Retargeting is a form of online advertising that helps your brand maintain visibility and engagement with customers who visited your website but have not yet purchased anything. Statistics tell us that only 2% of consumers actually convert on their first visit -- this means there is an enormous audience of potential customers out there. These users need help making their way through the buyer's journey, and retargeting ads are one great way to do that.
With retargeting, ads are served to people who have already visited your website or are contacts in your database, such as leads or existing customers. LinkedIn is a great platform for companies to set up a retargeting campaign and try to recover some of the lost sales potential from bounced customers. In addition to being able to segment audiences by company, industry, skills, etc., you can use LinkedIn's Matched Audiences to retarget website visitors, market to contacts already in your databases, and reach key people at target companies. Let's take a closer look at how to set up a successful retargeting campaign on LinkedIn.
Many marketing strategists don't even know about LinkedIn's retargeting capabilities. That's unfortunate because it is such a powerful way to generate revenue. Retargeting, in general, is basically a "second chance" attempt at marketing to someone who stopped by your website but didn't buy anything. Let's say you are marketing Cloud Software Services and a user visits your blog to read an article on new technology developments. When they're done reading, they just leave your website instead of filling out a form, purchasing an item, etc. What if you could follow up with each of these visitors by showing them an ad related to the content they were viewing?
That is exactly what retargeting does. It places anonymous retargeting cookies in the browsers of people who visit your site and then displays your ads to them as they surf other places on the web. The best thing about retargeting is that it works. Studies show that the average CTR for display ads is .07%, while the average for retargeting ads is 0.7%. That means retargeting ads perform 10x better than regular display banners. Another study found that three out of five online viewers notice and consider ads that show products they viewed from another page.
When you look into LinkedIn retargeting, you're likely to see the phrase "Matched Audiences" right away. This is just their catch-all term for all of their retargeting options. LinkedIn already exists as a unique and convenient way to contact members by company, industry, skills, job titles, and more. But Matched Audiences allows you to retarget your website visitors, contacts from your customer databases, and marketing automation platforms and reach decision-makers at target companies. Follow these steps to get your retargeting campaign up and running.
The most common type of retargeting is to serve ads to people who have visited your website. LinkedIn makes this very easy. The first thing to do is add the LinkedIn Insight Tag to your website. This Tag is similar to the Facebook Pixel and other retargeting tags -- it is a piece of code that tracks those users who have visited your site. Sign in to your Campaign Manager on LinkedIn and click on your account name.
Hover over Account Assets in the upper right corner of the screen and select Insight Tag from the drop-down menu. You should see a piece of JavaScript code. Copy the code snippet and then paste it into a file that appears on every page of your website. If you need help, ask a developer to do this for you. At this point, you have set up your site to respond to a retargeting campaign. Now it's time to get your campaign up and running.
In order to set up a website retargeting campaign, head back into your Campaign Manager. Go to Account Assets and select "Use a matched audience" under the drop-down menu. Next, click the Create an audience to retarget button. This will bring up an option to name your audience -- choose a name that reflects the segment you are targeting. For example, if you are targeting people who visited a certain product on your website, name the campaign "Page X visitors." This allows you to customize specific ads to be shown to each segment.
Once you have named your audience, enter the URL of the page that appeals to this segment, i.e., the product page, a blog article, etc. You can also add multiple URLs if there are several pages that appeal to a certain segment. When you're done, click the Save button.
After this, you'll be asked to set up your Insight Tag, but you've already done this. Now all you need to do is wait up to 48 hours for LinkedIn to verify your website. Once the audience has been verified, you can add it to your campaign. Open the campaign and click the Audiences tab and then under See Full List, you will find the website segments you have created. Choose to include or exclude certain website segments.
The second type of Matched Audiences targeting is called Account Targeting. This allows you to reach target accounts instead of specific people in those accounts. Head to the targeting page within Campaign Manager. It will require you to choose a location -- for a global campaign, just select all of the continents. To refine the segment, use the company name targeting and enter as many companies as you like, up to 100. Or, you can upload a list of companies. Save this and, again, wait for LinkedIn to verify the list. When you're ready to add it to a campaign, open the campaign, click the Audience tab, and under See Full List of the target list accounts you can select the list you want to add to your campaign.
If you scroll further down, you can add other targeting options to the campaign, such as Job title, Member Skills, Member Gender, Member Age, etc. Click Save and your campaign will be underway. Be wary of adding too many options at this point, however. You can always refine the campaign further down the line after you review the analytics, but excluding certain populations from the start might just limit your exposure and decrease the effectiveness of your campaign.
The third Matched Audiences retargeting option is Contact targeting. You can upload your email address list from platforms like Marketo, Oracle Eloqua, and more to build a custom audience. To upload your list, select Matched Audiences from the Tools Menu in the top right corner. On the Uploaded List Audiences tab, you'll see an overview of all your Matched Audiences targeting segments. This includes account lists, emails lists as CSV files, and email targeting segments imported from your marketing automation platform. Click on Upload a List.
Now choose Match Based on a List of Contacts and upload the CSV file of your choice. This works best if the file has all email addresses under one column and all spelling errors and formatting are correct. Save this and wait for LinkedIn to verify it, add the list to your campaign, and start to track its progress.
LinkedIn's Matched Audiences are a very effective way to connect with potential customers who have already shown an interest in your business. Thanks to the magic of LinkedIn retargeting, you can serve customized content to people who have visited your site, are in your contact list, or are key players in your target companies.
Eniture Technology specializes in helping e-Commerce merchants grow by providing useful information, digital marketing services, off-the-shelf apps that solve common problems, and custom programming services. Please contact us if you need help growing your online business or implementing the concepts presented in this blog post.
Interested in learning more? Start with our free guide on how to increase online sales, and subscribe to our blog!
