What’s your website’s sale or lead conversion rate? If you don’t know, then it’s probably 3% or under. If you do know, then it’s probably 3% or under. Ouch.

There’s many reasons someone doesn’t buy or become a lead on your site. The copy, the usability, the confidence instilling nature of the design and presentation has the ability to win hearts and minds or prematurely cause someone to bail. But the work that goes into the continuous optimizing and testing of website aspects is for another post.

Reaching out to the “Other 97″ with Remessaging

Right now, we’re talking about retargeting. Yes, those 97 people out of 100 are hitting your site, and bowing out to either a competitor, a search engine, or some other random thing they do online. And while your site may have swung and missed at it’s first shot to close the deal, there’s an easy (but still hard) way to get another shot.

How Retargeting Works

Site retargeting (different from search retargeting, which is still not quite there yet) is a simple form of behavioral targeting that allows you display ads to people who have visited "pixeled" pages on your site. For example, if someone visited the shopping cart, they would be cookied by a "pixel". If for some strange reason, that person left the store without purchasing, the cookie would allow an ad network to see them when they’re reading a favorite online publication, and call your display ad to be shown.

The targeting is fairly straight forward; as usual with advertising, once you accurately find your audience, closing them is all about the ad design, offer, call to action, and relevant landing experience. But on average, your click through rate, as well as your conversion rate, will be significantly higher.