Retargeting vs Remarketing: What’s The Difference?

 

Retargeting is where businesses will advertise to people who have shown interest on your website without making a purchase. This is where cookies are useful, being set in browsers when users interact with something on your site. You can use this data to retarget them, reminding them of the products or services they were looking at whilst browsing. 

 

Retargeting is often split between ‘On-site’ and Off-site interactions. 

 

‘On-site’ interactions are those that target individuals who have already visited your site and had some interaction with your products and services before but haven’t completed purchasing. This method of retargeting helps to increase your conversions and will also help you retain those potential customers who’ve expressed an interest but aren’t ready to convert just yet. 

 

Methods you can use to do this include: 

 

• Targeting based on a product they’ve interacted with 

• Targeting based on the way they found your site 

• Targeting those on your email list who’ve shown interactions but haven’t purchased anything 

 

Google Analytics, Google Ads and Facebook Ads are all ideal ways to use ‘on-site’ retargeting. 

 

‘Off-site’ interactions are actions taken by users on your social media pages – for example, Facebook now offers ‘engagement targeting’ for their ads, allowing businesses to target audiences who have interacted with your page, events or other areas of Facebook that register as interest in your business. 

Remarketing is all about re-engaging your existing customers through media or email platforms. Emailing a customer to renew a subscription or service, using previous purchase history to remind customers to take some kind of action or even asking for users to upgrade their previous purchases all count as remarketing, and mainly exist in the realm of email marketing campaigns. 

 

If your business has any of the following, you should consider using remarketing: 

 

• You have a product/service that is typically a repeat purchase. 

• You want to sell customers additional products 

• You don’t have a big budget. 

Remarketing and retargeting often overlap, with the terms often used to cover both definitions. For example, Google’s ‘Remarketing Tools’ can actually be considered ‘Retargeting Tools’. 

 

With Google and Meta also offering businesses the ability to use email lists for ad targeting, the terms have started to be used as one in the same. They do share the same goal – to re-engage potential or former customers with you business by utilising data on user behaviour in order to target a message via email or ad to drive conversions. Both can also be used alongside the other – pushing an on-site retargeting ad and emailing a similar offer means you’re doubly reaching your targeted audience using two methods that go hand-in-hand, reinforcing your businesses presence, message and increasing the likelihood of converting leads. 

Retargeting and Remarketing are two terms that businesses should consider using beyond the general acquiring of new customers, but you must understand what both of them entail and what they mean before slotting them into your campaign strategy. Take a look at how your business is performing on social media and see where you could use both of these things today.