Retargeting Ads? Start with Visitor Segmentation

It’s the hottest trend in website traffic—the key to profitable remarketing. You can consistently improve your ROI by segmenting your traffic and identifying its most profitable chunks. Then, you can develop a retargeting strategy built on this segmentation and set up an ad network and Facebook accordingly.

Successful segmentation generally involves decoding the data by looking at several key parameters, such as where on the site visitors navigated to, when the visits took place, and how long each visit lasted.

First, Pick the Low-Hanging Fruit

For the purposes of ad retargeting, you can divide website visitors into three groups: Not interested in your product, interested in your product, and buyers. Sometimes you can identify who are the most interested visitors based on whether or not they visited a particular part of your site. For example, you might be able to assume that visitors who came to your checkout page or watched a particular pricing video are very interested in purchasing your product.

You can improve your click-through rates and engagement by opting to show ads only to the interested group, and excluding the group that’s not interested.

Strike While the Iron’s Hot!

You can also divide website visitors based on elapsed time, meaning, how recently they visited your site. A visitor who came to your site yesterday is statistically more likely to make a purchase today than a visitor who entered your site three weeks ago. You can improve your ROI by opting to show ads to the more recent group of visitors, and excluding the visitors that are less recent.

The more recent members of your audience are more likely to make a purchase. It makes sense to put the emphasis on them. In addition, a time-oriented division has an added advantage in that it lets you reduce how much you bid over time, as you can choose to pay less for segments that are less likely to convert.

Perhaps I’ll Stay a While…

You can further divide website visitors based on an assessment of their degree of interest. There is a correlation between the amount of time a visitor spends on a site, and that visitor’s level of interest in buying your product. Generally, one can assume that visitors who spend more time on your site are more seriously considering a purchase. By using how much time visitors spent visiting your site as a parameter in building a remarketing list, you can limit your list to include only your most engaged visitors.

Similarly, there may be a correlation between certain traffic patterns on your site and a visitor’s degree of interest. For example, perhaps one can assume that the visitors who add a product to the cart AND view the checkout page are seriously considering a purchase.

Block Traffic You Do Not Want

You can improve your ad retargeting by excluding less relevant website visitors. This means you will want to block the visitors who, for example, visited your site a long time ago (relatively speaking) or did not reach any of the pages on your site that indicate a serious degree of interest in making a purchase.

Experiment with different segments and time frames, and keep an eye on the number of people on each list. Run ads to each of the segments and test the results. By excluding the less relevant visitors from your campaign, you can focus on those visitors who are ready to convert, so that you improve your click-through rates and maximize engagement.