Re-Targeting Your Customers on Facebook and Google Display Network

Image Credit lexity.com

Remarketing (or Re-Targeting) is the hot topic among digital marketers now days. If you haven’t heard about remarketing before, it’s the simple idea of delivering a customized advertisement at a visitor to your website. This usually happens targeting them on 3rd party websites they visit.

Let’s take this example. You visit Agoda.com website looking for Hotels in Singapore, and you exit the site after seeing couple of hotels in Singapore city. The next day you visit a different website, you will suddenly realize Agoda has targeted you an ad with “Hot deals in Sigapore”. How do they do this? They are using this ad delivery technique called ‘retargeting’.


How We Re-Targeted Customers Back in 2008
Even though this comes as a new buzzword in online marketing field, the marketing team of Roomsnet.com back in the day around 2008 (including myself, +Suranga Priyashantha,  and few others – neither of us are currently working for that company) practiced ‘Re-Targeting'. It was an automated email marketing system, where it detects customers who abandon hotel searches on the site and sending them an automated email in certain intervals (after 1 day, 3 days, and 7 days depending on the check-in date in their hotel search) with a special deal to complete their booking. Five years ago, this was a system we designed and developed in-house with the help of our local engineering team, but no one used the term “re-targeting” to identify this marketing technique.

 Remarketing on Google Display Network
Re-targeting on Google Display Network isn’t rocket science for most Adwords professionals by now, but what most people don’t know is, retargeting (or remarketing) is actually possible on other ad networks and direct media buys too. For example, if you directly buy and ad placement on DailyMirror.lk, you still can use that placement for retargeting the visitors who were previously on your website. To do this you must have a proper 3rd party ad-serving platform with advanced targeting options.

Can We Re-target Customers on Facebook?

Whether we can do retargeting on Facebook, was a question asked by many people all the time. Recently, +Infas Iqbal  referred me to a 3rd party ad management platform which allows you to re-target your customers on Facebook. I clicked on the link referred to me by Infas, and browsed through their site to see how it works. I did not subscribe to their services and I simply closed that browser window.

That was about a couple of days back. And surprise! When I logged into Facebook this evening, see who has followed me to Facebook!

Yes, re-targeting on Facebook is possible and it is practically happening. If you would like to know more about retargeting, you can buzz us at Neo@Ogilvy. We already do retargeting campaigns in Sri Lanka!