We’ve all experienced being ‘followed’ by a product when searching online. Perhaps you’ve browsed the Internet looking for laptops, clicked on a few retailer sites before ending your search without having made a purchase. Later on you may have noticed the same product popping up in a number of the sites you visit, whether they’re laptop-related or not. In other words, you are presented with a highly personalised advert for the same product you had been looking at. This is what retargeting is all about. With Pre-targeting, however, instead of targeting a user after they have clicked on your site and looked at a product, they can be targeted before they’ve had the chance to click on your ad or that of a competitor.
So, what are the differences between retargeting and pre-targeting?
Retargeting allows you to bid on visitors who have been to your site and who have abandoned the shopping carts and not converted. Pre-targeting takes it to the next level, allowing you to target visitors before they have even been on your site. For instance, visitors who have browsed competitor websites or searched for a particular keyword in the past. Here is an infographic by Pretarget, explaining the differences between retargeting and pre-targeting. 
How does pre-targeting work?
The more you know about your ‘prospect customer’ the easier it is to understand their online buying behaviour, and to target them with the right ad. and message. Advertisers can create pre-targeted ad groups with information about their target audience based on user characteristics such as age, gender, language, location, relationship status, and search history. You can identify and pre-select specific sites that users are likely to visit, are known to have visited, or have shown an interest in. Your ads will then only be shown to users that match the targeting criteria that have been specified.
The benefits of pre-targeting
The targeting can be as granular as desired, which translates into highly personalised ad messages. Pre-targeting gives advertisers the ability to display their ads to the right audience and to be ahead of the game. As shown in the infographic, your ads get shown to users either contextually, while they are on a “targeted list” site, or behaviourally on other sites after they leave the “target list” site. So, whether it’s on one of the sites from your targeted list, or a different site after they have visited one from your list, you reach users “ahead of the click”. Money is saved from unwanted clicks that you would certainly receive if they were appearing for all audiences. Click-through rate increases and so does conversion rate. Of course, this does not mean that retargeting is less efficient or less valuable than pre-targeting. They are simply different ways of utilising user data. Both tools can work hand in hand and complement each other. As the CEO of myThings, Benny Arbel stated: “Personalised retargeting has been proven to be one of the best performance marketing options in the market. To further boost scale, going up the funnel to acquire new users is vital and that’s where pre-targeting fits in, complementing existing acquisition solutions.” So, make sure you keep pre-targeting in mind to add to your marketing toolbox!
