Running a retargeting campaign has by far the best performance of any type of online advertising you can buy.  For those of you not familiar with retargeting, the service displays ads to people that have already visited your site but left without making a purchase or submitting their information. Here’s a few tips to get the most out of retargeting:

1. Don’t stalk your visitors – Retargeting works so well because it allows you to recapture someone’s attention after they’ve left your site. People get busy, the phone rings, they get distracted with an incoming email, life happens.It’s great to display banner ads and Newsbullets to these people after they have left your site, just don’t go crazy and stalk them forever by showing your banner.  Typically, retargeting becomes less effective as time goes on.  There’s less of a reason to run your retargeting campaign beyond 30 days.
2. Use Only Two Ad Networks at Most – Work with an ad network that has huge reach to increase your chances of targeting an individual. Here at Adblade, we reach 200 million users every month in the US alone. If you want to work with more than one retargeting network, limit your buy to an additional network. Anything beyond two ad networks, and a visitor can be bombarded with too many ads which could become annoying.
3. Use Different Creative Types – Use a bunch of different creative types when running a retargeting campaign to boost its effectiveness. A combination of IAB Standard banner ads in multiple sizes plus text ads, like Newsbullets, has a multiplier effect on performance.
4. Don’t Ignore All the Metrics – Multiple studies have shown that click-throughs are not a great metric when it comes to online banner display campaigns. If you want to understand the true value of your campaigns, you should look at view-throughs, which measure the number of people who arrive at your site after viewing one of your banner ads.