Which Goals You Should Have for Retargeting
Now that we have the background for how retargeting works and the different types of audiences you can segment by, we can focus on the goals you should aim for. The main types of retargeting campaigns you should consider running are those for awareness and those for conversion.
Awareness
Awareness campaigns are useful when you want to re-engage website visitors and tell them about relevant products, features, or announcements. These ads are usually served to pixel-based lists.
The obvious drawback to awareness campaigns is that you’re serving less targeted content to people who haven’t engaged heavily with your brand. They’re not in your contacts database, and often, there are lower expected clickthrough rates than other types of campaigns.
However, since the goal is to make prospects aware of your business, impressions and engagement are acceptable metrics to track. Often awareness campaigns are precursors to a much more effective campaign goal: conversions.
Conversion
Conversion goals are just that — you want to get people to click on your ad and take a next step, such as filling out a landing page form. Conversion campaigns are best used to align a specific list with a clear next step in the funnel, and can be measured with typical conversion metrics like website clicks, form submission, and cost per lead (CPL).
The best thing about a conversion campaign is that you can use it for multiple parts of the funnel. You can use pixel-based ads to generate leads — the ads will direct people to landing pages where they can give over their information. You can also use list-based ads to better qualify those leads — the ads will appear to contacts who gave you limited information and lead them to longer forms with additional fields. You can also use retargeting to move those qualified leads closer and closer to the bottom of the funnel. For example, you might use retargeting to send a list of contacts that have downloaded an ebook to sign up for a free trial of your product.
Regardless of your goal, it is important to align the positioning, creative, and next step in the conversion process — whether that’s an offer landing page, site page, or request for more information — with the list you’re showing it to. Remember, list-based retargeting can have low match rates (users synced with accounts on each platform, usually by email address), so you’ll need to make sure you’re fueling your retargeting activities with lots of top-of-the-funnel inbound activities.