An Intermediate Retargeting Primer: How Psychographic Targeting and Retargeting Can Work Together

If you’re anything like most attendees at this year’s MozCon, Marty Weintraub’s talk on psychographic targeting both fascinated and overwhelmed you.

As an in-house marketer at a dedicated retargeting firm, it was right up my alley. I felt more in my comfort zone here than during virtually any other presentation (though I still learned quite a lot about targeting).

To get the most out of Marty’s amazing, super-advanced content (if you missed it, his slides are here, and a recent blog post he wrote on psychographic targeting is here), you need to know something about retargeting. So, the ReTargeter marketing department thought it would be worthwhile to put together an intermediate retargeting primer explaining what you need to know to truly appreciate Marty’s brilliance.

What is Retargeting, Anyway?

For those who aren’t familiar, retargeting allows you to serve ads to people who have previously engaged with your brand online. In its simplest form, retargeting uses cookies to serve ads to people who have previously visited your website. For a more in depth introduction, check out this SEOmoz guide to the retargeting basics.

Marty’s presentation focused on retargeting from targeted landing pages that are getting their traffic from paid sources like Google, Facebook, or LinkedIn PPC. I’ll get back to this part later. For now, let’s talk about how savvy marketers use retargeting.

Segmenting a Retargeting Campaign

When it comes to retargeting, it doesn’t matter what you sell or to whom; performance is all about execution. The most successful retargeting campaigns will segment campaigns to serve the right ads to the right users at the right times.

Let’s use a simple example to demonstrate how this works. To build off of Marty’s example, let’s say you’re a travel agent and you sell both travel booking services and travel-specific products. You have a killer SEO strategy and you’re using PPC to drive people to your site. Some of this traffic is failing to convert, so you decide to try retargeting. Instead of serving the same ads to everyone who visits your site, you can create segments based on which part of your site people visit. For example, someone who visits your products page will be served different ads than someone who visits your travel bookings page. This way you can show people ads that feature the product, service, or particular benefit that they care about.

The same logic can be applied to landing pages. Let’s say you, the web savvy travel agent, are also running various PPC search campaigns and driving traffic to a handful of landing pages. One PPC campaign focuses on ‘travel gadgets’ and sends clickers to a landing page devoted to gadgetry, and another PPC campaign regarding travel services and sends users to a landing page highlighting the travel services you offer.

In addition to retargeting people who come to your website, you can place a retargeting pixel on each landing page and target ads to bounced visitors that reinforce your message. So, people who land on your gadget landing page and don’t convert will then see retargeted ads all over the web featuring gadgets. People who land on the services page and don’t convert will see retargeting ads featuring your services.

Segmenting for product differentiation is one logical way to make sure your ads are relevant, but more smart advertisers will also segment retargeting ads based on how far a user is in the funnel. So for example, you may show fairly general branding ads to someone who just lands on your homepage, but someone who visits your pricing page could benefit from more specific ads that highlight specific pricing or feature details.

Wait, So How Does Psychographic Targeting Fit In?

Now, imagine you’ve built complex psychographic personas using Facebook or LinkedIn that incorporate layers upon layers of highly relevant information. Just like the simple example outlined above, you send each segment to its own landing page that speaks to the persona being targeted. If someone leaves your landing page without converting, you serve retargeted ads that reinforce the tailored messaging established in your landing pages. Unlike the simple campaign, you now have insanely rich data that you can use to target your messaging, making your PPC ad copy, landing pages, and retargeted ads that much more relevant.

As a B2B marketer, I’m much more familiar with LinkedIn advertising than with Facebook. Though it’s easy to get excited about the extraordinarily rich demographic and interest-based targeting available with Facebook, LinkedIn is a veritable gold mine for the B2B marketer, allowing you to target by industry, company, job title, job function, seniority, skills, and even group membership.

When it comes to building out an audience segment in LinkedIn, it can be tempting to make one of two mistakes: over-inclusiveness or over-targeting. In order for the targeting to be effective, everyone within a given audience segment must be fundamentally similar in at least one way. That said, you don’t want to drill down to such a specific audience that you decimate your reach. Like Facebook, LinkedIn has a handy ‘target audience estimator’ that will let you know if your parameters are limiting you to 50 people.

After building a cohesive segment, you need to develop LinkedIn ads specific to that segment, and drive them to a custom landing page with a retargeting pixel. Bounced visitors will see retargeted ads that further echo the customized messaging.

For more psychographic targeting inspiration, check out the personas outlined by Marty himself. Hopefully, this introduction to some advanced retargeting techniques lays a solid foundation for understanding how you can use targeting across channels to get results for your business.