What Is Remarketing: How It Works and Why Your Business Needs It

Digital Marketing
What Is Remarketing: How It Works and Why Your Business Needs It
Article by Ivana Ivanova
Last Updated: June 18, 2024

Remarketing is a strategy that businesses use to engage customers who have previously interacted with their brand. It’s essentially a way to retain existing customers through ads, sending emails, or using other tactics.

Among many conversion marketing strategies, remarketing has recently gained popularity. Why? Let’s explore the answer in this remarketing guide and learn what digital remarketing is, how it works, how you can benefit from it, and how to create an effective remarketing strategy.

What Is Remarketing: Definition and Introduction

Remarketing is a smart way for businesses to stay in touch with customers who have already visited their website, added items to their shopping carts, or interacted with their brand in any way. It guides your customers back to your website by displaying relevant ads, product listings, or other relevant content that appeals to them.

Remarketing is often interchangeably used with retargeting, which uses cookies or other tracking technologies to track people who’ve interacted with your site. This data allows you to show ads when visitors are on other websites, helping you stay on your customer’s radar.

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What Is B2B Remarketing?

Business to Business (or B2B) refers to companies that sell products or services to other companies. This can be in the form of an internal company selling to the company it works for or a third party selling to another company.

B2B remarketing is a form of remarketing aimed at the B2B segment, which is an integral part of their customer base. B2B marketers have different goals than B2C marketers and therefore use various tools and tactics to achieve these goals.

The main difference between B2C and B2B marketers is that B2C focuses more on customer relationship management (CRM) strategies and often relies heavily on email marketing.

On the other hand, the B2B segment typically has longer sales cycles, does not have an established CRM strategy, and uses direct mail as a marketing channel. B2B remarketing allows advertisers to target B2B audience members by industry, region, and other criteria.

How Does Remarketing Work?

What is remarketing? It is a strategy for businesses to stay in touch with their customers across platforms.
[Source: Freepik.com]

Did you know that a remarketing campaign can increase your conversion rate by 161%?

Remarketing targets ads to people who haven’t checked in with your website or app in a while, sort of like a little reminder to say, “Hey! Remember us?” Because these users have already shown interest in your product or service in the past, it’s no surprise that these ads are such a success.

Remarketing can be done by tracking what they’ve done on your site through data and marketing analytics and then showing the ad again. If you don’t know where to start, top marketing agencies can help you with this.

Here’s how it works:

  • Place a piece of Java code, called a retargeting pixel, on your website. This activates whenever a customer lands on your page and leaves a cookie on the visitor’s computer.
  • When a customer leaves your site, the retargeting pixel or cookie signals you to show your ads to these individuals as they browse other sites
  • When someone sees an ad that’s part of a remarketing campaign, it’s known as an impression. If that person clicks on the ad, it’s called a conversion. The goal is to get them back to your site. The more time has elapsed between visits, the more likely it is for remarketing efforts to work.

In some cases, brands will even use remarketing campaigns for those who have visited their site but did not make a purchase or any interaction with the brand.

Remarketing vs. Retargeting: What Are the Differences?

Although remarketing and retargeting are often used interchangeably, there are some differences between the two:

Aspect

Remarketing

Retargeting 

Scope 

Includes a wide range of marketing efforts beyond online ads, such as email campaigns, personalized content, and other methods to reconnect with leads or customers.

Primarily involves online ads displayed to users who have previously visited a website or engaged with specific content, using cookies to track their online behavior.

Channels 

Utilizes multiple channels, including email, social media, content marketing, and more, to reconnect with leads or customers.

Primarily relies on online advertising channels, such as display ads, social media ads, and search ads, to target users based on their online behavior.

Objective 

Aims to build and maintain relationships with leads or customers, nurturing them through various marketing touchpoints.

Focuses on bringing back users who have shown interest in a product or service by displaying targeted ads to re-engage them and encourage desired actions.

Strategies 

Involves diverse strategies like personalized content creation, email drip campaigns, and other methods to provide value and maintain engagement.

Relies on the use of cookies and data tracking to identify users who have left a website without converting, then targets them with relevant ads to drive them back to the site.

Time Frame 

May involve longer-term engagement strategies to nurture leads over time and build brand loyalty.

Typically employs shorter-term strategies, as the goal is to bring users back to a site or encourage a specific action in response to recent online behavior.

Examples 

Sending personalized email campaigns, creating custom content, and using social media engagement to reconnect with leads or customers.

Displaying targeted ads on social media platforms, search engines, or other websites to users who have recently visited a specific website or interacted with certain content.

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6 Important Benefits of Remarketing

Remarketing can increase the visibility of your brand and products, while also boosting brand awareness and traffic. If a user sees an ad on their favorite website, they’ll associate that company with the product they were looking at.

It’s a very effective way to drive traffic back to your site because it happens in real time and can be targeted at specific people. In other words, you can have a user visit your website and leave without buying anything. Then, when they return to your website later, you can show them an ad for a product they might be interested in!

Other benefits of remarketing for businesses include:

  • Remarketing can increase brand awareness and reach since you’re targeting people who have already shown an interest in your product or service. 70% of marketers consider brand awareness the top reason for retargeting.
  • It can be customized to target specific audiences with tailored ads, so you’re not wasting your time or money reaching out to people not interested in what you offer. This results in more efficient use of your marketing budget.
  • Remarketing allows you to stay on top of your target audience’s radar, so they think of you first when they’re ready to make a purchase.
  • It can help increase sales and ROI by bringing back people interested in your product or service but didn’t buy for one reason or another.
  • Remarketing allows you to target a specific audience with tailored ads, resulting in more efficient use of your marketing budget.
  • Remarketing ads can also show up alongside search results (Google), so if someone searches for local plumbers and you’re running remarketing ads, your ad might appear next to the search results with information about your business.

