Welcome to this week’s edition of “Little Things”, a weekly blog series covering the small changes that you can make to improve marketing performance.

Last week’s topic was adding ALT tags to images to improve SEO.

This week’s tip:

Retargeting Your Visitors

At this point you may be spending money on advertising and you may not. Chances are, regardless of how much you’re spending, you’re getting visitors to your site. But we know that not every visitor becomes a sale, or client.

The goal for your site, and any changes that you make to it, should be to increase conversion rate. Conversion rate, for our purposes, is the percentage of people who visit your site and purchase something (or sign up). The higher this number, the more successful you’ll be.

And “retargeting” is one simple way to improve this number relatively quickly. Retargeting is simply the science of showing ads to people who have visited your site before and have not completed a desired action.

You’ve probably seen these ads before, you might not have even questioned how accurate they were. But you’re surfing the web and you see an ad for a product you were just looking at yesterday, calling you back. You’ve just been retargeted.

How it works:

1. Sign up with a retargeting company like ReTargeter or Fetchback (two of the largest).
2. Create ads that will “remind” people about your brand or product and bring them back (they’ll do this for you if you need).
3. Add a small piece of code to your site (they’ll give it to you and tell you where to put it).

Unlike previous posts in this series, this one will cost you money. But it’s the simplest way to get started, show ads only to those people who have already expressed interest by visiting your site, and increase conversion rate without spending a lot of time and energy you don’t have.