Businesses are spending more money than ever on retargeting ads. More than 91% of marketers believe that retargeting ads perform better than email, search, and display ads. It boosts your overall Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), gives you opportunities to enhance customer LTV and earns more loyal customers. Everyone wants to convert the user who has shown any interest in the products available on your app. With so many touchpoints available to run retargeting ads, and customer journeys going haywire, how do you do that effectively? How to optimize retargeting ads the right way?
On a broader level, there are 3 pillars of almost every digital marketing practice: technology, display, and strategy. The technology in retargeting ads is responsible for collecting and reaching the audience. The display is the creative messaging that you want to show to the audience. The strategy involved utilizing the technology and the display appropriately. Once you shape them in the right order and you can rest assured that your campaign will succeed.
Experienced marketers are aware of that, yet retargeting campaigns are not meeting expectations. Or you always feel there is a scope for improvement. Well, there could be some gaps in ad campaigns that remain in the blind spot of the marketers.
In this blog, we will discuss how you can optimize retargeting ads to drive better campaign results by deploying minor fixes in your technology, messaging, and strategy.
1. Are Your KPIs and Campaign Goals Different?
When the goal of your retargeting ads campaign is to drive conversion/sales, why would you rate the performance on impressions or clicks? There is no denying that such metrics help you in campaign optimization. However, it limits the approach of your advertising partners and dilutes the attention from the original goal.
The fix for this situation is to switch to the Cost per Converted User (CPCU) model in which performance is measured downstream KPIs (such as sales, first-time deposit, etc.). Once you and your advertising partners are focusing on the same goals, the results are bound to improve.
2. How Well Do You Understand Your Audience?
Stating the obvious – the better you understand your audience, the better you build a campaign for them. However, if the understanding of retargeting audiences is limited to demographics and interest in a product, then there is a lot that you can improve. Gather better audience insights to understand their preferences, behaviors, and decision-making intent.
Audience intelligence can help you leverage audience insight based on behavioral as well as contextual data. Based on this, you have more meaningful and data-driven audience segments. With affinity modeling of the data, your programmatic ad platform will understand the proclivity of the conversion of users and accordingly target them.
3. Will Your Campaign Creatives Get the Attention of the Audience?
Your customers won’t understand how good your products are or how fantastic your customer service is unless you get your ad creatives right. And, ensuring an excellent creative delivery in the ad doesn’t limit to placing the correct CTA and brand colors. In the world of dynamic ads, your ad creative should offer the products in which the user would be interested.
It should be compatible with different ad spaces and device sizes. To deliver stand-out ads and gain the interest of the user, you can even experiment with different ad formats, such as static images, GIFs, carousels, and videos in retargeting ads. With data-oriented A/B testing, you can learn from your campaigns and continuously optimize with Machine Learning.
4. What Level of Transparency Do You Have In Retargeting Campaigns?
Running retargeting ad campaigns utilizes the first-party data of advertisers. That data is fed to the Demand Side Platform (DSP) to target the customers across channels and drive conversions. Are your ads being served on quality apps? It is essential to look into where your ads are served on quality ad space using app intelligence. It helps with a lot of challenges in your campaigns, such as brand safety and other fraud possibilities.
Affle’s performance DSP – RevX offers 100% transparency at the site/app level for every impression served. With these critical insights on the self-serve dashboard, you remain assured that you are getting quality ad spaces that maintain a brand reputation as well as ad experience.
Some Quick Tips to Optimize Retargeting Ads
Watch Incremental Lift
Always keep a close eye on the different channels/touchpoints that you are using with your retargeting campaigns and how they impact your revenue. Incremental lift, the measurement of revenue contribution from various channels, helps you make out what is working for your ad campaigns. Accordingly, invest your ad budget on more promising channels when you optimize retargeting ads.
Sync Retargeting with User Acquisition
While you can work on different campaigns with different campaign objectives, your overall marketing goals should be in the same direction. This is where sync between ad campaigns at different marketing stages becomes almost mandatory. With one campaign supporting the other with brand messaging, technology, and strategic level, you are more likely to drive better results.
Use Social Media Ads
Social networking consumes 144 minutes of internet users worldwide every day[2]. Along with identification for key interest points of the users, social media offer the option to run different ad formats. Make social media an essential part of your ad strategy.
Monitor Your Historical Ad Data
Even if you have an ad partner that relies on Machine Learning that can learn from historical data points, it is needed to look into the campaign data from a human angle regularly. A manual analysis can help you figure out new strategies for your future campaigns.
Wrapping Up
Most markets are following the norms while ignoring that advertising in a constantly evolving space. The success lies not only in adapting to the changes but by being able to innovate new ways of reaching customers.
Retargeting may seem like an easy concept. However, considering the declining attention span of the users and cut-throat competition, you need to deliver stand-out ads and build the audience smartly. It means regular optimization in retargeting ads is a necessity. Be clear with goals, choose smart platforms for running ads, and create a comprehensive strategy for all buyer personas.
Need help running a retargeting campaign over RevX – Affle’s Demand Side Platform?
Write to us now at marketing@revx.io
Reference:
[1] The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) – PDF
[2] Statista
Lauren Heineck
