You place a retargeting pixel on either (a) certain sections of your site or (b) across your entire site. As visitors visit the pages you have the pixel on they are added to what is called an “audience.” This audience is cookied and as they visit other sites in the display networks you are running retargeting ads on, they are shown your ads. The size of your audience greatly affects the success of your retargeting campaigns. Even if you aren’t ready to start testing retargeting, I highly suggest you start building your audience. The larger this qualified group of past visitors, the better!
If a person in your audience converts then a “burn pixel” will fire, which takes them out of the audience. You can also choose to add different pixels if you wish to show converting visitors different ads. You can get quite complex regarding the sequence of pixels you cookie these users with.
You can also control the sites that show your ads, just like on typical display network buys. You can decide that a site isn’t cutting it, and cut them from the list. You have quite a bit of control around who sees your ad and who doesn’t.
Whether you decide to start out with a smaller audience (maybe you decide to JUST cookie those users that made it a cart page but didn’t complete a purchase) or whether you decide to put every possible visitor to your site into the audience, this tracking method is incredibly effective. At SEOmoz we have started passing back a unique conversion ID on our end, as to double and triple check conversions with the agency we are running our retargeting efforts through. This sort of granular tracking can be very powerful, and very robust, as we will explore in greater detail in a bit. Below is an image of the general process:
Technically all that is necessary is to place a JavaScript tag in the footer of your website. This code creates a list of people that visit your site by placing anonymous retargeting “cookies” in their browser. This list allows Us (or other retargeting vendors) to display retargeting ads to your potential customers as they visit other sites. Since Us works with the largest ad exchanges, we can retarget your customers just about anywhere they might go online.
First, a snippet of code—also known as a retargeting pixel—is placed on your website. The pixel collects essential, anonymous visitor data, including which pages a user visited, how long they spent on your site, and where they are in the world. When a user visits your website, the pixel will also drop an anonymous retargeting “cookie” in their browser. This cookie leaves a trail of crumbs as potential customers surf online, so you can retarget them with display ads across the web even after they’ve left your site.
In the programmatic era, buyer intent data is your most valuable marketing asset, but most businesses don’t leverage it to its full potential. Retargeting takes full advantage of this buyer intent data, letting you customize the ads served to prospects based on the way they’ve interacted with your website. Potential customers will see ads specifically selected for their interests, remaining engaged with your brand even as they navigate away to their favorite blog, news site, or social network