How to Use Onsite Retargeting to Maximise Your Conversions

In this article, we go over the basics of onsite retargeting and how you can use it in your strategy to improve your customer experience, increase engagement, and maximize your website conversions.

What is onsite retargeting
Why is onsite retargeting important
How does onsite retargeting work?
3 Tips to optimise your website with onsite retargeting
Onsite retargeting in practice

What is onsite retargeting?

Most marketers are familiar with behavioural targeting used in online advertising, that uses online visitor browsing data, such as search terms or websites visited, to display relevant ads and promotions.

But it can also be used on your website – maybe with even more effectively.

On websites, behavioural targeting, also called onsite retargeting essentially works the same way but by triggering actions according to your onsite visitor behaviour.

This data-driven marketing strategy is all about personalising and providing the right message, at the right time to the right person on your website.

It not only improves your customer experience but significantly increases your conversion rate and online sales.

Why is onsite retargeting important?

Well for one, consumer behaviour has completely changed - we are demanding, spoiled for choice and expect personalised experiences from brands.

80% of consumers are more likely to do business with a company if it offers personalised experiences. And companies that deliver personalization generate 40% more revenue than their competitors.

So clearly, onsite retargeting can help you reach your KPIs and drive results. Overall, onsite behavioural targeting allows you to:

• Segment your visitors and approach them in a personalised way
• Increase conversion rate and the probability of visitors making a purchase
• Improve the relevance of your promotions, offers and discounts
• Prioritise your most important visitors and leads

Targeting also allows you to approach visitors at the right moment with content that’s relevant to them and according to where they are in their buyer journey.

And failing to do this on your website can have a negative impact on your conversion rate. 48% of consumers reported leaving a company’s website and purchasing from a competitor due to a poorly personalised experience. 

Read more on 6 ways the lack of personalised service hurts your business

How does onsite retargeting work?

It’s not just about getting email opt-ins or time on page, onsite retargeting can be used to trigger all types of actions according to different data points.

Here’s some of the data points that can be used to target visitors on your website:

• What page your visitor is on 
• Where your visitors are on your page
• Where they came from: previous page, campaign URL, traffic source 
• Which country a visitor is in 
• Time spent on page 
• The number of sessions on your website
• The value of a visitors basket or shopping cart 
• Type of device i.e. tablet, computer or phone.
  
  

In addition to manual rules, onsite retargeting can be taken to the next level with machine learning. The difference with AI-powered targeting is it provides a fully automated targeting process.

AI tracks your website visitor behaviour, collects data and uses it to segment your visitors. Using that data, it triggers your interactions accordingly and ensures your visitors never leave your site unconverted. 

This kind of real-time targeting is growing increasingly important with 67% of consumers saying it’s crucial for brands to automatically adjust their content based on context for a real-time personalised experience.

3 Tips to optimise your website with onsite retargeting

The more you personalise your website experience, the more likely visitors are to convert. That’s why we’ve gathered some of the best practice tips for using onsite retargeting.

1. Set a conversion goal

When setting up your onsite targeting, start by defining your specific goal - what is it that you want to achieve? 

Your goal could be newsletter subscriptions, shopping cart conversions, or a guide download - but whatever it is, it should be measurable. Without measurement, you can’t quantify results or gauge how close you are to achieving them. 

Setting goals will help you optimise your targeting and help you measure and analyse your results.

2. Used detailed targeting 

Don’t just target according to time spent on page, combine different data points for specific targeting. This will help you interact with your visitors better and more precisely. Here are some examples:

• Launch pop-up promoting your upcoming webinar on blog pages related to the same content, and after a visitor has stayed on the page for longer than 30 seconds.
  
  
• When running a seasonal campaign on paid social, only show visitors from your campaign URL your offer when their basket value is over a specific amount.
  
  
• Trigger a button bot or start a live chat conversation with visitors who are on your pricing pages and have visited it multiple times. 
  
  

3. Create different interactions or offers (and test them too)

Onsite retargeting isn't just for your exit intent pop-ups.

By using different types of content such as chatbots, banners, live chat and changing your offering you can really learn what resonates best with your audience.  

You can also try out different offers, promotional copy and CTA’s and use A/B testing to find out what version will best help you reach your conversion goal.

If you want to really take your onsite targeting to the next level, check out these engaging 4 use cases!

Putting onsite retargeting into practice

We decided to put our onsite retargeting tips into good use in order to optimise our own website’s chat service! Here’s how we did it.

• We started by setting the conversion goal of our targeting - to get our website visitors to start chatting with us. 
  
  
• We then set up our on-page targeting according to URL and time on page. In this case, we targeted visitors on our homepage (to get as many results as possible) and set it up to appear after 7 seconds on page. 
  
  
• Lastly, we launched an A/B test. 50% of visitors were shown a proactive chat window with an personalised autosuggest message and the other 50% were shown a plain chat window with no message. 
  
  

After a few weeks of running our test, we got our results. And it’s safe to say we weren't surprised - The proactive targeted chat message had a 52% better conversion rate. 

This goes to show you that onsite behavioural targeting is really worth the investment. It allows you to better convert your hard-earned website visitors and also target visitors who are already interacting with your brand, making it an efficient use of your marketing budget!

To get more insight into how you can further optimise your website for a world-class customer experience, check out our guide!