3 Surprising Benefits Of Retargeting

Retargeting has been around for awhile, and some of the early adopters have quite the experience under their belts. Wordstream is one, and here’s what they have achieved with retargeting.
1. Better Brand Recall
One of the main challenges for Wordstream was that only 3% of their total organic traffic came from branded searches. Even despite big budgets for SEO, not many people were aware of the brand’s existence.
An interesting turn happened when the company introduced retargeting. After a while, there was an increase in direct visits based on the brand’s presence itself, due to the sole fact that people were exposed to the brand more.
2. More Engagement
Before the retargeting era, so to speak, Wordstream’s average time on site was only 1 minute and 34 seconds. The average visitor viewed 1.9 pages, and the standard new-visitor rate was 79.2%.
(For some thin affiliate sites this is actually quite good, but overall it’s not a score to be proud of.)
The whole idea of retargeting is to allow you to reconnect with your past visitors. For that reason alone, with a well-constructed campaign, you should be able to improve the new-visitor ratio significantly. This is exactly what happened with Wordstream, but they took it even further.
They started by creating different audiences, depending on the area of the site a person had visited. This allowed them to target the ads even more (by predicting what the visitor might be interested in).
The result for Wordstream was an increase in the average time on site to 5 minutes.
3. Batter Conversion
As it turns out, retargeting can also help us with one of the main goals of them all – conversion.
For Wordstream, the standard conversion was below 2%.
Their retargeting campaign in that area was all about aggressive bidding on people who had expressed interest in some of the company’s products. For instance, instead of bidding on someone who has just seen a blog post, they focused on people abandoning the shopping cart or performing other “more important” actions.
As a result, their conversion grew by 51%. The number of repeat visitors grew as well (by 50%).
The simple conclusion here is that retargeting works. And it’s a great way of bringing your past visitors back to your site.