We all know about retargeting strategies. We know that retargeted customers are three times more likely to click on your ad. And that retargeting makes customers 70% more likely to convert. Of course, retargeting requires timing and attribution, and the use of content to gain awareness and trust. The problem is, not everyone has time to create sufficient quantities of blog posts, articles, and ebooks.
Many marketing teams do a fabulous job of creating infographics and case studies to improve awareness, ebooks, and webinars to increase engagement, and reports and live demos to impact conversions. It’s a model that is successful across many industries and with a wide variety of ideal customer profiles.
But if your time and resources are severely limited, how can you best leverage that time? What kinds of content can you focus on? What tools and techniques can you use to have the same overall benefit? That’s where link retargeting comes into play.
What Is Link Retargeting?
Retargeting is when a pixel is placed on a website that records visitors and allows marketers to retarget them with ads on other platforms. This is perfect for leading buyers through those various stages and getting them to convert, and it’s incredibly affordable.
Link retargeting foregoes the requirement of using a tracking pixel on our site on our content. Instead, it uses a redirect. It effectively associates the retargeting pixel with the link that’s shared, allowing us to share any link we want.
For example, if company A is serving a similar audience as your company, you can share one of their reports. By using link retargeting, anyone who clicks on that link will be added to your custom audience for potential retargeting ads. You can draw from your own content or anyone else’s and fill those gaps where you might not have the perfect piece of content to help that buyer at that particular stage.
How Does Link Retargeting Actually Work?
To better understand the concept, let’s walk through an example of creating a retargeting link.
Now, this is a relatively new technique in marketing, and there are only a few vendors that provide this service—or variations of the service. Some offer it as part of their broader service, while others are for smaller niches (i.e., affiliates). I’m going to use RetargetLinks in this example.
Like any retargeting campaign, you first need to think about what it is you want to accomplish, and the means to get there.
- Do you want to use banner but also Facebook Ads?
- Do you want to create a single, large audience, or segmented audiences based on interests + products/services?
As you create links to be shared within RetargetLinks, you will select a campaign to associate that link with. Anyone who clicks on that link will be added to that campaign’s audience. This gives you the flexibility to target them with specific ads.
First, create your campaign. The campaign will have an ad-click through URL which is where your retargeting ads will send traffic. And if you want to use Facebook Ads, you can add your Facebook Pixel at this point.
Now, within the links dashboard (or while you’re on any other website if you install the Chrome Extension), you can easily create shortened links and assign those links to your chosen campaign.
As you and others share those links, and people begin to click on them, the link retargeting technology fires your tracking pixels, and your retargeting audience grows, even if the content you’re sharing is someone else’s.
This user has an audience of 12,814 people
It’s important to note that while you need to have a campaign created before you can build links, you do not need to activate the campaign or create ads for it initially. You can start building an audience now and run ads on that audience later. You can even change the name of the campaign and the URL the ads resolve to.
These are the ads I am going to display to all those that click my links
Since you can choose to use content that you own, or not, and links can be shared in a variety of ways, there are a tremendous number of possibilities in how you might leverage link retargeting. I’ll share just a couple to get you started.
Link Retargeting for Content Gaps
First, as I mentioned above, you can use content from other trusted sources to augment and fill in the gaps in terms of topics that you haven’t yet covered yourself.
For instance, while chatbots and AI are trending topics these days, I haven’t explored or written about them myself yet. I might curate some content for my readers and audience and use link retargeting to gauge their interest and capture that segment of my audience.
Of course, just because someone’s following me on social media doesn’t mean that individual is part of an audience that I can target with Facebook ads. I can target my Page followers, but link retargeting can help me reach my other social audiences on Facebook. Not to mention the larger audiences I might reach when other people share those posts and links.
Segmentation with Link Retargeting
Another use for link retargeting that I love is to help segment my own existing audience.
I currently have about 15,000 email subscribers, and these subscribers have joined my list through newsletter subscriptions, webinars, lead gen offers, contests, and more. I might be able to tell from the lead generation offers which segment of my audience is interested in, say, blogging, but I might not know what aspects of blogging they want to learn more about.
If I send an email to my list and include a few different articles on various aspects of blogging, I can use link retargeting to create different audiences based on who clicks what. Those that clicked on basic How-To guides might buy my blogging planner, while those who clicked on more advanced articles might buy into a paid mastermind. I can then run targeted ad campaigns accordingly.
All of this is possible using link retargeting technology. Consider how that might benefit your organization, and in particular, how that might complement your existing content curation efforts.