By
Veronica Carbonell
Have you ever searched the internet for a certain pair of shoes and immediately received ads for them or similar pairs? From retail to food delivery, we are constantly being targeted based on our hobbies and interests, including where we’ve browsed online. This process is called retargeting, and it’s an exciting tool for political campaigns as it allows us to continue to communicate to folks who have visited a campaign’s website.
Retargeting is a form of digital marketing that allows marketers to serve ads to those who have visited their website in the recent past. It allows companies – and now campaigns – to “re-connect” with site visitors by targeting those visitors with their ads on other websites across the internet.
Let’s break down retargeting together. Imagine you work at a fast food restaurant and you notice a specific customer who orders a chicken sandwich every week. Now, your restaurant is releasing a new deluxe chicken sandwich! As a star employee, you decide to tell your sandwich obsessed customer about the new sandwich because you know, based on their past interests, that they will likely be interested in trying it. Retargeting allows campaigns to target and serve ads to site visitors based on their past interests, just like the chicken sandwich example. Pretty neat, right?
Several tech platforms (including SpeakEasy!) offer retargeting pixels. Pixels are small pieces of code you can add to your campaign website. They are triggered to run every time an individual visits or takes certain actions on the site. These pixels can track page views or actions and then can create lists of audiences based on those pages.
Once these lists are generated, an ad serving platform can use them to target. These hyper-specific lists give you insights on exactly what these voters are interested in, and allow you to make very specific targeted ads based on their interests, clicks, or pages viewed.
None of your valuable energy is wasted when using retargeting because the campaign is only spending its advertising budget on users who have already expressed interest. Because retargeting saves time and money by investing every impression into high-intention voters, retargeting campaigns will see much higher conversion rates on specific actions such as signing a pledge or donating.
If you’re looking to run for office this cycle and have more questions about how to integrate retargeting into your campaign’s media strategy, please do not hesitate to reach out! Shoot us a note to: [email protected]. Happy campaigning!
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