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Difference Between Retargeting and Remarketing

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Retargeting and remarketing are two marketing strategies that businesses use to connect with their past audiences. While many people often confuse these terms, they have distinct differences in how they are implemented to achieve their intended objectives.

Retargeting primarily focuses on utilizing paid advertisements through various channels such as paid media, social media platforms, search engines, and others to re-engage individuals who have recently visited a website. Companies can track website visitors and their actions to promptly include them in retargeting ad campaigns.

On the other hand, remarketing primarily relies on email marketing to engage previous customers and people who have interacted with a website or social media profiles in the past. The process typically involves creating lists that include customer information for use in remarketing campaigns. While email is the primary channel for remarketing, it can also be done using paid ads on platforms like Google and Facebook by uploading specific user lists.

It is worth noting that advertising platforms often do not provide a clear distinction between retargeting and remarketing, which contributes to the confusion and assumption that these concepts are interchangeable.

Remarketing, as a marketing tactic, involves reaching out to previous visitors and buyers to remind them of a business and nurture leads. It helps increase brand awareness and maximize the lifetime value of each customer. Remarketing campaigns can be easily initiated by compiling a list of people who have interacted with the business and using various marketing solutions such as advertising platforms, email marketing software, and social media platforms.

There are several powerful remarketing tools available, such as Facebook, Google, and Mailchimp. Facebook allows businesses to upload lists of email addresses and phone numbers to include in their campaigns and offers various ad types for remarketing. Google provides access to a wide audience through the Google Display Network and Google Search, where businesses can upload contact lists for remarketing campaigns. Mailchimp, an email marketing platform, offers remarketing tools to re-engage the audience and create remarketing ads on platforms like Facebook.

When it comes to using remarketing, businesses can adopt different approaches. One approach is to run broad-level remarketing targeting that covers the entire audience, showcasing new product offerings or reconnecting with customers after a certain amount of time. Another approach involves more granular targeting, allowing businesses to personalize messaging based on specific interests of the recipients. For example, businesses can run a remarketing campaign that shows ads for products in a particular category to users who have viewed similar items.

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Types of remarketing include email remarketing, display remarketing, video remarketing ads, and remarketing for search ads (RLSA). Email remarketing involves building a list of prior contacts, including previous customers and email newsletter subscribers, and sending remarketing messages based on campaign objectives. Display remarketing displays ads across websites in advertising networks like the Google Display Network. Video remarketing ads are shown before or during other videos on platforms like YouTube. Remarketing for search ads (RLSA) is a feature in Google Ads that targets previous web visitors in Google Search campaigns.

Retargeting, on the other hand, is a marketing tactic that focuses on finding individuals who have interacted with a business and showing them digital advertisements to bring them back to the website. Retargeting ads target different segments of the audience based on their past behavior on the website, such as the pages they viewed. Tracking pixels and cookies are used to monitor user behavior and enable the ad network to add users to retargeting lists. Retargeting ads typically use a cost-per-click (CPC) payment model, although some also use cost per impression (CPM) and cost per acquisition models.

Retargeting can be used effectively in various ways. It can help recover abandoned carts by reminding users to complete their orders. It can also encourage users to revisit specific pages they have previously viewed or target customers based on.