Increasingly, search marketing specialists are turning to new, more focused ways to reach consumers. Behavioural retargeting is becoming a popular way to reach specific consumer segments – improving conversion rates and boosting return on investment in search marketing.
How does behavioural retargeting work?
Behavioural retargeting is simply the practice of serving adverts to people on the internet based on their previous behaviour. For example, if somebody visits a business’ website and looks around the products – but doesn’t buy them – they will be shown banner adverts for that business later while browsing around other sites.
These adverts could even show the specific products that were looked at, along with a range of other related products – encouraging the visitor to come back and complete the sale. This is known as personalised retargeting.
How does search retargeting fit into this?
Search retargeting is a type of behavioural retargeting based on the words or phrases entered by people into search engines. Even if that searcher doesn’t then visit your business website, you can display your banner adverts to them as they continue to browse the web.
For example, imagine a person searches for ‘cheap oak furniture’, which your business sells. They don’t click through to your site from that search results page – they may even follow a competitor’s link instead. But as they visit other websites, they’ll be served adverts for your business, encouraging them to click through and see what you have to offer .
So how can search retargeting help my business?
Search retargeting has obvious implications for making your marketing more accurate and effective, as it serves your adverts to people who’ve already expressed an interest in buying your product or service, but might not have heard of your business.
It also offers the chance to get your advert seen more often, and in more places, than PPC adverts in search engine results page – where people won’t tend to spend much time. This helps build brand awareness and drives engagement.
Together with your pay-per-click and search engine optimisation efforts, search retargeting could help you maximise your search marketing efforts and reach specific consumer segments.
Great article. One point of clarification is search retargeting companies (Chango included) use a combination of search engine data and other types of data customers type directly on publishers’ site. A recent report revealed a third of search data is actually performed outside search engines.
Ben Plomion
@chango
The human brain has an uncanny ability to filter-out anything it doesn’t want or need to see. If it didn’t, we would suffer from information-overload before we even finish breakfast.
The problem any advertiser faces is how to break this tunnel-vision, and make their advert ‘relevant’ and eye-catching at the right moment.
The vast majority of adverts will never be ‘seen’ and a few only ever achieve some level of ‘brand awareness’. This may translate into ‘interest’ at a later stage.
Search Retargeting would need to interrupt a searcher at full-speed, a tall order indeed.
Search Re-targeting would come into play outside of a search engines results page, it would take place on third-party websites – even after the user has clicked on a result.
The same human brain behaviour will still apply to that page.