Retargeting is a highly targeted and high-converting form of digital display advertising. When running retargeting campaigns in Feathr, here are some best practices to keep in mind.
Budget
Your campaign budget depends on several factors, including audience size, campaign length, and desired number of impressions per person. Feathr’s campaign creation wizard will take these factors into account and automatically suggest a budget for your campaign. You are welcome to adjust that budget as you see fit.
You can use this basic equation, which is based on showing every member of your audience one impression per day for the duration of the campaign, where N= the number of reachable people in your segment(s), and D= the number of days you want your campaign to run:
((N x D)/1000) x 5
1000 is the unit number of impressions (CPM) and 5 is the average cost per 1000 impressions. So if you are advertising to a group of 2000 people for 30 days, your budget calculation could look like this:
((2000 x 30)/1000) x 5, or $300.
Increasing or decreasing the budget from there is a strategic decision you can make, and will affect the number of impressions shown.
Campaign Length
When choosing how long to run your campaign, first consider what you’re promoting. It is ideal for your campaign length to correlate to the marketing message or offer your campaign is promoting. For example, it wouldn’t make much sense to run a campaign promoting earlybird pricing beyond the price increase deadline. Let your overall marketing strategy inform your campaign length, and be specific with your offer and your calls to action.
If you choose to run a campaign that is not tied to a specific marketing deadline, and perhaps is only intended to increase awareness, consider your budget and your audience’s attention span. Studies show that it takes 17-20 impressions per month for a marketing message to “stick,” so consider running awareness and engagement campaigns for one month, with enough budget to serve that many impressions to your target audience.
Audience
Serving a targeted audience is the entire reason why retargeting exists. The theory is that knowing about the activity and attributes of your digital audience enables you to advertise to them more effectively and more appropriately.
In retargeting, that is done through segmentation. A segment is a subset of your total digital audience, filtered by some activity that makes the members of the segment an appropriate audience for the marketing message you’re promoting.
One example is a cart abandonment audience. If someone reaches the final step of your registration process, but never submits a registration, it’s a good bet that that person is interested in registering but needs a marketing nudge in order to finish registering. By filtering your total digital audience by just the people who reached some point in the registration flow but never submitted, you have a perfectly targeted segment for a campaign with a message encouraging them to complete registration.
Similarly, the people who have viewed your benefits of membership page might make for a good targeted audience for a membership campaign.
The people who have visited your site more than five times in the last month would probably be a great audience for advertising any new offers, as they are consistently engaged with your website.
Feathr allows you to filter and segment by just about any individual piece of data you know about your digital audience. Not only can you mix and match filters within a segment, but you can combine and even exclude segments from a campaign. See this article for a closer look at segmentation.
Geographic Filters
The guiding principle of targeted digital marketing is that you should only advertise to people who are appropriate prospects for your services. Part of that principle includes making sure your ads are served in appropriate geographic locations. If you are promoting membership to the Nebraska State Phlebotomy Association, you probably don’t want ads being placed in Kuala Lumpur.
In Feathr, you have the option to either include or exclude geographic regions as large as whole countries and as small as individual cities. If you choose to include the United States in a geographic filter, Feathr will only serve ads in the US. In that case, there would be no need to actively exclude other countries, because they are already excluded by default. However, if you wanted to only serve ads in the US, but not in Florida, you could add two filters: an inclusion filter for the United States and an exclusion filter for Florida.
What’s important is to know your audience, and where your services are most valuable. Geographic filtering is optional in Feathr, but there’s no need to waste money placing ads in locations that are isolated from what you have to offer.
Creatives
Your ad creatives should be eye-catching, simple, and contain a direct call to action, such as “register now” or “sign up today.”
For simplicity’s sake, limit the content of your creatives to a few essential elements: a strong, branded visual, a bold headline, and a specific call to action. It’s important to remain on brand with every element of your creative image because you want your audience to instantly recognize your brand.
If you can, create at least one of each of these sizes:
- 300 x 250
- 728 x 90
- 160 x 600
- 180 x 150
These are the most commonly available ad dimensions across the web and will serve the most impressions in your campaign. For more supported creative sizes, click here.
Your first set of creatives should be the same or a very similar message, even across different sizes. If you have the bandwidth, try creating another set of creatives with swapped colors or an alternate call to action. You can upload more than one creative of any size and Feathr will serve them at an equal ratio. As your campaign runs, keep an eye on how each creative is performing and add more or disable some accordingly.
If you’re running a long campaign, consider swapping out all new creatives halfway through, in order to avoid the dreaded “banner blindness” effect.
Goals
A goal is what you tell Feathr to define as a conversion for your campaign. Read more about Goals here. In the Goals section of Feathr’s campaign creation wizard, it will ask for a goal segment to be connected to the campaign. This is a segment you would like to see grow as a result of the campaign. As the campaign influences people to perform the goal activity, the segment will grow and each person added will be counted as a conversion and included in your campaign report.
Most often, the segment connected here would be your segment of confirmed registered attendees or members. It could also be exhibitors, sponsors, or other partners, as long as there is a fully digital way for them to sign up. If your registration and/or member databases are managed by a third party vendor, talk to your onboarding specialist or your customer success manager about the best way to track this data in Feathr. It may involve placing the Feathr Super Pixel or Google Tag Manager with your vendor.
Once that data can be tracked accurately, it is only a matter of building a segment of people who have completed a registration and adding that segment as a goal in your campaign.