In our article on audience targeting, we looked at the three basic types of marketing data: 1st-party data gathered via your website, 2nd-party data from collaborative efforts with other marketers, and 3rd-party data purchased from commercial vendors and aggregators.
This followup article looks at a couple of ways you can extend the utility and effect of your audience targeting efforts, beyond the scope and duration of your initial campaigns, to further both engagement and conversions.
Using retargeting to re-engage prospects.
Studies have shown that, depending on a particular brand’s web strategy and the markets/audiences it serves, as few as 2% of website visitors will convert on the first visit. On average, it can also take up to 7 interactions to convert a lead into a customer.
Retargeting is a way to renew interest with visitors who have exited your website without converting or further engagement. An embeded tracking code sets a cookie in the visitor’s browser, which is used to maintain a connection as the prospect continues on their personal decision journey. This tracking enables you to stay abreast of the prospect’s evolving activity — beyond your website — in order to serve relevant and timely content via channels such as email, in-browser display ads and social media advertising.
With static retargeting, a series of ads is created to align with different personas and/or different stages of the conversion funnel. The retargeting platform determines which ad to display, depending on the prospect’s most recent online actions. Dynamic retargeting takes the content delivery a step further, with a platform that composes real-time personalized content to address the preferences of a large and diverse customer base. This is used largely by e-commerce enterprises and other companies with extensive product offerings.
Replicating successes via look-alike modeling.
The focus of SEO and analytics is to hone in on the people visiting your site who represent the greatest potential for sales, revenue and lifetime value. Look-alike (LAL) modeling is an analytical tool that enables you extend this targeting power beyond the analytics of your own website traffic.
Using 3rd-party data, LAL identifies people outside your current sphere who are similar to your most productive target audiences. The resulting LAL models, already proven as productive through your SEO program, can then be applied across the depth and breadth of your marketing channels. This enables you to leverage your insights to greatly expand the scale of your campaigns in a highly effective and cost-conscious way.