How We Keep Your Retargeting Campaigns Working

Summary

• Retargeting keeps your brand in front of people who have already read content from one of our brands. It only works if the ads land in the right places in front of the right people.
• Our team reviews every campaign several times a week and makes adjustments based on what we see: how ads are pacing, where they ran, what they cost and whether the clicks are real.
• The Takeaway: A click goal is easy to hit and easy to fake. We protect the quality of your audience over the number on the report.

Retargeting is one of the simplest ideas in digital advertising. Someone reads an article on Modern Machine Shop, Production Machining, MoldMaking Technology, Plastics Technology or Products Finishing. Then your ad follows them as they browse elsewhere online. They've already shown up in your market. Your job is to stay in front of them.

The hard part is everything that happens after the campaign launches. Ad platforms are built to spend your budget, and they'll find the cheapest way to hit whatever goal you give them. Left alone, that usually means ads on sites and apps your buyers never visit, and clicks that look great on a report but don't come from real people.

That's why we don't leave them alone.

We're always analyzing

Our team checks every retargeting campaign multiple times a week. We look at whether it's on pace for its monthly impression and click goals, which sites and devices the ads ran on, what each impression and click cost, and whether the click-through rate makes sense for a display ad.

When something looks off, we dig in. When something is working, we look for ways to do more of it.

How we optimize your campaign

We pay for impressions, not clicks. Your retargeting audience is already qualified because they visited one of our sites. The goal is to stay in front of them, and paying per thousand impressions does that predictably. When a campaign pays per click, the platform goes looking for the cheapest clicks it can find, and cheap clicks are rarely good ones.

We block mobile apps. App inventory is the biggest source of accidental clicks. Someone playing a game on their phone taps the screen, your ad happens to be there, and it counts as a click. We've seen app traffic push a display ad's click-through rate above 20%. A normal display CTR is closer to 0.1% to 0.2%.

We prune placements constantly. We review where your ads actually ran and exclude sites that rack up impressions without earning clicks. That's not a judgment on those sites. Many are popular, well-known destinations. They just aren't a fit for a B2B manufacturing audience.

We share what we learn across every campaign. We keep one exclusion list that applies to all of our retargeting campaigns. When we find a poor placement on one advertiser's campaign, it's blocked for every advertiser in one step.

We watch for numbers that look too good. A sudden jump in cheap mobile clicks isn't a win. It's a warning sign. We'd rather report fewer, real clicks than a big number that doesn't hold up.

We make one change at a time. Retargeting campaigns produce a handful of real clicks a day, so it takes several days to see whether an adjustment worked. Changing one thing at a time is the only way to know what helped.

We adjust bids, budget and creative based on performance. If a campaign is falling behind its goals, we look at the bid, the daily budget and the ads themselves. Fresh creative is often the fastest way to lift click-through rates.

We document every change. Each adjustment is logged on your campaign record, so your Gardner rep can tell you exactly what changed and why.

Why it matters

Anyone can make a retargeting report look good. Hitting a click goal with accidental taps takes no effort at all. Keeping your brand in front of the machining, molding, plastics and finishing professionals who read our brands takes someone paying attention.

That's the job we've taken on for every campaign we run.

Want retargeting that's watched this closely?

If you're running retargeting with us now, reach out to your Gardner rep to talk about how your campaign is performing. If you're not, let's talk about what a campaign could look like for you:

• Contact us
• Download a media kit