How Does Retargeting Grow Your Political Campaign?

Retargeting is a form of online advertising that allows you to serve ads to people who have visited your campaign website. A staple of big brands and small companies alike, retargeting is a powerful way to stay in touch with people who have demonstrated interest in the company. Recently, retargeting has entered the political sphere. Now an established tool for national campaigns, local and regional political campaigns have begun to catch on too.

How does retargeting work?

Retargeting depends upon a few simple lines of code placed within the HTML of your website. When people visit your site, the retargeting code is able to tag your visitors. After people leave your website, you can serve them your display ads all over the web.

Why does retargeting work?

Retargeting allows you to focus your ads on people you know are interested in what you have to say. For political campaigns, retargeting can help ensure that you are serving ads to your key constituency and voters who are actively researching candidates, allowing you to create a more focused set of ads. Retargeting can help keep interested voters engaged until the election, helping to increase awareness and voter turnout. As the election approaches, you can update your ads from a focus on candidate awareness and relevant issues to a focused call to get out and vote.

This targeted approach lets you develop campaign messaging geared toward more involved voters who already know who your candidate is and has an idea of what she stands for.

When should you use political retargeting?

Virtually all campaigns can benefit from retargeting. However, if your campaign website is relatively new and you’re still not seeing much traffic it could make sense to focus on bringing new traffic to your site. When it comes to bringing new traffic, targeted display advertising could be the right solution. Like retargeting, targeted display advertising helps focus your outreach on the people who you want to get in front of.

There are several variables you can use to target your ads including geographic and demographic variables, interest, and political affiliation. Depending on who you’re hoping to reach, any combination of these factors could be relevant to you. For example, in any local or state race, geographic targeting is likely to be a good option. Demographic targeting can encompass variables like age, income, gender, and occupation. You can include multiple data layers as well, for example you could target women over the age of 40, in California, who are affiliated with the Democratic party.

One of the primary benefits of ad targeting is the ability to show different messages to different groups, ensuring all your messaging is as relevant as possible.

Targeted and retargeted display ads are a great way to segment ads to likely or undecided voters, and to get the right message in front of the right voter.

Caroline Watts is a Marketing Associate at ReTargeter, a full-service display provider specializing in audience targeting and retargeting.