Unless you’re a well-known brand, bringing visitors to your website is not an easy task.
Your sales and marketing teams have to do cold outreach, create ad campaigns, and write SEO content. You have to find companies to partner with and rely on word of mouth.
But, after all that, website visitors might leave your website in seconds and never come back.
What marketers have figured out over the years is that a lot of those visitors could be brought back and even converted to customers.
The reasons why website visitors leave your website might vary and not always have something to do with your product or service:
- They might not know (or have confidence in) your brand
- They might get distracted with something else
- They might not be able to find a specific product during their visit
- They might leave with the intention of coming back later
The way to remind those visitors about you is to run retargeting campaigns that show them specific ads throughout the web. To do that, you need to use retargeting tools.
Tip: Now there’s a way to create powerful retargeting lists by focusing solely on high buyer intent visitors from your website. Lift AI uses the power of AI to detect buyer intent in real time, assigning each visitor a buyer intent score that can be stored and segmented for your retargeting lists. Read on for more.
What Are Retargeting Tools?
Retargeting tools bring previously lost potential customers back to your website.
For example, if someone came to your website, read about your product, placed it in their shopping cart but dropped out at checkout — not all is lost. It’s worth using dynamic remarketing to remind them of your company and get them to come back.
By using retargeting tools, you can specify what past website visitors need to see. It could be the same product they saw before, a different variant, a discount, or another marketing message.
All major social media platforms have their own retargeting tools: Google, Facebook, X (Twitter), and LinkedIn. You could use their tools directly or control everything from a single retargeting platform, such as AdRoll.
The Evolving Landscape of Retargeting
Even if you’ve tried retargeting in the past, you’ll find the landscape of remarketing campaigns today much different.
Three out of four online visitors now notice very specific ads based on their past browsing.
Retargeting platforms have become more powerful and flexible, offering more ad frequency and dynamic retargeting options than ever.
The results speak for themselves, as retargeted ads can produce 10 times the click-through rate with 70% higher conversion probability.
The retargeting marketing strategy is becoming more essential to businesses as, on average, only 2% of the initial web traffic leads to conversions. That leaves 98% of visitors to turn into new customers through retargeting.
Best Practices for Optimizing Retargeting Campaigns
Defining Clear Retargeting Goals
As in any digital marketing campaign, with retargeting, you can’t just start spending and hope for the best. You need to define clear KPIs. Are you looking for social media followers, newsletter signups, or product purchases?
Setting realistic conversion targets and adjusting them as your retargeting campaign progresses is key to success.
Leveraging Dynamic Display Ads
Ad platforms today, such as the Google Display Network, offer a variety of dynamic ad options that fit into the context and the previous browsing behavior of every website visitor.
For example, if a website visitor was considering buying a yellow umbrella from your online store, their dynamic ad might show both yellow and red options for them to choose from.
Striking the Right Frequency Balance
Even though digital advertising and search retargeting really work, showing past visitors too many ads will lead to ad fatigue and result in alienating target users as well as needlessly spending your ad budget.
When designing a new ad campaign across multiple networks, it’s almost always better to start slow and ramp up based on the results you get.
Segmenting and Personalizing Retargeting Efforts
Audience segmentation and personalization are key aspects of retargeting. After all, you want every past website visitor to see something relevant to them that would prompt them into action.
Most campaign managers have the automated personalization option that relies on the advanced behavior analysis to split the audience into similar cohorts and show ads at precisely the right time.
In-Depth Analysis of Top Retargeting Tools for 2024
Overview of Leading Retargeting Tools
There are two general approaches to retargeting ads: you can either use retargeting platforms separately or combine everything into one of the remarketing tools that allows you to control everything from a single dashboard.
A few major retargeting platforms are:
- Facebook (includes Instagram)
- Google (called dynamic remarketing)
- X (Twitter)
Some of the remarketing tools that combine all platforms are:
- AdRoll
- Criteo
- ReTargeter
Let’s discuss each retargeting ad platform and tool in more detail.
1. Facebook
Dynamic ads on Facebook also cover Instagram, Messenger, and the Facebook Audience Network, reaching over two billion people worldwide.
With Facebook Custom Audiences, you can cover people who’ve visited your physical store, any contacts in your CRM, or visitors to your website (through the Facebook pixel).
Every ad with Facebook will be personalized for all Facebook users. You can even specify to show new products to existing customers to nurture brand loyalty.
To create remarketing ads, select a particular audience based on their actions, write ad copy, add visuals, and specify your desired ad spend. Repeat the process to cover your whole customer segmentation strategy.
2. Google
Unlike Facebook that primarily shows visitors ads on its properties, Google Ads span the entire internet, across websites and even apps. Since Google runs its Analytics product on most websites, it can easily track visitors moving through various pages and show them tailored ads as a result.
Google automates creating custom ads by letting you upload a feed of the products and services you want to show. The ad algorithm will then determine the best mix based on product popularity and visitors’ behavior.
The latest feature in Google Adwords retargeting is dynamic prospecting, which leverages machine learning to the best products at the right time to most interested users.
3. LinkedIn
While it’s often overlooked for advertising purposes, LinkedIn has more than one billion professionals on its platform, making it an ideal ad space for B2B companies.
