Five ways how digital marketers waste retargeting dollars
1. They don’t have insight into audience intent
Standard practices add users to retargeting pools on page load, but not everyone who clicks an ad or browses a website is ready to buy, and hitting those audiences with conversion-based tactics shortly after can be a waste of money. Knowing the amount of time customers spent on a website, the number of products they checked out, the specific features they engaged with, or whether or not they added anything to their shopping cart can tell marketers a lot more than a website click. Collecting behavioural data like that can be as simple as placing a snippet of Javascript from your retargeting partner onto your site.
2. They haven’t taken every touchpoint into account
Another key element that helps marketers understand where customers are in their purchase journey is understanding where they’ve been — whether they’ve interacted with their brand before, the number of times, and on what platform. This offers additional insight into their customers’ likelihood to buy, which is why they need to work with a vendor that integrates a variety of data sources into their retargeting solution, from CDPs to e-commerce platforms.
3. They don’t have enough control over their campaigns
When marketers work with third-party vendors to manage their campaigns, they often don’t get any insight into where their ads are running or why audiences are being targeted. That makes it impossible for them to know which elements drove success, or what conversions should be attributed to the campaign. Instead, they should search for retargeting partners that empower them to understand the programmatic space, offer detailed, real-time analytics, and will work with them to adjust the strategy or optimize creative based on their most profitable audiences.
4. They’re relying too heavily on automation
Automation is a powerful way to analyze and segment data, but for machine learning to be successful, it needs to understand what “success” looks like, and have the time and data to learn how to reach that goal. To get to this point as efficiently as possible, marketers need a knowledgeable team, either internally or externally, that they can work with to set the strategy and provide optimization recommendations along the way.
