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Advanced remarketing explained: Enriched retargeting strategy

Sep 20, 2019 Robert Heger 5 min read

Only 3% of website visitors are ready to buy, so what about the other 97%?

They may be willing to share contact information in exchange for a newsletter.

But even then, it’ll take some next level genius to get them back to buying.

The smarts lie in retargeting, but not just any old remarketing strategy will do.

Here’s a breakdown of all of them, as well as the inside scoop on the latest technological marvel: enriched retargeting.

Key Takeaways

For Digital Marketing Managers and CMOs
  • With a track record of increasing sales by up to +50%, retargeting is a great channel to communicate with people once they’ve departed your website.
  • The latest retargeting strategy is called Enriched Retargeting, and leverages the data organisation of a CDP to supercharge retargeting via Facebook Pixel or Google Ads.
  • From pinpoint segmentation, use of AI-powered predictions to the inclusion of offline behavioral data, Enriched Retargeting is the next tool in your arsenal.

What’s Remarketing?

Remarketing is simply a digital follow-up.

It’s everything you do to reconnect with people after they’ve interacted with your brand.

We’re talking emails, on-site banners, targeted ads, etc.

Wait, So What’s Retargeting?

Ask Facebook, Twitter and Google though, and they’ll consider retargeting as remarketing techniques that involve just the retargeted ads, as opposed to its email communication counterpart—think abandoned cart emails—which exclusively falls under remarketing.

So to go with the flow, here are a few ways you can remarket using retargeting.

Types of Retargeting Strategies

Google discovered that combining retargeting ads with other advertising activities can help sell 50% more product. Though remarketing types tend to differ from one another depending on marketing goals and the resources on hand.
Here are the many ways brands can retarget their customers:

List-Based Retargeting Strategy (Email Focus)

Accounts, newsletters or gated offers help retailers turn the challenge of anonymity into an opportunity to engage customers with retargeting. To utilise your email database, here’s what you’ll need to do:

  1. Visitors leave their email address before departing your website.
  2. Upload an email list to a retargeting platform of your choice.
  3. Audience start to see your ads as they browse the web.

A common drawback is the customer use of different email addresses for different purposes, thus ads won’t target correctly unless proper identification and data merging is introduced. In addition, list-based ads don’t include behavioral data, rendering them untailored and very basic.

Pixel-Based Retargeting Strategy (Cookie Focus)

No email? No problem. With a retargeting pixel, an unobtrusive piece of JavaScript code is embedded in your website footer. When a visitor departs, the cookie notifies retargeting platforms to serve specific ads based on the pages they visited. Here’s how it works:

  1. Insert the JavaScript code on your website or post-click landing page.
  2. When met with a pixel, visitors receive an anonymous browser cookie.
  3. The cookie let’s retargeting platforms know they should start showing ads.

This time around, pixel-based retargeting includes light behavioral aspects such as specific landing pages that were visited. Traditional pixel retargeting then groups these visitors into audiences, so groups of individuals see the same ad. To achieve an in-depth view and granular ad personalisation, however, we’ll have to dig deeper.

Dynamic Retargeting Strategy (Product ID Focus)

Dynamic retargeting takes the pixel-based alternative a step further by including a wider range of behavioral recognition that includes specific products and services that people have interacted with on the web or in the app. By integrating product IDs, ads are executed with unique events in mind, such as items left in their shopping cart, categories last viewed and recommendations based on past purchases. How’s this done? Simple:

  1. Add a pixel to all the pages on your website.
  2. Assign custom parameters aligned with campaign goals (may include product ID).
  3. Select and run ads based on the unique use case.

With the introduction of product IDs, we’re getting closer to the level of personalised customisation we wish to achieve, where each ad displays different products based on individual user behavior

However, to produce highly targeted customer-centric ad content, segment users based off of their behavior across different data sources and devices, utilise predictive capabilities and keep up with the competition, we’ll need to employ something a little more potent.

Enriched Retargeting Strategy (Customer Focus)

Now with the use of customer data platforms (CDPs), data is identified, merged and reorganised into a single customer view: a central data hub organised into individual profiles for each customer. CDPs also provided the foundation for improvement when it comes to retargeting. Here’s the recipe for success:

  1. Include a pixel to your pages.
  2. Tie CDP events and pixel events into a single source of truth.
  3. Employ the CDPs segmentation, predictions, and use of offline data.
  4. Run highly segmented targeted ads.

Creepy, weird and annoying are three words often used to describe retargeting-gone-wrong. 

But what if it didn’t have to be that way?

Enriched retargeting tackles this problem by becoming customer (person) based, singling out customers ready to re-engage, purchase, or become loyal brand ambassadors. It does this with customer scoring, identifying which message, product or service is most appropriate for each customer, and with the assistance of predictive analytics, how ready they might be to buy.

