Retargeting has no audience of its own. Every person it reaches was delivered by something else: a search result, an advertisement, a link, which makes its performance a consequence of your other channels rather than an achievement of its own.
The pool is filled by other work
This is easy to say and easy to forget when the reports arrive. A retargeting campaign cannot find anybody. It can only speak again to people search optimisation, paid search or a referral already brought.
Two consequences follow. Improving your search visibility improves retargeting automatically, without touching the campaign. And a retargeting campaign attached to a site nobody visits will underperform however well it is built, because there is nobody in it.
Organic and paid visitors are not the same people
They arrive in different states, and if your audience is large enough to separate, it is worth doing.
Search optimisation tends to bring people earlier: reading about a symptom, working out whether it is serious, comparing options. There are usually more of them and they cost nothing per visit, but they are further from booking.
Paid search tends to bring people later, because the searches worth bidding on are the ones with intent in them. Fewer people, each one already paid for, each closer to a decision.
Retargeting the second group is the more defensible spend, because you have already bought that visit once and are protecting the investment. Retargeting the first is cheaper in origin but slower to convert.
The under-counted value of content that ranks
A page that brings forty visitors a month from search is usually judged on whether those forty called. Most of them did not, which is how useful pages get written off.
But those forty also entered your retargeting audience, every month, at no cost per visit and without anyone doing anything. Over a year that is a supply of people who have read something of yours and know your name, and it is the only free source of retargeting audience a contractor has.
When judging whether content is worth keeping, that contribution belongs in the assessment.
The gap most contractors do not notice
Your best local channel may be contributing nothing to this at all.
Calls that come from a map listing frequently never touch your website. Somebody searches, sees the local results, taps the number in the listing, and speaks to you: an excellent outcome, and one that leaves no trace in any audience you could advertise to later. The same is true of anyone who calls from the number on your van.
So if local search is producing most of your work, your retargeting audience is being built by your second best channel. That is not a reason to change anything about local search, which is working. It is a reason to be realistic about how much audience there is to retarget, and to lean on your own customer records instead, which is where the better list lives anyway.
Order of operations on a fixed budget
- Make sure the searches you already win are captured. Fix the site, the phone, the listing.
- Fund the channels that bring new people. Paid search, local search, the content that ranks.
- Then add retargeting to recover the ones who slipped away.
Running the third before the second produces a well-optimised conversation with a very small number of people. It also tends to report beautifully, which is the trap covered in whether retargeting is adding anything.
Frequently asked questions
Does SEO help my retargeting?
Directly. Every visitor a ranking page brings enters the audience at no cost per visit, which makes content the only free source of retargeting audience a contractor has.
Should I retarget organic and paid visitors differently?
If the audience is large enough to split. Paid visitors arrive later in the decision and were already paid for once, which makes reaching them again easier to justify.
Why is my retargeting audience so small when the phone rings plenty?
Probably because much of your work comes from local listings, where people call from the listing itself and never reach the website. Those calls leave nothing to retarget.
What should I fund first?
Capture what you already win, then the channels that bring new people, then retargeting. It can only speak to people the others already brought.
Where to start
Compare your monthly website visitors against your monthly calls. If the calls are a large share of the visits, most of your customers are arriving without ever entering an audience, and your retargeting ceiling is far lower than the campaign reports suggest.
Real Time Marketing has worked with home service contractors since 2016: plumbing, HVAC, roofing, electrical and other trades, nationwide, from our office in Bradenton, Florida. Agreements are month-to-month. See our pay-per-click management, search optimisation, or book a strategy call.
