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12 Retargeting Platforms for Your Marketing Stack

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December 20, 2021

Quick Navigation

• What Is a Retargeting Platform?
• How Does Retargeting Work?
• Why Is Retargeting Important?
• Retargeting and Digital Advertising
• 12 Retargeting Platforms

Did you know that 98% of visitors to a website don’t buy something on their first visit? Retargeting is a way you can help get more conversions from customers within their sales journey, even after they’ve left your store or website. If this sounds appealing, keep reading to learn why this practice is beneficial to businesses and learn about programs and apps that can help make this process simpler for you as a marketer.

What Is a Retargeting Platform?

A retargeting platform is a software program that allows a business to send reminder ads to leads and customers easily and across channels. They’re often used to put ads in front of potential customers that have abandoned a website without completing a desired action. They have access to websites and networks where you can display ads and increase your chances of getting your information in front of the right audience at the right time. These platforms have features beyond advertising, including metrics and tracking tools to let you know if your efforts or campaigns are working.

How Does Retargeting Work?

Retargeting ads remind customers about a brand they once explored or a store they once visited but never became a follower or customer of the company. For example, if you visit an online store and put an item in your cart, but never make the purchase, you might be a candidate to receive retargeting ads from that business. These ads appear throughout a customer’s buying journey online, not just on the brand’s website, but across the internet. Cookies play a role in making this happen.

When a customer visits the site, they collect an anonymous browser cookie that tracks their actions during browsing and follows them on their exploration of the web. This happens when marketers target pay-per-click advertising to remind people of their brand until they come back to the site and complete a conversion. It’s like how content marketers use content promotion to get their pieces better reach online. The cookies stay in someone’s browser until they clear them. Though it sounds like a complicated process, all these things happen automatically once you have a system in place.

Why Is Retargeting Important?

All businesses have competition on the internet, but it can be especially tight for brands that do business only online. These companies must compete with both big and small organizations, ones with a local presence, and many similar brands that offer the same goods and services. To get a share of the market, people have to notice your brand, be interested enough to learn more, and then become intrigued enough to make a purchase and keep coming back.

Retargeting plays on the psychological Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, or the frequency bias. The principle states that when you see something new, or new to you, for the first time, then you see it everywhere. But there isn’t actually an increase in occurrence, you’ve just noticed it more. This process does, though, increase the occurrence of the ads you’re seeing all across the internet, but this frequency may encourage people to go back and make the final conversion rather than making one with a competitor.

Retargeting and Digital Advertising

Retargeting is one component of digital advertising or promoting a brand, product, or service through digital channels. There are two main types of retargeting commonly used in digital advertising:

• Pixel-based retargeting: A type of JavaScript code, called a pixel, that places the tracking cookie so the host site can track visitors’ habits and locations across the internet.
• List-based retargeting: The marketers or retargeting platforms create a list of people, users, or visitors to show the retargeted ads. This is a popular method for social media retargeting because it’s based on the account itself, not an anonymous code.

There are some types of retargeting that can fall into both pixel-based and list-based methods, depending on their execution. These include:

• Account-based retargeting
• Buyer persona retargeting
• Cross-channel retargeting
• Facebook pixel retargeting
• Email retargeting

12 Retargeting Platforms

Here is a list of retargeting platforms you can add to your marketing stack to increase your chances of getting more conversions and capturing your share of the market:

1. AdRoll

Image via AudiencePrime

AdRoll combines social, email advertising, and display efforts together to help grow your business. It uses personalization and automation to make it easier for brands to structure, sync, and measure all their marketing data and campaigns. With this program, you can work through marketing for the entire customer journey.

The program helps you target all 56 touchpoints in the customer journey, but personalize them to make sure people return for more. This central program lets you access and sync your data from Facebook, Instagram, Google, and over 500 other sources. You can start using the service for free, but full access requires a subscription.

2. AudiencePrime

Image via AudiencePrime

AudiencePrime is a retargeting platform that lets you show ads to users based on their previous engagements on your site. It lets you conduct data onboarding, audience enrichments, identity resolution, and lookalike modeling. Each of these features lets you perform retargeting more effectively for your brand. AudiencePrime’s export capability sends audience segments to other platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook Ads for a more comprehensive strategy.

3. ClickMeter

Image via ClickMeter

ClickMeter’s retargeting program lets you compare, optimize, and monitor marketing links in one place to help raise your conversion rates. It offers services for agencies, affiliates, advertisers, and publishers to provide solutions for every type of business. This tool, originally created to address the needs of one agency, evolved into a program for others to collect, review, and share data for companies of all sizes.

ClickMeter can help you find the best online marketing sources or channels for your ads and determine which ones produce the best return on investment (ROI). Create tracking links to attach to ads anywhere online, from social posts to blogs and newsletters. This allows you to measure customer activity and conversations to determine what’s driving your audience to do what they do.

4. Criteo

Image via AudiencePrime

Criteo is an advertising platform that focuses on choice, freedom, and opportunities for marketers. Businesses of all sizes and industries can access technology and data to produce relevant ads at any time. The platform uses artificial intelligence (AI) in a shopping-focused segment to help with retargeting efforts.

