11 Programmatic Retargeting Strategies

You Can Run This Week

What Is Programmatic Retargeting?

Programmatic retargeting is a game-changing opportunity for businesses to reach their best customers with immediate messages about the products and services they care about.

It is a sophisticated strategy that leverages consumer data, automation, and algorithms to deliver personalized advertising to people who have previously interacted with a brand.

Retargeting is a subset of the overall larger programmatic advertising industry, which automates the buying and selling of ad space across screens via real time auctions. You can read more about programmatic data.

When a person visits a website, data is shared about that person, which identifies their interests and relationship with the advertiser. Cookies, mobile ad IDs, and other digital footprint data is shared, the advertising auction happens, and the ad is delivered.

Why Does Programmatic Retargeting Work?

Strong Conversion Rates

Retargeting is a walk in the park to generate sales because the ads are reaching people who already have a relationship with your business, and likely want what you offer. So, your conversion rates are going to increase.

Low Cost

It’s cost effective for a few reasons. First, since you are only reaching the most interested patrons of your business there is going to be a limited amount of these people. By default you will spend the least on retargeting and they will be the best converters.

Improved User Experience

Because you already know about the user’s interests your ads are particularly relevant to consumers. You already know what to say to these people to get them to buy. Your customers will love the customized approach.

Real Time Ad Optimizations

The real time feedback loop helps businesses modify the ad messages, which further improves ad performance.

Cross Screen Saliency

Finally, your ads resonate because consumers see them across their devices. This multi-screen approach helps your messages stand out.

How Does Programmatic Retargeting Work Without Cookies?

Multiple actions have resulted in third-party cookie data becoming generally deprecated across the digital advertising ecosystem. Apple set their devices to request permission for apps to track with their iOS 14.5 update in 2021. The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) closely defines rules for notifying site visitors of their tracking activities. Google will deprecate cookie data in future versions of their popular Chrome browser, which is expected to happen at the end of 2025.

Notably, Google’s replacement for cookies will allow for retargeting. Their Protected Audience is Google’s replacement method allowing users to be placed in different groups based on their browsing behavior. Websites will know the general interests and behaviors for the user tied to groups and categories. Protected Audience replaces the prior term FLEDGE, or “First Locally-Executed Decision over Groups Experiment.” This system will limit the amount of consumer data available across the programmatic advertising landscape by limiting data flow to the user’s browser and device. Some categorization of the user will be available, but the data won’t flow as freely across programmatic media as it does with the current cookie system.

There are three macro ways remarketing will continue to happen as cookies phase out of the digital advertising ecosystem.

Deployment of Complimentary Tech

Larger companies will deploy their own customer relationship management system (CRM) and customer data platform (CDP), to create targetable user sets.

Cross Device Targeting

Most demand side platforms (DSPs) are deploying IP address identifiers for their advertising. This means that a person’s devices can be targeted because the interacted with an ad.

AI Driven Audiences

AI will be part of the solution. Companies with be deploying custom built algorithms that fill in the cookieless gap with artificially generated data.

11 Programmatic Retargeting Strategies

With all the consumer touch points in digital advertising there are lots of opportunities for retargeting to develop prospects into customers.

1. Website Retargeting

General Site Retargeting

Serve ads to people who recently visited the site. This is good for businesses that want to remain top of mind with consumers.

Page Retargeting

Serve ads to people who recently visited an individual page from your website. This is relevant to ecommerce advertisers who want to reach people who abandoned cart. Serve up the product(s) that were in the cart.

For B2B advertisers serve ads based on the services the user looked at on the site.

Behavior Retargeting

Reach people who took a series of behaviors on your website. For example, with Google Analytics a business can isolate the groups of users who were on the site 3 times in the last two weeks, and who spent more than 5 minutes on the site. Activate with Google display ads.

2. Dynamic Creative Retargeting

Deploy the strategies above, but with ads that change based on the relationship with the advertiser. For example, if you are selling 10 different products, your ads will contain only the product the user looked at.

3. App Retargeting

Activate the same general principle as website retargeting, but the data comes from your app.

Retarget to people who downloaded the app
To people who registered inside the app, but didn’t spend money
To people who have already spent money in the app in order to upsell them.

4. Native Retargeting

Native advertising lets businesses run ads that click to an article inside a website. By placing a pixel inside that article page the advertiser can retarget visitors of that one article page. This is part of the native article integration featured by Brill Media.

5. Connected TV Retargeting

Run connected TV (CTV) ads and remarket to the people who received those ads. By using the demand side platform (DSP) household identifier any user in that household will be eligible to see the CTV retargeting ads.

CTV retargeting is useful for advertisers running CTV ads who want to create additional opportunities to generate sales.

6. Hyperlocal Retargeting

Hyperlocal retargeting uses location data to understand where people go in the physical world. Thus, advertisers can reach people who have been to a particular location. Use cases here include:

Retarget people who have been to your competitor’s location
Reach people who visited a particular storefront, such as a Walmargt

Advertisers who use this are interested in driving sales for large CPG brands, and also to reach the customers of their competitors.

7. Impression and Click Retargeting

When running ad campaigns inside DSPs it’s possible to retarget to people who have seen an ad. This is particularly useful when delivering ad creative in a particular order, and to ensure there is high frequency among users. Or, the same technology can be used to retarget to people who have clicked on an ad. The use case for click retargeting is when pixels are not placed on the website, but you want to reach the same people with multiple offers. This method works well for affiliate retargeting.

8. Household Retargeting

When users click on ads there is a household identifier that gets generated. This ID tells the DSPs which devices are connected within the household. Thus, if an advertiser wants to ensure multiple people in the household are seeing ads, they can turn on household extension, which opens up the retargeting pool.

9. Email Address Retargeting

If you have the email address of your contacts you can run email address retargeting. Simply upload the list of targets to a partner such as Throtle or LiveRamp. They will match the users to targetable identifiers and you can reach these people who display ads. This method is useful to reach people who have signed up for your email list, who have recently bought from you, people who recently lapsed, or to target a segmented group of your highest value customers.

10. Social Remarketing

Instead of using data from your website, use data from your social media accounts as the source for retargeting data. Use cases include:

Retarget people who follow your page
Retarget to people who engaged with your posts with a like, comment, or share
Retarget to people who watched 25%, 50%, 75%, or 100% of a video ad
Retarget to people who submitted a lead inside a form on Meta or LinkedIn

11. Search Retargeting

Reach people after they searched for a keyword or phrase. These display ads are activated through Google Ads. With this setting your ads will be delivered outside of of the search engine results page (SERP) on pages where display ads are available.

How Do You Make The Most Of Your Retargeting Campaigns?

Start With Strategy

Define your audience. Set your campaign key performance indicators (KPIs). Mix past marketing knowledge with insight into the methods and practices that work right now.

Select Your Platforms

Reach your customers across screens. Retarget to search, social, programmatic, and retail media. Place pixels from each platform to ensure conversion tracking.