Site retargeting is a
display advertising
Digital display advertising is online graphic advertising through banners, text, images, video, and audio. The main purpose of digital display advertising is to post company ads on third-party websites. A display ad is usually interactive (i.e. ...
technique used by marketers to display advertising to people who have previously visited their website. The marketer includes a
pixel
In digital imaging, a pixel (abbreviated px), pel, or picture element is the smallest addressable element in a Raster graphics, raster image, or the smallest addressable element in a dot matrix display device. In most digital display devices, p ...
within their webpage which sets a
cookie
A cookie is a sweet biscuit with high sugar and fat content. Cookie dough is softer than that used for other types of biscuit, and they are cooked longer at lower temperatures. The dough typically contains flour, sugar, egg, and some type of ...
in the user's browser.
That cookie allows the marketer to target the website visitor with advertising elsewhere on the internet using
retargeting
In software engineering, retargeting is an attribute of software development tools that have been specifically designed to generate code for more than one computing platform.
Compilers
A retargetable compiler is a compiler that has been designed ...
.
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.
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
LinkedIn () is an American business and employment-oriented Social networking service, social network. It was launched on May 5, 2003 by Reid Hoffman and Eric Ly. Since December 2016, LinkedIn has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft. ...
,
Facebook
Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...
,
Twitter
Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...
,
Pinterest
Pinterest is an American social media service for publishing and discovery of information in the form of digital Bulletin board, pinboards. This includes recipes, home, style, motivation, and inspiration on the Internet using image sharing. Pint ...
& 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
A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on World Wide Web, the Web in response to a user's web query, query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the sea ...
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
Customer experience, sometimes abbreviated to CX, is the totality of cognitive, affective, sensory, and behavioral responses of a customer during all stages of the consumption process including pre-purchase, consumption, and post-purchase sta ...
" - the process that each fictional customer needs to make until it decides to buy the product. 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.
See also
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Behavioral retargeting
Behavioral retargeting (also known as behavioral remarketing, or simply, retargeting) is a form of online targeted advertising by which online advertising is targeted to consumers based on their previous internet behaviour. Retargeting tags online ...
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Personalization
Personalization (broadly known as customization) consists of tailoring a service or product to accommodate specific individuals. It is sometimes tied to groups or segments of individuals. Personalization involves collecting data on individuals, ...
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Dynamic creative
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Email retargeting
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Personalized marketing
Personalized marketing, also known as one-to-one marketing or individual marketing, is a marketing strategy by which companies use data analysis and digital technology to show adverts to individuals based on their perceived characteristics and ...
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Search retargeting
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Web beacon
A web beaconAlso called web bug, tracking bug, tag, web tag, page tag, tracking pixel, pixel tag, 1×1 GIF, spy pixel, or clear GIF. is a technique used on web pages and email to unobtrusively (usually invisibly) allow checking that a user has ...
References
{{Reflist
Behavioral retargeting
Online advertising methods