What Is Retargeting?

Retargeting is a form of online advertising that enables companies to remarket to users who have previously demonstrated interest in their product or service.

The benefit of retargeting is that even if that user doesn't choose to further engage with your product or service (e.g., doesn't take your desired action) the first time, you can still reach out to them in the future with your message and try to reengage them. Or even if the user does take a desirable action – such as downloading a brochure – it may be desirable to reach them with subsequent messaging, to promote online purchase, for example.

How Does It Work?

Retargeting is done most often by placing an anonymous cookie on a user's computer after they come into your website and view or interact with your ad creative. This cookie will then be recognized by your advertising network or server, and prompt it to serve ads to that user any time they appear in the future.

Where Does Search Come in?

Search retargeting enables advertisers to reach back out to users who have previously searched for their brand name or target keywords.

Search retargeting is done in two main ways:

1. Retargeting users based on 3rd party search data
2. Retargeting users based on searches from the source

Why Does It Work?

Search advertising is often one of the best performing tactics in our digital marketing toolkit, however, inventory can sometimes be limited and you can only efficiently invest so much in search marketing. Search retargeting provides another avenue to get in front of highly-targeted, motivated people who have demonstrated interest in your product or service.

While retargeting users who come to your site can be valuable, the volume can sometimes be quite limited. The largest opportunity to increase share of voice is by retargeting users who have searched for your target keywords. Even if you are investing substantially in search marketing, you are never going to be able to capture all of the search inventory.

Those captured by sponsored search ads will still likely represent a minority of users. For example, if 500,000 people searched for your keywords in one month, and you have a 5 percent click-through rate on your ads, you will generate 25,000 clicks. What about the other 475,000 queries? Even if only half of these were actually unique searchers, that's still close to 250,000 prospects that you missed out on.

Search retargeting can help get your message in front of these users who are actively searching but that you have yet to capture via your own search ads.

How Do I Get Started?

Looking to get started?

• Search retargeting from the search engines. If you're already doing paid search marketing, then you are very likely already working with Yahoo (+Bing) and Google, who both offer the ability to retarget. Yahoo's offering has been around for a couple years and enables retargeting based on search behavior regardless of whether users made it into your site, whereas, Google's offering focuses solely around those who have come into your website through search. Additional reading: The Benefits Of Yahoo Search Retargeting
• Third-party search data retargeting. Most advertising networks, such as AOL's Advertising.com and Turn Media, that offer other types of targeting such as demographic, contextual, and behavioral targeting will also offer retargeting. Many of these also offer search retargeting by partnering with a third-party data provider, such as Magnetic. Other networks that specialize in retargeting include FetchBack, ReTargeter, and Channel Intelligence, among others.

Chris Sukornyk, CEO of Chango, has a great video explaining the basics of search retargeting.

Search Retargeting 101 from Chango on Vimeo.

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