What is Retargeting & How Does it Help Your Online Store

If you’re selling online, shopping cart abandonment is an unavoidable reality. It cost retailers an estimated $4 trillion in lost sales in 2017, and that number just keeps increasing in 2019. With as many as 77% of shoppers adding items to the cart but bouncing away from your website without making a purchase, you’d be wise to implement a proven solution to recapture some of those lost sales.

So, what is it? It’s called Retargeting.

Since 2015, we’ve been covering retargeting statistics and how they can help your ecommerce store win over customers who’ve visited your site but didn’t buy. Today, we’re here to deliver a brand-new guide that can give you an even more in-depth look and help answer the looming question: What is retargeting and how does it help your online store?

Read on to learn more.

What is Retargeting?

Retargeting is better thought of as remarketing. In a nutshell, retargeting works by helping you recapture otherwise lost sales from visitors to your website who’ve bounced away without making a purchase. In motion, retargeting requires that your webmaster install something called a “tracking pixel” into the backend of your website.

This tracking pixel knows when a visitor has bounced away, or left, your website without making a purchase. It then serves them display ads, via a cookie that’s cached in their web browser, across millions of online sites that the user is likely to visit.

If and when the visitor sees your ad, retargeting services track this view as an “impression.” If and when the visitor clicks on the ad, retargeting services track this as a “click through.” The great news here is that you only pay when a bounced visitor clicks on a retargeting ad that was served to them.

This means that you can, essentially, gain unlimited impressions (free ads), but only have to shell out dough when the clicks come through. Pretty sweet, right?

By example, the Best Buy retargeting ad we’ve included below gives you an idea of what you’d see if you were shopping for an Otterbox smartphone case on the Best Buy website but bounced away without making a purchase. In this sense, you can understand how these same types of ads would help your online store capture otherwise lost sales.

2019 Retargeting Statistics Prove It Works

Just how effective is retargeting? The proof in pudding is found in these recent 2019 retargeting statistics. Once you have a chance to glean some of these facts, you’ll better understand why it’s a must-have addition to your ecommerce marketing plan.

• Retargeted customers have a 70% likelihood of converting when they return to your website.
• Retargeting ads have a 100% higher return rate than display or text ads, with display ads earning an average 0.07% CTR and retargeting ads earning a healthier 0.7% CTR.
• Retargeted ads earn up to a 27% reconversion rate on shoppers who’ve abandoned the cart.
• Two-thirds of shoppers pay attention to a retargeting ad after they’ve bounced away from an ecommerce website.
• Nearly 30% of consumers see retargeting ads in a positive light, with 59% having a neutral response to them.
• 25% of consumers like retargeting ads because they remind them of products and services they want but may not be ready to use just yet.
• Email retargeting has a healthy click-through ratio of 3%-5%.
• 50% of major brands have specially allocated budgets in place just for retargeting spend.
• 90% of digital marketers see a higher yield and a stronger ROI on spend from retargeting, as compared to other digital ad spends and yields.
• Retargeting ads yield a 76% increase in clicks over any other type of digital ad.
• Retargeting ads have up to a 1046% increase in branded search, namely due to the impressions they create that don’t cost a penny to the marketer.
• 54% of marketers focus their retargeting ads on social media over any other vertical.
• Google remarketing campaigns have historically yielded a whopping 161% reconversion rate.
• Almost 97% of website visitors are not sold on the first visit, which is the primary reason why retargeting is so effective.
• Google’s retargeting service reaches 90% of all web users worldwide.
• Mobile conversions improve by as much as 51% when retargeting is in place.
• 27% of online retailers swear by retargeting as a critical part of their digital marketing plan.

The Case for Retargeting

As the facts above demonstrate, retargeting is a smart way to help reconvert on the estimated 65% to 77% of visitors who will abandon the shopping cart at your online store without making a purchase.

Retargeting is one of the most lucrative remarketing incentives that you can consider because it costs you zilch to get started and because you’re only paying when the bounced visitor clicks on one of your ads and comes back to your website, where they’re 70% likelier to reconvert.

To break it down in simple math: More than two-thirds of the time, visitors at your website won’t make a sale. But 100% of the time, you can serve these bounced visitors retargeting ads, which convert more than 66% of the time into a sale. See how nice that is?

All said and done, retargeting can help you improve your conversion rate exponentially with a reasonable cost per click that yields a greater CTR and a substantially higher reconversion value than any other type of ad you could ever spend money on.

Need Even More Tips?

Take a look at this infographic we’ve created about 2019 retargeting statistics, so you can better understand how this remarketing method works. Want other ways to reduce cart abandonment at your online store? Check out our related guide: The Ultimate Guide to Beating Shopping Cart Abandonment.