A visitor comes to your store, places a few items in the shopping cart, gets a call, or gets distracted, and leaves without completing the purchase. Your shopper forgets all about you. She didn’t actually make the purchase elsewhere; she simply just did not follow through with the purchase from your store. But maybe…there’s a way to get her back!
Social media retargeting, or “Remarketing”, is a form of advertising on social networks like Facebook, and now Instagram. This can help keep your products in front of shoppers who have abandoned their carts without ever purchasing from your store.
For most eCommerce stores, between 2%-5% of web visitors convert on the first visit. Having the ability to get back in front of them with a product they are already interested in is key in raising your sales and reminding people to buy your products.
Technically speaking, this is how it works: You place a small piece of code known as a pixel on your Shopify store’s backend. The code, or pixel, is unnoticeable to your site shoppers and won’t affect your site’s performance. However, every time a new shopper comes to your site, the code drops an anonymous browser cookie. Later, when your cookied shoppers visit Facebook and Instagram, the cookie serves your ads, ensuring that your products are served in a relevant way based on previous shopping behavior.
This essentially reminds your shopper that she was shopping with you in the past and should go back and complete her purchase with you, as she had originally planned. And BOOM! You experience the benefits of boosted sales that would have been left if not attended to in this way.
Sounds easy, right? There are a few caveats to consider before getting started:
- Your site has to have a decent amount of traffic. Typically speaking, if you are not seeing at least 150 site visitors each day, this magic bullet will take longer to be fruitful for your store’s conversion rates.
- You have to be selling a quality product at a fair price. If you are selling widgets to a very niche market, this might also impact the performance of retargeting visitors.