No, we don’t mean stalking in the personal sense. Aside from being illegal, it could be very labor intensive to stalk each prospect individually. Not to mention that since you won’t have their information yet, you won’t be able to find them…
But there is a way to do it. Legally.
First, WHY would you want to stalk your website visitors?
Well, it is more or less common knowledge that, when exposed to a new brand, product or concept, most people require around seven exposures or interactions with that “new thing” before they finally decide whether they will buy or not.
That is why – on most websites – the percentage of people who do buy from you right away, or who reach out to you, can be as low as 1% of your website’s visitors.
Now unless you happen to have an incredible website which attracts many, many more people than you can help, it probably means that you are not really happy about those numbers.
After all, when you start calculating the expected lifetime value of each potential customer, the numbers add up very quickly – and every lost customer usually costs you quite a pretty penny.
You may be selling low-cost goods, but you have to consider (a) how regularly your typical customer buys from you, (b) how much they spend per purchase, (c) how long the typical customer keeps on buying from you, and (d) whether they refer others along the way.
Even if you sell hot dogs, those numbers add up very quickly, and substantially. However, it doesn’t work so well for all industries – it probably won’t work that well for selling hot dogs.
At the end of the day, it comes down to ROAS – return on ad spend – and for this particular type of advertising, it is very good indeed.
While it varies from one industry to the next, the average ROAS for these ads are roughly 400%.
Now keep in mind that this is to advertise to people who would have left your website, and never returned. Not a bad deal.
Also, what exactly do we mean by “stalking”?
Have you ever been to a vendor’s website, and shortly afterwards, you start seeing “reminder” advertisements about the website you just left behind?
It seems somewhat creepy, right?
It should. They are stalking you – literally.
Legally.
Automatically.
And here’s the scary part: If the visitor uses a smart TV which is connected to the internet, you can stalk them right into their living room.
What happens is this:
When a potential customer or client visits your website, a cookie is left on their computer. Unless, of course, they are overly concerned about privacy, and their browser settings refuse permission for your website to leave a cookie on their device.
(Fortunately not too many people do that.)
But what most people don’t know about, is this: When the visitor leaves your website, and visit other websites who display advertisements for the same advertising network you use, the advertiser’s scripting detects the cookie on their computer, and remembers where they have been.
Based on where they have been, they will then be shown a specific advertisement. This can be repeated across multiple websites for as many times as you – the website owner/advertiser – choose to do it.
Depending on the visitor’s internet activity after they visited your website, this can happen in a matter of minutes, or it could take a day or two for all of the exposures to be triggered.
Regardless, it provides you with a mechanism to legally “stalk” your website visitors, and to compound the number of exposures they had to your brand or product.
In the advertising industry, it is referred to as re-marketing, or re-targeting.
So HOW do you go about stalking potential customers?
Well, there are a couple of networks out there that do this type of advertising.
The largest – and oldest – or so it seems, is Adroll. That has been around for many years, and they have agreements in place with several major advertising providers, even including Facebook.
You can use display ads, native ads (which look like they are part of another website’s content), video ads and CTV ads (connected TV ads, which can be shown on mobile devices and on smart television sets connected to the web).
This means that you can show your ads not only on different types of websites, but also in different formats.
It may be slightly creepy for your prospects, but in reality is it brutally efficient.
Keep in mind that, by the time you advertise to these people, they (a) have already been to your website, and (b) left without buying anything.
Chances are you already spent a load of money to get them to visit your website – whether it be in ad spend, or in work hours spent on social media or search engine optimization.
The bottom line is this:
If you don’t choose to stalk your unconverted website visitors, you will definitely lose most of the traffic you send to it.
If you do, every new customer you gain will be a bonus.
Keep in mind that these are people who have already seen your website and your offer – so part of the work to convert them to customers has already been done. You will just be building on that, and some of them will not even require 6 more exposures before they buy.