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
Feathr's recommended budget is intended to be the maximum possible budget to maximize the display of your campaign to your entire audience over the entire duration of the campaign.
Feathr's auto-optimization tool will set your campaign to automatically recommended frequency and exposure settings (how many ad impressions each member of your audience will see over the lifetime of your campaign). The auto-optimization tool creates an expected target number of impressions per audience member for the entire campaign using this information.
To determine a recommended budget, that target number of impressions is then multiplied by 1) the number of reachable people in your target audience, and 2) the estimated cost per impression.
If the resulting calculation is higher than $500/day, Feathr's budget tool will cap the recommendation at $500/day. If the total recommended budget exceeds $10,000 for the lifetime of the campaign, Feathr's budget tool will cap it at that amount.
This budget tool is designed to maximize the effectiveness of your campaign by displaying impressions to the entirety of your target audience consistently throughout the duration of the campaign.
You may override the recommended budget with a figure of your own. You may also override the auto-optimization tool and select different exposure settings. Changing these settings may result in a lower recommended budget, but may also result in a less effective campaign.
Campaign Optimization and Bid/Exposure Settings
In the Optimize step of a retargeting campaign, Feathr offers the option to allow the campaign to select optimal bid and exposure settings, or override the optimization and manually select those settings.
For the vast majority of campaigns, selecting the auto-optimize option will deliver the best results. If you choose to manually select bid and exposure settings, here is the information you need to know:
The frequency cap is the maximum number of times the campaign may show ads to the same person within the frequency period. You may select from the dropdown options or enter a custom value.
The base bid is the minimum the campaign will bid on CPM (cost per 1000 impressions). You may select from the dropdown options or enter a custom value. A campaign's bid range is from the base bid to 3x the base bid. For example, if you choose a $10 base bid, the campaign will bid between $10 and $30, and you can expect your CPM to be between those numbers.
The frequency period is the length of time after the campaign displays the cap of ads to an individual before the cap is reset. For example, with 9 impression frequency cap and an 8-hour frequency period, after any given individual sees 9 ads, the campaign will wait 8 hours before showing the same person more ads.
Omni targeting allows the campaign to serve ads to the same individual across multiple devices, for example their phone, tablet, and personal computer. It is recommended to leave this enabled unless you do not want to risk your campaign being seen by more than one person in a single household. Read more here.
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 running it for one month or more, with enough budget to serve that many impressions to your target audience. That campaign length will ensure your target audience sees enough impressions that the message becomes memorable, even without a specific offer.
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 grouping. A Group is a subset of your total digital audience, filtered by some activity that makes the members of the Group 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 Group 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 Group by just about any individual piece of data you know about your digital audience. Not only can you mix and match filters within a Group, but you can combine and even exclude Groups from a campaign. See this article for a closer look at Groups.
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 Group to be connected to the campaign. This is a Group you would like to see grow as a result of the campaign. As the campaign influences people to perform the goal activity, the Group will grow and each person added will be counted as a conversion and included in your campaign report.
Most often, the Group connected here would be your Group 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 Group of people who have completed a registration and adding that Group as a goal in your campaign.