Retargeting Your Website Visitors - The Opening Act Part 2

In this article, we are going to cover the power of retargeting and why it’s something you must be implementing in your online business. But first, a quick story…

When Sarah was a little girl she used to visit her Nana and Gramps’ house. It was a big red house way out in the country and, besides the box of cookies that was always available, it had one very special feature that Sarah absolutely adored…

It was an old-fashioned hand water pump that was outside of the house and it held this sort of magical appeal for Sarah.

Sarah was used to the kind of water she had at home, where you just turn on the tap.

But this pump, it was different. It required a little bit of work – what her parents called “priming the pump” and then the water would just start flowing like magic. The sweetest, best-tasting, coldest water Sarah had ever encountered. She was entranced.

And there is something magical about priming the pump – about doing a bit of upfront work that yields AMAZING results down the road.

That’s what building your first online sales funnel is… pump priming. And once you get it right, the money starts to flow just like the water did for Sarah.

And today we are going to talk all about a system that allows you to get the sales, leads, or money flowing like NOTHING else.

We’ll get into that in a minute…

But first, I want to make sure you have a good foundation. Here are the posts you should read first before going any further to have the proper foundation in place:

Make sure you read those first! These are articles in this series. The info they contain is important to your success and the foundation of what you’ll learn here.

OK, now that we have that bit of housekeeping out of the way let’s dig into the subject matter today.

Last time we talked about Part 1 of The Opening Act, and this time we are going to cover Part 2 – Retargeting.

Table of Contents

Retargeting Your Visitors with Paid Ads

Retargeting is a technology that can give you crazy ROI, but it can never be used in isolation. It has to be used as a piece of your sales funnel.

That being said, it is one of the MOST powerful pieces of your puzzle. And can give you VERY impressive results – no matter what your industry. So it is well worth understanding.

At this point, I’m going to go over the basics of retargeting with you, along with some simple companies I recommend to start with the setup. It’s BEST if you have the basics of the retargeting set up before you start the rest of your funnel, and then you can do more with implementing your retargeting lists later.

(Don’t worry, we’ll cover that too)

First, let’s go over what retargeting (sometimes also called remarketing) is.

If you’re not already familiar with the term I’m quite sure you’re familiar with the practice. Let me give you an example of a retargeting ad.

One day I was looking at some new furniture for my place at Wayfair.com and then suddenly started seeing this ad following me around the internet. I’m sure you’ve seen ads like this following you around as well.

This Wayfair.com ad is what I call a generic store ad and these work, but in my testing, a product specific ad often works even better. Product-specific ads are the types of ads that Amazon uses and they look like this:

These are the ads that show you the exact product you were looking at on Amazon, and they work. When you tailor a retargeting ad specifically to the page they land on when they visit your site, you will pick up extra sales or leads. It’s almost inevitable.

The reason they work SO well is that they are the EASIEST way to expose people who have shown interest in your offer another ad.

The shown interest part is important. Because retargeting ads are ONLY shown to people who have already visited a web property that you own. Here’s how that works:

The best part about this is that serving these highly profitable ads to your warm prospects doesn’t require them to do ANYTHING except visit your site – IF you have the correct code installed on your pages.

And that is the exact reason I’m going over this now with you instead of AFTER I show you how to get traffic.

I want you to get the retargeting code on your site BEFORE you send traffic from your initial ads.

The initial ads will prime the pump for your retargeting pixel (code) and then the magic starts to happen.

And don’t worry, if you are already sending traffic to a web property it’s OK. Just get the retargeting pixels installed right away!

Getting the right pieces of code to implement retargeting is actually pretty easy, and I’ll show you which companies to use, and how to find instructions so you know what to do with each one.

But first, before you get this code and put it on your site I need you to do something very important.

Update your privacy policy!

If you are using the power of retargeting you must state it clearly in your privacy policy. I’m not a lawyer so I can’t tell you the exact language to use, but make sure that you don’t skip this.

How to Place Your Retargeting Pixels

Each type of site (WordPress, Shopify, LeadPages, ClickFunnels, etc.) has different places to put the code you will be using on your landing pages for retargeting.

A pixel is a small piece of code that fires on your webpage when someone visits it. This piece of code is what allows retargeting ads to work.

And each company that offers retargeting has a different piece of code to place.

So, instead of trying to tell you each and every variation, I’m going to show you how to FIND the directions for your specific situation…

Here’s what you do – you use Google. Here’s an example:

So the search string is:

“[Company Name] retargeting pixel in [platform name]”

This will nearly always get you directions on how to install the code snippet that you need to leverage retargeting ads.

Remember to install these snippets as soon as possible – even if you aren’t using them right away. You’ll see the power of doing this later. Promise.

OK so now that we have installation covered it’s time to move onto:

What Retargeting Companies To Use

If you do a Google search for retargeting companies you will see A LOT of listings. And I encourage you to do your own research. But there are only two retargeting platforms that I use and recommend and they are:

Adroll and Facebook

It’s important to know that Facebook only has 1 pixel and it covers retargeting as well. So when you are searching for how to install the pixel you want to search:

“Facebook Pixel installed on Platform”

(You can learn more about the Facebook Pixel here.)

Instead of the search string above.

Both of these companies do a great job and you can cover nearly every (legitimate) nook and cranny on the internet with retargeting ads when you use these two companies.

There is a lot more to running a retargeting ad campaign successfully, but for right now all I need you to do is understand the importance of retargeting and get the pixels set up for both Adroll and Facebook on your website.

That will prime the pump for you to make the most out of your Opening Acts and get you set up for the next stage – creating the first step of your funnel, the squeeze page.

Take action now and get your retargeting pixels set up!

In the next article in this series, we look at how to use the power of a squeeze page to start building your list of email subscribers.