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​When a customer comes into your shop and asks about a certain product but then he leaves without purchasing it, you know that there is a potential sale right there, and a chance that the customer will be purchasing a similar product in the near future.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could send one of your salespeople to follow that customer and remind them of your business everywhere they go after visiting your shop?

In fact, what if you were able to remind them to the extent that when they are about to buy that product, your brand or business is the first name that comes to their mind?

In the real world, that idea sounds like something only an insane stalker would do.

Assuming that your salesperson doesn’t get arrested or beaten up for stalking the customer, the cost would make it quite impossible to pull off such an exercise.

And yet in the online world, it’s very simple to do that very thing using re-targeting or re-marketing services.

​Here are some of the many benefits of remarketing to your customers online:

• ​​Reduced CPI (cost per impression)
• ​Improved conversion rates
• ​Better ROI
• ​Laser targeting
• ​Cost-effective branding

When you consider all that, it’s no wonder re-marketing has taken the Internet world by storm in recent years. But, is remarketing only for the big players?

How does someone who is just getting started in online marketing take advantage of remarketing to boost their brand image, build their list and make more sales?

Remarketing isn’t all that hard to understand, and it’s certainly not difficult to set up.

In fact, it’s surprisingly easy to set up an effective remarketing campaign.

​There are a lot of re-marketing platforms that are ready to help you create a killer campaign. All you have to do is learn the basics and let them take care of the nerdy technical stuff.

That is unless you actually like doing stuff like leaving cookies to earmark site visitors, monitoring how they behave on your site and determining their intent…

If that’s you, then have at it.

But, if you’re anything like me, you’re going to appreciate just how much these re-targeting services take care of so you can focus on more important stuff like working on your strategy and branding.

Now, let’s look at 4 of the best platforms that you can use for your re-targeting campaigns:

1. AdRoll

This re-targeting service has been providing businesses with a range of advertising options for years now and they are well-known for their amazing re-targeting plans.

With customers such as Moz, Red Vines, Salesforce, and Levi’s continuing to use their platform year after year, they’re certainly doing something right.

AdRoll allows you to reach 98% of all the sites on the Internet by working with partners such as Google, Yahoo, Facebook Exchange, and Microsoft.

According to AdRoll’s website, on average, AdRoll re-targeting customers earn about $10 for each $1 spent.

This isn’t so hard to believe when you consider how good the guys at AdRoll are at advance targeting techniques like geo-targeting and customer segmentation.

Using AdRoll’s platform, you’re able to target or exclude visitors to your site based on their behaviors.

You can create user groups that are based on buyer intent (for example, adding products to a shopping cart) and you can even set up conversion and tracking rules that are customized for your specific campaign.

Re-targeting becomes really simple when you use AdRoll’s features and easy to read analytics.

As an official Facebook partner, their platform is one of the easiest to use when it comes to re-targeting customers on Facebook, particularly on the news feed ads.

Yes, that means that AdRoll can re-market to those people who left your site and went on to visit Facebook.

All you have to do to set up a Facebook news feed campaign is to choose a weekly budget, targeted locations, schedule, and a max CPM (cost per thousand) bid.

After that, you can select your visitor segments and then your ads will begin to appear in their news feeds. These ads will show to anyone who was ‘cookied’ on your site.

This happens whether or not they interacted with your Facebook fan page in any way. Your ads will be displayed in that person’s news feed just because they previously visited your site and you’ve targeted them in your new ad campaign.

That’s pretty awesome!

AdRolls Re-targeting: The Takeaway

AdRoll’s pricing is very transparent, which is a big plus for those who are just getting started building their business online.

They also have a great customer support team who are responsive and knowledgeable about their platform – again, this is something you will appreciate if you’re tech-challenged.

So, in a nutshell, AdRoll is easily the front-runner with regards to re-targeting platforms.

It is a little on the pricey side compared to some of the other services on the market right now, but it’s worth it if you’re new to re-targeting and can’t afford to spend weeks trying to figure it all out on your own.

2. Chango (Now The Rubicon Project)

Although Chango offers site re-targeting solutions, they mainly specialize in search re-targeting.

With search re-targeting, a customer doesn’t have to have visited your site for your ads to be displayed to them.

Instead, relevancy and customer interest are decided using recent searches that the potential customer conducted on Google, Bing, or Yahoo.

This means that if someone searches for a particular product or service and ends up on a website that is a part of Chango’s massive data network, the service will earmark that user and allow you to show customized ads to them promoting your products and services.

Chango has a huge number of data partners. When using their platform, you get access to over 8 billion search events as well as search data from the major search engines.

This means that you’ll also be able to get some great ideas and suggestions for keywords.

