Ad Serving and Retargeting Platforms enable you to remind your customers of your products and services if your customers leave your website without buying. These platforms also allow your company to show visitors relevant ads when they visit other sites. Retargeting works with apps and search as well as website banner ads.

There are different types of retargeting:

Pixel-based retargeting is a way to re-display your material to any anonymous site visitor. This is probably the most common type of retargeting. When someone comes to your website, an unobtrusive piece of JavaScript (often referred to as a pixel) is placed on their browser.

List-based retargeting works after you already have someone’s contact information in your database. You can also use lists of your existing contacts for certain types of retargeting ads. The way that works is you upload a list of the email addresses to a retargeting campaign (usually on a social network like Facebook or Twitter), and the platform will identify users on that network who have those addresses and serve retargeting ads just to them.

Dynamic retargeting will show prospects ads featuring the exact items they viewed or left in shopping carts. The more data you collect on your customers, the more focused your retargeting ads can be.

Problems with Ad Serving and Retargeting Platforms

1. Google Changes. The top problem are the changes by Google to prevent advertisers and ad networks from connecting browser cookies to websites they are not managing. While there are other browsers, Chrome has 63.8% of the market so it will have a large impact.
2. Irritating customers. Customers are very sophisticated about ads and too many ads at the wrong time can irritate customers.
3. Re-Using the same Boring Ad Repeatedly. Like irritation, boredom leads to a lower ROI.
4. Not Being Focussed Enough. Lack of focus can lead to additional costs and a low ROI.
5. Cookie Window Too Short or Too Long. The standard length is usually 30 days but for B2B customers the decision time is usually much longer.

Solutions

The problems can be aleviated by carefuly planning and monitoring to see which criteria are the best to use.

Systems

The follow are some of the systems that provide assistance in managing retargeting.