It seems like everyone is running retargeting campaigns these days. And why not? Ads tend to work better when they're aimed at the right people. But some are retargeting much more effectively than others. Follow these ten tips to get the most out of your retargeting campaign.

Prospecting

1. Set the stage: Retargeting campaigns are designed to push consumers through the sales funnel, but you need clear benchmarks and understanding of retargeting to know if your campaign is working. Make sure you have the right metrics in place for success at the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel. Here are some frequent FAQ's to get you started.

2. Build on your past successes: Once you know what works, you've got to make the most of that knowledge. Be sure to identify the best-performing keywords from your SEM campaign. Once your search retargeting campaign is up and running, determine which keywords are leading to conversions and then target users performing similar searches with look-alike targeting.

3. Get straight to the point: All the retargeting in the world won’t work if your creative isn’t top notch. Be sure your creative includes a strong call to action and brings the user to a landing page that makes the conversion as simple and straightforward as possible.

4. Stretch your dollar: Retargeting can still be a big bargain. Don’t believe it? Just compare the cost of top keywords on AdWords to the cost of those same keywords in a search retargeting campaign. Same keywords, very different prices.

5. See the light: Don’t ignore view-through conversions. Study after study after study has shown that click-throughs are not a very good metric when it comes to display campaigns. If you want to understand the real value of your campaign, you have got to look at view-through, which measures the number of people who arrive at your site after being exposed to one of your ads.

Converting

6. Relevancy is key: Your retargeting campaign is only as strong as the data behind it. Use Programmatic Site Retargeting to employ as much data as possible, from the referral sites and keywords that bring users to your site, to the sites that users travel to after leaving.

7. No one likes to be stalked: Make sure you establish the right frequency cap to avoid annoying the consumer. The last thing you want is give your customers nightmares about your creative chasing them down a dark alley.

8. One vendor to rule them all: Only use one Site Retargeting vendor to avoid waste and data leakage. If you’re using a bunch of vendors, they may end up bidding against one another in ad exchanges, thus driving up the price of your impressions. Even worse, keeping track of all those pixels can turn into a big headache and put your data at risk.

9. Be Methodical: Don’t forget to place conversion and exclusion pixels on your confirmation pages. After all, if someone just bought your product, it doesn’t make much sense to continue to target them with display ads. You should be equally obsessive about your A/B testing. Just because two ads appear similar doesn't mean they'll perform similarly.

10. Don't ignore the Facebook Exchange (FBX) opportunity: If you’re running a retargeting campaign, it only makes sense to test it on FBX. The early results indicate that FBX campaigns are performing brilliantly. Remember: FBX lets you use 1st-party and 3rd-party data. With prices still on the low side, there’s not much to lose and a whole lot to gain.