Setting Up Retargeting Audiences
Key Metric:
Retargeting audience size.
Why it Matters:
Retargeting helps increase brand awareness by serving ad impressions to previous blog visitors, and it increases repeat visits to your site.
Final Result:
Advertising impressions to visitors that have previously engaged with your content.
Understanding how retargeting works
After you install a retargeting code snippet, new visitors are marked with a cookie whenever they read one of your blog posts. This cookie stays in the user’s browser for a certain amount of time, during which you can use retargeting to put advertisements in front of those visitors. Retargeting advertisements can appear on social media sites and any websites that are part of the Google Advertising Network.
Install the appropriate retargeting scripts
Depending on your target audience, install the Facebook, Google, Twitter, or LinkedIn retargeting scripts on your blog. This code usually goes in the same place as your Google Analytics code does, but there’s very good documentation for implementing these snippets on each platform’s documentation page. If you opt to use Google Tag Manager, you can load your snippets from Tag Manager directly.
What about privacy?
According to GDPR regulations in Europe and the CCPA act in California, users must give consent to these retargeting cookies. We recommend cookie consent solutions like Confirmic or Iubenda for this.
If you are not sure about the rules in your locale, be sure to check with a lawyer or experienced professional first.
What if you don’t have an advertising budget yet?
Even if you don’t run ads right away, it’s very powerful to have these tracking scripts in place ahead of time. That way, whenever you do decide to start advertising, you can turn it on and immediately start sending ad impressions to your cookied visitors, driving traffic to your landing page of choice.
Dedicated retargeting audiences, based on which pages your visitors have visited, are very powerful.