Retargeting or Remarketing, is a simple and often highly economical way to draw people back towards your website after they've visited once and chosen to leave without converting. In some cases, conversions are lost simply because a prospect wasn't in the right position to buy when they came across your website, or because someone was distracted away from your page by another matter. When used properly, display retargeting gives you a second chance to prompt that all-important action, whether you're looking for subscriptions, sales, or anything else.

Unfortunately, simply jumping into retargeting isn't the best way to make the most of the technique. Failing to properly plan out your retargeting efforts could leave you with diminished results - or worse, damage your brand image. The following best practices should help you to avoid the digital threats, and achieve your marketing goals.

1. Invest in High-Quality Display Assets

If your aim is to draw in more traffic through display retargeting, one of the first things you'll need to think about is the quality of the display banner ad you're showing to prospective customers. If your display image is low-quality, your customers are less likely to trust you, and therefore less likely to convert. This may seem like a simple enough concept, but it's surprising how many terrible banner ads seem to be left cluttering up the Internet. With retargeting, ensure that your display isn't an eyesore to improve customer experience.

Also, try to remember that your ads will be appearing on different websites, and different platforms. With that in mind, you may be best served by creating a range of shapes and sizes designed to suit any environment.

2. Target Your Audience Carefully

One of the hardest challenges to balance with display retargeting, is being able to avoid over, or under-serving. If you don't serve enough advertisements to your target audience, then you're not going to drive many clicks, or do anything to improve brand recognition. However, on the other hand, when you serve too many impressions, you run the risk of annoying your audience and even causing an outcry on social media.

Try to make sure you target an actionable audience and be cautious about the number of impressions you serve to each visitor. Most experts recommend using somewhere in the region of fifteen to twenty impressions for each person in a segment.

3. Segment Prospects Selectively

Just because it might sound easier to place only one smart pixel on your website, doesn't mean that you should choose the time-saving route and target every visitor in the same way. In fact, one of the most important best practices to address in any display retargeting campaign is segmentation.

To properly segment your audience, start by looking at your conversion funnel for different customers, including cart abandoners, people who spend a lot of time on product pages, and people who check out your landing page only to bounce back a moment later. Once you've defined the high-value segments, ensure you're targeting them with the right images, language, and offers to make them take notice.

4. Test Everything

Since you should have already segmented your audience for the purpose of display retargeting, you should be in a great position to do some testing. In fact, you can A/B test everything from offers and incentives, to display options and messaging choices. The more you test, the more likely you are to establish a winning method for your retargeting campaign - meaning that you stop wasting your budget, and start drawing in more profit.

Also, remember to test for impression frequency to learn where and when your banners and display advertisements get the most clicks. This should give you an insight into how to use other marketing strategies in the future.

5. Keep it Fresh

Finally, make sure that your display retargeting pieces are always new, fresh, and interesting for each segment of your target audience. This often means using multiple pieces of creative, to stop your campaign from quickly becoming stale. Remember that banner blindness can easily occur when prospects are exposed to the same displays on a regular basis, so changing up your imagery while maintaining a consistent brand theme can be essential.

Because retargeting gives your marketing scheme an extended reach, it offers a fantastic opportunity to think outside of the box and get creative. Use your displays as a chance to show your audience what you're really worth.