Retargeting practices for small businesses

If you are a small or local business owner, you are probably making good use of local marketing strategies. But are you missing out on retargeting opportunities? If so, you are missing out on a great opportunity to directly advertise to potentially interested customers. Here at Pumpkin Web Design in Preston, we work with businesses and companies across the region, from Southport to Blackburn, to provide top quality web design and web marketing support. After all, what’s the use in an incredible website, if it isn’t marketed correctly? As a result, we have produced this guide to retargeting practices for small businesses.

Firstly, what are retargeting practices for small businesses?

Retargeting is all about targeted advertising. It is a way for you to advertise directly to the customers that have placed an item in your basket, or spent a long time on your website, but haven’t purchased anything. Perhaps they are comparing products or prices with one of your competitors? Or maybe they had to search for their bank card and simply forgot? Whatever the reason, these customers add to your failed conversion rate, and without retargeting practices, there is no way to find them again.

As a result, retargeting practices allow companies and businesses to place a pixel or a cookie on the website users browser, once they reach a specific page. This means that when the user uses the same browser to access another website with a retargeting platform, the user can be shown a targeted advert. There are many websites that allow retargeting advertisements, including giants like Facebook and Yahoo. So you can rest assured, your advert will hit the mark.

Retargeting services

There are many retargeting services, each with slightly different practices. Two of the big names are Facebook and Google (of course).

Facebook retargeting

Facebook is a powerful marketing tool for both large and small businesses. With more than a billion users, most of them active on the social media platform daily, your audience is potentially huge. To expand on their services, Facebook also offer a retargeting method.

This is really easy to use, as all you need to do is install the Facebook pixel on the page that you want to use to create your audience. This will then track and monitor the behaviour and actions of users on the page, and allow you to create a custom audience based on the information discovered. As a result, you can easily target people that were interested in your product or service, but did not sign up or purchase.

Once you have created your audience, you can create Facebook ads that will target the selected audience on their Facebook page, as they scroll through social media. This can be just the reminder that your users needed to revisit your page and purchase or sign up.

The advantage of this is that you will pay to advertise to your selected audience, but you don’t have to advertise to everyone else. This targeted advertising is a great way to be successful online.

Another advantage is the “Call Now” feature that Facebook offers to mobile users. As a result, users that see your ad on Facebook will be able to call your business simply by touching the “Call Now” button. Anything that makes life easier for the customer, is likely to improve the chances that they do take action.

Google Retargeting

Search Engine giant Google is another obvious choice for your retargeting advertisements. After all, the vast majority of people use Google multiple times a day. Google is the largest search engine in the world and it is highly likely that any potential customers will also use Google. As a result, it can be perfect for retargeting.

Google has several retargeting options. These include:

• Standard retargeting to target customers as they browse websites and apps that are in Google’s Display Network
• Dynamic retargeting to target customers with specific products or messages based on their browsing history with you
• Mobile retargeting to target people who have used your mobile app or website while they are using other mobile apps or websites in Google’s network
• Search retargeting to target people who have visited your site when they search for related products on Google

Considerations for retargeting

Although retargeting is the perfect way to re-appeal to those customers who left your website, there are some considerations:

⦁ the amount of times you display an advert will influence their decision to return to your website. Too few and they might not notice. Too many and they will become “banner blind” and not pay attention to your advertising. As a result, you should make sure you never target the same user more than 20 times.

⦁ users may well have returned to your website to purchase or sing up using a different device. In which case your retargeting might be irritating or annoying for the user. This is another reason to make sure you don’t retarget too often.

For more information, or for professional web marketing or SEO support, get in touch with the experts today, here at Pumpkin Web Design.