Site retargeting

Site retargeting is a display advertising technique used by marketers to display advertising to people who have previously visited their website. The marketer includes a pixel within their webpage which sets a cookie in the user's browser.^[1] That cookie allows the marketer to target the website visitor with advertising elsewhere on the internet using retargeting.

A related technique used by retailers involves dynamic creative, which allows the marketer to customize the ad displayed to any site visitor, for example displaying a picture of a product the visitor was viewing earlier, but did not purchase.

Site retargeting is now commonly considered a "standard practice" among digital marketers.^[2]

Social Media & Site Retargeting

The ability to "retarget", or sell ads on different websites to visitors of certain webpages, lays at the heart of most social networks business models. LinkedIn,^[3] Facebook,^[4] Twitter,^[5] Pinterest^[6] & more all allow and have detailed guides on how to run retargeting ads on their platforms. Google's business model is also built on retargeting - both in their search engine and in their display advertising network.

Personalization

Another common use of site retargeting has been to deliver personalised content to users. A common idea in marketing is the "buyer persona", where marketers create fictional characters of potential customers and think about the "customer journey" - the process that each fictional customer needs to make until it decides to buy the product.^[7] Site retargeting makes it easier to keep track of where each user is on their customer journey - and thus personalize the content that is shown to the user accordingly.^[8]

See also

• Behavioral retargeting
• Personalization
• Dynamic creative
• Email retargeting
• Personalized marketing
• Search retargeting
• Web beacon