Written by Anastasia Kurmakaeva
Retargeting in online marketing is a technique whose objective is to retarget users who have interacted with a website but have not carried out the targeted action.
In an online store, retargeting will consist of seducing users who have visited the store but for some reason did not buy so that they return and resume the purchase process.
There are several retargeting options depending on the strategy selected to communicate with the customer.
Email retargeting
If a user accesses an online store and registers or logs in because he/she was previously registered, the e-commerce must be able to register the products inserted by the user in the shopping cart, even if he/she does not complete the shopping cart. In this way the online store will have all the necessary information to design a targeted email advertising to recover the sale.
This technique can be applied by programming the functionality in the online store engine itself if it is a custom development, acquiring a module or plugin if you are using an open source manager or contracting the service to a specialized company.
Another more economical option to start testing email retargenting is for the person in charge of managing the online store to manually design and send these emails. This solution is only feasible if the volume of abandoned baskets is small, but it may serve to test the effectiveness of this tactic.
Remarketing with Google AdWords
Google offers the possibility of retargeting through display campaigns and sponsored search ads. These are called remarketing campaigns.
In this case it is not necessary to know the user’s email address. Google installs a cookie in the user’s browser to identify him/her and protect his/her anonymity. The e-commerce administrator will never know any data of the users registered by Google in its remarketing lists.
Google allows you to create lists based on the pages you have visited or actions you have performed in order to launch specific commercial actions. In this way you will be able to design different actions depending on the behavior of your potential customers.
When a user with one of the online store’s cookies browses the Google display network, which consists of thousands of websites associated with the search engine’s advertising service, Google shows the user ads specially designed to bring the user back to the online store and recover the sale.
Remarketing campaigns have a lower CPC than a conventional display campaign and its CTR is usually higher so it is a highly recommended option if you invest in Google AdWords.
In addition, if Google Merchant – Google Merchant Platform – is configured appropriately Google will show the user with the cookie personalized ads with the same products visited in the online store increasing its effectiveness. For this, the online store platform must generate a data feed with the product information and send it to Google.
This technique can become harmful if the ads are shown too many times to customers, to avoid this from the Google Adwords control panel it is possible to configure the number of days and the frequency of daily publication and thus ensure that the online store ads do not saturate users.
When dealing with users who have been very close to closing the purchase, the tactic of offering a promotional discount to the users we reach with retargeting is usually very effective.
