Retargeting for online shops: how it works and providers compared

Retargeting shows targeted ads for your shop on other websites to visitors who left your online shop without buying. This way you spend your advertising budget where interest already exists. In this article you will learn how retargeting works technically, which providers there are and which solution suits which size of shop.

What does retargeting mean and how does it work?

Every online shop operator faces the question of how best to spend their advertising budget. There are now a great many options: sensible ones, but also bottomless pits with a disastrous ROI (return on investment). When it comes to online advertising, more is not necessarily better.

Retargeting, often also called remarketing, is a form of online advertising. The difference from “normal” online ads: the banners are not served roughly based on a target group or without any data at all, but on the basis that the customer has already visited a shop once. The user is then shown tailored ads for that shop on other platforms. The idea behind it: visitors who looked around the shop but did not buy anything should still become buyers thanks to ads on external sites. After all, only three to four per cent of online shop visitors buy straight away. The vast majority leave without buying. Retargeting therefore means bringing back visitors who already know your shop with targeted advertising.

Who is retargeting worthwhile for? In principle, for any kind of online shop. Other websites can benefit too, but in e-commerce in particular it has become an almost indispensable way to increase ROI. An important keyword here is brand awareness. If a user only takes a quick look around an online shop, there is a high chance they will soon forget it. Repeated ads for that shop make sure the brand stays in their mind. That is the first step towards customer loyalty, and it is why retargeting is so attractive for online shops.

Technically, retargeting works via cookies stored in the visitor’s browser. Among other things, they record which products the user viewed and whether they bought them. Based on this information, matching ads for the items or services are shown on external sites. The principle is simple, but implementation varies considerably between providers. We have compared several providers and platforms so that you can judge which service has which advantages and which is an option for you.

	Google Ads	Agency	Criteo	AdRoll	releva.nz
No specialist know-how needed	X	✓	X	X	✓
Automatic setup	X	✓	X	✓	✓
Strong performance	X	✓	X	✓	✓
Works as a plugin	X	X	X	X	✓
Facebook ads possible	✓	✓	✓	✓	X

Table: retargeting providers at a glance

Ways to implement retargeting

There are many ways to implement retargeting for your own online shop. Here we present a selection that we consider the most sensible. There is no universally optimal platform, however, because every online shop is different. Size, the operator’s technical knowledge and advertising budget are among the factors that determine which type of retargeting fits.

Google Ads

In online marketing, there is hardly any way around Google. Through Google Ads, the search engine offers several forms of retargeting or remarketing:

• Standard retargeting: predefined, static ads are shown in the Display Network after a user has visited your website.
• Dynamic retargeting: the advertising is based on the products the visitor viewed previously.
• Remarketing lists for search ads: if a user viewed a product on your website and later searches for exactly that on Google, a matching ad of yours is shown automatically.
• Video retargeting: if you have a YouTube channel, matching ads are also shown in the Display Network if a user has previously watched a video on your channel.
• Retargeting with customer lists: you upload a list of your customers’ contact details, and ads are then delivered to them specifically.

Google Ads therefore offers many variants. Implementing them correctly, however, requires quite a lot of technical know-how. Custom graphics for the ads are possible but technically complex and time-consuming. In our experience, the standard ad designs do not perform particularly well. In addition, Google Ads bills on a CPC (cost per click) basis, so every click on the ad costs money. Compared with CPM (cost per mille) models, which bill per thousand impressions, this leads to higher costs.

Online marketing agencies

Without the necessary know-how, manual retargeting solutions such as Google Ads are not easy to set up. You can of course study the subject in depth yourself, but that takes a lot of time and effort. The obvious solution is an agency. Good online marketing agencies offer retargeting campaigns that, ideally, can be booked individually or as a package. The advantage: you do not have to take care of anything and can leave the work to specialists. The disadvantage: an agency incurs extra costs, which can quickly blow the budget, especially for small online shops. For online shops and service providers above a certain size, on the other hand, support from an agency is almost indispensable. You can read how we set up campaigns on our performance marketing page.

Criteo

Criteo is one of the big players in online marketing and offers retargeting software that some large companies also use. The focus is on dynamic retargeting with machine learning. The software is designed to recognise automatically how website visitors behave along their customer journey in order to show the right ads at the right moment. The network in which the ads can run includes Facebook, Instagram and Google Ads. Performance has proven to be mediocre, and as with Google Ads, setup is manual and technically fairly demanding. In addition, Criteo may not accept customers with too small an advertising budget.

AdRoll

Above all, its connection to well-known e-commerce platforms such as Shopify and marketing tools such as MailChimp makes AdRoll interesting for retargeting. Linking it with Facebook and Google Ads also works smoothly, and the ROI has convinced many customers. On top of that comes good customer support. The flexible pricing is not particularly cheap, but fair overall. If you have the necessary background knowledge and know exactly what you want, AdRoll is a good choice.

releva.nz

A relatively new provider is releva.nz. The young company has launched a plugin that automatically shows ads on the retargeting principle. Once activated, it needs no complicated setup or maintenance. This means you can work with this comparatively inexpensive plugin even without background knowledge. What surprised us in our comparison was the good performance: in terms of ROI as well as reach, clicks and conversions, only the considerably more expensive AdRoll kept up.

Conclusion: size and know-how decide

Used correctly, retargeting can improve overall performance, especially for online shops. The range of retargeting solutions is large, however, and there is no single perfect solution for everyone. Depending on the starting point, some offers are better than others.

Large online shops

For large online shops with an advertising budget of around 8,000 euros a month or more and at least 100,000 users a month, we recommend working with an online marketing agency. At this scale you should leave retargeting to specialists who know it inside out and take the work off your hands.

If you already have the know-how

If you or your staff are already familiar with retargeting, AdRoll is a good partner. Its communication and performance convinced us.

Small and medium-sized online shops without know-how

Without background knowledge, working with providers such as Criteo or AdRoll quickly becomes too complex and causes unnecessary costs. If you want to spend as little time as possible on the subject and do not want to pay for an agency, releva.nz is a good fit. Thanks to its fully automatic operation and good performance in our comparison, the plugin is a sensible solution for many small and medium-sized online shops.

In the end, it depends on what you want to achieve, where you stand today and where you want to go. On that basis you can calmly decide which tool, platform or agency to choose for your retargeting.

You can find out more about the provider on the releva.nz website.