Depending on how often the person sees the ad, this advertising could mean more leads and higher conversion rates. For some businesses that rely on repeat customers, like restaurants or dry cleaners, remarketing could even mean gaining loyal customers who come back because they’ve seen advertisements reminding them of these businesses.

6 Main Types of Remarketing

There are different types of remarketing, each with its benefits. Here are the six main types:

  1. Display remarketing: Shows ads to people as they browse other websites in the Google Display Network.
  2. Standard remarketing: Show ads to people who have visited their website.
  3. Dynamic remarketing: This takes things a step further by allowing businesses to show ads specifically tailored to each user.
  4. Remarketing lists for search ads: Target users who have searched for keywords related to their product or service.
  5. Video remarketing: Target users who have watched a video about their product or service.
  6. Email remarketing: Targets customers who have given them an email address but have not bought anything yet.

Costs and KPIs in Remarketing

Measure your remarketing campaign’s KPIs like CTR, CPA, ROAS, and conversion rate.
[Source: cookie_studio on Freepik.com]

The costs of remarketing highly depend on many factors, such as the platform where you remarket or the type of ad you place. In general, remarketing costs around $0.5 to $1.5 per click.

To get a better insight into the amount you’d spend on remarketing, you should measure your campaign’s main KPIs:

  • Click-through rate (CTR): The difference between the number of people who’ve clicked on your ad and the number of times the ad was shown i.e. clicks divided by impressions.
  • Conversion rate: The number of new customers or people who have completed some action like purchasing a product. You can calculate it by dividing the number of conversions by the overall number of visitors.
  • Cost per acquisition (CPA): Closely related to the above KPI, this one refers to how much it would cost you to convert a customer. Calculate it by dividing the overall ad costs by the conversions you’ve made.
  • Return on ad spent (ROAS): This is how much you gain from an ad for each dollar spent. By dividing the total income from the ad by how much you’ve spent on it, you get the ROAS.
  • Ad frequency: Measures how many times your ad has been visited.
  • Ad recency: Measures how long it has been since a user has interacted with your ad.

By following these KPIs, you’ll gain insight into how the ad is performing and gauge an estimate of how much it would cost to remarket it.

How To Create a Remarketing Strategy

How do you reap the benefits from remarketing? Simple — by devising a good content remarketing strategy that fits your brand. In general, there are four steps every business can follow when creating their remarketing plan:

  1. Set your goals: What do you want to achieve by remarketing? Is it to increase your sales or to spread the word about your offerings?
  2. Choose a platform: Where do you want to set up your remarketing camp? Google Ads is a great platform for PPC advertising, but you can also use social media like Facebook and Instagram.
  3. Pinpoint your audience: Who are you remarketing for? You can do this based on location, demographics, interests, etc. It’s better to create subsegments of your general target audience so you can easily focus your digital remarketing plan.
  4. Focus on the content: Your next stop is the content you’ll show when remarketing. This mainly depends on your target audience and how they interact with your site. For example, if your audience is mainly Gen Z, Instagram ads will reach them faster even if they’ve interacted with your main site once.
  5. Set up the ad and monitor the success: Finally, run the ad and see how it does. Most platforms give detailed analytics, so you’ll know whether you’ve reached your desired audience, how many times they engaged with the ad, etc. Based on these analytics, you’ll be able to identify strong and weak points you can improve in your next digital remarketing endeavor.

8 Remarketing Tips for Small Businesses

Small businesses can highly benefit from remarketing — but only if they do it right. Here are some tips that can help:

  1. If you have a small budget, start with search remarketing.
  2. Define your audience as narrowly as possible. This will help you create more targeted campaigns and, therefore, be more likely to succeed. The more specific you can be, the better.
  3. Try to reach as many people as possible with your remarketing campaigns.
  4. Use negative keywords to avoid showing your ads to people who aren’t interested in what you’re selling.
  5. Create separate campaigns for each type of product or service you offer.
  6. Use different ad copies and images for each campaign.
  7. Test, test, test! Try different strategies and see what works best for your business.
  8. Always track your results so you can make necessary changes along the way.

When Should I Use Remarketing?

There are a few key moments when every business should consider using remarketing as part of their digital marketing strategy:

  1. If you have a new product or service you want to promote, remarketing can be a great way to reach people who have already shown interest in what you offer.
  2. If you have a sale or special event coming up, remarketing can help boost interest and attendance.
  3. If you’ve just launched a new website or made changes to your existing site, remarketing can help spread the word and drive traffic.
  4. Remarketing can be a great option if you’re simply looking to increase brand awareness or reach a larger audience.

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Key Takeaways

In many cases, digital remarketing may get a visitor to go through the entire checkout process. That can be enough to help your bottom line, but it doesn’t always mean you’ll reach the sales goals the marketing team has set. You’ll have to take other measures, such as email campaigns, to increase revenue.

Regardless of the combinations you use, when done right, remarketing can be one of your most effective promotional tools!

Remarketing FAQs

1. What is the role of remarketing?

The role of remarketing is to re-engage and nurture leads or customers through various marketing efforts, including personalized content, email campaigns, and targeted ads. It aims to maintain brand visibility, build relationships, and encourage desired actions from people who have already shown interest in a product or service.

2. How effective is remarketing?

Remarketing can be highly effective in engaging and converting leads as it targets individuals who have already shown interest in a product or service. Remarketing helps reinforce brand awareness and often leads to higher conversion rates compared to general marketing strategies. However, the effectiveness may vary based on the industry, audience, and the overall execution of the remarketing campaign.

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