What Is Remarketing?

Posted in Web Marketing     

Remarketing is oftentimes called behavioral targeting and is a big brother-esque way to advertise to internet users based on what they’re already interested in. As such it’s commonly misunderstood, so we’ll debunk the myths in this post but first and foremost identify what is remarketing specifically and how does it work?

Remarketing is a tactic which allows marketers/ad networks to display their ads to internet users for products/services/niches which that user has already shown an interest in through their browsing or searching history.

You’ve probably been targeted by remarketing before when browsing the internet. Let’s say you search for the phrase “dog collars”. You go to a couple of websites, one being PetSmart, to read up on the subject and maybe compare prices, and then you move on in your internet browsing to check your email. After you log out of your email, you notice that one of the displayed graphic ads on the exit page is for PetSmart and possibly more specifically for dog collars.

When you visited PetSmart.com, a cookie was created and stored in your internet browser. Then when you leave PetSmart’s site, that cookie is accessed by advertising networks wherever you surf online, so you get the effect of feeling as if you’re being followed around by certain PetSmart’s banners and ads wherever you go.

Remarketing is so effective because it drives home repetition of your brand name. If someone doesn’t purchase from your site the first time they visit, by utilizing remarketing your brand will continue to appear on major websites like Yahoo, Google, news sites, content sites, forums, blogs, etc. when they travel them.

The vast majority of internet users don’t understand the full specifics of remarketing and cookies; they just think that your website/brand is bigger than it really is in actuality when it starts cropping up everywhere. This increases your authority and reputation in that person’s mind, making it even more likely that they’ll become a customer of yours.

Additionally, you can use remarketing to offer discounts to the people whom you’re targeting to motivate their business with you. You can create a banner which shows your newly discounted price on precisely the thing which they were interested in before and that banner will take them to the discount page. Remarketing works remarkably well with discounts, incentives, and all kinds of specials.

There are implied privacy concerns when it comes to remarketing but the truth is is that no personal information is gathered in remarketing, just your browsing history and it is only used in this way. Advertisers cannot collect or learn your name, address, etc. through cookies, just your browsing history itself.

Knowing all of this, most people would likely embrace remarketing as they would rather see advertisements relevant to what they are interested in as opposed to something completely random.