Digital Marketing

Digital marketing plays an important role for all business organizations to get success in todays world. As we know that more number of people are now accessing internet for the purpose of buying various things including the daily need commodities along with several other products or services. As a result of which digital marketing is now considered to be the most powerful weapon to reach potential customers online and get them to engage with the product or services they are interested in.

Capturing Customers Interest for Product or Services

We generally see that sometimes people surf a website in search of the desired product but bounce back to other website without buying. This is the situation where some techniques of digital marketing come into play and create an interest among the users for the product or services available on a particular website.

There are numerous ways to attract users towards a business website and make them stay on it and provoke them to purchase their desired products online. Among the available digital marketing strategies, Remarketing and Retargeting are the two names that work well to capture the interest of customers for their desired product or services. These two techniques also return a customer back to a business website, after an initial intent is shown or even once interest may have been lost and help to retain that customer and increases the chance of converting that prospect into a happy customer.

Remarketing vs Retargeting

Remarketing and Retargeting are more or less similar kind of online advertising techniques, that are specifically implemented with the intent to re-engage a visitor or customer who have recently visited your website with the purpose of buying things but somehow didnt make any purchase and bounced to some other website.

Behavioral retargeting (also known as behavioral remarketing, or simply, retargeting) is a form of online targeted advertising and some noted companies in the behavioral retargeting space include: Criteo, AdRoll, Retargeter(acquired by SellPoints), Chango (acquired by Rubicon Project), MyThings, Steelhouse, Perfect Audience (acquired by Marin Software), and Google.

Source: Wikipedia

Now, lets see the differences between these two digital marketing techniques which are used to regain visitors who have already visited your brand. We can distinguish them based on the tools which we use to implement these techniques.

Remarketing Technique

Remarketing campaigns is an important technique to connect with visitors to your website who may not have made an immediate purchase or have visited your brand earlier. When it comes to retain the people who earlier visited your business portal, remarketing helps to provide good chance of bringing back potential customers with tailored advertisements and offers that relate to their past interaction on your website. With remarketing you can increase the chances of converting a prospect into a happy customer.

Remarketing is generally associated with re-engaging customers with e-mails. Let us take an example of shopping cart mail campaigns that you have got after youve bought something or just have bounced to another website. In that case you may have received e-mails related to your earlier search mentioning the current discount offers or the availability of some new varieties of that product. You may also see such type of related ads while browsing other websites.

Implementation and Working Process of Remarketing

To render ads in front of the recent visitor of your website, a remarketing tag needs to be added to your website which is a small snipped code provided from Adword. After the addition of remarketing code, you can create remarketing list, for example different category lists can be created for an ecommerce website like Electronic list, Apparel list, etc. and when users visit that website then a unique cookie ID is added to a specific remarketing list. So on the basis of these cookie IDs relevant ads have been displayed to different users. These ads can be seen in either or both text and image formats and can be managed in Google AdWords. This is the simplest way how remarketing technique has been implemented and the process how it works.

Retargeting Technique

Retargeting is a kind of marketing technique that converts window shopper into genuine buyers. As per the stats only 2% of the online visitors convert into buyers on the first visit, so this campaign is basically used to convert those 98% missed opportunities. Retargeting is also considered as remarketing that helps you to keep your brand in front of bounced visitors after they leave your website.

How Retargeting Works

Retargeting works on cookie-based process where a Javascript tag need to be placed on your website and this code generates a list of users that visited your online business by embedding cookie in their browser. So whenever a new visitor enters to your site, the javascript code drops an anonymous browser cookie and serve the retargeting ads. e-Commerce platform generally use retargeting as their main strategy to regain lost customers. Apart from e-commerce companies, some other B2B portals also availing the benefit from this technique, B2B companies are often considered the best applicant for retargeting, as it can help them to be in front of genuine customers and converts that prospect into a customer.

Different Form of Retargeting

The four forms of retargeting have different approach and strategies designed to engage a specific audience. These four forms are:

• Site Retargeting
• Search Retargeting
• Social Retargeting
• Behavioral Targeting


Photo Credit: Different Form of Retargeting by Search Engine Land




Site Retargeting: In site retargeting, the current customers are re-engaged, as the visitor is on your site and have already made a purchase in the past. You then use their data in retargeting campaign and try to re-engage that consumer again for buying more things in future.




Search Retargeting: Search retargeting focuses on audience who has shown some interest in a product and may not have interacted with that business earlier. Search retargeting rely on the data based on the search habits of a visitor. So the customers converted through search retargeting are purely based on SEO keywords or on site retargeting data.




Social Retargeting: Social retargeting is an interest-based engaging of customers, it targets consumers data and create audience list, whether or not they have searched for or purchased. Facebook is an example of social retargeting, as it would use social data including the updates and commenting of users on any brand to reach consumers with relevant ads. Now Facebook has expanded its targeting capabilities to include search and site-level data.




Behavioral Retargeting: Behavioral retargeting mainly focuses on building audiences and it is is more about inference and is less targeted towards facts (i.e., a consumer actually searches for a product through social platforms). As a result, marketers may be less interested to reach qualified consumers through behavioral targeting as compared to search retargeting.




Source: Search Engine Land