‘cookie’) tracks which page and listings your audience views, and then notifies the ad networks you’ve chosen to serve specific ads to that user based on what they looked at. But to segment your audience and show different audiences different ads, you’ll need to add multiple pixels.
For example, people who visited your agent profiles pages are probably more interested in listing a property with your agency than they are in buying — so you could set up a pixel to retarget them with ads encouraging them to request an appraisal. You could set up another pixel to retarget your listings ads to people who visited your listings. Or, you can take things a step further and specifically retarget people who spend more than 2 minutes on your website, or who view more than 3 property pictures, or who started filling enquiry form but never finished.
You can get quite complex regarding the sequence of pixels you cookie your audience with — or you could use an artificially intelligent platform like Spoke, our social media and online advertising tool built specifically to help agents create and publish dozens of beautiful, eye-catching ads in seconds.
Segmentation is the key to successful retargeting — but we can’t share exactly how Spoke does it. It’s our secret sauce.
2. Constantly rotate and optimise your ads
Even if you launch your campaign with incredibly click worthy ads, continuously running with the same set will result in a lower performing campaign. Remember what we said about ad fatigue?
After seeing the same ads again and again, your audience’s interest is no longer piqued and the ads are more likely to blend into the background. By rotating your ad creatives, you keep your audience engaged and interested for longer.
To do this, you’ll need to create multiple ads using different images, headlines and calls to action. You could switch these out manually, set specific start and end dates for each ad — but a platform like Spoke can do it for you.
Spoke’s ad performance formula uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to tweak ads and audiences during the campaign, so you don’t have to manually check what’s working or not. Any ads that aren’t performing too well are switched off.
Retargeting isn’t exactly easy — but when it you get it right, if really pays off.
It’s no secret that social media is more effective, less intrusive and a better use of your marketing spend. However, many of our Rex CRM users told us it was hugely time consuming to create and manage effective advertising campaigns, and expensive to outsource. Add retargeting into the mix, and you’ve got yourself a whole other day job.
As a product house, our goal is to create simple, smart software solutions that solve complex problems — just like this one. Learn more about Spoke at https://spokeapp.io/.
