Retargeting, a useful variable for online advertising (part 2)

As I mentioned on my last post, retargeting has become very popular on the last years. This is the reason why I decided to write a series on this subject, so that entrepreneurs and businessmen understand more about this practice, which commonly performs very well. In the first part of this series I introduced the subject and explained how it differs from traditional online campaigns. I recommend you to read the mentioned article before you read this one where I will talk about other elements of retargeting.

 

How to activate a retargeting campaign?

This section explains the most important parts on how to activate a retargeting campaign. I won’t delve the technical aspects on retargeting, because it goes beyond the scope of this blog, but it is important to understand how does it works. Therefore on the next paragraphs I will explain the implementation of this subject.

What we have to do is to add a pixel to our website, either on the whole site or just on some specific pages. Basically a pixel is a discrete JavaScript, therefore our visitor will not notice it. In this way once a visitor comes to our site, it will drop an anonymous browser cookie. This cookie will inform our retargeting provider to whom should he show our campaign, or in other words to show only the campaign to our visitors.

Retargeting platforms today are very advanced and provide us many features. In the first place and as I mentioned before the pixel can be placed in all our site or just on specific pages. This is a very useful feature when we only want to boost a specific product so we want to show our campaign only to the people that have visited that product.

Other feature these platforms provide us is to show different ads to different visitors. With this characteristic we can reach the complexity level we want, taking into account the cookie that was generated to the visitor.

These platforms generally also let us decide where to show our retargeting campaign. In this way if we see that a site is not performing in the way we want, we can cut it form the list of sites that show our campaign.

 

I hope that what I have just explained helps you to understand better retargeting, and that even if you are not a technician you get to know how it works. Remember to continue reading this series of articles where you will understand in a better way the retargeting subject.

 

Image taken fromFlickr.com