Remarketing & Retargeting: What’s the Difference?

Retargeting and remarketing enable marketers to reach consumers who are speculated to buy their services or products than the first-time visitors. It is one of the most important advertising strategies in your whole business. Whereas both retargeting and remarketing have a common goal of nurturing previously visited or engaged customers, there are some major differences as well. Let’s learn about each of them!

Retargeting: What is it?

It has various approaches or means in marketing, but commonly it is meant for placing online display ads to the targeted audience that have previously interacted with your business site in certain ways. When a user lands on your site, looks through products, or performs specific actions that you want from them, a cookie is placed in its browser.  You can use that cookie data to retarget that user with paid ads according to its interactions when they exit your site.

You can place retargeted ads via third parties be it Google Display Network; enabling your ads to show on other sites that your targeted users visit regularly. 

Eventually retargeting can be put into two types:

• On-Site Events
• Off-Site Events

Therefore, you can use diverse strategies based on the type of interacted audience you want to target. Let’s learn about these interactions in-depth:

Off-Site Events

These audiences or users have never been to your website in the past, but they have similar interests to your past visitors and you want them to visit your site. You quickly include them in your sales funnel so that they can see your ads and get to your site. If you wish to target a particular according to its offsite interactions, you should target its searches.

In some situations, you may want to target users that interact or search similarly to the users who have been to your site earlier. Marketers can also choose to target users based on interactions with distributed content or based on a site that is similar to yours.

On-Site Events

Here you target the users who have interacted with your site and shown interest in your products and services earlier but made no purchase. It is one of the most obvious or popular retargeting techniques. When you do retarget the user who has been to your property, you can get surprising conversations. This also helps in retaining the visitors as customers who have interacted with your brand.     

Here are some methods to target the visitors who have shown interest in your site or the on-site interactions:

• Use the product in which they have shown interest to lure them. 
• Focus on how they got to your site (social media sites, search engines, or inbound events.
• Focus the users on your email campaign who also interacted with your site. ·

Facebook is one of the best methods for retargeting on-site interactions. With Facebook ads, y9ou can retarget the users who have been to your online properties and can get remarkable results. Recently when I was scrolling through my Facebook timeline, I saw an ad about booking a stay. It only took a few seconds for me to memorize that I was looking for cabins a few days ago for vacations.

This proves Facebook can be a perfect retargeting tool for your onsite audience. Most marketers are still limited to using Google Ads which is a way too common way to capture the same traffic. 

Remarketing: What is it?

When people are asked to tell about remarketing, they mostly get confused. Many people think that it is the same as retargeting, but that’s not really true either. Sometimes retargeting is called remarketing such as Google named its retargeting tool as Google Remarketing Tools which is technically a tool for retargeting purposes. Kindly note that retargeting and remarketing have similar goals but the strategy in them is the game-changer.

“Remarketing means building email campaigns that can re-engage your customers”. So now you can see the clear difference remarketing is limited to email marketing while retargeting means targeting people via paid ads who have interacted with your site.

Remarketing is primarily done to customers such as reminding them about the product that they left in cart or wishlist. It is used often for the customers who were most likely to make a purchase but due to some reasons, they did not.

According to a successful marketing company, remarketing emails can split into 3 types. Here are the three categories of efficient remarketing emails:

• Production on Sale: 58 % of users loved emails that help them to remind them about the products they viewed or liked. They all purchased it.
• VIP Treatment: 51 % of people liked outreach as it delighted them similar to a VIP.    
• Cart Abandonment: 41% of users of 25-34 ages loved cart abandonment emails.

In short remarketing is a unique email campaign based on the users who have higher chances of conversion than first-time viewers.