What is Delayed Retargeting?

Delayed Retargeting is a strategic approach that marketers started employing with the rise of online advertising traffic.

It became more prevalent when businesses realised the need to focus on high-quality, engaged audience rather than just raw numbers. The strategy waits for a specific time, normally 45 seconds to a minute, before tagging a user for retargeting. The concept is to ensure that visitors who leave almost immediately are not included in the retargeting pool.

The primary intent behind Delayed Retargeting is to create a more engaged audience set to market to. When your website is aiming for traffic, it's not about attracting everyone, but pulling in those that genuinely have an interest in your content or service. Delayed Retargeting narrows down the demographic to the people who have shown at least a brief interest in your website's content, making them a potentially more valuable audience for future advertisements.

Examples of Delayed Retargeting

  1. An online clothing store could use Delayed Retargeting to track visitors who have spent some time browsing through different items but left without making a purchase. Later, they could be served with tailored ads showcasing the items they showed interest in.

  2. A blog using this strategy would wait for a set time before tagging a new visitor for retargeting. If the visitor remains on the site beyond this threshold, exploring different posts, they will then be marked for future targeted content.

  3. A news website can implement Delayed Retargeting to observe how long a user stays on a particular article. By avoiding immediate bouncers, retargeted ads would be shown to the users who actually read the news and engaged with the content.

  4. An e-learning platform, intent on traffic, might deploy Delayed Retargeting. Those who stay and browse different courses would be tagged and later served ads to increase the likelihood of course enrolment.

  5. A fitness website could use this tactic to note visitors who, for instance, read through an article about different training programs beyond the initial minute. These individuals could then be targeted with ads for fitness gear or workout supplements, based on their reading interest.

Marketing Tactics Similar to Delayed Retargeting

  • Behavioral Retargeting: This tactic serves ads to a user based on their past online behaviour, including sites they've visited and content they've interacted with.
  • Geo-Retargeting: This involves serving customer-specific ads based on their past visits to a physical location or specific geographic areas.
  • Email Retargeting: A strategy where personalized emails are sent based on a user's browsing behavior on a website.
  • Contextual Retargeting: It targets users based on the type of content they engage with, providing relevance and increasing the chance of conversion.

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