Programmatic Advertising 101: Retargeting Ads
As a media planner, several targeting tactics are available to you for every digital campaign you’re working on. Every programmatic campaign type brings its own unique set of challenges. Certain targeting strategies are more helpful against specific end goals and KPIs, but there’s one tactic that will always add to the overall performance of your digital strategy, and that’s retargeting.
Retargeting Ads and Programmatic
What’s retargeting and why is it so crucial? Retargeting is the ability to use data captured via pixels (cookie-data) to show an ad to a user who has demonstrated interest in your product before.
These users and the audience data that’s gathered on them is quite valuable from a marketing perspective for a few reasons. Because they’ve already demonstrated interest in your site, they become a first-party audience, and consequently part of a retargeting list. You’re then able to create customized campaigns that are tailored to those users and only visible to them.
So, how are users captured?
With cookies!
When users visit your landing page, a piece of code, or a tracking pixel, sends a string of text from a web server to a user’s browser. Cookies generally store a unique identifier (like which ads were recently seen by the user). The user is then added to an audience list that can be used in retargeting campaigns.
Retargeting Your Programmatic Ads in Basis
In some cases, you may not be able to place a tracking pixel on the site you want to capture visitors on. Thankfully, DSPs provides options to capture these users to retarget them in your campaigns. If you’re using Basis, it’s a pretty simple set-up:
- Audience Capture: With the “Audience Capture” feature, you can capture users who have clicked on a Basis campaign ad to retarget them. Pro tip: To drive higher engagement, make sure there’s a strong call-to-action.
- Redirect Pixels: Instead of placing the retargeting pixel directly on the site you want to collect visitors from, use the redirect pixel option in Basis. This code will use a URL redirect for your search ad, so that when a user clicks on the ad, Basis captures the user first before redirecting them to the desired landing page.
Real-time bidding within DSPs makes retargeting campaigns particularly powerful. Overall, retargeting increases the effectiveness of other marketing efforts and raises brand awareness. Users who recognize your brand will now see your ads displayed across various websites, creating the impression of a large-scale advertising campaign, but for a fraction of the budget. Not to mention, this targeting tactic increases brand recall and drives consumers down the sales funnel, allowing multiple opportunities for conversion.
When retargeting is done right, it can be an incredibly effective way to reach current and prospective clients.