With LinkedIn retargeting, you can personalize content to the audience based on their actions, guide leads along the conversion path, and engage customers at different stages in their lifecycle.
To start, you need to create a custom audience, add a LinkedIn Insight Tag on your website, and wait for your audience to automatically populate based on their visits to your online properties.
4. X (Twitter)
Remarketing on X (formerly Twitter) is more niche than Facebook or LinkedIn but, at the same time, presents powerful targeted opportunities for companies that can find their perfect audience there.
X is a mobile-first platform, with retargeted ads being integrated directly into the feed. This means brands can tailor their messaging directly to the interests of their audience and discreetly blend in with the rest of the content that potential customers consume. Videos work especially well in that context.
5. AdRoll
AdRoll is one of the original retargeting tools on the market that has been helping customers with retargeting opportunities for nearly 20 years.
What’s great about retargeting tools like AdRoll is that you don’t have to implement the retargeting campaign strategy, manage budgets, and track results separately on every platform. AdRoll takes your vision and does the heavy lifting for you. This also means that you can shift your strategy seamlessly on the fly, allocating more resources to better performing campaign assets.
6. Criteo
Criteo is a complete ad management platform that includes any ad solution a company might need, from customer acquisition to video advertising to dynamic retargeting.
With dynamic retargeting, Criteo uses not only social media networks but more than 1,000 premium publishers in its network with more than 750 million daily users.
Besides, Criteo can show potential customers tailored videos and ads, and even similar products — with all the delivery optimized by machine learning.
7. ReTargeter
ReTargeter is a company that specializes in retargeting ads based on your website, CRM, or search engine results.
Using ReTargeter enables businesses to widen their marketing channels and create custom audiences based on website visitors, CRM entries, and key characteristics detected by search engine ad platforms.
CRM retargeting is a unique ReTargeter feature, allowing you to re-engage old leads, prospects, and even customers even if they haven’t visited your website in a while.
Lift AI: Revolutionizing Retargeting Efforts By Targeting High Intent Visitors Only
One critical issue that every marketer faces with retargeting is the amount of anonymous visitors coming to the website. As anonymous visitors have no unique characteristics, placing a browser cookie on them has no effect and makes it impossible to show them Google Ads (or other retargeted ads) later on. Or, marketing and sales teams are using a “spray and pray” approach to retargeting which targets all visitors within a time window, which ends up getting poor conversion results and high spend.
The most seamless way to solve that problem is by using Lift AI.
Lift AI is a unique buyer intent solution powered by a proprietary machine-learning model. Using its AI capabilities, this tool predicts the exact buyer intent of every website visitor, even if they are completely anonymous to you.
As a result, high-intent visitors can be segmented and targeted accordingly. Ideally, you would use a real-time engagement tool such as Drift to engage those high intent visitors before leaving your website when you have the best chance of converting them (even better than retargeting).
However, you can also use that high intent segment of audiences (using Google Audiences or similar) to create a retargeting list that is packed full of high intent visitors.
The Lift AI machine-learning model is trained on billions of data points and more than 14 million live sales interactions. As a result, it identifies visitors with the highest buyer intent with over 85% accuracy every time.
Another key feature that sets Lift AI apart is its ability to integrate with any part of your marketing stack, be it chat, CRM, or a retargeting platform.
Case Study: Lift AI’s Impact on Retargeting Campaigns
When Lift AI is integrated into the marketing stack, customers tend to get anywhere from two to 10 times conversions within the first 90 days.
For example, Chronos extracted 85% of their website pipeline from traffic that was anonymous before using Lift AI. They’ve also converted those visitors 8.5 times more effectively.
Another company, Formstack, used Lift AI integrated with Draft (a chat platform) to get 420% more monthly recurring revenue, increasing its ROI by 18 times.
All that is possible due to Lift AI’s ability to determine the buyer intent of every single website visitor.
Imagine, then, using the real-time buyer intent scoring of Lift AI instead to:
- Create high intent retargeting lists
- Improve conversion rate of regarding campaigns
- Optimize spend of retargeting (by uploading smaller, but high intent segments)
Future-Proofing Your Retargeting Strategy
The retargeting space is constantly evolving, and it’s important to monitor whether there are new ways to remind your website visitors of the product or services you offer.
Depending on whether you want to attract a specific segment of your audience (e.g. Twitter users) or anyone who visits one of your landing pages, you should either choose an engagement tool that’s specific to one platform or a solution that covers all of them at once.
Regardless of your choice, integrating it with Lift AI will accelerate the retargeting process by identifying how interested every website visitor is in your solution. Get started with Lift AI today. No complex installations are required, and clients get in results in as quickly as 30 days.
FAQs
How have retargeting tools evolved over the years?
Retargeting started with Google Ads and gradually expanded to nearly every social media platform. Then services like AdRoll allowed businesses to run retargeting campaigns through multiple platforms at once.
What are the latest innovations in retargeting strategies?
If you use a solution like Lift AI, you can make your retargeting efforts much more accurate by identifying the exact buyer intent of every website visitor.
How can businesses maximize ROI from retargeting campaigns?
The best way to maximize ROI is to ensure that the people you show the retargeted ads actually want to purchase your offering. This will increase efficacy and lower ad costs at the same time. Identifying buyer intent is a good place to start.