Unfamiliar With the Power of Predictions?

Check out our dedicated ebook: The Winning Combo | CDP + Predictive Analytics

 

It’s about leveraging CDP capabilities to appeal to the more relevant crowd, people who are likely to be valuable to your brand, reducing marketing spend and driving sales.

Europe can also rejoice, since enriched retargeting can exclusively filter those that have accepted your terms and conditions, making even Facebook Pixel GDPR-approved.

More importantly, enriched retargeting is flexible, and can be implemented in both Facebook Pixel and Google Ads, among others.

We’ve gone ahead and tested it, and the results are uncanny.

Real-World Results

In the following example, online travel agency Kiwi.com wanted to start segmenting their retargeting strategy, creating personalised, custom audiences with the use of enriched retargeting.

Where we find success with the click-through rate (CTR) of a retargeted ad that’s 10x higher than the CTR of a typical display ad, arguably due to its precision in relevance, we can find similar success by employing enriched retargeting that further improves this average.

If we only retarget the customers who are most likely revisit the website, purchase again, or further engage with the brand, we can save on ad costs while getting a higher conversion rate as well.

That’s precisely what happened when Kiwi.com employed enriched retargeting. They saw a whopping +15% return on ad spend, with a +34% conversion rate and a -16% reduction of cost per purchase.

In fact, the new retargeting strategy performed even better than Facebook Pixel alone, thanks to the added power of segmentation and predictive analytics alongside enriched retargeting.

Final Thoughts

Since the majority of website visitors leave before making a purchase, employing a retargeting strategy is a great way to communicate once they’ve departed. Though what and how marketers choose to communicate to them and how effective that is at achieving strategic goals is up to the retargeting strategy that’s employed. 

Some strategies are more effective than others and marketers should pay particular attention to which strategies work and which truly excel.

Enriched retargeting is brand new, but it’s already proving it’s worth just with the inclusion of custom segmentation and AI-powered predictive analytics.

How Can Exponea Help?

As a Customer Data Platform, Exponea can ingest, consolidate and normalise your customer data to prepare for a retargeting strategy like you’ve never seen. 

Customer data is centralised, organised, and accessible to other systems to use for custom analytics, marketing campaigns, and other data-related business needs.

Exponea was the first GDPR-certified software as a service (SaaS) company in the world, and is now one of the first CDPs to start testing and implementing enriched retargeting with the inclusion of customer scoring, unique segmentation, GDPR-compliance and predictions.

It all comes down to giving your customers an experience they’ll enjoy. So what are you waiting for? Let’s get cracking.

Unfamiliar With the Power of Predictions?

Check out our dedicated ebook: The Winning Combo | CDP + Predictive Analytics

meet the author
Robert Heger
Inbound Content Specialist
Robert is the Inbound Content Specialist at Exponea, where he spends much of his time researching and writing to create Exponea’s articles and e-books. Robert’s previous experience revolved around project management, business strategy and innovation. With Exponea, Robert has been leveraging his talents for the world of e-commerce.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is retargeting?

Retargeting is simply a digital follow-up with the use of targeted ads. It’s the deployment of advertising to reconnect with website visitors after they’ve interacted with your brand.

What are the different types of retargeting?

Retargeting types include:

  • List-based Retargeting
  • Pixel-based Retargeting
  • Dynamic Retargeting
  • Enriched Retargeting

What is the difference between remarketing and retargeting?

Ask Facebook, Twitter and Google though, and they’ll consider retargeting as remarketing techniques that involve just the retargeted ads, as opposed to it’s email communication counterpart—think abandoned cart emails—which exclusively falls under remarketing.

How does retargeting work?

Retargeting takes whatever data is collected when a customer visits your website and employs it to display retargeting advertisements elsewhere on the internet in hopes of driving the visitor back to your website to make a purchase.

Why is retargeting important?

Only 3% of website visitors are ready to buy, so what about the other 97%? Retargeting gets visitors back to buying, and according to Google, combining retargeting ads with other advertising activities can help sell 50% more product.

What is a retargeting pixel?

With a retargeting pixel, an unobtrusive piece of JavaScript code is embedded in your website footer. When a visitor departs, the cookie notifies retargeting platforms to serve specific ads based on the pages they visited.

What is enriched retargeting?

Enriched retargeting takes advantage of the organisational structure of a customer data platform (CDP) by implementing customer scoring, segmentation and predictive analytics to retarget to the most appealing crowd. When utilised correctly, brands discovered a whopping +15% return on ad spend, with a +34% conversion rate and a -16% reduction of cost per purchase.

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