Onsite retargeting is a term you’ve likely heard countless times before. When it comes to our customers one size doesn’t fit all. We all have different needs, goals and desires. That’s why we need to start treating our website visitors differently.
What Do We Know About Our Visitors?
As soon as a visitor reaches our site we actually know quite a lot about them. We know where they’re from, the time of day they’re browsing, the browser they’re using, their device type and preferred platform (Windows or Mac) and a whole lot more. For a returning visitor, we know (or should know) even more about them.
A retail website may know what sorts of items a visitor previously browsed (jeans, t-shirts, shorts etc.), their gender, their clothes/shoe size, how much they spent on their last order etc. For a travel website, the information we have to hand will be different, but just as insightful. We may know that last time they visited they booked a 1 night hotel stay and indicated their reason for travel was ‘business related’. They also only booked their hotel 2 days before departure. They chose a 4-star hotel and spent 5 minutes reading reviews before checking out.
Using What We Know Correctly
Data is only useful when we use it. We use it to understand our customers better, to inform business decisions and to formulate plans that are designed to put us ahead of our competitors. We can then use this data to fuel onsite retargeting.
When it comes to conversion rate optimisation (CRO) it’s imperative that we use data in the right way. We could spend months, even years, analysing what to do with the enormous volume of data available to us. The thing is, our customers are constantly evolving and the longer we wait to act, the less relevant the data is. The key is to extract the main nuggets and to act quickly to use these for onsite retargeting.
Onsite Retargeting – Retail Case Study
We explored the idea of retargeting with a major retailing client of ours. Having recognised the wealth of customer data we had at our disposal we spotted an opportunity to improve the conversion rate for returning customers. Many customers were using the basket in a similar way to a wish list; adding products they liked but not checking out. We used Webtrends Optimize onsite retargeting functionality to design a test which reminded returning customers of items they had previously added and invited them to checkout.
This simple act of using data which was previously collected to improve the user experience for returning customers resulted in a significant positive result (almost 6% lift in sales).
Advanced Onsite Retargeting
The above example is quite simple to implement. It is onsite retargeting but would be considered relatively basic. Advanced onsite retargeting may involve feeding in a flat file from an analytics tool to fuel an optimisation project. Or it might be an ongoing live integration between analytics (or another database) and an optimisation tool. This would give relevant (up-to-the-minute) data and would result in highly personalised user journeys.
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