Retargeting solutions allow advertisers to track user behavior and respond with customized ads aimed at visitors who performed particular actions on the website. On MGID, you can easily launch retargeting campaigns with our feature called Audiences.
This targeting approach cultivates first-party data by tracking users’ behavior on your own website and allows granular audience segmentation. By adopting this practice, you make fuller use of your own proprietary data as a website owner and reach higher efficiency compared to building a new audience with third-party cookies or socio-demographic profiling.
In this article, we will walk you through the retargeting basics, tips for running a successful retargeting campaign, how retargeting works, and how it can be done on the MGID platform.
What is retargeting?
Most people are already experienced with the common application of product retargeting in e-commerce. For example, when you browsed an online shop, put some products in the shopping cart, and left the cart, ads for these products started to appear on other websites.
By definition, retargeting advertising serves custom ads to users who previously performed particular actions on the website, such as any number of website visits, landing on specific pages, hitting JavaScript events, or reaching goals set for other campaigns.
This can be done by placing the sensor code on all website pages and collecting data regarding visitor navigation and other interactions with the site. That small bit of code drops a cookie on the visitor’s device, and hereinafter this user’s browser can be identified across advertising networks that you use. Note that the placed cookie represents the first-party data and does not identify any personal information, such as name, address, etc.
Tips to get the most out of it
Numerous studies have proved the critical role of retargeting, and not only for online retailers but also for offline shops, app monetization, and other niches. It is important, however, to measure and optimize campaigns over time to reach this efficiency. Do not forget to track conversion rates, test different creatives, and tweak targeting settings based on the achieved outcomes. You also have to know when to stop showing these ads and set the exit conditions or time limits for retargeting.
Remember that no one has the exact client base and customer relationship, therefore, retargeting messages should be customized and adjusted to the business model and communication style of your brand.
Don’t target visitors with the same message they have already seen on the website, but make sure they recognize and recall the visited webpages through visuals. Sometimes you can offer an additional discount on these products or services if you think that the price is the main reason why users leave without a purchase.
Set up a retargeting campaign on MGID
To retarget users across the MGID partner publishers, go to the Audiences section located in the top right corner menu and click on the Add New Audience button. When creating the audience, select the target type (on what basis a visitor can be added), conditions for a visitor to be added, and the period during which the visitor can be included in the audience.
To enable the collection of an audience, you should generate the MGID pixel and add it to all pages of the site. A detailed guide of this process can be found here.
Depending on your goals, you can set the following target types when creating an audience:
- Page link
Retargeting ads will be shown to users who have visited particular pages of a site. You can specify only parts of the URL (Starts from, Contains, or Ends with).
- JS event
You can also re-engage users who have performed certain actions on the site (registration, adding an item to the cart, placing an order, etc.). To set up this type of retargeting campaign, you also have to install the event tracking code.
- Website visitor
You can create an audience of all site visitors and specify the minimum number of visits for a user to be included.
- Existing targets
Finally, it is possible to target those who made conversions in certain campaigns and add conditions for a user to be added when they haven’t reached goals in some campaigns.
Next, you should create or edit a campaign and add the new audience during the targeting set up. The ad creatives of this advertising campaign will be displayed to this audience.
Final thought
With retargeting, advertisers can bring visitors back to the website even after they left, showcase the exact products they were interested in, finetune their messages to consumers, and maximize conversion rates. This approach is invaluable for direct-to-consumer brands or e-commerce websites as they can reach users when they are on the verge of buying or halfway through the checkout process. Other advertisers also can leverage the existing first-party data and segment creative messages based on visitors’ browsing behavior.
On MGID, you can re-engage users by creating audiences in the MGID dashboard. When a person visiting your website meets specified conditions, they will be included in the audience you created and their browser will be marked with a cookie. Then the retargeting campaign will start showing them the custom ads across MGID publishers.
