We’ve all been there—launching an eCommerce paid campaign with the best audiences, top-notch creative, and seeing purchases roll in. ROAS climbs, CPP drops, and things look great until we notice sky-high cart abandonment rates. Now we need an Effective Retargeting Campaign because the campaign we thought was great is now just good.

And that’s okay—it was bound to happen in eCommerce. You might say, “But I did everything right!” and you probably did. Sometimes it is just our luck as sellers, people go in, see something they like add it to the cart and once that’s done, they keep looking for special offers on similar products, or get distracted, or need to add something else to the cart and can’t find it, and the list goes on.

So, what to do next? That’s when an Effective Retargeting Campaign enters into the mix. Before I continue, let’s clarify something, there’s “Retargeting” and there’s “Remarketing”, and they are similar but different.

What’s the Difference Between Retargeting and Remarketing?

Retargeting is when your target people that interacted with your brand on any touchpoint but didn’t make the desired conversion, in this case, didn’t purchase our products or subscriptions.

On the other hand, Remarketing is when you target people that are already customers to get them to purchase complementary products/services or simply to keep them engaged with your brand, most commonly done through social media or email marketing.

Ok, now that this is out of the way and we know what we mean by Effective Retargeting Campaign let’s start with the “How to” you came for…

First Step – Understanding Cart Abandonment 🛒

Is easy to see why this is the first step with the name and all but you’d be surprised by how many times I’ve seen people just retarget anyone that visited their website in a 90+days period of time, and it will work because somewhere in the middle of that crowd are those who just forgot to complete the purchase, but we are talking about Effective Retargeting Campaigns so…

It’s important that you see those abandoned carts not as simple carts, but as the people that filled them. Some questions to ask are:

• What are the most added products coming from my paid campaigns?
• What’s the average value of your abandoned cart?
• What’s the avg. time it takes a customer to purchase after adding a product to the cart?
• How many of this “abandoned carts” in reality abandoned after reaching the checkout page?
• How’s the journey of a user that completes a purchase vs. a user that doesn’t?

Understanding this will help you build the right audience, for the right placement and what’s the best message to reach them in your retargeting campaign, for example, on Google Ads understanding this will help you build better similar segments, engaged audiences, or even create a GA4 audience and import it to Google Ads.

On Meta, you can use values such as parameters, session duration, pages visited, or use custom audience inclusion and exclusions to better target them.

Building audiences that range from fairly broad to highly specific will give you the opportunity to test what work’s better for you.

Which takes us to the next step, now that you know how to “cluster them” you have to know where to reach them.

Second Step – Where Can You Find Them? 🕵️

A reality we have to embrace is that as users we don’t live in one place on the web, we aren’t limited by physical distances like we are IRL and we can see and shop on an international online store as easy as if it was right around the corner of our homes.

Here is where analytics tools like Google Analytics play a BIG role. It is easier to understand user behavior when we have all the information in one place, using GA4 can help us map the customer journey in our site and shows us things like:

• Traffic sources: an easy-to-read report that shows us what traffic sources are the one bringing the most traffic and purchases.
• Touch points to purchase: an easy to read mini journey GA4 presents where it shows a 3-level map that shows the last and previous two touch points of users. This helps us understand what role each traffic source plays in the purchase journey.
• eCommerce reports: how many products views, add to carts, and checkouts a user does on average before actually completing a purchase, what’s my average order value, what are my best selling products, and more.

Once we understand better how our customer purchase on our site, it is easier for us to chose the right placement for our retargeting, where we want to do it as a general abandoned cart campaign or a product-based campaign.

Now that we know who they are and where to find them, it’s time to talk to them again and with that we jump to…

Third Step – Show Them You Care 🫶

Your Retargeting Campaign shouldn’t focus on showing an image of the products they abandoned, is not enough and it feels like a cold sale.Depending on your products you could focused on:

• Offering Discounts or Free Shipping Codes: Nothing motives people more than the idea of saving money, to maximize this approach Meta recently introduced better way to Highlight Discounts.
• Create a Sense of Urgency: If your offers are time-sensitive or based on pre-requisites, you can definitively need to leverage the sense of urgency.
• Product Related Ad Creative: Yours is a mattress eCommerce? Here is something for you, “Come back to bed”, “Don’t lose sleep over mattress prices, returned to your cart and get your mattress with a 10% discount.”
• Show customers enjoying your product or not: What’s that, your eCommerce is about everything bug spray? No problem, let’s go even further and not only write creative ad copy, change your images, from product only to a random scenario… “A cart with couple bug sprays in it protected by a semi-transparent shield while a person is standing next to it surrounded by mosquitos”.

Most retargeting campaigns will live in visual spaces, you need to capture user attention, that’s why social media and the display networks tend to be the perfect place to run them. In this step, your only limit is how creative you can get.

Finally, we get to the…

Fourth Step – Try EVERYTHING ✅❌

• You came up with 6 possible audiences? Try them.
• You have 3 possible purchase journeys? Try to recover those abandoned carts through all of them.
• You have different cart values? Range them, and try different offers.
• You came up with 15 ad copies, 10 headlines, and 13 new creatives? Test them all.

I think you get where I’m getting at, and if not, read the 4th step title again.

There you have it, that’s How to Create an Effective Retargeting Campaign for eCommerce. These tips will guide you to find your ideal retargeting strategy since is not a one-size-fits-all type of thing. Your interactions with your customers are unique and so it’s your strategy, so go on and try EVERYTHING.

Do you have more tips? Leave them in the comments or share them with me on LinkedIn.