Many people are surprised to hear that we also provide retargeting on our RTB platform. As a result of being connected to so many traffic exchanges, our network reach is large enough that our advertisers can run very effective retargeting campaigns in addition to their usual display campaigns. The following is a very simple guide to retargeting.
Use the following links to skip to the appropriate section:
The Basics
Frequently Asked Questions
How To Create a Retargeting Campaign
Advanced Retargeting Strategies
The Basics
Retargeting or “Audience Targeting” allows you to track all users that visit your webpage (or any online destination), and find those users across almost any site on the web. By building a retargeting list or “audience” of users who have visited a certain website, you can create powerful customized campaigns, tailored to those specific users, and which will only be seen by those users.
Primary Advantages of Retargeting:
1. Brand Recognition — Users who recognize your brand will now see your advertisements displayed across thousands of websites, creating the impression of a large-scale advertising campaign, but for a fraction of the budget.
2. Cost Effectiveness — The highly-targeted nature of retargeting allows you to pay higher-than-normal CPM prices compared to otherwise untargeted campaigns. However, due to the relatively limited size of audiences, overall costs are generally lower.
3. Behavioral Targeting — It’s possible to create campaigns which only target users that fall into certain behavioral groups. For example, users who are:
- known to click on banners
- known to enter their e-mail address into forms
- known to make online purchases with a credit card
- known to purchase specific types of products
- and so on…
Frequently Asked Questions
The following are the most common questions that we get from our advertisers.
Q: Is there an extra fee for retargeting?
A: No, there are no extra fees. You only pay for the impressions you win, just like any campaign.
Q: Can SiteScout find users who arrived at my site from other traffic sources/networks?
A: Yes! It doesn’t matter how people arrived at your page, our system can track them. Whether they came from search engines, links from other websites, or even media buys on other ad networks, they will all be captured in your audience.
Q: Who cannot be tracked with retargeting?
A: Users who have cookies disabled cannot be tracked using retargeting. In addition, users who were being tracked, but subsequently erased their cookies, will no longer be tracked, unless they revisit your website and receive a new cookie.
Q: Is it difficult to set up a retargeting campaign?
A: Setting up retargeting is very easy! You paste a small piece of code on the page (or footer of the site) on which you want to build your retargeting list, but otherwise it’s almost the same as creating a traditional campaign. The following are the most basic instructions on how to build a retargeting campaign…
How to Create a Retargeting Campaign
The following steps assume you have an account on the SiteScout platform. To create a free account, just click here and complete the sign-up form.
Step 1: Place a Retargeting Pixel on Your Website or Page.
a. Open the Retargeting tab by going to the “Tools” menu and selecting “Retargeting Lists“.
b. Create a new audience list and give it a name:
c. Grab the retargeting code. Select your new pixel from the list and click “Get Tags”. Highlight and copy the code in the box:
d. Once you have copied this code, paste it into the HTML of the webpage from where you want to retarget users. The code should (ideally) be placed after the content, right before the closing body tag, but anywhere will do.
Step 2: Create the Campaign.
a. Click on the “Tools” menu -> then “New Campaign“
b. Complete the Campaign Basics section.
c. Add Sites to your campaign. You should either add many sites, or select “Run of Network”. The idea is to get a large amount of network coverage so that your audience will see your ads no matter where they go. For the most reach and the simplest setup, choose “Run of Network”.
d. Add your Creatives (banners) to the campaign.
e. Add Geo Targeting to the campaign.
f. Go to the Retargeting section to add your retargeting list to the campaign. Once your audience has been added, the campaign will ONLY buy impressions for users on your audience list.
It’s generally a good idea to stay away from adding too much additional targeting if you plan on doing retargeting, since it will further reduce the traffic volume of the campaign. In other words, retargeting mixed with contextual targeting and/or day parting is generally not recommended.
g. Click the “Save” button, and your campaign will go into Pending mode for review.
Step 3: Monitor Your Audience Count.
Once you’ve added the pixel to your website, visitors will start being added to your retargeting list. You can monitor the progress of your list within the Audience tab.
Set the beginning of the date range on the toolbar to the day that you first added the pixel to your website. Leave the end of the date range as Today.
Every time a user is added to your list they will be counted in the “Created” column. Ever time a user re-visits your list, they will be counted in the “Updated” column. This allows you to track both the first and the most recent time that visitors accessed your page.
Once your list has at least one user in the “Created” column, your retargeting campaign will begin tracking them across the network.
Advanced Retargeting Techniques
The following are two ways to be creative with retargeting and really use it to it’s full potential…
1) Retarget Users for a Limited Time
It may be that you don’t want to target your users indefinitely. You would rather retarget them for a specific number of days after they visit your site, and then stop. You can set this window of time from the first time they visit your site, or from the most recent time they have visited your site.
The Process:
1. Tick the “Advanced” checkbox.
2. Add your audience as before, leaving the default setting of 0 days after first access.
3. Change the rule to “Untarget”, select the same retargeting list, and set the number of days after which you stop retargeting users. Add that rule. It should look like this:
4. This campaign will only target users for 7 days after the first time they access your site. Revisiting the site will not affect the status of the campaign pertaining to that user.
5. If you wish the campaign to react to the most recent time the user has accessed your site, then the rule should be changed to “last access”. It would look like this:
6. Each time the user re-visits the page, the 7 day window will be reset.
2) Untarget Converted Users
Your retargeting campaign might have a specific goal (signup, sale, form submission, etc.) Once that goal has been achieved (on a per-user basis) you no longer want to waste your budget advertising to those users. If you are selling a product, for example, you no longer want to advertise to users that have purchased it.
To accomplish this, you need to create a second retargeting pixel that will be placed on the Conversion Page, or Thank You page of your website. If that page is secure, you may need to redirect to a non-secure page to make this possible. Once the second pixel is in place, you’ll create a retargeting campaign which targets your main audience and untargets the converted audience:
That’s it.
If you have any questions, please let us know either in the comments or by contacting us directly.
At the same time as our new website launch a few weeks back, we also released an update to our RTB interface. We have received some great feedback from it already, so we hope you like it also. We are also working on some additional design updates to the interface, which will be launched in the near future.
Two columns have been removed from the interface – “Estimated Bid” and “Bid Range”. These proved to be confusing and missing for a good portion of our sites and placements. Instead, they have been replaced by the “Average CPM” column, which shows the average cost of traffic for the past 24 hours. This should give a ballpark idea of what price to bid. It should be noted that this is an average for impressions won on the SiteScout platform, and does not reflect the highest or lowest bid price on any given property. In order to win the 1st impression, it’s probably necessary to bid above the average price. Of course, it’s also possible to win traffic by bidding lower than the average price.
To begin with, we changed the name from “Spend Cap” to “Budgeting”. Many of our users were unfamiliar with the term, so we decided to forgo the industry speak, in favor of more straightforward language. In addition, we made it so that the default settings encourage the use of a daily budget, to help new users from overspending. The platform can deliver a very high volume of traffic, and if someone doesn’t realize that, they can unintentionally blow through their budgets very quickly. We also opted for radio buttons, instead of the drop-down menu we used before, to make the settings more visible.
Device Targeting was previously an optional feature. However, it’s such a powerful and useful feature that we decided to make it more prominent and change the design to a more intuitive layout that encourages its use. Furthermore, we’ve changed the default settings so that mobile devices are not selected by default. This prevents web advertisers from paying for mobile traffic that they don’t want.
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