Everything You Need to Know About Remarketing Facebook Ads and General Remarketing Techniques

 Introduction

Remarketing is often mentioned in hushed tones, in spite of all the marketing jargon that populate public websites, forums, and discussion boards. Why, you ask? The concept of remarketing has a negative connotation due to the fact that it is based on following users’ data trail. Snippets of code track user online activity, following them from one website to another as they surf the net. This valuable information has been life-changing for businesses as they analyze the data to boost sales and increase website views. Sure, customers get a chance to opt out of retargeting, but with changes in Cookie policies, it also means they will be denied access to the website.

Retargeting for General Ads

Two of the most popular ad services with retargeting are Remarketing Facebook ads and Remarketing Google Ads. Many firms specialize in Facebook and Google Ads remarketing services and create specialized content for such ads along with their proper placement. Retargeting does not actually track a person’s personal details, but only their past browsing data; such as websites visited and accessed webpages to show relevant ads. In addition, their location is also tracked in case the app is granted location access by the user. More details on how retargeting works is mentioned below.

How Does Retargeting Work?

Many are curious about the working process of retargeting ads. Take for example, imagine you are looking for a smartphone on Amazon, whether it is via desktop, mobile site or app. Sometime later, you visit a different website or app that displays Google ads or Facebook ads, and you might come across the very phone you were looking at in the ad. Not only does it show the exact same model, it shows the same website, Amazon. You might be surprised that the ad offered the exact item you were searching for and through what means.

This is an example of retargeting. In context of the above example, when you visit Amazon’s website to look for a smartphone, like the Apple iPhone 11, there are codes that work in the background to store data about your visits. The code stores the webpage data in form of ‘cookies,’ to keep track of your search for the iPhone 11. When you visit another website, the ad boxes in that website will pull data from your local cookies, and find out that you’ve been looking for the iPhone 11 from Amazon. They then show this exact ad on that website, completing the retargeting process.

Benefits of Retargeting for Businesses and Advertisers

Retargeting involves the consumer getting repeat ads for their last visited websites and products, and in more than 50% of the cases, the customer clicks the ad and ultimately returns back to the original website, which in our case is the iPhone 11 listing on Amazon. From there, the customer may end up buying the iPhone, and the business effectively declares the retargeting process a success.

Retargeting ensures that the customer leaving the website gets a second or third chance to make up their mind. If they come back and buy the product or service, then it means the business managed to bring back a customer and get a sale, boosting profits. Retargeting offers business an opportunity to gain back on potentially lost sales.

Can Customers Opt Out for Retargeting?

Retargeting involves tracking the customer’s activity, so many of them are concerned about privacy and may refuse to be retargeted. However, it is not as easy as it sounds. You might have noticed; whenever you visit a website, you get a notice saying that you have to accept cookies to access the website. Some sites allow you to customize which cookies to allow, whereas majority of sites ask you to accept all cookies or you cannot access the website. The remarketing or retargeting codes are actually present in those cookies, so if a customer doesn’t want retargeting, he/she will have to deny cookies when entering a website. Without complete access to the website, the customer defeats their original intent to purchase the item. Hence, majority of customers accept cookies when entering a website, for cookie data is stored locally and can be cleared from browser settings.