Retargeting Campaigns Overview

Have a clear understanding of your target audience and your campaign goals. This is crucial for determining your Bid Strategy and overall campaign direction.

• For example, are you trying to drive direct sales, increase sign-ups, or simply build awareness of the brand?

Prepare the necessary creative assets for your ads.

• Static Ads: Consider various types such as web, native, video ads.
• Dynamic Ads: If you have a product feed set up either through an e-commerce integration or manually, you can leverage dynamic web/native ads, which automatically display products a user has viewed or similar items.

Your budget should align with the size of the audience you're targeting. As your audience grows and market conditions change, be prepared to adjust your budget accordingly. You'll need to decide whether your priority is to spend your entire budget or to achieve the best possible performance (e.g., lowest Cost Per Acquisition).

Your own website

• AdRoll works by tracking the behavior of every user on your site. If you don’t have a site or only have a social page, AdRoll is not the best fit for your business.

A site with structure and navigation

• AdRoll can help you run top-performing campaigns, but if your site has no clear way for visitors to take actions (e.g. complete purchases, fill out forms) it’ll be difficult to see positive results.

Please read more about AdRoll's Website and Landing Page Guidelines.

More than 500 monthly site visitors

• Retargeting works best when you have at least 500 monthly site visitors. If you are unsure how many monthly site visitors you have, consider using the AdRoll Pixel to monitor your web traffic to determine your monthly visitors.

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are metrics used to measure the effectiveness of your advertising campaign. As you consider which KPIs to use, think about how retargeting will work as part of your entire marketing program.

For example, you might already be running search marketing, traditional display ads, and social posts to drive signups on your site. If you’re going to use retargeting to also drive signups, you can use the performance of these marketing initiatives as a baseline for measuring your performance with AdRoll.

AdRoll measures the following KPIs for Retargeting Campaigns:

• Spend: The amount spent on delivering ads
• Impressions: The number of times an ad has been displayed
• Clicks: The number of times an ad has been clicked
• Click-through rate (CTR): The percentage of impressions that resulted in a click
• Cost per thousand impressions (CPM): Cost per mille (thousand in Latin), common way that ad displays are sold
• Cost per click (CPC): Total spend divided by the number of clicks
• Cost per acquisition (CPA): Total spend divided by the number of conversions
• View-through conversion (VTC): Number of conversions completed after someone saw an ad, but did not click on it
• Click-through conversion (CTC): Number of conversions completed after someone clicked on an ad
• Return on ad spend (ROAS): Attributed revenue divided by spend

Focus your efforts on a single KPI that you can easily tie to business value. Also, make sure that any goals or baselines are based on historical data. If you don’t have any historical data, consider running a small test with AdRoll to understand your unique situation.

Retargeting can play several roles in your overall marketing strategy. Before building more complex campaigns, how will you measure campaign success and give credit where it is due?

One area to think about is attribution. Attribution is the process of assigning credit to different marketing initiatives and touch points based on their impact in driving your audience to conversion. In digital advertising, marketers track conversions in two ways: click-through conversions (CTC) and view-through conversions (VTC).

CTCs track users who click on an ad and convert as a direct result. VTCs track users who are shown an ad and do not click on it immediately, but convert at a later time either organically or after seeing an ad from a different channel. AdRoll recommends using both CTC and VTC when you evaluate the performance of your Retargeting campaigns.

Remember that retargeting ads are one of many marketing touch points that can lead to a conversion. Although the impact of VTCs is harder to quantify, the ads seen still help raise awareness and affinity for your brand for every new customer.

Pro Tips:

• AdRoll follows the industry standards for lookback windows. We give AdRoll 100% credit if a user converts within 30 days after a click or 7 days after an impression. If you want to modify this default setting, you can either change the days in your lookback window or set a specific percentage of conversions within the window to attribute directly to AdRoll.
• If you use Google Analytics for web analytics, you can see how retargeting contributes to conversion using Assisted Conversions. Note that this will only account for clicks, not views, and typically doesn't contain cross-device data. It will default to a 30-day lookback window.

• Ads Reporting Dashboard Overview: Provides a quick overview of your campaign's performance for a specific date range, allowing you to select the most relevant metrics.
• Campaign Reports: You can create customized and scheduled performance reports with the specific information you need.

Leverage your customer knowledge to create ad messaging and creative that resonates with them.

General Best Practices

• Create different versions of ad creative. Our platform will automatically test and optimize different versions of the same ad size to help you drive the best results.
• Most of the largest ad inventory sources, including Google and Facebook, have strict guidelines about the ads that get approved for their networks. You need to meet these guidelines to maximize your exposure online.

Ad Sizes

• Make sure to create each ad creative in all of the most popular sizes. It will make sure you don’t miss out on the right audience because you didn’t have the right ad size.
• For web: 300×250, 728×90, 160×600, 300x600, 320×50, and 970x250
• For Facebook & Instagram: 600x315, 600x600, 1200x628, and 1200x1200
• For Native web ads: 600x500 (Recommended), 600x600, and 600x315.

Creative

• Try different color schemes for every item like buttons, backgrounds, and images.
• Use clear and crisp images for products

Ad Copy

• Use copy to either inform customers or draw them to convert. Avoid trying to do both.
• Make sure copy is legible over background images.
• Keep copy short and clear.

Call To Action (CTA)

• Test multiple CTAs, because what works for one audience might not work for another
• Make sure every CTA lets users know exactly what to expect if they click on the ad
• For lower-intent audiences, consider CTAs that highlight your brand for awareness. As you move down the funnel, you should have stronger CTAs, such as “Learn More” or “Buy Now.”

Landing Pages

• Landing pages should be relevant to the message in the ad.
• Make sure users are able to convert either directly on the landing page or within 1–2 clicks
• If the ad features a promotion, position that promotion prominently on the landing page.

Crucially, exclude users who have already converted or are no longer relevant to your current campaign goal.

Exclude Converters

• Set up conversion audiences, add them to the campaigns and toggle them to exclude users from your retargeting pool once they've completed a desired action (e.g., made a purchase, filled out a form). This prevents wasting ad spend on users who have already converted.

Time-Based Exclusions

• Consider excluding users who last visited your site beyond a certain number of days if your typical conversion cycle is shorter (e.g., exclude users who haven't visited in 60 days if your typical purchase cycle is 30 days).

Allow Learning Time

• AdRoll learns over time. Allow new campaigns sufficient running time (e.g., at least 30 days) to gather enough data for BidIQ® to optimize effectively before making drastic changes.

Regular Review

• Evaluate performance regularly (e.g., weekly or bi-weekly), but be patient with daily fluctuations. Focus on trends over a 30-day timeframe for statistically significant data.

Scale High-Performing Campaigns

• Identify campaigns or ad groups with exceptionally good CPM/CPC/CPA and consider increasing their weekly budget to maximize impressions and conversions within that segment.

By following these guidelines, you can create a comprehensive and effective retargeting strategy that brings back valuable visitors and drives business growth.