How to Combine Offsite & Onsite Retargeting for PPC Advertisers

How would you describe your marketing efforts?

• Weak?
• Pretty good?
• Well-developed?

I’m afraid I have some bad news. If you don’t have a strategy for your lost visitors, then your marketing efforts are weak.

Sorry to sound harsh… but that’s the truth.

It doesn’t matter how well-designed or user-friendly your website is, how many awesome ads you write, or even if you’re an expert at driving traffic to your website. Unless you have a strategy for abandoning visitors, most people will leave your site without converting – and never come back.

Bottom line: there’s no point in spending money, time or effort on driving traffic to your site if you let your visitors leave without a strategy to bring them back.

In this article, I’ll show you how to recover the visitors leaving your site. You’ll learn how to turn these abandoning visitors into sales and leads, and you’ll see how offsite and onsite retargeting can work together to boost your conversion rate and overall ROI from your marketing efforts.

First, let’s take a look at the two types of solutions for marketing to visitors who are leaving your site. These solutions are known as “remarketing” or “retargeting” because you are marketing to visitors again to recapture them as a sale or lead.

A Recap of Offsite Retargeting

As a PPC advertiser, you’ve probably heard about offsite retargeting. This traditional remarketing solution is becoming more and more popular.

Facebook and Google AdWords are the most common platforms that offer remarketing as part of their advertising solutions. It’s a really powerful way to remind people about visiting your website after they leave, and are browsing the Internet outside of your website and social channels.

Check out this example from Digital Marketer. They retarget people on Facebook who visited the landing page of a swipe file but never downloaded it.

It’s a fact that many people abandon a site because something comes up that grabs their attention. For example, the phone is ringing, there is a knock at the door or they receive an important email. Digital Marketer knows real life events can get in the way of browsing online, and took advantage of this knowledge to create their ad. And, we love it!

Unfortunately, there’s a limitation of offsite retargeting. You won’t be able to reconnect with all of your lost visitors. There are multiple reasons for this:

• Facebook announced recently that they have officially hit 2 billion monthly users. However, there are some people who don’t use the platform, or use it on a regular basis, which means they won’t see your Facebook remarketing ads.
• Many Internet users have ad-blocking extensions installed in their web browser which prevent tracking for remarketing purposes. Adblock Plus, the most popular ad blocking extension, announced that it has been downloaded over 500 million times – and this was at the beginning of 2016.
• Some visitors simply will not notice ads due to “banner blindness”. Here’s an image that shows what percent of visitors actually “see” certain parts of a website. Note in particular, how the ad in the right column has only been 27% of visitors.

In addition, the tracking of Google AdWords and Facebook Ads is great, but it is by no means perfect. When someone uses a different computer, their IP address changes, or they clear the cache in their browser, you may also lose the opportunity to remarket to them.

In general, you are not guaranteed an opportunity to reconnect with your visitors because the interaction takes place outside of your website.

What is Onsite Retargeting?

Onsite retargeting is a vital part of any remarketing strategy, and thereby any good marketing strategy, because it does not suffer from the same shortcomings as offsite retargeting or traditional remarketing.

In principle, onsite retargeting operates much like offsite retargeting. People who are leaving your site are shown another ad or message to convince them to return to your site.

There’s one important difference – as its name implies – onsite retargeting takes place on your site. You display a second message to your visitors, usually on a popup overlay, before visitors have left your site forever.

Onsite retargeting is effective because it’s not like typical “annoying” popups. Using intelligent behavior tracking and dynamic text, onsite retargeting allows you to display highly-personalized messages at just the right time.

You can use it for eCommerce to drive immediate sales, improve upselling, reduce cart abandonment, and more. It’s not like swatting flies with a bazooka, it’s more like laser-precise targeting and that’s why it’s so effective.

Beyond recapture, you can also use onsite retargeting for lead generation. It is probably the best way to build a healthy email list. In the example below, you can see a popup which is part of an email list building campaign.

Ok, that’s a basic look at traditional offsite retargeting and onsite retargeting. The main difference is that onsite retargeting happens before visitors leave your site and covers many of the gaps left by traditional remarketing.

Of course, you can combine both solutions to achieve even better results…

Actually, let me rephrase that: You must combine onsite retargeting and offsite retargeting to have a well-developed marketing strategy. It doubles your chances to capture more sales and leads.

How to Combine Offsite and Onsite Retargeting Effectively

Using onsite and offsite retargeting together helps your remarketing efforts in multiple ways. In the next 2 minutes, you’ll learn my best practices for achieving amazing results. So, keep on reading! 🙂

1. Improve your PPC Campaigns

You can use onsite retargeting to increase the quality score and effectiveness of your remarketing PPC campaign.

You should display an exit-intent popup for visitors coming from the remarketing ads. This way, you can convince them to browse your site longer and visit more pages.

For example, if you have an e-commerce site, you can use product recommendations, such as the popup below. This strategy helps to decrease the bounce rate of your website, and increase the engagement of your visitors.

2. Build your Email List

As I mentioned earlier, onsite retargeting is great for email list building. Use offsite retargeting to get abandoning visitors back to your site, then make them subscribe with an onsite retargeting campaign.

Sounds easy? Well, it is. And it really works. 😉

3. Display Customized Messages

For even better results, you can personalize your messages and show different popups to returning and first-time visitors.

Check out this example below that targets returning visitors.

4. Remind Subscribers of their Discount

It’s common practice to offer discounts and coupons in exchange for a signup to your email list, i.e. – “Sign up for our monthly specials and get 10% off”.

If you combine this approach with retargeting, you can increase the usage of these coupons, and hence improve your customer acquisition.

But how? Using a Facebook PPC campaign you can remind your subscribers that their coupon will expire soon.

You can also use onsite retargeting to remind visitors who signed up, while they are still on your site, and after they return from Facebook or another source.

Check out this example from BOOM! By Cindy Joseph. They used a nano bar to remind visitors of their discount. Note how the nano bar – also known as a notification bar or sticky bar – fits with the style of their site and gets visitors’ attention while allowing them to continue browsing the site.

5. Improve Customer Experience

To improve customer experience using onsite retargeting, you need to make sure that you are not distracting your visitors and you only show content that is relevant to them.

I recommend displaying an onsite retargeting campaign for visitors coming from a specific offsite retargeting campaign. But only when they’ve scrolled to the bottom of a page.

Always show content that is related to your ad’s topic. For example, if they clicked on an article focusing on Facebook, then display an ultimate guide for Facebook ads. Here’s an example from Digital Marketer which does just that:

Conclusion

Onsite and offsite retargeting are an important part of every well-developed marketing effort. Not only do they bring back visitors, but they can increase your conversions.

For a PPC advertiser, it is a must-have strategy for your toolkit. Now, it’s up to you to start using the strategy to boost your sales. If you want to learn more, check out this guide.

Good luck and happy retargeting! 🙂

About the author

Csaba Zajdo is an ecommerce specialist, founder of OptiMonk and several other projects specializing in conversion. OptiMonk is an award-winning onsite retargeting platform, which helps small and medium-sized businesses leverage the power of onsite retargeting. If it has to do with conversion optimization and e-commerce, Csaba is interested. He’s always looking for the best and brightest and he’s constantly on the lookout for game-changing solutions. Csaba has been involved with web marketing including search, lead generation, e-commerce, CRO, PPC, and analytics for over 10 years. He is also a frequent presenter at seminars and conferences.