For decades, the field of marketing saw very small changes over time. In the Internet Age, every month seems to bring a revolutionary new concept for reaching customers with effective and relevant advertisements.

While it’s certainly not advisable to hedge all of your bets on the latest marketing craze, there is one online development that has stuck around for a few years and earned its stripes – Remarketing. 

What is Remarketing?

To paraphrase Joey Tribianni, this does not mean “marketing again.” If anything, it would be more accurately described as “continuous marketing.”

Put simply, remarketing occurs when a user visits a website and has their browser tagged with a cookie. Then, once they migrate away from that initial site, they’ll start to see a targeted banner advertisement on certain sites they visit. The idea is that this user will have a regular reminder of the site they were visiting, hopefully return, and if we’re really lucky, complete a conversion (sign-up for a mailing list, purchase a product, etc.). In this way, remarketing benefits both parties: the advertiser knows that they are targeting people that have shown an initial interest in their products/services, and the user gets a customized web experience where the ads they see are relevant to their interests.

How does this piece of Internet magic work exactly? The aforementioned tagging done by the visited website utilizes a piece of Google-created code that speaks to sites on the Google Display Network.

With remarketing, you go beyond simply showing up on the sites your customers may be visiting – you go to the sites that they are definitely visiting. It’s quite remarkable (remarketable…?).

For many people, this may seem “creepy” or overkill. When executed correctly, remarketing is neither of those things. Firstly, this Google code identifies a user who’s visited a specific site by a string of numbers, and nothing more. No personal information is shared or spread around. Secondly, when setting up a new remarketing campaign, the campaign manager is able to set parameters on exactly which sites the ads can show on, how many times they can show up, as well as how long the ads will continue to appear after the initial visit.

Remarketing is a powerful tool, but must be handled with care in order to be effective. At Dynamics Online, we have successfully executed remarketing campaigns for a variety of clients including vacation destinations, industrial manufacturing products, real estate and software, just to name a few. Give me a call at 216-292-4410 or email me at anthony@dynamicsus.com to learn more, and I promise I won’t follow you around the Internet unless you request it.

Anthony Mahramus is the Internet Marketing Strategist at Dynamics Online.
You can reach him by calling (216) 292-4410.