How to Use Retargeting for the Holidays

With the holidays rapidly approaching consumers will be hopping from website to website searching for the right product at the right price.

In order for companies to maximize their profits from the holiday season they need to devise a strategy on how to shift consumers' focus from their competitor's site back to theirs. One of the most popular ways for companies to bring consumers' focus back to their site is through retargeting (also referred to as remarketing).

Below are descriptions from four highly visited websites detailing how to initiate retargeting campaigns on their sites.

Google

Google is one of the most visited sites in the world with more than 1.1 billion unique monthly visitors that make more than 4 billion queries every month. Each query provides companies with another consumer to possibly retarget or remarket based on what their search query was.

Google understands the value that it has to marketers regarding remarketing and has different five ways that marketers can leverage the search engine to regain the attention of consumers: standard and dynamic remarketing, remarketing for mobile apps, and remarketing lists for search ads as well as video remarketing. To start your AdWords remarketing campaign companies must add the remarketing tag (a small snippet of code) that AdWords generates to their website's code. Then, companies select which type of remarketing campaign they would like to use and go from there.

By leveraging AdWords for your remarketing campaign companies will be able to have their ads displayed on any site that is part of the Google Display Network as well as when users search for terms related to your products on Google.

Facebook

Facebook is another one of the world's most visited sites on a monthly basis with more than 1.3 billion monthly users. The social network thrives off of user generated content with more than 55 million statuses and 350 million pictures uploaded every day. With so many monthly users, Facebook provides companies with a great opportunity to reach an extraordinary amount of consumers from across the globe.

In Jan. 2014, Facebook announced that it was opening their Custom Audiences feature to all companies. Custom Audiences works by companies placing Facebook's remarketing pixel on their site or third-party software development kit (SDK) in their mobile app. Through placing the pixel on their website and mobile app companies will be able to track which consumers have visited their site or interacted with their mobile app and remarket to them in their Facebook feed.



Twitter

While Twitter may not receive the same amount of visitors that Google and Facebook do, it is still one of the most popular social networks with 271 million monthly users. Companies have long been taking advantage of Twitter to display their ads to users, since 2010 in fact, but have only recently been able to remarket to users that have previously shown interest in their company.

In July 2014 Twitter announced the roll out of a website tag for remarketing to consumers that have previously visited their website. Companies simply place the tag on their site and the consumer will then see Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts from the company in their Twitter timeline.

YouTube

YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, second only to its all-powerful parent company Google. With more than 100 hours of videos being uploaded every minute, there are virtually endless possibilities of videos for users to watch. However, with so many videos available for viewing it creates a challenge for companies to keep users from getting distracted by videos others produced.

Through Google AdWords, companies can set a list of specifications for their YouTube remarketing campaigns including targeting those that previously visited your channel as well as those that interacted with or viewed one of your YouTube videos in the past.