With 70% of consumers abandoning their carts and only 8% returning to complete their purchases, retargeting presents a crucial opportunity for eCommerce businesses. According to the same ReadyCloud study, effective customer retargeting can boost conversion rates to 26%.
Retargeting, or remarketing, is a valuable strategy that lets you reconnect with potential customers who have shown interest in your products. It can reinforce brand awareness, boost eCommerce sales and drive customer loyalty.
If you’re ready to transform lost opportunities into sales and foster long-term business growth, this guide is for you. Below, we cover the following topics to offer actionable strategies and retargeting best practices:
• What Is Retargeting?
• Effective Types and Formats for Retargeting Ads
• How To Segment Your Audience for Personalized Retargeting
• 6 Best Practices for Retargeting Campaigns
• The Role of Data and Analytics in Tracking and Optimizing Your eCommerce Retargeting Campaigns
What Is Retargeting?
Customer retargeting is a powerful digital marketing strategy you can leverage to users who have already shown interest in your product or interacted with your eCommerce site but didn’t finish the transaction.
Retargeting aims to move these interested users closer to a purchase. Since they’ve already shown interest in your brand and offerings, they require less persuasion.
Different Kinds of Retargeting Campaigns
Here are three types of retargeting ads you can include in your customer retargeting campaigns to engage interested buyers more efficiently.
Abandoned Cart Ads
These ads target users who added items to their cart but didn’t complete the purchase. By reminding them of their unfinished purchase, often with a gentle nudge like “Don’t forget what’s in your cart!”, you can bring them back to complete the sale, boosting your conversion rate optimization efforts.
Win-Back Campaigns
These campaigns aim to re-engage customers who haven’t purchased or interacted with your brand in a while. By targeting these previous buyers with personalized messages based on their past behavior, you can encourage them to return and make a new purchase.
Cross-Sell/Upsell Ads
After a customer makes a purchase, retargeting ads can also be used to encourage them to buy related products or upgrade to higher-end versions. Done right, this can not only increase sales but also improve customer engagement and enhance their shopping experience.
Dynamic Retargeting
Dynamic retargeting serves ads automatically generated based on individual user behavior. For example, if a user views a specific product on your site, dynamic ads will showcase that exact item when they encounter your ad elsewhere.
This hyper-relevant content boosts customer engagement and makes converting interested buyers into paying customers easier.
Effective Types and Formats for Retargeting Ads
Choosing the right ad type and format is essential for driving engagement and conversions in your retargeting campaign. Below are some of the most effective formats for retargeting ads worth exploring.
Display Ads
Displayed across networks like Google Display Network, these ads keep your brand visible as users browse the web. Popular formats include:
• Banner Ads: Traditional rectangular ads appearing on websites and apps.
• Interstitial Ads: Ads that cover the entire screen and are shown at natural transition points in apps or websites. While immersive, they should be used sparingly to avoid disrupting the user experience.
• Native Ads: Ads that blend seamlessly with website content, making them less intrusive and more likely to engage users.
• Video Ads: Engaging ads that showcase product features or customer testimonials, ideal for enhancing eCommerce marketing and remarketing efforts.
• Dynamic Ads: Real-time content adjustments showing users the exact products they viewed or left in their cart.
Social Media Ads
These ads are displayed on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X (previously Twitter) and LinkedIn, appearing in users’ feeds, stories or sidebars. They offer powerful targeting options and integrate smoothly into the social media experience. Primary formats include:
• Photo Ads: Simple image-based ads that blend into users’ feeds.
• Carousels: Ads that showcase multiple products in a single, scrollable ad.
• Video Ads: These auto-play in social media feeds or as sponsored content, capturing users’ attention.
• Stories: Full-screen ads that appear between user-generated stories, offering a more immersive experience.
How To Segment Your Audience for Personalized Retargeting
Many eCommerce brands make the mistake of sending the same ads, offers and messaging to the same audience group. The repetitive ads overwhelm viewers and rob businesses of the opportunity to tailor the message and encourage higher customer engagement.
Here are three primary ways you can segment your audience and keep your messaging relevant:
• Behavioral Segmentation: Group your audience based on their actions, such as interaction with your ads, browsing history, past purchases or items added to their cart. This can help you create highly relevant ads catering to their specific needs and interests.
• Demographic Segmentation: Segmenting your audience based on factors like age, gender, income or location lets you craft personalized messages that resonate with each demographic group.
• Preference Segmentation: This involves grouping audiences according to their product preferences, brands they’ve shown an interest in or shopping habits. Unlike demographic or other traditional segmentation methods, preference segmentation focuses on the key factors influencing consumer decisions: their likes, dislikes and distinct tastes.
