When I talk to people about their marketing efforts with their channel partners, I’m often surprised at some of the obvious tools that companies either don’t know about, or know about and don’t use, because they don’t realize how powerful they are.
One of the most frequent cases I’ve noticed is when companies either don’t know about or don’t use ad retargeting. It doesn’t make sense to me, because ad retargeting is easy to implement, cost effective, and consistently delivers results. Yet, many companies don’t even know what it is.
Ad retargeting is an incredibly simple concept. A potential customer comes to your site and browses products or services. When they do so, a cookie is automatically installed on their computer.
Now, most people don’t make a purchase the first time they visit a site, and eventually they’ll click to another site. This is where ad retargeting comes in. The cookie that you have placed on their computer will cause your ads to show up on the pages of other sites they visit. This can have a huge impact on your brand awareness!
Clicking on the ad automatically brings visitors back to the page you specify on your site for the products and services they are interested in. Studies have shown that this tactic is so effective it can bring between 42 and 70 percent of visitors back to the site within a 24-hour period.
Not only can vendors bring these window shoppers back to their own site, but they can also configure the ads to Bring them back to the channel partner’s site – and away from competitor sites – greatly increasing the chance of a purchase through the channel partner. It’s really that simple.
You can even modify your ad retargeting efforts to increase the chance of converting the site visitor into a customer. You know what product or service they are interested in, so you could have the ad redirect them to a page with a special discount offer or coupon code. If you let them know this discount is only available for a limited time, you are strongly motivating them to buy from your channel partner more urgently. That’s good for your bottom line and that of your partner.
Once ad retargeting is up and running, it goes on autopilot. There’s not much more you need to do, so once you’ve gone through the initial effort of setting it up, you reap the benefits of brand awareness, revenue and profit.
I sometimes find it surprising that more companies are not using ad retargeting. It’s so simple effective, and elegant – and if you offer it to your channel partners, both of you will see increased revenue as the result.
