Have you ever noticed after you visit a retailer’s website, you keep seeing banner ads for the company on other websites that you visit, including Facebook? This is a widely employed online technique called retargeting, to remind you to return to the earlier site that you abandoned.

E-commerce companies, recruiters, schools, entertainment companies – and now lawyers – are employing retargeting to display advertising to website visitors who have bounced off a previously visited site. These are prospective clients who might otherwise contact a competitor because they left your website and then found the competitor’s.

Example law firms include Hughes & Coleman, a Louisville, Ky., personal injury firm; D.M. Cantor, a criminal defense lawyer in Phoenix, Ariz.; the Richard Harris Personal Injury Law Firm in Las Vegas, Nev.; and Steven D. Miller P.A., a divorce lawyer in Plantation, Fla., according to the Geobid customer list.

“Retargeting” (often referred to incorrectly as “remarketing”) is a proven online marketing strategy, according to Law Firm Marketing 360. “97% of prospective law firm clients look at 3 to 5 law firm websites before contacting one. Many people spend weeks or months researching their legal issue, deciding what to do. The reality is very few website visitors convert [become a client] on their first visit. Retargeting ads keep your attorney ads in front of prospects. As they research legal concepts, go to YouTube or even just read the news, your ads stay with them, building awareness and trust. With timely, targeted ads, your conversions [new clients] will jump dramatically.”

A law firm website that uses retargeting will place a cookie, or line of computer code, on the visitor’s browser. The cookie will store the site visit but does not store any sensitive information, such as the visitor’s name, address, or any other information that might personally identify the visitor. Then, when that person visits a site in the advertising display network – especially local news channels to CNN or ESPN – the visitor will see the law firm’s banner ad.

To try it out, simply visit the Zappos shoe site, look at a pair of shoes, and leave without buying. Next you will see Zappos ads all over the web.

“These visits are far more likely to convert, since they have already seen your message and what you have to offer and are choosing to visit the site again,” according to swell-SITES. “This model makes sense for most consumer-facing areas of law like divorce, bankruptcy and even personal injury and criminal defense. Imagine your potential client first looking at your site after a past due notice or a fight with their spouse. They end up getting some preliminary information about bankruptcy or divorce but end up not taking any action.

“Now, when aggressive collection calls start, or problems with the spouse continue, they are more likely to come back to your site instead of starting a new search. Your potential clients may already remember your firm name, having seen your ad over the past few weeks. Even if they don’t, they will be seeing the ads again but they will likely resonate with them even more after additional trigger events.”

Retargeting is inexpensive. The cost of a click based on a legal term in Google AdWords can exceed $100 per click, but a click on a remarketing advertisement will typically cost as little as $1–$3 per click on the banner ad.

Retargeting ads on Facebook can cost as little as $1.35. “On average people spend 20-40 minutes per day on Facebook and visit the social network 14 times per day,” according to WordStream. “The click-through rate on Facebook ads compared to traditional display ads can be as much as double, meaning the likelihood of bringing clients back to your site is much higher than other ad types.”

The set-up fee for a campaign is in the $750 range, with a monthly cost of $800. According to a recent study by Marin software, the majority of marketers are spending less than 10 percent of their advertising budget on retargeting.

A Google search will reveal many marketing agencies that will set up a retargeting advertising campaign. The ultimate vendors include Google and AdRoll, which says it has more than 37,000 customers.

“As you work hard to build a name for yourself within your industry, you need as many loyal consumers as you can find,” says Wisconsin Media. “Rather than giving up on the ones that didn’t find what they were looking for the first time, retargeting allows you to reach out to them again and again until they find just what they want.”

Retargeting also offers a long list of benefits including:

• Increased return on investment

• Loyal customers rather than lost visitors

• Recapturing of lost leads

• Increased conversions

Setting Up a Retargeting Campaign

Lawyers can retarget visitors based on a person visiting any page on your website, based on visiting a certain page such as a contact form or a particular blog post, and even based on not visiting a certain page, such as your bio page. For example, a visitor to a particular practice page can be shown ads that illustrate that particular practice.

Lawyers can choose how to store the cookie in a visitor’s computer, up to 180 days. For example, if you have a service that requires people to sign up after 30 days, you can adjust the cookie duration to 60 days so that visitors are retargeted if they forget to renew directly after 30 days.

Another feature is frequency capping. You can limit displays of your retargeting ad to 10 times per day or place no limit at all. However, if you show your ad too often to users, it is likely they will begin to feel annoyed. An example is a group of upper-class women to whom Prada was retargeting. They would see Prada ads all day on every site, all over the internet. “It started to become very obvious that they were being targeted, and it came off as creepy,” according to Hanapin marketing.