How Does Site Retargeting Work?

You may have heard the term “site retargeting” a lot lately—it’s one of the hottest topics causing a buzz in the online advertising and marketing world.

In a nutshell, site retargeting takes the marketing strategy of multiple impressions and “electrifies” it with technology that targets potential customers and keeps your product or service in front of your website visitors even after they leave your site. Your ads simply follow them as they continue to shop around for the very product you are offering.

For instance, a person interested in buying a “VIP” widget starts shopping with a Google search and your site comes up. The customer reads all about your widget offer but they still are curious as to what deals are out there—they are shopping after all. So at this stage, they are off to check out the next result from the Google search.

However, when they get to the next site—lo and behold—there is an ad for your company’s widget right there on the new site’s page. You have just made another impression. In fact, as your potential customer travels down the Google results, your ad can be found on many of the pages that they visit and the number of your widget’s impressions keeps going up with the goal of bring the customer back to your site to make the purchase.

So, how does this site retargeting work anyway? It’s all in the cookies. As soon as a visitor comes to your page, they get a cookie, which is a simple piece of data that is placed in the user’s browser. The cookie sends you or your retargeting vendor a heads-up that the visitor is now on another site. Now, if at that point there is ad space to be had, you or your vendor can bid on it in real-time. If your bid wins, within seconds your ad moves into the available ad space when the user enters the page.

The goal of course, from the first moment your site is entered, is to have the visitor make a purchase. That is the action item you are giving to the visitor. But research has shown that 90% of all first-time visitors to a site move on without making a purchase. That is why an automated system that seamlessly delivers your ad across the Internet is a hot marketing idea that is causing such a stir on e-commerce sites.