Setting and Achieving Goals for Your Retargeting Campaign

You may know how important written goals are for personal achievement, but do you really need them to achieve marketing success? According to original research by CoSchedule, the answer is an emphatic yes: 

Marketers who set goals are 376% more likely to report success than those who don’t. And 70% of those successful goal-setting marketers achieve them.

Beyond the goal itself, figuring out the process to get you to the goal is even more important. James Clear, one of the world’s leading experts on habit formation, lays out in his book Atomic Habits, “while goals are good for planning your progress, systems are good for actually making progress toward your goals.” Once again, CoSchedule’s research backs this claim by reporting that “marketers who document processes are 466% more likely to report being successful.” So it’s clear (no pun intended) that you should set goals and develop processes to achieve marketing success. But how do you apply this to your retargeting program?

Think about potential retargeting opportunities for your business
Choose one that you think may really move the needle, and start documenting the steps that will turn this idea into a real retargeting revenue opportunity:

• What is the hypothesis or idea that properly scopes this new retargeting opportunity?
  Be specific about who you’re retargeting, what products or services you’re testing, and why that is a good opportunity.

• What steps need to be done to bring the campaign to life and ensure you hit your goal?
  Document each step — from setting up the target audience or persona, to creating the ad, monitoring the metrics, and evaluating the results.
• How will you evaluate the results to determine if progress was made and achieved the goal?
  What is the action you’re trying to get recent buyers to take, what are the right metrics to measure that, and what else should you monitor to learn what you can do differently next?
• What outcome would indicate the retargeting test is worthy of full implementation?
  What are the levels of a bad/okay/great outcome? What factors helped or hindered the campaign’s ability to hit those levels?
• What is your post-test evaluation to get maximum learning to improve future campaigns?
  What should you do more of? What should you do less of? How can it be modified to perform better?

Online advertising heavyweight WordStream calls this process “creating a PPC workflow” and walks you through how to tackle common online ad goals to make sure your ecommerce site doesn’t become “the lame party that no one wants to attend.”

Write down all the questions and answers, and you’ll end up with a one- to two-page documented model for bringing retargeting campaigns to life. You’ll gain tremendous clarity on what each retargeting ad is really about, a clarity that gives them their best chance for success — and set yourself up to be one of those goal-setting marketers that consistently delivers outstanding retargeting ad campaigns.

Don’t forget to follow your model and execute!
Remember, your retargeting ad success system can only deliver you top results if you actually use it. Not having a clear goal and/or a process to achieve those goals is only one mistake retailers might make when it comes to launching retargeting campaigns.

More pitfalls are revealed in our FREE e-book 7 Retargeting Mistakes That Cost Retailers Customers and Cash. #7 might really surprise you!  

Call a Direct Marketing Specialist at 800.959.8365.