Crieteo allows you to scale your retargeting efforts and work with different types of messaging, like personalized video ads, to reach customers where they visit and in ways that appeal to them. The company partners with premium publishers to get you better placements on the web. You can add a custom piece of code to your website to trigger the Criteo AI Engine to look at shopper engagement and provide product recommendations in ads. You can also set a bid per shopper based on their conversion worth to spend your budget more wisely.

5. Facebook Custom Audiences

Image via AudiencePrime

Through Facebook Ads, you can set up a feature called Custom Audiences. To do so, create a Facebook retargeting pixel and add it to your website. Then, build your custom audience. This program lets you reach the people who already know you and keep them coming back to your brand, besides those you’re trying to retarget.

You can build the list of people you’d like to retarget, collaborating information collected online, and in-store, if you have a physical location. App developers can use Custom Audiences to work with the Facebook SDK. Similar to the Facebook pixel, install the SDK within your app and retarget those who use it in place of your online store. Custom Audiences lets you choose your ad type and reach sources all across the Meta network, such as Instagram and Messenger.

6. Fintzea

Image via AudiencePrime

Finteza is a retargeting platform that focuses on analytics and advertising. It lets advertisers use a customer relationship management retargeting plan to drive their efforts. The software also safeguards customer data and puts a priority on privacy. Finteza can tell you specific information about your visitors, such as:

• Service provider
• IP address
• Browser choice
• Device type
• Geographic location

Finteza breaks down the conversion data for each segment so you can see if there are certain factors that affect customer behavior. You can choose to display ads to users who have performed specific actions or set other retargeting triggers to fit your needs.

7. Fixel

Image via AudiencePrime

Fixel is a search retargeting tool. It uses AI to create audience segmentation to improve marketing and targeting campaigns. The program learns how people interact with your site by using machine learning algorithms. It also highlights which visitors matter the most to your business growth and expansion. Fixel then includes these audience lists right in your other ad platforms, like Facebook or Google, so you can apply them to current and new campaigns.

8. Google Ads

Image via Wikimedia Commons

Google Ads is a helpful retargeting platform, especially if you already use Google Ads for your business. The audience manager tools let you create custom audiences within the program. Linking Ads to Google Analytics, Google Play, YouTube, and other Google affiliate programs can help provide you with more data.

Google controls a 92.47% share of the search engine market as of 2021, so if you’re trying to get your ads on their services, it’s an excellent tool to try. While Google Ads accounts are free, they follow PPC pricing models. You don’t have to pay to use the service, but you have to pay for ad space.

9. MailChimp

Image via Drupal

Though well-known for its email capabilities, MailChimp offers a retargeting platform for not just email but also automated messages. Other features include reporting, analytics, and building landing pages to enhance conversions. It works on social media, like Facebook and Instagram. It also works across the internet with Google’s network of ads.

10. Meteora

Image via LinkedIn

Meteora is an advertising platform that uses a unique feature called geofencing ads for retargeting. This lets marketers show their ads to a target audience based on real, physical locations they’ve visited, not just their online browsing habits. Businesses with in-person locations who want to target people that have come into their stores to browse but haven’t made purchases may be interested in this type of program. The geofencing feature allows companies to set up retargeting ads on social media based on their customers’ real-time movements.

11. ReTargeter

Image via AudiencePrime

ReTargeter is a program that allows you to reach both new audiences and re-engage past visitors, too. The company claims that remarketing benefits most from personalization, rather than a one-size-fits-all campaign, and promises to deliver. It works with business-to-business (B2B) and direct-to-customer organizations to tailor their media strategies and campaigns to desired business models and a specific audience.

ReTargeter also commits to transparency to give marketers and advertisers control over where their ads go, and who they’re reaching and serving. The program focuses on making sure you pay only for impressions that are viewable by the widest possible audience so that you’re getting a quality ROI. ReTargeter offers three types of products in this area, including site retargeting, CRM retargeting, and search retargeting, so that you can narrow in on exactly which areas you want to pursue.

12. SharpSpring Ads

Image via SharpSpring

SharpSpring Ads is part of the Constant Contact brand of services. It lets you retarget across sources, including:

• Web
• Shopify
• Facebook
• Mobile
• Cross-device
• Dynamic ads
• Twitter
• Marketing connections

The conversion tracking and revenue review let you see how your ads are working and learn more about the statistics of the clicks, conversions, and spending. With SharpSpring, you can customize your retargeting window to determine how and when you want to reach customers. You can do so immediately, right after they abandon your site, or set up a plan over time. The cross-device targeting lets you reach browsers wherever they visit the internet, whether that’s on tablets, desktops, or phones.

Retargeting is a way to help you make sure you’re getting the best market share and securing as many conversions as possible. If you’re looking for other ways to capture audience attention and stay competitive, consider the CopyPress content analysis tool. It can help you discover gaps in your content marketing strategy and understand your competition better.

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Kevin Doory

Director of SEO at Auto Revo

jross

CopyPress writer

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