Adhering to retargeting best practices and grouping your audiences helps you focus on specific groups and create more effective and personalized campaigns.
6 Best Practices for Retargeting Campaigns
Let’s explore some helpful tactics for optimizing your retargeting efforts, ensuring your ads capture attention and drive conversions effectively. From setting frequency limits to conducting split tests, these retargeting best practices will guide you in creating more engaging eCommerce retargeting campaigns.
1. Set a Frequency Cap
While retargeting ads are effective in re-engaging prospective customers, you don’t want to bombard potential clients with the same advertisements. This can lead to ad fatigue, where users become disinterested and ignore your ads moving forward.
Ad fatigue can also signal to platform algorithms that your ad is stagnant. This can limit your ads’ reach to users who haven’t encountered it yet.
To prevent this, set a frequency cap on how often an individual sees your ad within a certain period. This keeps your ads fresh, helps maintain customer engagement and supports your conversion rate optimization efforts.
2. Rotate Your Ads
In addition to setting frequency caps, it helps to switch up the ads you serve to your audiences. If your ads become repetitive, they risk losing their impact and becoming background noise.
Updating and rotating ads with different formats and messages keeps your eCommerce retargeting campaigns dynamic and engaging. Doing so not only sustains interest but also provides valuable insights into which of your personalized retargeting strategies work best.
3. Explore Cross-Channel Retargeting
Maximize your reach by implementing cross-channel retargeting, engaging customers across platforms like social media, display networks and email. With a coordinated effort, you can reinforce your messaging and create a seamless experience for your prospects, regardless of the channel they’re on.
4. Leverage A/B Testing To Refine Your Ads
A/B testing or split testing is vital for eCommerce marketing success. By systematically comparing different versions of your ads, you can identify which elements and variations resonate most with your audience and refine your campaigns accordingly.
Here are some ways to perform split testing:
• Test different headlines and calls to action.
• Experiment with various ad visuals and ad copy one at a time.
• Analyze the impact of different ad formats for the same purpose, such as single-image ads versus carousel ads.
5. Consider Offline Conversions When Monitoring Performance
For businesses with physical locations, tracking offline conversions is essential to gauge the actual return on ad spend. Here are some ways to do that:
• Google Ads Store Visits Conversions: Enable the Store Visits metric in Google Ads to track store visits. This feature estimates the number of customers who visit your physical location after interacting with your online ads using anonymized location data.
• Facebook Offline Conversions: Facebook’s offline conversions feature allows you to upload in-store transaction data to match with ad interactions, providing insights into how your online ads drive in-person sales.
• Custom Promo Codes or Coupons: Create unique promo codes for specific ad campaigns. When customers redeem them in-store, the codes can be traced back to the ads that generated the visits.
• POS System Integration: Integrate your POS system with your ad platform. Doing so allows real-time syncing of sales data, making it possible to directly link in-store purchases to specific online ads.
6. Broaden Your Retargeting Efforts Beyond Paid Advertising
While paid advertising on platforms like Facebook, Google, YouTube or any other platform is worthwhile, diversifying your retargeting tactics can further enhance your online store’s potential. Consider integrating email marketing, SEO and other strategies to improve brand awareness and boost eCommerce sales more sustainably.
The Role of Data and Analytics in Tracking and Optimizing Your eCommerce Retargeting Campaigns
Leveraging data and analytics is crucial for tracking and optimizing any campaign. Closely monitoring key performance metrics allows you to refine your eCommerce marketing strategy, improve customer retargeting and maximize ROI.
Some metrics to consider tracking:
• Conversions track the number of completed purchases to evaluate the direct impact of your retargeting efforts.
• Click-Through Rate (CTR) measures the percentage of people who clicked on your retargeting ads, indicating the ad’s appeal and relevance.
• Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) is the metric that compares the revenue generated from ads to the amount spent on those ads, assessing the profitability of your campaign.
• Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) refers to the cost of acquiring a new customer through your retargeting ads.
• Engagement Metrics include time spent on site, page views and bounce rate — metrics that indicate how well your ads are re-engaging users and encouraging further interaction with your site.
Boost Your Bottom Line With Thrive
Customer retargeting is a powerful tool in conversion rate optimization. With suitable ad types and formats, retargeting best practices and a well-planned overall strategy, you can not only bring interested customers back but also boost eCommerce sales and build lasting brand loyalty.
If you know it’s time to elevate your retargeting efforts, our pay-per-click experts at Thrive would love to hear from you! We’re here to partner with you in launching a tailored retargeting campaign that turns your visitors into loyal customers. Get in touch to get started.
