Word of mouth is still a viable marketing tool, right? You don’t need to think about re-attracting the people that checked you out and left your website, right? Wrong. Sure, word of mouth works for local businesses with local customers. If you’ve got a web presence and you want to stay viable, however, you need to think about not just bringing people to your website once but how to get them to come back.

Why is Once Not Enough?

There’s a lot of information available out on the web. Additionally, there are lots of options from which people can get whatever it is you’re selling. Consumers who are shopping the web aren’t looking in only one place to find what they’re looking for and then committing to buy. These people are searching for what works best for them over multiple websites not just from you, but from your competitors, too. This is where a paid search can come in handy.

What’s a Paid Search?

A paid search, also called a remarketing or retargeting campaign, is a way to target your customer to come back to your website and make their purchase from you. It places advertisements for you in front of customers who’ve already visited your website, reminding them of your viability for their purchase dollars. This practice places those ads on the websites and platforms your potential customer uses the most. It will seem as though your product is more pertinent to your client, as well as timed perfectly for them to make their purchasing decision.

How Does It Work?

Cookies. No, not Cookie Monster’s cookies, but web cookies are the driving force behind paid searches. When you allow a site’s cookies, you’re granting permission for that business to remarket you. It’s why your YouTube and Facebook ads suddenly reflect the websites you visited for the first time just last week. They’re not following you, per se, they’re following the cookie trail you allowed.

Is It Worth the Investment?

How many of your customers buy your product the first time they visit your website? Marketing studies show that number is about 2%. Paid searches can bring up to 68% of those clients back to your site to purchase by deliberately putting you in their field of vision on a repeat basis. The more times a customer sees your ad, the more likely they are to come back to you.

Getting customers back to your site is just as important as getting them to visit the first time.