Tips to improve your dynamic retargeting results
1. Use a Full-Funnel Approach
As you build your campaign, consider the entire purchase funnel and where your potential customers fall within the sales cycle. Try to have a different conversion goal for each point.
Upper-funnel (awareness) – Focus on attracting a new audience and educating them about your product.
Possible conversion goals: Time spent; video completions
Mid-funnel (interest) – Focus on growing the interest of consumers who are already aware of your product.
Possible conversion goals: Coupon downloads; website clicks; email sign-ups
Lower-Funnel (action) – Close the sale and turn a prospect into a customer.
Possible conversion goals: Purchase; trial sign-up
Loyalty – Target your current customers with exclusive deals or new products.
Possible conversion goals: Purchase; eBook download
2. Have a Segmentation Strategy
When structuring your Contobox, develop a segmentation strategy with your navigation, UX features, content, product types, and product groupings to make it easy to segment users based on what they are interested in and where they are in the marketing funnel.
Organize items into similar groups to create segments for both mid-funnel and lower-funnel campaigns. For example, a tab including all of your kitchen supplies can be used to retarget with general mid-funnel kitchen creative, while creative featuring a particular kitchen item can be used for lower-funnel conversions.
3. Choose the Right UX Features for Your Segmentation Strategy
Use grids, tabs or menus for lower-funnel segmentation rather than galleries or scrollable features. These features indicate intent related to particular products or product categories and give you the opportunity to retarget consumers with specific items geared to their interests.
Galleries and scrollable features are great for mid-level retargeting campaigns as they increase time spent and interaction, which indicates the consumer is moving beyond awareness and into interest.
4. Use Multi-Channel Attribution & View-Through Conversions
Optimize your campaigns to get the most out of your dynamic retargeting. In order to be effective, you need to use a multi-channel attribution methods and view-through conversions.
Multi-channel attribution models give credit to multiple events in the conversion process. (Popular methods include linear and time-decay attribution.)
View-through conversions track the people who did not click on one of your ads but converted later. This is important for optimization, because your campaign may increase the number of consumers who search for your brand, but if you’re using a click-only model it would be attributed to paid or organic search.
In the above example, a user views a Contobox unit and later sees a retargeted ad on a news site. Instead of clicking this ad, it prompts the user to visit a search engine and search for the brand. After the user visits the brand’s site, they make a purchase.
In traditional last-click attribution models, only the search engine would get credited for the purchase, but with multi-channel attribution and view-through conversions both the Contobox unit and the retargeted display ad get credit.
5. Use Cross-Device Retargeting
With cross-device retargeting, you can reach the same consumer across multiple devices, exposing them to your campaign as they switch between devices throughout the day, increasing the chances they’ll notice and engage with your ad.
6. Use Exclusion Pixels (Do. Not. Skip)
Don’t annoy people who have already converted (and waste your advertising spend) with ads for products they’ve already purchased. Use an exclusion pixel on your post-conversion pages (e.g. a post-transaction or thank you page) to remove converted-users from the retargeting list they’ve converted on, then add them to another retargeting list (e.g. a loyalty list).
7. Use Lookalikes as an Upper-Funnel Tactic
Use lookalike modeling to scale up potential audiences who’ve shown similar behaviours to your most valuable visitors with new upper-funnel campaigns.
8. Have a Loyalty Strategy
Develop a loyalty strategy to target your current customers with exclusive deals or new products.
9. Set Frequency Rules (Do. Not. Skip)
Set a frequency cap for your retargeting campaigns to ensure you don’t over-expose consumers to your ads, which can lead to creative fatigue, banner blindness, and even a negative perception of your brand.
The ideal frequency depends on your brand and the campaign, but as a general rule performance campaigns have lower frequency caps than branding campaigns, and more specific creative (based on specific products a user viewed, for example) will have lower frequency caps than more general creative. Talk to your Contobox Experience Manager (XM) to help find the ideal frequency cap for your campaign.
10. Retarget From Both Your Contobox Units and Your Website
Use both your ad units and website to collect first-party data and maximize the effectiveness of your dynamic retargeting campaigns. Not everyone will see your ad or hit your website, so why limit yourself to one or the other?
11. Use a Consistent Style with All Your Units and Your Website
Consistent design across all of your campaign elements (interactive Contobox ad units, standard dynamic display units, website landing pages, etc.) helps avoid user confusion and increases brand lift.
