Marketing campaigns on the internet are not done exactly the same as ones offline due to the lack of face to face interaction. Re-Marketing is one of the most effective marketing strategies for the internet. The main reason it is so effective is because it targets the appropriate customer and reduces the possibility of the user classifying the effort as spam.

The concept of Behavioral Re-Targeting

Behavioral Re-Targeting is a marketing strategy that works by showing ads to people that visited a page showing an item or service, but did not end up purchasing. Let’s say a user is looking for soccer shoes to purchase on his home PC. So, he goes on a shoe website, looks at the time and realizes that he needs to leave his house; therefore he closes the web browser and shuts down the computer. Two days later he visits his social networking page, and realizes that on the banner are the soccer shoes and deals on footballs that he likes. This is so effective because the user is reminded of the shoes he could not buy because he was rushing out of the house, it is not regarded as spam due to his familiarity with the product and more than likely he will need a soccer ball if he is ordering soccer shoes.

To make this advertising strategy effective, here are some steps you can take:

1. Make an account of everything that is done on your website by visitors
2. Ascertain which actions would benefit from individual advertising
3. Make Retargeting commands that would capture these unique actions.
4. Target each group of users with a tailored Retarget advertisement.

Here are some examples of cases

Increase conversion in the Ecommerce Shopping Cart

Behavioral Retargeting can be set up in such a way to target only the users that loaded the shopping cart page but did not purchase. Users will only see the “Thank you for your purchase” page if they converted on an item. Therefore, a cookie is setup to only load and start a campaign if the user browsed to the thank you page and not the shopping cart page. A user will not receive advertisements if he purchased from the website. The cookie can also have an expiration date for the campaign such as 60 days.

Increase conversion of a specific product that was not purchased

Okay, let’s look at the concept of marketing a certain product that was not purchased at the shopping cart. So the user looked at a page with a soccer shoe. Then he went to the shopping cart but did not purchase. We can ascertain that he did not see the “Thank you for purchasing” page. Therefore, the marketing campaign for the specific product will only be loaded if the user browsed the page for the soccer shoe, the shopping cart and the “Thank you” page. We can target the brand specifically because we know what the user was interested in.

Targeting Annual Celebrations and Yearly Events

There are 365 days in a year and 366 for every leap year. Let us look at a scenario where John is married to Cathy and he purchased a female necklace for her as a gift on the 5^th of March this year. He bought it 10 days before his wedding anniversary, which is on the 15^th of March. He got the necklace on an “Anniversary Special” deal which had a page that he had to browse to. It would be a great idea to re-target John with the same category of products around the same time next year since we know that he was browsing anniversary gifts. A good idea might be a pair of earrings from the same brand. We don’t want this campaign to start until around the time that his anniversary is coming up. Therefore, there are four conditions that need to be met in order to start the campaign:

• He has to see the browse the “Anniversary Special” page
• He has to view the shopping cart
• He has to see the “Thank You” page
• A special “Thank You” page criteria that has a 355 day limit has to expire

In order to offset the rest of the year, a special command is inserted. The first three will run for 370 days. The special command says that if he saw the thank you page within 355 days of the purchase, it will override the other criteria and stop the campaign from running. So, the Retargeting campaign would activate only when the special rule expires which gives john a window of 15 days for the campaign.

Trial Offer membership reminders

Remarketing is a great option to remind users to register early when they are on a trial membership. Let’s say the trial is for a month. So for the campaign to be started:

• The user must have visited the Trial page.
• A trial criterion which has been set for 25 days must expire.
• The user must have seen the “Thank you for purchasing” page.

Again, just like the previous example, a criterion is set to prevent the user from being reminded to register too early. We set it to 25 days in order to give a 5 day window. Once the 25 days are up, the advertising campaign will run.

Retargeting to Offline users

A flyer or sweepstake that is handed out can contain a website link. The person will check the website to see if they have been entered into the contest or if they have won a prize. You can target the user with specific advertisements such as events happening at the location that the flyer was given out at. So if they visited the page but did not purchase anything, they can be retargeted with advertisements for the product they did not purchase.

James Dean is an avid hiker that lives & breathes the outdoor life, capturing every moment with his childhood passion of photography. Following his interest in business, he writes columns for orange county web developers. Follow him on Google+