Remarketing Vs. Retargeting: What's the Difference?

Search Engine Marketing for Lawyers

When you get into the digital marketing world you’re bound to run across terms that are unfamiliar. Two terms that generate a lot of questions in search engine marketing for lawyers are retargeting and remarketing.

Both are used to describe the idea of connecting with visitors to your law firm’s website who did not convert into new leads or clients during their initial visit. The goal is to continue to market to these specific audiences in an effort to get them to return to your site and complete the conversion process.

How Retargeting Works

Retargeting is not as complicated as it might seem. It works by placing and updating a series of cookies in the browser of visitors to your law firm’s website. The cookies allow advertising networks to identify visitors that you want to retarget and show them your advertisements as they browse other sites on the web.

The Basics

Setting the cookies in visitors’ browsers is done by placing a “pixel,” a small piece of code you’ll get from an advertising network, on your firm’s web site. It is invisible to web surfers and doesn’t affect your web site at all, other than allowing the advertising network to set cookies on visitors’ browsers. The pixel could be from a large network that works across many sites on the web, like Google AdSense, or it could be from a more specific network like Facebook.

Generally, you can configure special tracking for different pages of your site, as well as what counts as a conversion. For example, you might mark people who read a page about personal injury so they can be retargeted with ads specific to personal injury cases. At the same time, you might have another campaign set to retarget people who’ve shown interest in finding a criminal defense attorney. You would accomplish this by placing different pixels on each of the relevant pages of your firm’s site. This allows you to make your retargeting ads ultra-specific to topics these visitors have already shown interest in.

To finish everything off, pixels should be set up on closing pages that tell the ad network when someone has converted, so they can be removed from the retargeting list. This might be, for example, on a thank you page that is shown to visitors after they fill out a form asking to be contacted by phone for a consultation.

What Is Remarketing?

Remarketing is a term used specifically by Google to describe the retargeting options they launched within its AdWords platform back in 2010. Remarketing works in a similar fashion to the retargeting options you’d find in other advertising platforms, but can also be tied in with Google Analytics which allows for some simplification when it comes to setting up tracking pixels and monitoring results.

In reality, remarketing and retargeting are the same thing. Most marketing professionals will use the word retargeting, reserving the term remarketing for when they are specifically talking about Google’s platform. You will, however, occasionally run across people who use both terms interchangeably.

Benefits of Retargeting

Retargeting is a marketing option that your law firm should be using. The key to the success of retargeting campaigns is that you are paying to show your ads to people who’ve already shown interest in your services, as opposed to displaying ads to a “cold” audience who may or may not be interested in what you have to offer them.

When it comes to search engine marketing for lawyers, a well-planned retargeting campaign will help you achieve much higher conversion rates which you should already be tracking. Retargeting is one of the best ways to stretch your advertising dollars and convert a higher percentage of your audience into happy clients.

Save