Best Feature: Dedicated Account Manager

​Chango gives you a dedicated account manager when you sign up so that you don’t have to spend valuable time trying to learn how to optimize and manage your campaigns on your own.

This is great because it means that even if you’re totally new to re-targeting, you can have a killer campaign up and running in no time at all.

You can use this re-targeting service to target customers from the best markets: US, UK, and Canada.

There are indicators and scores that allow you to access each of your visitors according to what they do while on your site and also what they did before visiting your site, and what they did after they left.

This is called ‘intent score’ and it helps you target the visitors who intend to buy a certain product.

Do you have a product feed?

Chango has a dynamic creative that they offer for online stores. It allows you to create ads using recently viewed products that the customer checked out at your e-commerce store.

Chango Key Takeaways

This service has a massive network of data partners and you will undoubtedly gain a competitive edge when it comes to SEM (search engine marketing) just by using their option for search targeting to reach potential customers who have a high intent to buy.

While they do offer a lot as compared to other re-targeting platforms, they are also one of the most expensive ones around and if you’re just starting out in online marketing, it may be wise to try one of the other platforms first.

3. Perfect Audience

If you’re someone who likes to keep it as simple as possible, then this might just be the perfect platform for you. All you need to do to use this re-targeting service is to insert a piece of code in the body section of your site.

You then create lists of the types of visitors that you want to target, and then design campaigns to target specific segments within your re-targeting lists, and that’s it.

After that, your ads will begin to appear to your visitors.

When visitors leave your site without making a purchase, Perfect Audience allows you to re-market your products to potential customers on Facebook.

That’s a platform that has a massive user base of almost a billion people.

Just like AdRoll, this service allows you to re-target using standard Facebook ads as well as on the Facebook news feed.

Best Platform for E-commerce Stores

Perfect Audience offers some really practical solutions to online stores that are using platforms like Magento, Shopify, Volusion, and 3dcart if your visitors leave without buying anything.

The great thing about this platform is that you don’t have to pay anything for set up or maintenance. This is why it’s such a great choice for small businesses that are operating with very tight budgets.

When using this service, you get site reports that actually show you the names of the sites on which your ads have been served. You also see how many impressions were served as well as how many clicks they got.

This data can help you to easily determine where your ads are performing well and where your ideal audience is hanging out online.

In addition to this, you can blacklist any of the sites that you notice aren’t doing that well so that you can focus more on the profitable exposure.

In a bid to keep things as simple as possible and make the learning curve as short as they can, Perfect Audience has a 5-minute quick start guide that has instructions to help you set up and start using the platform in just minutes.

They also have a large knowledge base that has short, to-the-point video tutorials, manuals, and guidelines.

Perfect Audience Final Verdict

This is an excellent platform for those who are just starting out in business and are on a tight budget.

If you want to learn about online advertising and re-targeting without having to spend massive amounts of money, then give this platform a try.

It’s particularly great if you have an e-commerce store that uses a third-party platform such as WordPress, Magento, or Shopify.

4. Google

You can’t discuss re-targeting without at least mentioning what the big ‘G’ can do.

Google has a huge display network that encompasses over a million websites, videos, and apps. There are a lot of opportunities to re-target successfully using Google.

You can set up this service easily from inside your AdWords account.

Just add the re-marketing tag to your site, create your ads, and then set up your campaign and you’re ready to go. From your campaigns tab in your Google AdWords account, head over to the shared library and create a list of people visiting a particular page or section of your site.

Google has really simple targeting options that you can use to target people according to their actions, the specific pages they landed on, the time of their visit, and other factors.

Google has another feature, RLSA (re-marketing list for search ads) which allows advertisers to create campaigns that are aimed at those who performed searches for certain keywords even if they didn’t visit your site.

Google does its re-marketing on the GDN (Google Display Network) which means that you have access to almost 10% of the internet through that platform.

Google Retargeting – Points to take home

This is a quick and simple solution for anyone who is already comfortable with AdWords.

This option doesn’t offer Facebook re-targeting and is limited to just the Google Display Network. It’s a useful service that comes with no hassles or headaches, but it could prove to be a little limiting as your business grows.

In Conclusion

You’ve seen that no matter what niche you’re in, or what size your site is, you can always benefit from retargeting and remarketing to your lost customers.

Everyone is doing it – from the huge international brands to the small businesses that are just starting out.

The number of remarketing platform options that are available on the market makes it easy to find one that suits your specific needs. So choose one of the ones mentioned above and get started right away.

Set up a campaign, start remarketing, build your list, and boost your sales.

Feel free to post your comment below.  An email address is required but it will not be shared with anyone, put on any list, or used for any kind of marketing, just to alert you if there are any replies. Thanks and happy hunting!

PlanetBizOp.com

->Steven

Updated: Originally published June 28th 2018