Retargeting Ads: Are You Big Enough to Run Them?

Someone Visited Your Website. Now What?

Most people who land on your site leave without calling, buying or filling anything out. That’s normal. It’s also expensive, because you paid to get most of them there.

Retargeting is the fix people will sell you. It’s the ad that follows someone around after they’ve been to your site. Sometimes it’s the best money in your budget. Sometimes you’re not big enough to run it yet, and nobody tells you that before they invoice you.

Here’s how to tell which one you are.

First, do you have enough traffic?

Google won’t run these ads until it can find at least 100 people from your site in the last 30 days. Not 100 visits. One hundred actual people it can still recognize out on the internet, which is always fewer than the number in your traffic report.

If your site gets 300 visits a month, strip out the bots, the repeat visits and the people who left in four seconds, and you might have 30 usable people. There’s no clever setup that gets around that. Facebook’s floor is lower, but a pool that small means the same dozen people see your ad over and over until they’re sick of you.

So before you budget a dollar, pull up your analytics and look at unique visitors per month. Under a few hundred and your money is better spent getting more people to the site in the first place. Retargeting is what you add once the front door is busy.

Second, does your tracking still work?

The little piece of code that watches who visits your site has gotten a lot less reliable over the past few years. Apple’s privacy changes, browser changes, consent pop-ups. All of it shrank these lists.

A site that could build a list of 5,000 people in 2019 might build 1,500 today, and nobody sent you a memo about it. If your tracking was set up once, years ago, by someone who no longer works with you, that’s the first thing to check. Not the ads themselves. The backend.

Ask whoever runs your ads when they last verified your tracking is firing correctly. If they hesitate, that’s your answer.

Third, are you paying to chase the wrong people?

This is where most of the waste happens, and it’s easy to check.

Somebody who glanced at your home page for 11 seconds and somebody who started filling out your quote form and stopped are worth wildly different amounts. If both are seeing the same ad at the same spend, half your budget is going to people who were never going to call.

Then there’s the one that makes founders cringe. Are your existing customers still seeing your ads? If the people who already bought aren’t excluded, you’re paying to advertise to people who already said yes.

Lastly, your ads should point to the page that matches them. If you’re advertising termite treatment and the click dumps them on your home page to hunt for it, you’ve paid for a click and thrown it away.

Three questions for your agency. If they can’t answer all three quickly, you’ve found your problem.

What it looks like when the foundation is solid

We ran paid ads for Dixon Pest Solutions, a pest control company in Anderson, S.C. We built search campaigns around what people type when they’ve got a problem, and gave each one its own landing page instead of sending everybody to the home page.

Leads from paid went up 67 %. Cost per lead dropped 42 %. Their organic traffic more than doubled over the same stretch.

It worked because we caught people at the moment they were looking, and didn’t waste the click when they arrived. That’s the engine. Retargeting makes a working engine work harder. It doesn’t start one.

Facebook or Google?

If your work looks good in a photo, Facebook and Instagram are the go-to. Before-and-afters, finished jobs, your crew. People aren’t shopping when they’re scrolling, so the job of that ad is to keep you familiar until they need you.

If your customers research before they buy, and especially if there’s a committee or a spouse or a budget approval involved, then Google is the way to go. Those ads follow people while they’re still comparing options, and they now run through Demand Gen, which reaches YouTube, Gmail, Discover, and websites across the Display Network in one campaign.

Most small businesses should pick one and run it properly rather than split a small budget across both and do neither well.

How to know if it’s working

What does a lead cost you, and is that number going down? That’s the one that matters.

Be careful with reports platforms send you. They tend to take credit for customers who were coming back anyway. Somebody who needed a plumber today and already picked you gets counted as an ad win. Every retargeting number you see has some of that baked in.

So watch your total cost per lead across everything you spend, not just the number inside the ad account. If retargeting is doing real work, your blended cost comes down. If it’s only taking credit, the platform report looks great while your overall numbers don’t move.

The platform is grading its own homework. Be sure to grade it yourself.

The short version

Retargeting is a cheap way to stop losing people you already paid to reach. It’s not a growth plan by itself, and below a certain amount of traffic it doesn’t work at all.

Before you spend anything, check how many real people your site can put on a list in 30 days, and whether your tracking still works.

We’ll look at both for free. If you’re not ready for retargeting, we’ll let you know and tell you what to fix first.