The wrong way?

Everyone is talking about how effective retargeting is and how targeted advertising is.

But there is something that not everyone is talking about…

Everyone is doing it wrong

Well, in almost all cases they start off by doing it wrong, and through trial and error learn what I’m about to explain to you.

How to do Retargeting the Wrong Way

I am not ashamed to say that when I first started retargeting, I fell into the same traps as most people do. I just started putting pixels on my websites and hoped for the best!

On one of these websites I even bragged about having 84 thousand people pixeled, and we only needed 1700 people to attend our event.
Everyone was celebrating, right?

Well, no. It was all just bravado and vanity. We had actually tried to run ads against all the 84k people that had visited our pages, but we had lost money – not made money.
There were a few sales, but nowhere near enough to cover the cost of the ads.
This made me think, I needed to dig deeper if I was going to increase my ROI. I had targeted that traffic, but not correctly.

How to do Retargeting the Right Way

After summarizing the information, I realized I wasted as much as 78% of the ad budget.

Retargeting works by placing a “cookie” on the visitor’s computer. A cookie is a piece of code that anonymously tracks the person’s activity, monitoring the pages they visit, and retargeting them based on this activity.

This means I can show the ads with my products on because they have landed on my site. Unfortunately this is all the information I get – that they have landed on my site.

If you are familiar with Google Analytics you will know what “bounce rate” means. The bounce rate reflects the number of people who landed on your site, and the leave before viewing any other pages. Indicating they didn’t find what they were looking for.

It’s common for sites to have between 50-80% bounce rates.

This site I’m talking about had a bounce rate of 83%.

How does this affect retargeting you’re wondering?

Well, think about it like this; if 83% of the visitors to a page retargeted by the cookie are leaving before viewing or clicking more pages on the site then they are not finding the content they were looking for. This means that 83% of my ad spend is not being targeted correctly, and potentially wasted.

How Does This Affect Retargeting?

Well, my retargeting is off if 83% of the visitors I have attached a cookie tag to are leaving the site. Meaning I’m wasting a large part of my ad budget, not the result I’m aiming for.

If you don’t retarget all those people who bounced, they you will not be wasting as much of your ad spend. Those people aren’t interested anyway, so it’s only a good thing to exclude them.

The solution is to wait around 30-40 seconds before tagging them with a cookie, by “hiding” the cookie. This allows long enough for those who are going to bounce to leave. Meaning only the interested visitors are targeted and tagged with a cookie.

All it takes is a simple piece of code, so that x seconds pass before the cookie tags the visitor.

Using this simple string of code allowed us to wipe out the 83% of wasted ad spend.

We instantly saw our ads become profitable.

VERY profitable! It works!

For every AED 3.00 I spend on retargeting, I’m making AED 97.00 (Registration was AED 100).

Every one love cookies :) 

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